This [3.41 tCO2eq/â$] is not a credible number, and Founders Pledge as of several years ago said they no longer stand behind the cost-effectiveness calculation you link to in your post.
What is your best guess for the expected marginal cost-effectiveness of CCF? For the purpose of this analysis, it does not matter much whether it is 10 % or 10 times that I assumed, because I think in this case the qualitative conclusions would be the same.
You may be right that Founders Pledge no longer stands behind the cost-effectiveness analysis (it would be helpful if you could link to where they say that). However:
Johannes Ackva, who is the manager of CCF, âthinks this [3.41 tCO2eq/â$] is in the right ballpark and not worth getting more precise for an analysis like this (where most parameters are much more uncertain)â.
Note the 0.5%/â1%/â2% assumptions that nuclear will displace coal that are doing quite a lot of heavy lifting in getting the numbers to work out. The percentages are far lower than that.
Interesting. In that case, GiveWellâs interventions would be better than CCF, and corporate campaigns for chicken welfare would be many orders of magnitude more cost-effective than CCF.
Be careful of arbitrary bounding your analysis in whole numbers between 1-100%.
Great point! I do think this is a major source of error in cost-effectiveness analysis, and quantitive analyses more broadly:
In general, I suspect there is a tendency to give probabilities between 1 % and 99 % for events whose mechanics we do not understand well [unlike e.g. lotteries], given this range encompasses the vast majority (98 %) of the available linear space (from 0 to 1), and events in everyday life one cares about are not that extreme. However, the available logarithmic space is infinitely vast, so there is margin for such guesses to be major overestimates.
The supposed climate benefits of nuclear advocacy are contested, and far more credible and sophisticated modeling shows the possibility that there are some zero-sum trade-offs in scaling that mean more nuclear power could result in higher cumulative emissions.
Note the goal is decreasing cumulative deaths rather than GHG emissions. I think there is no difference if one conditions on a given emissions trajectory, but the goals may come apart accounting for uncertainty in the emissions trajectory. It is more valuable to decrease emissions in scenarios where emissions and temperature are higher, and nuclear power may be specially valuable here if those are scenarios where renewables did not scale as much as is currently anticipated.
The lesson is to be careful with BOTECsâuse probability distributions instead of single-point numbers, and have several people red-team the analysis both in the numbers and the structure of the calculation.
I agree all of these are useful. Just one note. I often use probability distributions in my analyses, but at the end of the day one has to compare interventions by boiling down their cost-effectiveness distributions to a single number corresponding to the expected cost-effectiveness. If one decides to fund A over B, one is implictly saying the expected cost-effectiveness of A is higher than or equal to that of B.
Another issue is you are taking values derived from speculation and comparing them to measured cost-effectiveness from RCTs with a strong evidentiary basis.
This is one reason I do not conclude CCF is better than TCF even though I estimated the cost-effectiveness of CCF is 3.28 times as high. However, I think one can robustly conclude that corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are more cost-effective than TCF because I calculated their cost-effectiveness is 1.44 k times as high, which is a lot (similar to the ratio between the cost-effectiveness of TCF and unconditional cash transfer in high income countries, as TCF is 10 times as cost-effective as unconditional cash transfers to people in extreme poverty, and people in high income countries earn around 100 times as much as people in extreme poverty, which leads to a multiplier of around 1 k).
Thanks for the comment, Matthew.
What is your best guess for the expected marginal cost-effectiveness of CCF? For the purpose of this analysis, it does not matter much whether it is 10 % or 10 times that I assumed, because I think in this case the qualitative conclusions would be the same.
You may be right that Founders Pledge no longer stands behind the cost-effectiveness analysis (it would be helpful if you could link to where they say that). However:
Interesting. In that case, GiveWellâs interventions would be better than CCF, and corporate campaigns for chicken welfare would be many orders of magnitude more cost-effective than CCF.
Great point! I do think this is a major source of error in cost-effectiveness analysis, and quantitive analyses more broadly:
Note the goal is decreasing cumulative deaths rather than GHG emissions. I think there is no difference if one conditions on a given emissions trajectory, but the goals may come apart accounting for uncertainty in the emissions trajectory. It is more valuable to decrease emissions in scenarios where emissions and temperature are higher, and nuclear power may be specially valuable here if those are scenarios where renewables did not scale as much as is currently anticipated.
I agree all of these are useful. Just one note. I often use probability distributions in my analyses, but at the end of the day one has to compare interventions by boiling down their cost-effectiveness distributions to a single number corresponding to the expected cost-effectiveness. If one decides to fund A over B, one is implictly saying the expected cost-effectiveness of A is higher than or equal to that of B.
This is one reason I do not conclude CCF is better than TCF even though I estimated the cost-effectiveness of CCF is 3.28 times as high. However, I think one can robustly conclude that corporate campaigns for chicken welfare are more cost-effective than TCF because I calculated their cost-effectiveness is 1.44 k times as high, which is a lot (similar to the ratio between the cost-effectiveness of TCF and unconditional cash transfer in high income countries, as TCF is 10 times as cost-effective as unconditional cash transfers to people in extreme poverty, and people in high income countries earn around 100 times as much as people in extreme poverty, which leads to a multiplier of around 1 k).