Thanks so much for the engagement. We at Giving Green share your concern around some of CATF's activities around carbon capture, though I wouldn't go as far as to say that CATF's work on 45Q is "net harmful". Instead we acknowledge there are tradeoffs from CATF's strategy in this sector that have uncertain overall impacts. We have noted this element as a "Key Uncertainty" in our report. The relevant text is copied at the bottom of this post. 

Our recommendation of CATF was primarily based on our assessment of their work in Shipping/Aviation and Enhance... (read more)

Thanks, super-interesting!

On "We still need a RCT powered for Mortality", someone from GW could confirm, but I heard through the grapevine that they are going to fund Kremer to do a large multi-country RCT powered for mortality to get at these very questions. 

Hi Nick, thanks for the thoughtful response. I think you make a lot of good points and I agree that there are numerous incentives can can lead an M+E provider to bias results positively. That's why there is a ton of bad M+E out there. 

One main reaction: for an employee who works in an M+E org, there is arguably no worse situation than being pressured to skew your results positively, or even worse, taking on projects where you know a certain results is expected by your clients. It makes you feel you work is meaningless, and really sucks. And when you a... (read more)

[Disclaimer: I'm the Chief Economist of IDinsight, an M+E provider who has worked with GiveWell and many others. I have a LOT of experience with evaluators being pressured to sugarcoat results, or lack thereof. ]

Strong disagree on this conclusion that M+E providers are inherently biased. 

Yes, there are situations where M+E have incentives that can lead to bias. For instance, if an NGO hires an M+E provider to do an external evaluation of themselves, the NGO is therefore the 'client' of the researchers. This can be problematic, since the NGO will need ... (read more)

Thanks, super-helpful. 

Is it still true though that FTX Foundation Inc has not filed for bankruptcy? If that's true, returning any funds from FTX Foundation through this mechanism seems premature. But well, I'm no lawyer. 

By "very careful", I mean they shouldn't make the case that their org is higher-impact than the current org unless they are damn sure. And this is an extremely difficult judgement call to make, when comparing two organizations whose mission is social impact.  Given that impact is integral to an EA's worldview, it would be a pretty incendiary accusation for a headhunter to make the case that org X is higher-impact than org Y, so someone should switch jobs.  It's one thing to make this case if hiring someone away from Exxon, but another to make the case within a community of arguably impactful organizations. I think these kinds of tactics have potential to cause major rifts within the community so should be avoided. 

OP here. Thanks for all of the engagement with this post and for the varying opinions. People have brought up some important points on the benefits of headhunting (increased information, better outcomes for employees, overall better job matches, etc), and I agree with a lot of what is said.   After taking these into account and mulling what has been said, here's where I stand (subject to change):

1. It's clearly ok for EA orgs to hire employees who work at other friendly orgs. Refusing to do so is illegal and I'd say also unethical. 
2. I think it's ok i

Good points- I take back my earlier "Clearly..." statement, and agree it needs to also include utility gains for the worker in the calculation. 

Just to clarify, I wouldn't be advocating that orgs don't hire from peer orgs. Of course, post jobs, make them widely known, take and consider applications from all place. But I think it's different to spend money on dedicated staff to directly target and aggressively recruit staff from friendly orgs within your ecosystem. 

Oh that's very interesting! I had no idea, seems relevant. Also not a lawyer, but I think that this would just apply to agreements not to hire others' employees, as opposed to an agreement not to aggressively recruit. 

Thanks for the comment- I see where you are coming from. As noted in a previous reply, I think a lot has to do with how much the headhunter informs vs convinces. There are a lot of parallels with advertising. Do we think that advertising performs a positive social function? Well, it could if it simply provides information about a new product and allows consumers to make more informed choices. But also the advertiser has incentives to increase sales, so why would we trust them to be truthful and have everyone's best interests at heart? Headhunters/recruiters have incentives to fill roles, so I don't think we should assume that they are playing a neutral, information-providing role. 

Thanks for the comment- I understand where you are coming from, and see how this could go either ways. But I think I'd tend to disagree. I'm always happy  for people to be aware of other opportunities and consider them, but I think there's a difference when there are paid professionals targeting specific people to switch jobs. These professions tend to not just inform, but also convince. So in the situation of a job switch, you end up with a situation where the recruiting organization gains, the recruited organization loses, and  actual job-seeke... (read more)

Hi Joel, thanks for this write-up and for the work you're doing on this. For some context, I'm the Chief Economist at IDinsight and worked on the GW-funded study you mentioned. 

A few comments: 

1. Thanks for this work and these thoughts! I haven't dug into the math in detail, but I'm intrigued about systematically measuring and correcting for social desirability bias. But one question: are you arguing that SDB is more likely to be an issue in the community perspective than the individual perspective? I don't really see why this would be the case- i t

Hi Richard, 

I think you've identified a problem in the funding space, and I've had numerous conversations with others about this. A couple of comments:

1. As mentioned in another comment, I think that Open Phil's Global Health and Development team is evolving to fill some of this gap. But they have certain issue areas of concentration, and also have a limited team evaluating grants, so I think they aren't well-suiting to identifying high-impact opportunities in all areas (especially small grants). 
2. I think the right venue for this would be EA Funds' '

Nice work Ryan! This is really interesting. I would agree that exposing IDEV professors to EA would be a net positive. I'm wondering what are the best ways to do this. My cynical take (from my time in the academy) is that it's hard to get econ profs to take seriously knowledge generated in non-Econ circles. So maybe the way forward is to try to get an article on EA (or that would at least ex-post expose profs to EA) in QJE, or at least JDE. I'm not sure the right angle. But maybe you should come up with an idea and pitch it to EA Funds again!

I'm wondering where you think a paper on this topic will land. Probably not JDE, right?

Hi Stephen, just to add a bit to what my colleague Kim has said, we at Giving Green are working on something very similar to this. We aren't explicitly starting with the Drawdown list of solutions, but have attempted to create a comprehensive list of areas for philanthropic engagement within climate space, and the drawdown list was one source of ideas. We've gone through a first cut to try to determine which are potentially most cost-effective, and are writing reports on some of the ones we think ex-ante have promise (such as the examples Kim wrote below).... (read more)

Hi James, thanks for this and I feel like this research is super-helpful. As you know, we at Giving Green have also explored the question of protest (as a form of what we call "outsider legislative advocacy"), and are also generally bullish  on these techniques. But also, (as you mention), I think only a small minority of protest movements are really successful. We've had a lot of trouble identifying organizations we want to recommend in the context of climate policy in the US. 

We're looking forward to applying your findings as our search continues!

Sorry, looks like our write-up of CCL didn't make it into that document. Sorry for the wrong info. I'm going to stick with my opinion there there is no viable path towards carbon pricing in the near term in the US, and also that carbon pricing in practice has not been a very effective lever for reducing GHGs. I'd be happy to change my mind on either of these points in the future. I like this article as a nice argument to be skeptical on carbon prices: https://bostonreview.net/articles/leah-c-stokes-matto-mildenberger-tk/

Hi Max, thanks for your comment. We quickly looked into CCL in 2020, and wrote up a "shallow dive" here.  While we support the carbon tax  push of CCL in theory, our assessment is that there is currently no clear pathway to passage of such a provision as it's not supported by either party. We therefore decided not to pursue further research  into CCL at that point, but are open to revisiting them in the future. 

I don't agree that a carbon pricing is the only way to reach our climate goals- my view is that reductions can alternatively be... (read more)

Hi Matthew, thanks so much for the thoughtful reply. I'm sure the team at Founder's Pledge will have some comments on this, as they have gone a lot deeper into the model for 45Q, but I'll drop a few thoughts here. 

I think that a lot of your comments have validity, and underline why 45Q is controversial among environmental groups. In theory it could keep old coal plants alive, and could give old oil fields a new lease on live through EOR. 

Truthfully though, I don't think it's realistic that 45Q keeps a significant amount of coal plants alive. Like... (read more)

I'm not directly involved with this effort, but I do know that CN has a new person in charge of trying to make these impact ratings work, and they are trying to think very creatively about how to improve and add value. They need something they can do at scale and it's a tough job. I know this because their team has been reaching out to various people in the space (myself included) to help with brainstorming. So just to say, they are definitely not burying this effort. 

I think it's still unclear if CN will be able to turn this effort into something compelling, but I think it's worth waiting to see what their new team comes up with before passing final judgement. 

Hello Maxwell, we at Giving Green have recently begun tackling this issue, from a couple of angles. We have two reports, one on ESG Funds and Climate Impact and one on Impact Investing for Climate. The ESG report covers more passive strategies like index funds (mostly public equity portfolios), while the impact investing report is more about active, riskier strategies to help pro-climate businesses get capital. 

Overall, there weren't totally clear conclusions. On ESG, We're relatively skeptical of the classic "divest from bad stuff" approach of most E... (read more)

Thanks Johannes for the reply. I agree with you on (a) and (c), but I'm a bit confused on (b). I understand (and for the most part) agree with your view that "technology-specific support and innovation policy" is a very promising route for philanthropic engagement to fight climate change, but I'm struggling to see how this recent shift in climate badness predictions adds additional support for this route of intervention vis-a-vis other mechanisms (rich-country policy advocacy concentrated on reducing domestic emissions, projects that directly reduce emissions in the short term, etc.) 

Thanks for this report, very interesting.  I think that the question on everyone's mind after reading this is: what does this mean for the EA viewpoint on the importance of climate change as a cause area (which is already somewhat controversial)?  Sounds like the two of you disagree and John is working on a report on this, but I'd say that I am quite interested to see this report and both of your views on the subject. 

Hello Manny, thanks for the encouragement and good ideas! Some quick responses to your points:

1. Yes,  reduction in particulate matter is super-important, and we haven't incorporated this into our CEAs. Measuring the social cost (of both CO2 and particular matter) is pretty tough/controversial, but in the future we'd like to incorporate this kind of thinking into our models. 
    
2. Yes, this is a good point. We've focused on the US because we have a comparative knowledge from our understanding of the US context, and also as a large emitter chan

Hi James, 

Thanks for your feedback! It was really helpful and gave us a few things to think about.  A few responses:

1. Marginal benefit: These are all good questions. They are ones we didn't tackle in our general activism model laid out here (which was inspired more by looking backward at Sunrise's previous activities) , but that we are thinking about as we consider whether or not to recommend Sunrise this giving season. Sunrise says that additional funds (especially to the c3) will be used to grow their movement in both size and effectivness.  

HI Michael, thanks for the question!

We haven't tried to do an in-depth analysis of Citizen's Climate lobby, though we did do a shallow dive on them last year. I think in theory it would be great if we could find an organization doing high-impact, centrist activism, but I haven't seen it. CCL is an interesting model and they have had a lot of success, but they have been really focused on a carbon tax, which doesn't seem to have much leverage in DC recently. So I think that blunts their effectiveness. 

That being said, a carbon tax just came up in the di... (read more)

Hi Scott, thanks for your questions! Good questions, let me try some responses.

1. This is clearly the most difficult parameter to measure. We thought .5-10% represented a reasonable yet conservative range of potential values. I'd say "conventional wisdom" (ie what quite a number of the people we've spoken with have argued, but certainly not everyone agrees) is that you can draw a pretty straight line between the recent work of policy-focused climate activism groups like Sunrise and subsequent placement of climate as a high priority for the Biden adminis

As outlined in the document, the ranking/prioritization was done internally by Giving Green staff, based on our experience working in the space, a wide array of experts working on various parts of the climate issue, and reviewing public documents. I agree probably not the most robust procedure, but it was meant mostly to  limit the scope of our search task to make it manageable given the size of our team. 

In 2021 we're taking some different tactics, in an attempt to improve our methods. For our US work we're diving much more deeply into some sect... (read more)

Hi Jackva,

Thanks so much for your detailed and thoughtful response, we really appreciate your engagement. Some quick responses to your points:

On funding and room for funding:
1. Big Green over-funding is not the right reference class for neglected issue advocates and probably more informative for grassroots

You’re right that it’s a bit tough to place the Big Greens in a conceptual framework, because they do so many diverse activities. We place them more in the “insider” category since a lot of their activities for federal policy fall on the insider spec... (read more)

Hello everyone, Dan from Giving Green here. As noted in the explanation above, the main purpose of this grant is to deepen and improve our research into grassroots activism, hopefully coming up with something that is more aligned with research norms within the EA community. We'd love to bring an experienced EA researcher on board to help us with that, and would encourage any interested parties to apply. 

We currently have two jobs posted, one for a full-time or consultant researcher, and the second for a full-time program manager. We're also interested... (read more)

Super interesting  Karolina! I only took a quick look at the model, but was wondering if it includes the human welfare outcomes?  (I didn't see it, but maybe I missed it.) For instance, we at IDinsight are working on a project based around shrimp farming, and a main pathway of the theory of change is improved tech -> improved water quality -> increased stocking density -> increased farmer profits -> increased consumption -> increased human welfare. Given that development actors are focusing on this pathway, I think it would be important to take into account. 

Hello, Giving Green is hiring a consultant to help us research climate change charities in Australia.  For those of you unfamiliar, Giving Green is an EA-inspired organization working to generate cost-effective donation and investment recommendations to fight climate change. For more information and to apply, please see our job post. 

Our ideal candidate has a wide range of qualifications, and we understand that our ideal candidate may not exist. We believe that it’s possible to substitute experience in some categories with hard work and dedicatio... (read more)

Hello everyone. Well, this forum has blown up, and we (GG) have taken some punches. I want to list a few take-aways on my end:

1. One thing we’re hearing loud and clear is that there is a lot of worry among this group that having  recommendations in categories that are not the most cost-effective will do more harm than good. I think this is worth considering, though I don't totally agree. What I do agree with is that our site could be designed to lead people to the most cost-effective recommendations, and make deviations from this ideal more obvious. Base

Hi Alex, let me clarify my thoughts on the "unsure of sign" argument. Let's say for a given charity, you are considering the sign of impact on some outcome given an increase in donations. Given inherent uncertainly, you might think of a having a probability distribution reflecting your belief on the effect of a donation on this outcome. In almost any case, you would have to believe that there is some non-zero portion of the probability mass of this distribution below zero (because we've seen good intentions backfire so many times.) This is my point: the si... (read more)

Hi, this is Dan from Giving Green. As you might imagine, I have a lot to say here. 

First though, let me thank Alex for going about this criticism in what I would consider the right way: he brought his concerns to us, we had a discussion, and he changed some things based on the discussion. He also offered us a chance to comment on his draft to ensure he hadn’t said anything blatantly factually inaccurate. And then he aired his disagreements in a respectful post. So thanks for that Alex. 

That being said, I fundamentally disagree with the majority o... (read more)

"The EA movement currently has no organization dedicated full time to exploring and making a strong case for new cause areas. " 

Isn't this what open phil does? 

Hey, Dan from Giving Green here.  Nice post, and glad to see more and more EAs thinking deeply about the climate problem. There are a lot of tough assumptions that go into these numbers, but I think the logic is sound that promoting clean energy innovation is among the most cost-effective ways to fight climate change. 

That being said, I think the question of how to best promote clean energy is pretty complicated. I don't know a lot about the MIT Energy Initiative in particular, but I think that directly funding specific research efforts is likely... (read more)

Johannes and I have debated this at length before, but I'd like to make a plug for the utility of providing recommendations for offsets, as we do at Giving Green. I agree with Johannes that offsets are likely much less effective in the fight against climate change than donations targeting systemic change, such as moving policy or technology. (Though I'm less confident about putting any numbers on this difference, which feels like an exercise in extreme guesswork.)  

That being said, I do think that providing recommendations in the offset space is likel... (read more)

Thanks!

Hi Milan,

I can't speak for CE, but we at Giving Green have looked a bit into Wren.

Some thing I like about Wren:

1. They seem to have put some thought and extra effort into picking offsets they think are better than normal. 
2. They have a nice interface and good publicity, so hopefully that will crowd some money into funding good projects. 

Some things I don't like about Wren:

1. I fundamentally disagree with the idea that measuring a 'carbon footprint' and then offsetting this footprint is a meaningful and productive way to fight climate change. People shoul

Hi Maria, thanks for the note. I understand the point you're making, but I think the case of forestry and cookstoves are really quite different.  The difference is that with clean cookstove (or really any project that improves energy efficiency), you permanently remove demand for energy, which is not reversible. 

Let's take a classic impermanence example around forestry offsets. A project works for a year to conserve a hectare of forest that would have been counterfactually cut down . They are issued X carbon credits for this conservation, and sel... (read more)

Hi Everyone, Dan from Giving Green here. Just a note that we'll be doing a big re-launch of our website and product (with recommendations for the 2020 giving season!) in about a month's time. We're looking forward to sharing more details of our strategy in a post here around that time. In the meantime, happy to answer questions here or chat with interested parties.

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.