This is a really great discussion piece and a very mature response from Giving Green (GG) to it. I would mostly second jackva’s comments, and will just raise a few additions points.
There seems to be a misapprehension on the core criticism. The fundamental criticism of this article is not just that GG don’t do things quantitatively, but that they have completely neglected the “cost” side of cost-benefit analysis. The qualitative metrics don’t attempt to account for either the actual scale of money needed to do anything, nor the potential negatives of the actions. It appears designed to convince me that the charities accomplish anything at all, rather than that they do good things efficiently.
Minor disagreements with the article (Flagged to avoid the impression of consensus here rather than to divert the discussion onto these topics)
I would challenge the article’s assertion that CATF has no significant downsides. Quite apart from CCS debates, the new distributed nuclear faculties it proposes have elevated risk of enabling nuclear terrorism, which (besides being bad itself) can trigger further backlash against established nuclear generation. There are fundamental safety reasons why nuclear technology develops so slowly now, and why it isn’t widely distributed. There are fundamental geology reasons why CCS at high flow rates is hard, and the trend of attractive-looking test cases that are ultimately distracting failures is historically real.
I’m also confused by the article’s criticism of BURN, which seems to be a valid company that sells carbon offsets. It clearly has social co-benefits from pollution reduction, and it’s not claiming anything other than high-confidence emissions reductions. The write-up about BURN is worded misleadingly but not conceptually flawed.
Disagreement with the response and additional problems
In terms of analytic models, I agree that GHG emission changes are hard to establish with exactitude, but not obviously harder than the social benefits of any other intervention. In many cases I would expect the error bars in GG’s analytic evaluations to be smaller than So Give’s, and have a fairly uncontroversial choice of meaningful unit (e.g. tCO2-equivalent/$) unlike in social problems. Given that several options are pre-packaged as carbon offsets for a particular price, GG really just need an estimate of the probability that the emissions will really be trapped/avoided for some lifetime.
Ironically, the large range of things that are fundamentally difficult to include quantitatively are lumped into a single category: “co-benefits”. I don’t know who this is for. If I was donating from a pot of money that cared about development per se, I would go to Givewell or So Give to work out how. If I care about community buy-in (a really important aspect in the success of many projects), I need to know how those co-benefits are distributed, not just that someone somewhere benefits, and this should really be a part of “Causality”. If I care about biodiversity or literally any other green metric than global warming, I would be consistently disappointed by how little was written here.
Finally, I struggle with way this entire discussion revolves around US policy change. I suspect the amounts of money spent on lobbying in the USA is hugely more than in most countries, but I don’t see any consideration of neglectedness at the country level. Your research priorities document claims: “We focused on US policy because the US is the world’s second-largest emitter, it has outsized global influence, and because Giving Green’s staff are most familiar with the US policy systems.” The first two are not sufficient to demonstrate it’s optimal (it’s not even the first choice!), and the third is a problem with GG rather than the basis for a conclusion. Have you looked at state-level interventions? The whole world is even bigger than the US (and China), so why not look at global movements? Can you not either diversify your staff or expand their sphere of knowledge?
Conclusions The amount of opinions expressed here should be interpreted in three ways: firstly that a lot of people are really unhappy with the current GG methodology, secondly that they are willing to offer free advice and assistance, and thirdly that what GG are trying to do is really valuable, hence why it’s so important to get it right.
“Finally, I struggle with way this entire discussion revolves around US policy change. I suspect the amounts of money spent on lobbying in the USA is hugely more than in most countries, but I don’t see any consideration of neglectedness at the country level.”
This is actually another important and independent reason why we should expect CATF > TSM, CATF can optimize marginal resources across different geographies whereas Sunrise is limited to the US environment.
Indeed, although CATF is still very North America-centric. I’d be more excited to learn about a similar charity acting in China (assuming it wanted Western money).
CATF operates in China, albeit with a small program (but one could fund that to grow!). They are also generally expanding and have recently been funded to set up a somewhat significant presence in the EU as well.
This is a really great discussion piece and a very mature response from Giving Green (GG) to it. I would mostly second jackva’s comments, and will just raise a few additions points.
There seems to be a misapprehension on the core criticism. The fundamental criticism of this article is not just that GG don’t do things quantitatively, but that they have completely neglected the “cost” side of cost-benefit analysis. The qualitative metrics don’t attempt to account for either the actual scale of money needed to do anything, nor the potential negatives of the actions. It appears designed to convince me that the charities accomplish anything at all, rather than that they do good things efficiently.
Minor disagreements with the article
(Flagged to avoid the impression of consensus here rather than to divert the discussion onto these topics)
I would challenge the article’s assertion that CATF has no significant downsides. Quite apart from CCS debates, the new distributed nuclear faculties it proposes have elevated risk of enabling nuclear terrorism, which (besides being bad itself) can trigger further backlash against established nuclear generation. There are fundamental safety reasons why nuclear technology develops so slowly now, and why it isn’t widely distributed. There are fundamental geology reasons why CCS at high flow rates is hard, and the trend of attractive-looking test cases that are ultimately distracting failures is historically real.
I’m also confused by the article’s criticism of BURN, which seems to be a valid company that sells carbon offsets. It clearly has social co-benefits from pollution reduction, and it’s not claiming anything other than high-confidence emissions reductions. The write-up about BURN is worded misleadingly but not conceptually flawed.
Disagreement with the response and additional problems
In terms of analytic models, I agree that GHG emission changes are hard to establish with exactitude, but not obviously harder than the social benefits of any other intervention. In many cases I would expect the error bars in GG’s analytic evaluations to be smaller than So Give’s, and have a fairly uncontroversial choice of meaningful unit (e.g. tCO2-equivalent/$) unlike in social problems. Given that several options are pre-packaged as carbon offsets for a particular price, GG really just need an estimate of the probability that the emissions will really be trapped/avoided for some lifetime.
Ironically, the large range of things that are fundamentally difficult to include quantitatively are lumped into a single category: “co-benefits”. I don’t know who this is for. If I was donating from a pot of money that cared about development per se, I would go to Givewell or So Give to work out how. If I care about community buy-in (a really important aspect in the success of many projects), I need to know how those co-benefits are distributed, not just that someone somewhere benefits, and this should really be a part of “Causality”. If I care about biodiversity or literally any other green metric than global warming, I would be consistently disappointed by how little was written here.
Finally, I struggle with way this entire discussion revolves around US policy change. I suspect the amounts of money spent on lobbying in the USA is hugely more than in most countries, but I don’t see any consideration of neglectedness at the country level. Your research priorities document claims: “We focused on US policy because the US is the world’s second-largest emitter, it has outsized global influence, and because Giving Green’s staff are most familiar with the US policy systems.” The first two are not sufficient to demonstrate it’s optimal (it’s not even the first choice!), and the third is a problem with GG rather than the basis for a conclusion. Have you looked at state-level interventions? The whole world is even bigger than the US (and China), so why not look at global movements? Can you not either diversify your staff or expand their sphere of knowledge?
Conclusions
The amount of opinions expressed here should be interpreted in three ways: firstly that a lot of people are really unhappy with the current GG methodology, secondly that they are willing to offer free advice and assistance, and thirdly that what GG are trying to do is really valuable, hence why it’s so important to get it right.
“Finally, I struggle with way this entire discussion revolves around US policy change. I suspect the amounts of money spent on lobbying in the USA is hugely more than in most countries, but I don’t see any consideration of neglectedness at the country level.”
This is actually another important and independent reason why we should expect CATF > TSM, CATF can optimize marginal resources across different geographies whereas Sunrise is limited to the US environment.
Indeed, although CATF is still very North America-centric. I’d be more excited to learn about a similar charity acting in China (assuming it wanted Western money).
CATF operates in China, albeit with a small program (but one could fund that to grow!). They are also generally expanding and have recently been funded to set up a somewhat significant presence in the EU as well.
I am planning to look into China’s climate philanthropy landscape later this year.