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)
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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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[Cross-posted from my Substack here]
If you spend time with people trying to change the world, you’ll come to an interesting conundrum: Various advocacy groups reference previous successful social movements as to why their chosen strategy is the most important one. Yet, these groups often follow wildly different strategies from each other to achieve social change. So, which one of them is right?
The answer is all of them and none of them.
This is because many people use research and historical movements to justify their pre-existing beliefs about how social change happens. Simply, you can find a case study to fit most plausible theories of how social change happens. For example, the groups might say:
* Repeated nonviolent disruption is the key to social change, citing the Freedom Riders from the civil rights Movement or Act Up! from the gay rights movement.
* Technological progress is what drives improvements in the human condition if you consider the development of the contraceptive pill funded by Katharine McCormick.
* Organising and base-building is how change happens, as inspired by Ella Baker, the NAACP or Cesar Chavez from the United Workers Movement.
* Insider advocacy is the real secret of social movements – look no further than how influential the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights was in passing the Civil Rights Acts of 1960 & 1964.
* Democratic participation is the backbone of social change – just look at how Ireland lifted a ban on abortion via a Citizen’s Assembly.
* And so on…
To paint this picture, we can see this in action below:
Source: Just Stop Oil which focuses on…civil resistance and disruption
Source: The Civic Power Fund which focuses on… local organising
What do we take away from all this? In my mind, a few key things:
1. Many different approaches have worked in changing the world so we should be humble and not assume we are doing The Most Important Thing
2. The case studies we focus on are likely confirmation bias, where
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I speak to many entrepreneurial people trying to do a large amount of good by starting a nonprofit organisation. I think this is often an error for four main reasons.
1. Scalability
2. Capital counterfactuals
3. Standards
4. Learning potential
5. Earning to give potential
These arguments are most applicable to starting high-growth organisations, such as startups.[1]
Scalability
There is a lot of capital available for startups, and established mechanisms exist to continue raising funds if the ROI appears high. It seems extremely difficult to operate a nonprofit with a budget of more than $30M per year (e.g., with approximately 150 people), but this is not particularly unusual for for-profit organisations.
Capital Counterfactuals
I generally believe that value-aligned funders are spending their money reasonably well, while for-profit investors are spending theirs extremely poorly (on altruistic grounds). If you can redirect that funding towards high-altruism value work, you could potentially create a much larger delta between your use of funding and the counterfactual of someone else receiving those funds. You also won’t be reliant on constantly convincing donors to give you money, once you’re generating revenue.
Standards
Nonprofits have significantly weaker feedback mechanisms compared to for-profits. They are often difficult to evaluate and lack a natural kill function. Few people are going to complain that you provided bad service when it didn’t cost them anything. Most nonprofits are not very ambitious, despite having large moral ambitions. It’s challenging to find talented people willing to accept a substantial pay cut to work with you. For-profits are considerably more likely to create something that people actually want.
Learning Potential
Most people should be trying to put themselves in a better position to do useful work later on. People often report learning a great deal from working at high-growth companies, building interesting connection
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James Özden and Sam Glover at Social Change Lab wrote a literature review on protest outcomes[1] as part of a broader investigation[2] on protest effectiveness. The report covers multiple lines of evidence and addresses many relevant questions, but does not say much about the methodological quality of the research. So that's what I'm going to do today.
I reviewed the evidence on protest outcomes, focusing only on the highest-quality research, to answer two questions:
1. Do protests work?
2. Are Social Change Lab's conclusions consistent with the highest-quality evidence?
Here's what I found:
Do protests work? Highly likely (credence: 90%) in certain contexts, although it's unclear how well the results generalize. [More]
Are Social Change Lab's conclusions consistent with the highest-quality evidence? Yes—the report's core claims are well-supported, although it overstates the strength of some of the evidence. [More]
Cross-posted from my website.
Introduction
This article serves two purposes: First, it analyzes the evidence on protest outcomes. Second, it critically reviews the Social Change Lab literature review.
Social Change Lab is not the only group that has reviewed protest effectiveness. I was able to find four literature reviews:
1. Animal Charity Evaluators (2018), Protest Intervention Report.
2. Orazani et al. (2021), Social movement strategy (nonviolent vs. violent) and the garnering of third-party support: A meta-analysis.
3. Social Change Lab – Ozden & Glover (2022), Literature Review: Protest Outcomes.
4. Shuman et al. (2024), When Are Social Protests Effective?
The Animal Charity Evaluators review did not include many studies, and did not cite any natural experiments (only one had been published as of 2018).
Orazani et al. (2021)[3] is a nice meta-analysis—it finds that when you show people news articles about nonviolent protests, they are more likely to express support for the protesters' cause. But what people say in a lab setting mig
By "working with local partners", do they mean "give money to Asian lobbying groups that are already successful"?