I made a comment replying to this post generally but there were some specific issues I had with this comment I also wanted to flag. I will copy some across as they’re relevant but also add some more thoughts. For context, I’ve been working with Extinction Rebellion UK (XR UK) full-time for almost two years, since just after they launched, as well as with the slightly newer Animal Rebellion.
To start with, I’ll reply to some specific comments:
Grassroots activism might have been neglected ten years ago, but it is not neglected now
and
US-focused public engagement—the category under which grassroots activism falls—received about 100 million on average between 2015-2019, which is about 27% of total US-focused climate philanthropy by foundations, a lot more than what the 2011-2015 numbers that underlie the neglectedness analysis suggest. It is also the largest share of any item in the US and far larger than the total global philanthropic spending for key neglected technologies such as negative emissions tech (25 million) and CCS or advanced nuclear (not even having their own positions, buried under clean electricity, but this will be heavily focused on renewables).
Different types of activism: Speaking from my experience at XR, I definitely do think that certain kinds of impactful climate activism are neglected. To give some anecdotal evidence to start, let’s talk about XR. XR was found to be the largest influencer on public awareness around climate change according to Twitter research conducted at COP25 (this sentence was edited due to an incorrect statement). Yet, I would say XR is extremely funding constrained currently, having just an income of £46,000 in December 2020, whilst still having thousands of volunteers across the UK. If XR UK, at their level of popularity and significance are under-funded, I would make an assumption that it is the same for other climate movements. Two key points I would like to make here are:
1. That not all progressive activism is equal. Something I believe that both you and Alex allude to (or directly say) is that we can lump together a groups such as Friends of the Earth and WWF with TSM and Extinction Rebellion under umbrellas like public engagement. I think there is a huge distinction between your traditional NGO (FoE and WWF) versus a movement whose priority is shifting public support, mobilising volunteers and using civil disobedience as a theory of change.
On this point, I think there is an abundance of traditional NGO climate campaigning—WWF, Greenpeace, FoE and so on. I would say the main theory of change they apply is advising policy and public education. Whereas if you look at the number of groups who are trying to mobilise a large base of people to engage in non-violent direct action for the climate, I would say there is only two meaningful groups left in this regard: TSM and XR. This is a huge topic that I might make another post generally on the EA Forum about but for the time-being, I’m going to link to an article by someone from Open Phil discussing the necessity for an ecology of change that includes mass protest and civil disobedience as a key and neglected piece in recent times. In addition, here is a full report funded by Open Phil on the topic of funding social movement doing civil disobedience. In short, I think that it’s not possible to equate the money given to other progressive “activist” groups and money given to TSM as being given for the same theory of change, as they are fundamentally different. So whilst climate NGOs are not neglected, social movements for the climate are.
The assumption in the TSM analysis is that there is something transformative / unique / high value in TSM that only TSM or grassroots activism can deliver. As I argued in the “Some misconceptions about CATF” section above, this claim does not seem well-supported because both technological change driven through incremental policies and climate laws could be transformative. There is no reason to assume that TSM > CATF on this at this point. One could try to model this.
CATF vs TSM—Transformative vs Incremental: Some comments I have on this is that there are way that TSM are societally transformative in ways that CATF legislation is not. Fundamentally, groups like TSM and XR work to shape public opinion around an issue and build public support for a general cause. This then creates the public weather for groups such as CATF to incrementally change legislation. However, I think where incremental policy fails is when it is premature relative to the public sentiment of the country/world, and open to reversal by future politicians or leaders. A perfect example is the Paris Agreement; a great piece of legislation for the climate—what could go wrong? However when leaders such as Donald Trump choose to leave behind such policies, they are effectively nullified. If the climate was such a central issue to the majority of the American public, such as freedom to marry, then Trump couldn’t have withdrawn from similar legislation due to risk of committing political suicide. In this way, I believe TSM do have more transformative and long-lasting effects on the climate as they generate broad-based public support for climate which is generally permanent and continuous, whereas specific policies are open to change every 4 years with each set of new politicians.
But there is no parallel argument made—to my knowledge—for why in case of Sunrise we should move away from the prior that something that has increased 40x-fold in funding over the last years and has captured the public imagination and support of an entire wing of a major US political party, would have great room for funding left.
Funding constraints: here seems to be an assumption that because that because the funding has grown by X amount, that Sunrise is no longer funding constrained. The argument I would make the change the prior is that Sunrise has built capacity, through networks of thousands of volunteers, 400 local hubs and so on that have been mentioned, to demand larger policy change from the Biden administration compared to what was previously possible. Regarding funding constraints, I would actually argue the opposite; As TSM has thousands of engaged volunteers, if it had greater funding capacity, it could look to take on some volunteers into full-time staff positions and greatly increase the capacity and impact of TSM. This alludes to a point I’ll make later on and a general theme I see is that yes, this is not as easily quantifiable as the achievements by CATF, yet they are a high-risk and potentially very high-impact investment if it pays off.
Risk aversion to social movements: I couldn’t find the exact quote from yourself however I get the general gist from your post and comments that funding groups like TSM is sub-optimal relative to CATF due to the difficulty in qualitatively measuring the outcome of such a complex system. I worry this risk-aversion in our funding will constrain us to options that are limited to technological innovation and very discrete policy change (CATF basically) whilst excluding the more opaque, yet still valuable, systems of social movements and people-powered campaigns.
However, this does not at all mean that we should donate to TSM at this point. I agree TSM could have been a great philanthropic bet 4 years ago.
Whilst slightly off-topic from the current TSM conversation, I believe this has been a large problem throughout EA for years and I can’t recall any EA groups giving money to social movements in the past 4-5 years (besides Open Phil giving to Ayni Institute in 2016) which seems ridiculous, given that we’ve just been talking about the huge impact that groups like TSM, XR, Fridays for Future or people like Greta have had on the climate movement. Generally it seems EA funders are too risk averse (or maybe averse to hits-based giving is more accurate) to fund social movements early on for potentially a few reasons:
1) because they don’t have enough quantifiable metrics to prove impact or people just don’t understand certain practices (the latter was said to me in a grant application to ACE). Then 3-5 years down the line, we see comments, saying that groups like TSM would have been a great bet 4 years ago. Whilst this is a more general point and off the topic of TSM specifically, it seems like we should reconcile this and start funding social movements earlier.
2) EAs think that social movements aren’t effective and therefore assign them a low expected value due to both low probabilities of success and low impact if successful. It seems this we should change our minds on the scale of impact as historically, it’s been quite significant. I read higher up about your background in Friends of the Earth so it would be interesting to hear your take on this!
Again, thanks for your work on XR and Animal Rebellion and for your comment!
With apologies for the delay, here are my responses:
1. My criticism of the TSM recommendation is of a particular funding opportunity at a particular time and place—my view on XR could be quite different (I actually don’t have strong views on XR at this point).
I think it’s important to recognize some important differences here between TSM and XR, namely TSM’s association with a very well-funded movement (progressive Democrats), something that doesn’t really have a clear equivalence in case of XR as far as I am aware.
I think the argument for funding (a) a partisan grassroots organization in the US (b) at a time where this organization is relatively mature, (c) has lots of support from progressives, (d) and where there is a lot of risk from backfiring because the most effective actions require some level of bipartisan support (and, ideally, a continuing Democratic majority rather than a severe backlash due to perceived progressive over-reach), is implausible to be the best thing we can fund in climate at face value and the analysis by GG doesn’t alleviate those concerns.
This is quite different from saying that XR should not be funded or that TSM would not have been worth funding some years ago. It is even different from saying TSM should not be funded, just that it is fairly unlikely to be the best use of marginal climate dollars.
2. We regularly fund high-risk high-reward bets with the FP Climate Fund. We are very much into hits-based giving, e.g. last year we made the first larger grant to TerraPraxis/Energy for Humanity (they had no received more than 45k/year in philanthropic support before, we granted 250k for that organization to achieve a step change). We are evaluating another such grant at the moment. I certainly would have considered funding Greta had I been a climate philanthropist some years ago.
3. As Alex points out, not funding grassroots is not necessarily reflective of risk aversion—it can just be because of low expected value.
4. Should we automatically assume high expected value of social movements? You seem to suggest that the rise of progressive climate movements proves their high expected value and, thereby, the mistake to not fund them.
While I think this is a bit of a different question (see 1, 2; it is totally consistent to be positive about those movements without wanting to fund them now), I would also want to challenge the assertion a bit that social movements are definitely always positive.
This is a bit more anecdotal than the rest, but I think one of the big mistakes of the environmental movement—for example—has been its ideological narrowness and framing environmental problems in very particular terms (I have a bit more about this in my new comment). I think on balance modern environmentalism and progressive grassroots activism are probably good, but it is not as obvious as it seems at first glance—for example, we would probably have a lot more nuclear if not for the modern environmental movement which would greatly help with the problem this movement now cares the most about. I say this as someone who literally walked through the streets of Frankfurt protesting against nuclear power in my FoE days.
While somewhat anecdotal, this shows the risk of funding social movements which will often have ideological or other lock-ins that may create a lot of damage. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fund social movements, it just means that it has a lot more uncertainty attached to it than more targeted interventions and we need to reflect that (not with risk aversion, but including it in our EV calcs).
5. Neglectedness is a tricky beast. I go into this a bit more in my new comment but I don’t think we should just infer from low funding levels of XR in December that it is underfunded.
Ultimately, we are interested in high marginal returns to funds—i.e. in this case that giving more to XR would make a meaningful difference to XR’s success and that XR’s success would lead to less emissions, in expectation. There’s uncertainty along the way with each step.
The point is not that it cannot be true that XR is high impact to fund at the margin, the point is that such an argument would require a lot of additional evidence such as (a) productive funding margins, (b) impact of XR on emissions, (c) absence or low relevance of downside risks, etc.
As I lay out in my new comment, I think it is quite implausible that a large organization has very productive funding margins, this has nothing to do with grassroots per se, but just the size of the overall effort. Do we really think that a movement with thousands of people willing to give their time could not mobilize more than 50k if they had great use for it? This seems quite implausible to me.
6. Type of activism. It is true that WWF et al. are different from TSM and XR, but they fundamentally serve the same purpose—mass mobilization / building public support / engagement (shifting the Overton window). They do so with different approaches, but it is not clear that the TSM approach, in particular, highly partisan mobilization, is the most useful one at the margin.
If it is, we should expect more of that public engagement funding to go into that direction, that part of climate philanthropy is in principle open to TSM. Also, note that as I stressed in my initial comment, that ⅔ of climate philanthropy or so are from individuals, many of which will be quite happy to fund grassroots in the US. This is really quite different from the situation in the UK, I think.
7. Incremental vs. transformational. [Aside: Hopefully without being too nitpicky, the Paris Agreement isn’t legislation, in the case of the US it is not even a binding treaty, but an accord that any President can choose to commit to or not (effectively). Also, the President has little power to enforce emissions targets, this would either need executive orders that could be revoked by the next President or a binding law that seems infeasible in the US (would need 60 votes in the Senate or getting rid of the filibuster).]
Ultimately the point for CATF not being incremental is exactly that those policies that CATF et al advance are often very robust—tax credits, innovation budgets, etc. -- a lot more robust than executive orders; while Trump scrapped almost all of Obama’s executive orders (or tried to so), he failed to reduce innovation budgets (defended by Senate Republicans), he even approved lots of new essential innovation policy (such as 45Q and bills on advanced nuclear innovation) and, crucially, even the tax credits for renewables are constantly being renewed.
Ultimately, of course, the goal is not for legislation to exist, but for emissions reductions to materialize. But this makes the point even stronger: If we woke up tomorrow and California and Germany would be governed by climate-denying psychopaths, we would still have cheap solar, electric cars approaching market parity etc. Which is to say there are a lot of transformative benefits from seemingly incremental policies and the evidence for this is much clearer than for the benefits or more bindingly looking policies that would also always be unstable in the US.
No worries about the delay, now it’s my term to apologise as it’s been a while on my side too! I am finding this quite fascinating and informative so I really appreciate you taking the time to write such detailed and thorough comments. I also wanted to thank you for your work at FP as everything I’ve read from FP regarding climate has been extremely rigorous and interesting.
1. Differences between TSM and XR: These points make sense so thank you for the explanation. It seems like the main concern you have about TSM is their partisanship and allegiance with the Democratic Party so I definitely understand how that’s both quite different to XR and also a potential problem. Interestingly enough, I previously thought that was a positive that TSM had over XR as XR being apolitical in that it doesn’t endorse specific parties or political candidates, often gets touted as an organisation that raises the alarm about the problem of the climate crisis, yet doesn’t provide tangible steps forward through policy or politics (with the exception that there was a CEE Bill introduced to UK Parliament recently which actually does those things). I would also say it can enable greater mobilisation to a degree as people are much more used to turning out for electoral politics where local groups within XR may not have as tangible organising points locally.
2. We regularly fund high-risk high-reward bets with the FP Climate Fund.
That’s really interesting and I didn’t know about this. I’ve now found a page on your website explaining the funding for TerraPraxis (I missed it initially as it was referred to as Terra Praxis and not Energy for Humanity). Interestingly enough, a friend/colleague of mine from XR is now working for them, small world. You mentioned elsewhere that you often have 20 or so pages of research for each charity recommendation and I was wondering if these were accessible at all as I would be interested in reading more about the reasons behind funding for TerraPraxis and Carbon180 beyond the summaries on the website, specifically if you had any quantification of EV/ the possible impact of these two groups on carbon emissions? And are there other examples of hits-based giving from previous years you can point me towards that FP Climate Fund has funded as I can seemingly only find the usual suspects of CfRN and CATF on your climate page!
3. Progressive movements impact
The rise of progressive climate movements recently is only one example of where I was drawing the general high expected value of social movements. The other being historical research from Harvard researcher Erica Chenoweth which found that any nonviolent social movement that garnered over 3.5% of the population in active support, never failed to achieve their aims. There were some limitations to this study in terms of audience (primarily Global South countries) however I believe it is worth noting nonetheless. Then of course there is a slight element of anecdotal evidence from history i.e. Civil Rights Movement, Indian Independence, Serbian revolution and so on.
I would agree about the unintended risks and uncertainties around movements, especially decentralised ones such as TSM and XR where it is more likely you’ll have individuals or groups that could go AWOL to put it bluntly and come out against certain important solutions i.e. CCS or nuclear like you said. To a degree I think this could be mitigated by the approach taken by the movement in terms of levels of decentralisation and central opinions on certain policies (or having none, such as XR)
4. Neglectedness and quantifying expected values
I definitely agree about the marginal returns to funds and it was implied but not obvious in my comment that in my opinion, XR could achieve a lot more given an increase in funds and that its main bottleneck to success currently was financial. The second point about the impact of XR on emissions is much more tricky to calculate and one I wanted to ask you about.
How would you even go about doing an EV calculation for a group such as TSM or XR where the causal link from the work they do to change in emissions seems so distant and vague? For example, if I had to try break down very crudely, it would be something like:
Direct action → Media coverage → change in attitude of public/policy maker → growing public support for climate → pressure on policymakers for more green legislation → green legislation passes → climate emissions affected.
Obviously this is very basic but not only are the uncertainties for the second and third links (most of them actually) quite large in my opinion, this whole chain could have a time lag of 5-10 years with subconscious effects on people so how can we quantify things like that in our EVs appropriately? Not to mention that there would be 100s of other factors that can lead to a change in attitudes of the public or policy makers so how do we determine how much of that was a movement vs other factors?
5. Incremental vs. transformational.
Apologies for the bad example of the Paris Agreement, yes it’s not legislation but hopefully it made the point well enough. I can see presidents wouldn’t scrap certain policies that are favourable to both parties (such as innovation budgets or tax credits for businesses that Republicans are likely to support) however surely this would break down for some climate legislation. Another example I’m plucking out of thin air would be a policy to divert subsidies from fossil fuels to renewable sources. I’m fairly certain that there is a swath of examples that would fit the bill in terms that most Republicans would oppose but Democrats would support and are good for the environment, such as the above one. Surely then all of these policies would be up for reversal if leadership of a country changed, whereas if 70-80% of the population, including Republicans, supported climate change legislation sufficiently (via a successful social movement) then even Republican representatives would not want to endorse reversals.
It seems like we’re slightly talking about different things though as what you say is true for groups such as CATF who (probably) only support robust policies that are favourable by both sides. However where I think the difference would like is other green policies as the one I mentioned above that could be essential in reducing emissions but are more divisive politically currently, where a social movement could (but could also not) work to increase general public support for climate legislation.
Thanks for your work for XR and Animal Rebellion and for your comment!
I wanted to reply but could not find the claim that XR is the largest influencer on climate change in your link. Could you clarify what you mean?
They are linked as #1 in Twitter (?) influence on the sub-topic of education in climate change at one climate conference which is quite a bit different from “XR was found to be the largest influencer on climate change according to research presented at COP25” which suggests large impact on emissions.
Thanks for your reply—I don’t think you’re missing something, it seems like I was guilty of misinterpreting that data (I assumed the analysis and mapping wasn’t just limited to Twitter but wider media) and subsequent poor word choice!
So yes, I should have said something more like: XR was the largest influencer on public awareness around climate change at COP25, according to Twitter analysis. The “on public awareness” is a key bit I missed out so my bad there. Also, I guess I extrapolated slightly as one would assume that if you’re the largest influencer around public awareness of climate change at one major climate conference, you would probably be quite prominent in that area for some time afterwards too (and it’s only been just over a year since COP25 so I was implying XR has been one of the largest influencers on public awareness of climate change for the past 18 or so months).
Apologies for the confusion and thanks for pointing it out nicely. I’ll edit my original post for clarity.
Thanks, James! This is very clarifying.
Always curious for studies that systematically study the impact of things, so if you come across something for XR that more directly links it to changes in opinion, political opportunity windows, feasibility, emissions etc. please do send (johannes@founderspledge.com).
Will reply to your comment in full soon, hopefully tomorrow.
I made a comment replying to this post generally but there were some specific issues I had with this comment I also wanted to flag. I will copy some across as they’re relevant but also add some more thoughts. For context, I’ve been working with Extinction Rebellion UK (XR UK) full-time for almost two years, since just after they launched, as well as with the slightly newer Animal Rebellion.
To start with, I’ll reply to some specific comments:
and
Different types of activism: Speaking from my experience at XR, I definitely do think that certain kinds of impactful climate activism are neglected. To give some anecdotal evidence to start, let’s talk about XR. XR was found to be the largest influencer on public awareness around climate change according to Twitter research conducted at COP25 (this sentence was edited due to an incorrect statement). Yet, I would say XR is extremely funding constrained currently, having just an income of £46,000 in December 2020, whilst still having thousands of volunteers across the UK. If XR UK, at their level of popularity and significance are under-funded, I would make an assumption that it is the same for other climate movements. Two key points I would like to make here are:
1. That not all progressive activism is equal. Something I believe that both you and Alex allude to (or directly say) is that we can lump together a groups such as Friends of the Earth and WWF with TSM and Extinction Rebellion under umbrellas like public engagement. I think there is a huge distinction between your traditional NGO (FoE and WWF) versus a movement whose priority is shifting public support, mobilising volunteers and using civil disobedience as a theory of change.
On this point, I think there is an abundance of traditional NGO climate campaigning—WWF, Greenpeace, FoE and so on. I would say the main theory of change they apply is advising policy and public education. Whereas if you look at the number of groups who are trying to mobilise a large base of people to engage in non-violent direct action for the climate, I would say there is only two meaningful groups left in this regard: TSM and XR. This is a huge topic that I might make another post generally on the EA Forum about but for the time-being, I’m going to link to an article by someone from Open Phil discussing the necessity for an ecology of change that includes mass protest and civil disobedience as a key and neglected piece in recent times. In addition, here is a full report funded by Open Phil on the topic of funding social movement doing civil disobedience. In short, I think that it’s not possible to equate the money given to other progressive “activist” groups and money given to TSM as being given for the same theory of change, as they are fundamentally different. So whilst climate NGOs are not neglected, social movements for the climate are.
CATF vs TSM—Transformative vs Incremental: Some comments I have on this is that there are way that TSM are societally transformative in ways that CATF legislation is not. Fundamentally, groups like TSM and XR work to shape public opinion around an issue and build public support for a general cause. This then creates the public weather for groups such as CATF to incrementally change legislation. However, I think where incremental policy fails is when it is premature relative to the public sentiment of the country/world, and open to reversal by future politicians or leaders. A perfect example is the Paris Agreement; a great piece of legislation for the climate—what could go wrong? However when leaders such as Donald Trump choose to leave behind such policies, they are effectively nullified. If the climate was such a central issue to the majority of the American public, such as freedom to marry, then Trump couldn’t have withdrawn from similar legislation due to risk of committing political suicide. In this way, I believe TSM do have more transformative and long-lasting effects on the climate as they generate broad-based public support for climate which is generally permanent and continuous, whereas specific policies are open to change every 4 years with each set of new politicians.
Funding constraints: here seems to be an assumption that because that because the funding has grown by X amount, that Sunrise is no longer funding constrained. The argument I would make the change the prior is that Sunrise has built capacity, through networks of thousands of volunteers, 400 local hubs and so on that have been mentioned, to demand larger policy change from the Biden administration compared to what was previously possible. Regarding funding constraints, I would actually argue the opposite; As TSM has thousands of engaged volunteers, if it had greater funding capacity, it could look to take on some volunteers into full-time staff positions and greatly increase the capacity and impact of TSM. This alludes to a point I’ll make later on and a general theme I see is that yes, this is not as easily quantifiable as the achievements by CATF, yet they are a high-risk and potentially very high-impact investment if it pays off.
Risk aversion to social movements: I couldn’t find the exact quote from yourself however I get the general gist from your post and comments that funding groups like TSM is sub-optimal relative to CATF due to the difficulty in qualitatively measuring the outcome of such a complex system. I worry this risk-aversion in our funding will constrain us to options that are limited to technological innovation and very discrete policy change (CATF basically) whilst excluding the more opaque, yet still valuable, systems of social movements and people-powered campaigns.
Whilst slightly off-topic from the current TSM conversation, I believe this has been a large problem throughout EA for years and I can’t recall any EA groups giving money to social movements in the past 4-5 years (besides Open Phil giving to Ayni Institute in 2016) which seems ridiculous, given that we’ve just been talking about the huge impact that groups like TSM, XR, Fridays for Future or people like Greta have had on the climate movement. Generally it seems EA funders are too risk averse (or maybe averse to hits-based giving is more accurate) to fund social movements early on for potentially a few reasons:
1) because they don’t have enough quantifiable metrics to prove impact or people just don’t understand certain practices (the latter was said to me in a grant application to ACE). Then 3-5 years down the line, we see comments, saying that groups like TSM would have been a great bet 4 years ago. Whilst this is a more general point and off the topic of TSM specifically, it seems like we should reconcile this and start funding social movements earlier.
2) EAs think that social movements aren’t effective and therefore assign them a low expected value due to both low probabilities of success and low impact if successful. It seems this we should change our minds on the scale of impact as historically, it’s been quite significant. I read higher up about your background in Friends of the Earth so it would be interesting to hear your take on this!
Again, thanks for your work on XR and Animal Rebellion and for your comment!
With apologies for the delay, here are my responses:
1. My criticism of the TSM recommendation is of a particular funding opportunity at a particular time and place—my view on XR could be quite different (I actually don’t have strong views on XR at this point).
I think it’s important to recognize some important differences here between TSM and XR, namely TSM’s association with a very well-funded movement (progressive Democrats), something that doesn’t really have a clear equivalence in case of XR as far as I am aware.
I think the argument for funding (a) a partisan grassroots organization in the US (b) at a time where this organization is relatively mature, (c) has lots of support from progressives, (d) and where there is a lot of risk from backfiring because the most effective actions require some level of bipartisan support (and, ideally, a continuing Democratic majority rather than a severe backlash due to perceived progressive over-reach), is implausible to be the best thing we can fund in climate at face value and the analysis by GG doesn’t alleviate those concerns.
This is quite different from saying that XR should not be funded or that TSM would not have been worth funding some years ago. It is even different from saying TSM should not be funded, just that it is fairly unlikely to be the best use of marginal climate dollars.
2. We regularly fund high-risk high-reward bets with the FP Climate Fund. We are very much into hits-based giving, e.g. last year we made the first larger grant to TerraPraxis/Energy for Humanity (they had no received more than 45k/year in philanthropic support before, we granted 250k for that organization to achieve a step change). We are evaluating another such grant at the moment. I certainly would have considered funding Greta had I been a climate philanthropist some years ago.
3. As Alex points out, not funding grassroots is not necessarily reflective of risk aversion—it can just be because of low expected value.
4. Should we automatically assume high expected value of social movements?
You seem to suggest that the rise of progressive climate movements proves their high expected value and, thereby, the mistake to not fund them.
While I think this is a bit of a different question (see 1, 2; it is totally consistent to be positive about those movements without wanting to fund them now), I would also want to challenge the assertion a bit that social movements are definitely always positive.
This is a bit more anecdotal than the rest, but I think one of the big mistakes of the environmental movement—for example—has been its ideological narrowness and framing environmental problems in very particular terms (I have a bit more about this in my new comment). I think on balance modern environmentalism and progressive grassroots activism are probably good, but it is not as obvious as it seems at first glance—for example, we would probably have a lot more nuclear if not for the modern environmental movement which would greatly help with the problem this movement now cares the most about. I say this as someone who literally walked through the streets of Frankfurt protesting against nuclear power in my FoE days.
While somewhat anecdotal, this shows the risk of funding social movements which will often have ideological or other lock-ins that may create a lot of damage. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t fund social movements, it just means that it has a lot more uncertainty attached to it than more targeted interventions and we need to reflect that (not with risk aversion, but including it in our EV calcs).
5. Neglectedness is a tricky beast. I go into this a bit more in my new comment but I don’t think we should just infer from low funding levels of XR in December that it is underfunded.
Ultimately, we are interested in high marginal returns to funds—i.e. in this case that giving more to XR would make a meaningful difference to XR’s success and that XR’s success would lead to less emissions, in expectation. There’s uncertainty along the way with each step.
The point is not that it cannot be true that XR is high impact to fund at the margin, the point is that such an argument would require a lot of additional evidence such as (a) productive funding margins, (b) impact of XR on emissions, (c) absence or low relevance of downside risks, etc.
As I lay out in my new comment, I think it is quite implausible that a large organization has very productive funding margins, this has nothing to do with grassroots per se, but just the size of the overall effort. Do we really think that a movement with thousands of people willing to give their time could not mobilize more than 50k if they had great use for it? This seems quite implausible to me.
6. Type of activism. It is true that WWF et al. are different from TSM and XR, but they fundamentally serve the same purpose—mass mobilization / building public support / engagement (shifting the Overton window). They do so with different approaches, but it is not clear that the TSM approach, in particular, highly partisan mobilization, is the most useful one at the margin.
If it is, we should expect more of that public engagement funding to go into that direction, that part of climate philanthropy is in principle open to TSM. Also, note that as I stressed in my initial comment, that ⅔ of climate philanthropy or so are from individuals, many of which will be quite happy to fund grassroots in the US. This is really quite different from the situation in the UK, I think.
7. Incremental vs. transformational.
[Aside: Hopefully without being too nitpicky, the Paris Agreement isn’t legislation, in the case of the US it is not even a binding treaty, but an accord that any President can choose to commit to or not (effectively). Also, the President has little power to enforce emissions targets, this would either need executive orders that could be revoked by the next President or a binding law that seems infeasible in the US (would need 60 votes in the Senate or getting rid of the filibuster).]
Ultimately the point for CATF not being incremental is exactly that those policies that CATF et al advance are often very robust—tax credits, innovation budgets, etc. -- a lot more robust than executive orders; while Trump scrapped almost all of Obama’s executive orders (or tried to so), he failed to reduce innovation budgets (defended by Senate Republicans), he even approved lots of new essential innovation policy (such as 45Q and bills on advanced nuclear innovation) and, crucially, even the tax credits for renewables are constantly being renewed.
Ultimately, of course, the goal is not for legislation to exist, but for emissions reductions to materialize. But this makes the point even stronger: If we woke up tomorrow and California and Germany would be governed by climate-denying psychopaths, we would still have cheap solar, electric cars approaching market parity etc. Which is to say there are a lot of transformative benefits from seemingly incremental policies and the evidence for this is much clearer than for the benefits or more bindingly looking policies that would also always be unstable in the US.
No worries about the delay, now it’s my term to apologise as it’s been a while on my side too! I am finding this quite fascinating and informative so I really appreciate you taking the time to write such detailed and thorough comments. I also wanted to thank you for your work at FP as everything I’ve read from FP regarding climate has been extremely rigorous and interesting.
1. Differences between TSM and XR: These points make sense so thank you for the explanation. It seems like the main concern you have about TSM is their partisanship and allegiance with the Democratic Party so I definitely understand how that’s both quite different to XR and also a potential problem. Interestingly enough, I previously thought that was a positive that TSM had over XR as XR being apolitical in that it doesn’t endorse specific parties or political candidates, often gets touted as an organisation that raises the alarm about the problem of the climate crisis, yet doesn’t provide tangible steps forward through policy or politics (with the exception that there was a CEE Bill introduced to UK Parliament recently which actually does those things). I would also say it can enable greater mobilisation to a degree as people are much more used to turning out for electoral politics where local groups within XR may not have as tangible organising points locally.
That’s really interesting and I didn’t know about this. I’ve now found a page on your website explaining the funding for TerraPraxis (I missed it initially as it was referred to as Terra Praxis and not Energy for Humanity). Interestingly enough, a friend/colleague of mine from XR is now working for them, small world. You mentioned elsewhere that you often have 20 or so pages of research for each charity recommendation and I was wondering if these were accessible at all as I would be interested in reading more about the reasons behind funding for TerraPraxis and Carbon180 beyond the summaries on the website, specifically if you had any quantification of EV/ the possible impact of these two groups on carbon emissions? And are there other examples of hits-based giving from previous years you can point me towards that FP Climate Fund has funded as I can seemingly only find the usual suspects of CfRN and CATF on your climate page!
3. Progressive movements impact
The rise of progressive climate movements recently is only one example of where I was drawing the general high expected value of social movements. The other being historical research from Harvard researcher Erica Chenoweth which found that any nonviolent social movement that garnered over 3.5% of the population in active support, never failed to achieve their aims. There were some limitations to this study in terms of audience (primarily Global South countries) however I believe it is worth noting nonetheless. Then of course there is a slight element of anecdotal evidence from history i.e. Civil Rights Movement, Indian Independence, Serbian revolution and so on.
I would agree about the unintended risks and uncertainties around movements, especially decentralised ones such as TSM and XR where it is more likely you’ll have individuals or groups that could go AWOL to put it bluntly and come out against certain important solutions i.e. CCS or nuclear like you said. To a degree I think this could be mitigated by the approach taken by the movement in terms of levels of decentralisation and central opinions on certain policies (or having none, such as XR)
4. Neglectedness and quantifying expected values
I definitely agree about the marginal returns to funds and it was implied but not obvious in my comment that in my opinion, XR could achieve a lot more given an increase in funds and that its main bottleneck to success currently was financial. The second point about the impact of XR on emissions is much more tricky to calculate and one I wanted to ask you about.
How would you even go about doing an EV calculation for a group such as TSM or XR where the causal link from the work they do to change in emissions seems so distant and vague? For example, if I had to try break down very crudely, it would be something like:
Direct action → Media coverage → change in attitude of public/policy maker → growing public support for climate → pressure on policymakers for more green legislation → green legislation passes → climate emissions affected.
Obviously this is very basic but not only are the uncertainties for the second and third links (most of them actually) quite large in my opinion, this whole chain could have a time lag of 5-10 years with subconscious effects on people so how can we quantify things like that in our EVs appropriately? Not to mention that there would be 100s of other factors that can lead to a change in attitudes of the public or policy makers so how do we determine how much of that was a movement vs other factors?
5. Incremental vs. transformational.
Apologies for the bad example of the Paris Agreement, yes it’s not legislation but hopefully it made the point well enough. I can see presidents wouldn’t scrap certain policies that are favourable to both parties (such as innovation budgets or tax credits for businesses that Republicans are likely to support) however surely this would break down for some climate legislation. Another example I’m plucking out of thin air would be a policy to divert subsidies from fossil fuels to renewable sources. I’m fairly certain that there is a swath of examples that would fit the bill in terms that most Republicans would oppose but Democrats would support and are good for the environment, such as the above one. Surely then all of these policies would be up for reversal if leadership of a country changed, whereas if 70-80% of the population, including Republicans, supported climate change legislation sufficiently (via a successful social movement) then even Republican representatives would not want to endorse reversals.
It seems like we’re slightly talking about different things though as what you say is true for groups such as CATF who (probably) only support robust policies that are favourable by both sides. However where I think the difference would like is other green policies as the one I mentioned above that could be essential in reducing emissions but are more divisive politically currently, where a social movement could (but could also not) work to increase general public support for climate legislation.
Thanks for your work for XR and Animal Rebellion and for your comment!
I wanted to reply but could not find the claim that XR is the largest influencer on climate change in your link. Could you clarify what you mean?
They are linked as #1 in Twitter (?) influence on the sub-topic of education in climate change at one climate conference which is quite a bit different from “XR was found to be the largest influencer on climate change according to research presented at COP25” which suggests large impact on emissions.
Am I missing something?
Thanks for your reply—I don’t think you’re missing something, it seems like I was guilty of misinterpreting that data (I assumed the analysis and mapping wasn’t just limited to Twitter but wider media) and subsequent poor word choice!
So yes, I should have said something more like: XR was the largest influencer on public awareness around climate change at COP25, according to Twitter analysis. The “on public awareness” is a key bit I missed out so my bad there. Also, I guess I extrapolated slightly as one would assume that if you’re the largest influencer around public awareness of climate change at one major climate conference, you would probably be quite prominent in that area for some time afterwards too (and it’s only been just over a year since COP25 so I was implying XR has been one of the largest influencers on public awareness of climate change for the past 18 or so months).
Apologies for the confusion and thanks for pointing it out nicely. I’ll edit my original post for clarity.
Thanks, James! This is very clarifying. Always curious for studies that systematically study the impact of things, so if you come across something for XR that more directly links it to changes in opinion, political opportunity windows, feasibility, emissions etc. please do send (johannes@founderspledge.com).
Will reply to your comment in full soon, hopefully tomorrow.