Climate change questions for Johannes Ackva and John Halstead

Why do they find policy advocacy or technology innovation counterintuitive or off-putting?

Thanks for the good question, I hope they raise the topic at the event! 

It might not be completely satisfactory to what you're looking for, but from what I hear it seems like the work at givinggreen.earth seems to have exactly those people in mind by giving more recommendations than just policy.

I have anecdotal evidence from Swedish donors being happier with BURN Manufacturing as an evidence backed climate intervention with positive effects on the local community, than an option more effective on a co2e/$ basis.

One question we might still want to ask ourselves, if Clean Air Task Force are >10x as effective as the more accessible choice – would it perhaps be worth losing 9 in 10 potential donors and still have a larger effect? Personally I would imagine a second best option can have a gateway effect to be more receptible to evidence based giving, and make this a priority in future donations.

Additionally to this: What is the best way to convince green and left political parties (EU view), that have in many cases started and championed anti-nuclear-sentiments, that they should drop their old convictions; and that this is not a betrayal of their ideology?

Edit: And in another extension, their/the electorate that is also to a big part negatively impressed by it?

Hello!

I agree that climate change is not neglected but I view that as a bit of a weak steer when deciding whether to work on it, for reasons I outline here. Neglectedness is one determinant of how cost-effective it is to work on a problem, but there are many others. Taking the example of AI safety - it is more neglected than climate change, but I have almost no idea how to make progress on this problem, whereas with climate change there is quite a clear path to making a difference. It also might be true that certain solutions within climate are less neglected than others, e.g. CCS and nuclear are neglected. 

I think to make cause prioritisation decisions when the stakes are high, we actually need to sit down and figure out directly which cause is more cost-effective to work on. 

My position is roughly the following:

1. I agree with this line of reasoning in the way that CATF presents it, i.e. that while there is a possibility that intermittent renewables alone could be sufficient, this is not particularly like and, crucially, this is not where most climate risk is that we should hedge against.

Of course there is (and CATF acknowledges this) a future where intermittent renewables solve almost the entire decarbonization challenge, but this requires a lot of things to go right including (1) continued cost reductions, (2) solving the challenge of seasonal storage, (3) massive transmission infrastructure, (4) very cheap conversion technologies to zero-carbon fuels (related to 2) for storage, transport applications and industrial applications, etc., (5) a world where many regions with poor renewable resources are happy to remain / become more energy-dependent,  (6) a re-organization of the global energy market that finds a way to provide revenue to zero-marginal-cost resources, etc.

This is probably not impossible, but it does not seem very likely. In the same way that we are prioritizing AGI-safety interventions that do not assume that AGI is inherently safe, I don't think we should assume this to all work out when thinking about high-impact philanthropic interventions. Indeed, because damage is concentrated in world where this does not work out, we should probably focus on stuff that works in those futures.

2. Storage would solve some of this, in particular if it is chemical storage (rather than electric) because zero-carbon fuels can also be used to create heat for residential and industrial applications, to power heavy-duty transport, to store energy over seasons, etc.  But it needs to get really cheap if we only rely on intermittent renewables (because the storage/conversion tech would not work 24/7, i.e. not be optimally economical). 

It doesn't solve potential problems around land use and potential energy, of course.

3. I would say advanced nuclear & super-hot-rock geothermal are tied for first position from an environmental and public health perspective, gas with carbon capture would be much better than coal with carbon capture (15x less air pollution), comparing this with large-scale hydro or large-scale bio-energy would be tricky and I am a bit out of my depth here. But neither of those second-best options is really great.

 

This is one consideration among many, but if low-coordination futures are (a) a significant part of the probability mass (b) and are sufficiently bad (both of which seem plausible) this can be an important consideration in favor of innovation / solutions that work when shit hits the fan.
 

At FP, we're trying to get a better handle on the quantitative import of this consideration and others to be able to make more informed statements about how the balance shakes out (e.g. hypothetically, what if policy leadership was really neglected and super high leverage?) 

That said, policy leadership could also be really good if impactful policy indeed cascades. The main barrier I see to this right now is finding policies that are cascading and are effective in a variety of settings. E.g. carbon pricing policies are arguably cascading, but implemented at such weak levels that they are relatively inconsequential with regards to global emissions. And something like the Climate Change Act, a binding commitment to an emissions trajectory, seems hard to pull off in a developing/emerging economy.

 

Bill Gates' How to Avoid a Climate Disaster is a pretty good introduction to the challenge, very accessible and framing the challenge of climate change in the wider context of  a developing world with rising energy needs (something the debate too often forgets).

Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air  is somewhat dated now, but a classic and available freely on the internet (https://www.withouthotair.com/).

The Citizen's Guide to Climate Success by Mark Jaccard is also good, although it does not give a full overview in the way the other books mentioned here do.

My own thoughts: I have a bias against doing a PhD in climate science (which is generally recommended) and going into research. This is because that by the time you're doing great research and are well-respected (5-10 years), you've lost a lot of time in terms of carbon lock-in and you could've have potentially done some great advocacy work in the mean-time or supported clean-tech work etc.

Yes, I (and I think we?) very much agree with that -- that's why we (FP) are supporting Carbon180 as the key advocacy org focused on this solution:
https://founderspledge.com/stories/carbon180-high-impact-funding-opportunity