With climate change the #2 priority reported by EAs in the most recent survey, what should these EAs think about doing?
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Some related links:
- https://lets-fund.org/clean-energy/
- https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/15/how-to-decarbonize-america-and-the-world/
- https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2nrx8GdtobScoAZF8/extinguishing-or-preventing-coal-seam-fires-is-a-potential
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkNdrTZ7CG4
- https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8ac9cBK22o9rh2NwS/will-team-trees-be-effective
- https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XRTiojqqJ3wrFFZAf/can-we-really-prevent-all-warming-for-less-than-10busd-with
- (I couldn't quickly find a good link for clean meat, but it could reduce methane emissions from cattle)
- https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3poYR8mXfcr9YM34Z/new-research-on-effective-climate-charities
- https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EAii5kf65cvywb2cF/why-we-think-the-founders-pledge-report-overrates-cfrn
- https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-the-fern-that-cooled-the-planet-do-it-again/
More speculative questions (my own personal uninformed thoughts):
- Regarding the tree planting option, can we breed trees which are less vulnerable to wildfires?
- Regarding the marine cloud brightening option - could you make it doubly useful by going to areas which experience periodic flooding and spraying floodwaters up into the air? Maybe you could even get municipalities to pay you and make a business out of it.
- Kelly and Zach Weinersmith wrote a book called Soonish which says (among other interesting things) that robots which automatically build buildings are on the horizon. To what extent could easy, cheap construction of new buildings and cities help mitigate sealevel rises and other global warming effects?
- My brother has a physics degree and finds this to be a bit implausible: http://superchimney.org But it does make me wonder if there's a way to make money by buying land, terraforming it in a way that's good from a climate perspective, and selling the land after it's increased in value.
I'll add:
- the Founder's Pledge report being responded to https://founderspledge.com/stories/climate-change-executive-summary
- ID Insight's recommendations https://www.idinsight.org/givinggreen
- Vox's recommendations https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/12/2/20976180/climate-change-best-charities-effective-philanthropy
Clean meat could also have a huge impact on CO2 levels. According to Vinod Khosla (source):
- about 30-50% of all land area is used for animal husbandry
- clean meat and plant-based alternatives could allow us to take back most of it
- restoring this land would solve the carbon emissions problem by carbon capture (~100 out of 110 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s scenarios for carbon reductions on the planet involve freeing millions of acres of land for reforestation)
In terms of plant-based alternatives, I think nutrition research could be high-impact and neglected. It seems like people are focused on trying to replicate the taste of meat, but when I experimented with veganism, I found myself wanting meat more the longer I'd gone without it, and experiencing it to be unusually satisfying if I hadn't had it in a long while, which seems more compatible with a nutritional issue -- the same pattern doesn't seem to manifest for other foods I find tasty.
I'm imagining a study which feeds participants a vegan diet along with some randomly chosen nutritional supplements to see which are correlated with reduced desire to eat meat or something like that. Or maybe just better publicizing already known nutrition research / integrating it into plant based meat substitutes -- for example, I just found this article which says iron from red meat is absorbed much more easily -- I do think I was craving red meat specifically relative to other animal products. (Come to think of it, I was also experiencing more fatigue than normal, which seems compatible with mild anemia?)
There might be something in soil, perhaps from a research or policy angle? https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/We-should-discuss-soil-as-much-as-coal
The Effective Environmentalism group on Facebook compiled an Effective Environmentalism Resources page which contains an (almost) comprehensive list of EA-related climate change resources with charity recommendations, articles, posts by EA organisations, many with summaries.
Anyone can suggest resources directly to the page, if there are any missing recommendations please feel free to do so! Many (but not all) of the links in the comments are included on the doc.
The Effective Environmentalism group itself is a useful place to have EA related climate discussions.
I think the most obvious thing is prioritization; i.e. "figuring out what to do". My impression is that there's a considerable amount of interesting work to do to apply an EA-mindset to climate change and get a better sense of the opportunities and their effectiveness.
I wrote a bit that's related: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Df2uFGKtLWR7jDr5w/ozziegooen-s-shortform?commentId=ZT5ArGKSWsctoWrZF
According to Let's Fund: Fund clean energy research.
See also: What can a technologist do about climate change? (a)
Which also happens to be one of the most beautiful websites I've ever seen.
I'm curious about the work that Citizens' Climate Lobby is doing. They push for a carbon tax that comes back as a public dividend. They're doing lobbying now, but I'd be curious about how their odds might improve if tackled as a series of ballot initiatives.
A post from EA at Harvard from 2017 recommends the following:
- Working with local partners to advocate against coal power in China, India and Southeast Asia
- Growing capacity and coordination at state and local levels in the U.S
- Contributing to one or more climate philanthropy bodies that strategically target climate finance interventions
Comments4
It can be difficult to figure out where the biggest marginal benefit will be, or even how to fully grok the landscape, when there's already quite a lot happening in different domains. A few of us at CSER have been thinking of organising a workshop or hackathon bringing together climate researchers (science, policy, related tech) and leading EA thinkers to explore in more detail where the EA skillset, and interested individual EAs with a range of backgrounds, might best fit in and contribute most effectively. Would be interested in sounding out how much interest/value people would see in this.
I think that sounds like a great idea. You could put forward a proposal on the EA forum, with a form for people to express interest, and share it to other places where the EA survey respondents expressed an interest. If the EA survey data is accurate, I'd expect you'd have a decent level of interest to get it running.
I know I'm a bit late to this topic, but at Giving Green (www.idinsight.org/givinggreen) we are trying to answer specifically this problem. We're building on excellent previous work (like that at Let's Fund and Founder's Pledge) to do a comprehensive analysis on giving, investment, and volunteer options to fight climate change. The work is still very early, but there is a lot coming in the pipeline so stay tuned. For now, we have a few recommendations in the offset market.
Curated and popular this week
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By Jim Chapman, Linkedin.
TL;DR: In 2023, I was a 57-year-old urban planning consultant and non-profit professional with 30 years of leadership experience. After talking with my son about rationality, effective altruism, and AI risks, I decided to pursue a pivot to existential risk reduction work. The last time I had to apply for a job was in 1994. By the end of 2024, I had spent ~740 hours on courses, conferences, meetings with ~140 people, and 21 job applications. I hope that by sharing my experiences, you can gain practical insights, inspiration, and resources to navigate your career transition, especially for those who are later in their career and interested in making an impact in similar fields. I share my experience in 5 sections - sparks, take stock, start, do, meta-learnings, and next steps. [Note - as of 03/05/2025, I am still pursuing my career shift.]
Sparks – 2022
During a Saturday bike ride, I admitted to my son, “No, I haven’t heard of effective altruism.” On another ride, I told him, “I'm glad you’re attending the EAGx Berkely conference." Some other time, I said, "Harry Potter and Methods of Rationality sounds interesting. I'll check it out." While playing table tennis, I asked, "What do you mean ChatGPT can't do math? No calculator? Next token prediction?" Around tax-filing time, I responded, "You really think retirement planning is out the window? That only 1 of 2 artificial intelligence futures occurs – humans flourish in a post-scarcity world or humans lose?" These conversations intrigued and concerned me.
After many more conversations about rationality, EA, AI risks, and being ready for something new and more impactful, I decided to pivot my career to address my growing concerns about existential risk, particularly AI-related. I am very grateful for those conversations because without them, I am highly confident I would not have spent the last year+ doing that.
Take Stock - 2023
I am very concerned about existential risk cause areas in ge
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[Edits on March 10th for clarity, two sub-sections added]
Watching what is happening in the world -- with lots of renegotiation of institutional norms within Western democracies and a parallel fracturing of the post-WW2 institutional order -- I do think we, as a community, should more seriously question our priors on the relative value of surgical/targeted and broad system-level interventions.
Speaking somewhat roughly, with EA as a movement coming of age in an era where democratic institutions and the rule-based international order were not fundamentally questioned, it seems easy to underestimate how much the world is currently changing and how much riskier a world of stronger institutional and democratic backsliding and weakened international norms might be.
Of course, working on these issues might be intractable and possibly there's nothing highly effective for EAs to do on the margin given much attention to these issues from society at large. So, I am not here to confidently state we should be working on these issues more.
But I do think in a situation of more downside risk with regards to broad system-level changes and significantly more fluidity, it seems at least worth rigorously asking whether we should shift more attention to work that is less surgical (working on specific risks) and more systemic (working on institutional quality, indirect risk factors, etc.).
While there have been many posts along those lines over the past months and there are of course some EA organizations working on these issues, it stil appears like a niche focus in the community and none of the major EA and EA-adjacent orgs (including the one I work for, though I am writing this in a personal capacity) seem to have taken it up as a serious focus and I worry it might be due to baked-in assumptions about the relative value of such work that are outdated in a time where the importance of systemic work has changed in the face of greater threat and fluidity.
When the world seems to
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Written anonymously because I work in a field where there is a currently low but non-negligible and possibly high future risk of negative consequences for criticizing Trump and Trumpism.
This post is an attempt to cobble together some ideas about the current situation in the United States and its impact on EA. I invite discussion on this, not only from Americans, but also those with advocacy experience in countries that are not fully liberal democracies (especially those countries where state capacity is substantial and autocratic repression occurs).
I've deleted a lot of text from this post in various drafts because I find myself getting way too in the weeds discoursing on comparative authoritarian studies, disinformation and misinformation (this is a great intro, though already somewhat outdated), and the dangers of the GOP.[1] I will note that I worry there is still a tendency to view the administration as chaotic and clumsy but retaining some degree of good faith, which strikes me as quite naive.
For the sake of brevity and focus, I will take these two things to be true, and try to hypothesize what they mean for EA. I'm not going to pretend these are ironclad truths, but I'm fairly confident in them.[2]
1. Under Donald Trump, the Republican Party (GOP) is no longer substantially committed to democracy and the rule of law.
1. The GOP will almost certainly continue to engage in measures that test the limits of constitutional rule as long as Trump is alive, and likely after he dies.
2. The Democratic Party will remain constrained by institutional and coalition factors that prevent it from behaving like the GOP. That is, absent overwhelming electoral victories in 2024 and 2026 (and beyond), the Democrats' comparatively greater commitment to rule of law and democracy will prevent systematic purging of the GOP elites responsible for democratic backsliding; while we have not crossed the Rubicon yet, it will get much worse before things get better.
2. T
In terms of plant-based alternatives, I think nutrition research could be high-impact and neglected. It seems like people are focused on trying to replicate the taste of meat, but when I experimented with veganism, I found myself wanting meat more the longer I'd gone without it, and experiencing it to be unusually satisfying if I hadn't had it in a long while, which seems more compatible with a nutritional issue -- the same pattern doesn't seem to manifest for other foods I find tasty.
I'm imagining a study which feeds participants a vegan diet along with some randomly chosen nutritional supplements to see which are correlated with reduced desire to eat meat or something like that. Or maybe just better publicizing already known nutrition research / integrating it into plant based meat substitutes -- for example, I just found this article which says iron from red meat is absorbed much more easily -- I do think I was craving red meat specifically relative to other animal products. (Come to think of it, I was also experiencing more fatigue than normal, which seems compatible with mild anemia?)