When a post like this on cause prioritization appears on EA forums, I expect it to go something like this: “the marginal costs of the best interventions are lower in category A than category B, under the following assumptions (though if we tweak the assumptions in a certain way, B looks better)… so it’s likely that we should fund those best interventions in category A rather than B.”
This post, however, doesn’t appear to be based on the current EA thinking about the marginally-best interventions for climate change or global development. On climate, the last thing I heard was that clean energy R&D is most sorely needed… which agreed with my prior that molten salt reactors are awesome, scalable and sorely needed, plus the potential of things like enhanced geothermal energy to provide a transition path for the oil & gas industry, and then there’s alternative fusion technologies like DPF and EMC2′s Polywell (whose value to society is either zero or astronomical). Yet I don’t see these on the chart of interventions. I don’t recall what the best available interventions for global development are thought to be, but I thought I heard someone say that cash transfers likely weren’t it.
And although we should be skeptical of “free lunch” interventions with negative costs, that doesn’t mean they aren’t real. Some of them could be great investments, and if so, should we not identify which ones are realistically negative-cost and invest in them?
(I only read the first half; sorry if I missed something important.)
You’re absolutely right—generally, my agenda was probably a bit simpler than people might have supposed. This was not intended to be the last word on whether climate change or development interventions are always better. Rather it’s a starting point and “choose your own adventure” model to help prioritizing between a concrete climate and a concrete development charity.
Note that there are four parameters that drive the results of this analysis (the SCC, the income adjustment eta, the cost to avert CO2, and the effectiveness of global dev/health vs. cash). For the first two, there really is a lot more uncertainty, but for the latter two, it’s more clear. This makes the model actually valuable and with action guiding potential.
For instance, if you’re a small donor and can’t decide between GiveDirectly and the Coalition for Rainforest Nations (or perhaps the Let’s Fund Clean Energy campaign that you cite), then, if you believe that CfRN really has a cost-effectiveness of $0.02 / tCO2e averted, in many scenarios, especially the realistic one around which there is most consensus, it will often beat unconditional cash-transfers, even if you believe that social cost of carbon is quite low.
However, CfRN does lobbying, not a scalable intervention that one could invest a lot of money in. So, in contrast, if you’re a billionaire and are looking to decide between global development and climate change as a cause area for your foundation, then perhaps global development might be a better bet.
When a post like this on cause prioritization appears on EA forums, I expect it to go something like this: “the marginal costs of the best interventions are lower in category A than category B, under the following assumptions (though if we tweak the assumptions in a certain way, B looks better)… so it’s likely that we should fund those best interventions in category A rather than B.”
This post, however, doesn’t appear to be based on the current EA thinking about the marginally-best interventions for climate change or global development. On climate, the last thing I heard was that clean energy R&D is most sorely needed… which agreed with my prior that molten salt reactors are awesome, scalable and sorely needed, plus the potential of things like enhanced geothermal energy to provide a transition path for the oil & gas industry, and then there’s alternative fusion technologies like DPF and EMC2′s Polywell (whose value to society is either zero or astronomical). Yet I don’t see these on the chart of interventions. I don’t recall what the best available interventions for global development are thought to be, but I thought I heard someone say that cash transfers likely weren’t it.
And although we should be skeptical of “free lunch” interventions with negative costs, that doesn’t mean they aren’t real. Some of them could be great investments, and if so, should we not identify which ones are realistically negative-cost and invest in them?
(I only read the first half; sorry if I missed something important.)
You’re absolutely right—generally, my agenda was probably a bit simpler than people might have supposed. This was not intended to be the last word on whether climate change or development interventions are always better. Rather it’s a starting point and “choose your own adventure” model to help prioritizing between a concrete climate and a concrete development charity.
Note that there are four parameters that drive the results of this analysis (the SCC, the income adjustment eta, the cost to avert CO2, and the effectiveness of global dev/health vs. cash). For the first two, there really is a lot more uncertainty, but for the latter two, it’s more clear. This makes the model actually valuable and with action guiding potential.
For instance, if you’re a small donor and can’t decide between GiveDirectly and the Coalition for Rainforest Nations (or perhaps the Let’s Fund Clean Energy campaign that you cite), then, if you believe that CfRN really has a cost-effectiveness of $0.02 / tCO2e averted, in many scenarios, especially the realistic one around which there is most consensus, it will often beat unconditional cash-transfers, even if you believe that social cost of carbon is quite low.
However, CfRN does lobbying, not a scalable intervention that one could invest a lot of money in. So, in contrast, if you’re a billionaire and are looking to decide between global development and climate change as a cause area for your foundation, then perhaps global development might be a better bet.