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This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
Summary
Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.
Public Opinion...
I think right now EAs might be making a significant mistake by paying insufficient attention to the political realm. As EAs we tend to figure out what’s most impactful for us to work on and focus hard. That’s great! But there are various actions that are ‘non-delegatable’ - the extent to which an individual can do the action is limited (like voting, going to a protest, making hard money contributions to particular campaigns). It might be useful if we were all more in the habit of doing variou...
This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
Recent opportunities to take action
For anyone interested, especially university students, here's my (unsolicited) story of working at SoGive:
Two years out my three main takeaways were probably (1) getting feedback on my writing and practice writing for EA contexts, (2) experience with charity evaluation, and (3) support exploring topics of my own interest, plus (3.5) I really liked working with Sanjay.
I volunteered with SoGive during the last year of my bachelors and later went on to work as an RA for the Founders Pledge Climate Team. During undergrad years prior to SoGive, I was an RA for an academic research lab at my Uni (sciences), had a campus job as a tour guide, held a leadership position with my student co-op, and did a data science internship.
Critically, the things I benefitted from most while volunteering with SoGive were things my other roles didn't provide. I think specializing in EA research too early probably isn't a great longterm career move, and diversifying your extracurriculars to get a healthy mixture of community, fun, and targeted skill/career capital building is really important for both well-being and intellectual growth. Because my university had strong research programs for undergraduates, academic labs were probably a more direct way of "testing my fit" for research, but I expect this won't be the case for most students. This work was a good fit for me as an undergraduate, but especially so because it met criteria others didn't and provided mentorship from someone I respect (Sanjay).
TLDR; I'd encourage interested students to check out this program and listen to Alex Lawsen's 80k episode on advice for students.