Hi all,
I'm looking for an EA perspective on this question. While the majority of our giving goes to highly effective global health charities, we are also interested in trying to help mitigate climate change and ocean plastic pollution. I've seen some analysis of the climate change options (and are currently giving to Cool Earth) but I haven't seen anything done on plastic pollution. We are already living as low waste as we can and don't eat netted fish, and now want to donate. www.plasticbank.com claims 1$/kg of "ocean bound plastic" recovered through their work, and 5gyres.org looks solid but I can't find any cost effectiveness data. Anyone have any thoughts on this?
Thanks for your input Habryka. I try to be pretty deliberate about optimizing for fuzzies some of the time (which tend to be local charities), but this one is more of a 'most good per dollar' type issue. To me, the time that EA gets the most nebulous is how to define 'good'. Even if we narrowly define 'good' as human happiness, I think there are arguments to be made for environmental causes with long term effects such as animal extinction and plastic pollution.
I think you are right that there aren't any in depth analyses... (read more)