I don’t know why this didn’t occur to me sooner. Even if you just use a junk account to like and subscribe it’s the cheaper version of donating.
PBS Terra, for one, has actual climate change news and science. In addition to all the other cool things, and, ofc, PBS kids.
Here’s the list: NOVA PBS official, PBS, PBS Terra, American Experience PBS, Frontline PBS Official, PBS Documentaries, PBS NewsHour, PBS kids, PBS Eons, PBS Origins, PBS SpaceTime.
Ads obviously, and people that pay YouTube premium also contributed to monetization but idk how much
as I understand, premium accounts are paid out per-user proportional to which channels they spend the most time watching. so if a user spends 30 minutes watching channel A and 1 hour watching channel B, and doesn't watch anything else, then channel A gets 33% of that user's subscription fee (after YouTube takes their cut), and channel B gets 67%