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 you mentioned, CCS for coal plants has never worked and I don’t think many people realistically see it working anytime soon. The unit economics of coal are only getting worse, and CCS/45Q are not going to save them.
The reason why CCS is an exciting technology is not for power plants (which, as you correctly note, can be much more efficiently replaced with carbon-free energy sources), but for use in the future for hard-to-abate sectors like heavy industry (concrete, chemicals, etc). Investments like 45Q are a means to an end- a way to incentive R+D in the hope that this becomes a viable technology down the road when we really need it.
I see you have some skepticism on the learning curve estimates, which is quite reasonable. It’s very hard to predict the speed of innovation, and I think smart people disagree on whether CCS will ever become viable at scale, and if so how long it will take. Therefore we should all have really wide bounds on the cost-effectiveness estimates of something like 45Q, and yes there’s probably some part of the distribution that is negative.
But CCS is such an important potential technology in the broad scheme of things, and I believe strongly that it is deserving of huge amounts of investment. 45Q is a politically feasible way to leverage government funds to do this. From my perspective, it is absolutely worth it to get this investment, even if it means in the short terms that a few oil fields hang on a little longer than they could have. The long-term payouts in expectation are just too large to ignore.
In addition: Coal might be dying in the US, but not yet globally (or at least not fast enough) and CCS is also useful for gas w/CCS, blue hydrogen, and carbon removal, all of which could be/are definitely important so there are plenty of reasons to be excited about 45Q even at the risk of marginal emissions increases in some edge cases.
I don’t know how to contextualize your statement that 45Q is worth supporting “even at risk of marginal emissions increases in some edge cases” given your own report. CATF’s report “Carbon Capture & Storage in The United States Power Sector” which only considers coal and gas power production CCS was a primary input to your cost-effectiveness model of CCS globally (page 117 and footnote 35 of your Nov 21 report “A guide to the changing landscape of high-impact climate philanthropy”). I don’t see how this is either a “marginal emissions increase” or “edge case” when it was the primary justification for CATF to support 45Q at the $85/ton level. Have you significantly changed your cost-effectiveness model for CCS since you released your report in November?
We can have some nuance about 45Q here. Why not just say to CATF “lobby for only industrial CCS, keep the level at $30-$40/ton, and don’t lobby to remove the 75% capture requirement”?
Quick calculation here: emission rates per kWh: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11 (1 kg CO2 per kWh) * (0.8 capture rate) * ($85/1000 kg sequestered) = $0.068 / kWh. That’s a big enough generation subsidy that it could keep some coal plants operational. And there are plants that are explicitly using this reasoning to justify to regulators that they should stay open.
CATF could have lobbied to have the tax credit apply only to industrial facilities, or that the credit amount should be lower—more like $30-40/ton. But CATF targets $85/ton partly because they think that is the threshold necessary to make CCS projects for fossil fuel electricity production viable: https://www.catf.us/2022/01/gao-report-highlights-importance-doe-carbon-capture-and-storage-demonstration-funding/ Founder’s Pledge assumptions are primarily based on coal CCS and its impact on retrofitting locked-in coal power plants globally.
The risk exists for other sectors too—that the tax credit could be used to keep fossil incumbents operating longer with lower but far from zero emissions. I do think it makes sense to have some carbon sequestration tax credit for certain industries. If I were drafting 45Q, I would be careful to balance the sunset clause on the tax credit to be long enough to encourage projects in key industries, but short enough to remove it if it is crowding out true zero-emission alternatives on an industry-by-industry basis. I also think we should be incredibly cautious and risk averse doing lobbying work in this space because of the potential of lock-in effects and white-knighting the fossil fuel industry. Unlikely other areas in the climate space, there is a clear and significant risk of doing damage here.
Also, I think “R&D” is thrown around too loosely. The conventional, common definition of R&D that DOE and academia uses refers to technologies on a 1-9 technology readiness level scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level. Coal CCS is a mature technology, not on that scale, and there is an operating plant. It’s just enormously expensive and still has emissions. I think what you and others are referring to when using the phrase R&D in this context is driving cost reductions through scaling and learning curves, not new technology (R&D). This is generally referred to as deployment, not R&D. Please do correct me if you think I’m misunderstanding and misrepresenting your terminology here. In the context of scaling and learning curves, one does not do this with “the hope that this becomes a viable technology down the road when we really need it”. Learning curves and scaling require consistent and significant growth of a sector; you can’t just do a bit of deployment, shelve the industry, and then come back and expect it to be at the same price point. If we want to deploy CCS to be at scale and low cost, that requires a massive developing and growing industry. In that context lobbying for 45Q one way or another is risky and path dependent, and I agree with you that the distribution has really wide bounds encompassing zero. For coal CCS specifically, I think that distribution is nearly entirely negative and there are clear downsides (at least 20% of continued coal emissions) with small potential for an upside. Why not just focus on industrial CCS only? That removes a significant know risk and learning probably happens across a wider array of industries anyways.
Regardless of whether you think CCS is important or not, I don’t see a case for why EAs should fund CATF doing advocacy in this space. CCS is an existential lobbying priority of the fossil fuel industry which massively outspends most other industries and environmental groups. 45Q got extended and increased as pork for Manchin and republican support on BBB and the infrastructure bill. Why is CATF necessary here?
As one detractor of a new gas plant in West Virginia says, “if the objective is to decarbonize our energy sector at the lowest possible cost, with the greatest reduction of greenhouse emissions, and with the greatest amount of job creation, the development of renewable resources would do a much better job of all three.”
Much has been already discussed, but I wanted to add some clarifications and additional arguments on some points.
None of our grants was driven by the cost-effectiveness analysis that Matthew cites as justifying or being the basis of our grants.
All money that FP and Giving Green direct to CATF are philanthropic dollars.
Why philanthropic CCS support is valuable despite a powerful fossil lobby
Learning curves of CCS
And, more generally, on uncertainty and the relative uncertainty of different interventions:
Should we care about the degree of uncertainty?
If we care about uncertainty, we need to look at the entire theory of change
FACTUAL CLARIFICATIONS
1. None of our grants was driven by the cost-effectiveness analysis that Matthew cites as justifying or being the basis of our grants. This is also clear from the report, as we (i) only include it in the background section, (ii) have plenty of qualifiers about this explaining a logic / theory of change (indeed, it is first referenced in a section on theory of change, irrespective of a specific grant, p. 86), (iii) the cost-effectiveness example is a historical case from 2018 and we have only started making grants from the Climate Fund in 2020, and (iv) the rationale for our grants, including for CATF, is also explained in the report. From the two grants we made to CATF from the Climate Fund, the first was to capitalize on the Biden moment across the entire spectrum of technologies CATF focuses on (CCS, but also hydrogen, advanced nuclear, geothermal, methane etc.) and the second was for globalization of CATF activity and organizational investment.
As I emphasize whenever I talk or write about it, these cost-effectiveness analyses are clearly wrong and they (i) primarily serve as explaining a logic and important stylized facts (such as the stark difference between local and global effects) and (ii) they are not the only and certainly not the primary piece of analysis when making a grant – a lot of other kinds of evidence and considerations go into grantmaking.
Indeed, because these cost-effectiveness analyses are ultimately so arbitrary at FP we now focus on understanding the source of impact differentials – analyzing the climate philanthropy and action landscape – rather than getting more precise with specific analyses, as impact differentials are more important to make the right prioritization decisions (again, more in the report and also the reason we do not publish lots of BOTEC cost-effectiveness analyses these days; lots more on this in the report).
2. All money that FP and Giving Green direct to CATF are philanthropic dollars, c(3), not c(4), so they are not part of the lobbying budgets and expenses discussed above.
ON CCS
3. Why philanthropic CCS support is valuable despite a powerful fossil lobby: 2 gives part of the answer why CATF’s CCS work is valuable despite a powerful well-funded fossil fuel industry. Insofar as one accepts that CCS support is a bet we should take (Kim & Dan have elaborated on this so I won’t add detail here) from a climate angle, it does matter that there is one credible environmental org aligned with Democrats (there are also Republican climate orgs, like ClearPath) that pushes for it, it can make the difference between this being entirely dismissed as fossil fuel or Manchin demand to being an option that has support from clearly climate-motivated actors. CATF also has different incentives than fossil fuel lobbyists in shaping the legislation, so this is another positive aspect of CCS-philanthropic-funding that is not just lobbying expenditure.
4. Learning curves of CCS: The learning curve that we assume for CCS is 10% (based on an 8% conservative rate in a report by Global CCS institute, see report for details), compared to a learning curve of 25% or so one would use for solar. So we do indeed adjust for the fact that for a technology like CCS, large-scale not easily mass manufacturable infrastructure, the learning rate is much lower than for more modular technologies. 45Q supports a whole lot of different CCS applications – coal, gas, carbon removal etc – and it doesn’t seem particularly plausible that none of them will have significant technological progress because of a more ambitious 45Q (as discussed above, we do not specifically focus on coal CCS, indeed I am personally more optimistic on other forms of CCS). Within the CCS bucket, there are technologies with high modularity where indeed we should expect higher learning curves than for coal CCS.
ON UNCERTAINTY
5. Should we care about the degree of uncertainty? There’s a bit of a semantic stop-sign dynamic in some of the discussions of uncertainty here, suggesting that higher uncertainty would be a reason to be less enthusiastic, more skeptical etc, to use it as a disqualifier. But from an impact-maximizing perspective there isn’t really a case per se for treating uncertainty as an impact-reducing feature. There are, of course, interactions between uncertainties and how they are resolved which we discuss in our report, but these considerations are around the interactions of uncertainties, not the width of uncertainty.I think there is something like intuitive risk aversion going on, where uncertainty leads to skepticism (“maybe it will have zero effect”), whereas the positive case is mentally discounted. But for uncertain technological trajectories as well as ambitious policy changes, the upside can be extremely large.
6. If we care about uncertainty, we need to look at the entire theory of change: As discussed, I don’t think uncertainty should be a qualifier from an impact perspective. But regardless, statements like “innovation advocacy is more uncertain than interventions to deploy mature tech” are partial and, for this reason, possibly quite misleading. We all agree that the innovation process is more uncertain than the deployment of existing technology, but here are a couple of uncertainties that run the other way (which are more uncertain for deploying mature technology) that would need to be taken into account in an overall account of uncertainty of different philanthropic bets:
Lower probability of policy success: policies to meaningfully affect the emissions trajectory in the short term will be larger, more restrictive, more expensive etc and, hence, have a higher risk of failure, certainly in the US federal context. The case in point is the CEPP, which had a low probability of passing (and which indeed did not pass) rendering Evergreen’s past impact ~nil, whereas there are multiple touchpoints every year to have a positive impact on innovation policy.
Lower probability of marginal impact of charity: Mature technologies have more clout in terms of special interest groups and political representation and these policies are often more politicized (a clean energy standard is more of a top-line item than additional innovation policy) so, prima facie, the probability seems lower and it seems more uncertain that a charity could have additional relevant impact.
Lower probability of policy additionality: Short-term emissions reductions in wealthy OECD countries rarely have full additionality. In the US case, lots of state policies undermine the additionality of federal policy targeted at immediate emissions reductions. Had the CEPP been implemented for its emissions reductions to be fully additional it would have been necessary that ambitious states like California and New York strengthen their own targets in proportion to the additional emissions reductions from federal policy, rather than just reaching their own targets a bit more cheaply (in terms of their own budgets). And this does not yet account for states making their policies more ambitious in what they perceive as federal inaction. On the flipside, the benefits of technological innovation are global (with most jurisdictions with less strict targets and hence more policy additionality) and trajectory-shaping beyond the near future for which existing policy commitments are credible, so the policy additionality is much higher (also see our report for more).
So whether or not uncertainty of Rewiring America or Evergreen or CATF or Carbon180 is higher is very much an open question. It depends on how the entire sequence of uncertainties from (i) funding additionality (will this be funded anyway?) to (ii) activity additionality (will the funded activity happen anyway, if not by charity X then by someone else?), (iii) probability of policy change, (iv) naive emissions reductions from policy change and (v) emissions reductions adjusted for policy additionality plays out. We cannot just single out (iv) and assign it to the entire intervention and conclude that innovation advocacy is more uncertain than mature tech deployment just because one step in the theory of change of the former is more uncertain.
“it does matter that there is one credible environmental org aligned with Democrats (there are also Republican climate orgs, like ClearPath) that pushes for it, it can make the difference between this being entirely dismissed as fossil fuel or Manchin demand to being an option that has support from clearly climate-motivated actors. ”… actually, this is just one more reason why what the CATF is doing is retrograde. Supporting and aiding development of CCS for, say, cement making is OK in my book and there is plenty of room for experiments there that are directly applicable to future need. This podcast is good on this point. The danger is that learning how to capture emissions from near end of life coal plants in the US may not tell us all that much that is useful to deploy CCS where it is needed.
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 you mentioned, CCS for coal plants has never worked and I don’t think many people realistically see it working anytime soon. The unit economics of coal are only getting worse, and CCS/45Q are not going to save them.
The reason why CCS is an exciting technology is not for power plants (which, as you correctly note, can be much more efficiently replaced with carbon-free energy sources), but for use in the future for hard-to-abate sectors like heavy industry (concrete, chemicals, etc). Investments like 45Q are a means to an end- a way to incentive R+D in the hope that this becomes a viable technology down the road when we really need it.
I see you have some skepticism on the learning curve estimates, which is quite reasonable. It’s very hard to predict the speed of innovation, and I think smart people disagree on whether CCS will ever become viable at scale, and if so how long it will take. Therefore we should all have really wide bounds on the cost-effectiveness estimates of something like 45Q, and yes there’s probably some part of the distribution that is negative.
But CCS is such an important potential technology in the broad scheme of things, and I believe strongly that it is deserving of huge amounts of investment. 45Q is a politically feasible way to leverage government funds to do this. From my perspective, it is absolutely worth it to get this investment, even if it means in the short terms that a few oil fields hang on a little longer than they could have. The long-term payouts in expectation are just too large to ignore.
Agree with Dan here.
In addition: Coal might be dying in the US, but not yet globally (or at least not fast enough) and CCS is also useful for gas w/CCS, blue hydrogen, and carbon removal, all of which could be/are definitely important so there are plenty of reasons to be excited about 45Q even at the risk of marginal emissions increases in some edge cases.
I don’t know how to contextualize your statement that 45Q is worth supporting “even at risk of marginal emissions increases in some edge cases” given your own report. CATF’s report “Carbon Capture & Storage in The United States Power Sector” which only considers coal and gas power production CCS was a primary input to your cost-effectiveness model of CCS globally (page 117 and footnote 35 of your Nov 21 report “A guide to the changing landscape of high-impact climate philanthropy”). I don’t see how this is either a “marginal emissions increase” or “edge case” when it was the primary justification for CATF to support 45Q at the $85/ton level. Have you significantly changed your cost-effectiveness model for CCS since you released your report in November?
We can have some nuance about 45Q here. Why not just say to CATF “lobby for only industrial CCS, keep the level at $30-$40/ton, and don’t lobby to remove the 75% capture requirement”?
Quick calculation here:
emission rates per kWh: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11
(1 kg CO2 per kWh) * (0.8 capture rate) * ($85/1000 kg sequestered) = $0.068 / kWh. That’s a big enough generation subsidy that it could keep some coal plants operational. And there are plants that are explicitly using this reasoning to justify to regulators that they should stay open.
CATF could have lobbied to have the tax credit apply only to industrial facilities, or that the credit amount should be lower—more like $30-40/ton. But CATF targets $85/ton partly because they think that is the threshold necessary to make CCS projects for fossil fuel electricity production viable: https://www.catf.us/2022/01/gao-report-highlights-importance-doe-carbon-capture-and-storage-demonstration-funding/
Founder’s Pledge assumptions are primarily based on coal CCS and its impact on retrofitting locked-in coal power plants globally.
The risk exists for other sectors too—that the tax credit could be used to keep fossil incumbents operating longer with lower but far from zero emissions. I do think it makes sense to have some carbon sequestration tax credit for certain industries. If I were drafting 45Q, I would be careful to balance the sunset clause on the tax credit to be long enough to encourage projects in key industries, but short enough to remove it if it is crowding out true zero-emission alternatives on an industry-by-industry basis. I also think we should be incredibly cautious and risk averse doing lobbying work in this space because of the potential of lock-in effects and white-knighting the fossil fuel industry. Unlikely other areas in the climate space, there is a clear and significant risk of doing damage here.
Also, I think “R&D” is thrown around too loosely. The conventional, common definition of R&D that DOE and academia uses refers to technologies on a 1-9 technology readiness level scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technology_readiness_level. Coal CCS is a mature technology, not on that scale, and there is an operating plant. It’s just enormously expensive and still has emissions. I think what you and others are referring to when using the phrase R&D in this context is driving cost reductions through scaling and learning curves, not new technology (R&D). This is generally referred to as deployment, not R&D. Please do correct me if you think I’m misunderstanding and misrepresenting your terminology here. In the context of scaling and learning curves, one does not do this with “the hope that this becomes a viable technology down the road when we really need it”. Learning curves and scaling require consistent and significant growth of a sector; you can’t just do a bit of deployment, shelve the industry, and then come back and expect it to be at the same price point. If we want to deploy CCS to be at scale and low cost, that requires a massive developing and growing industry. In that context lobbying for 45Q one way or another is risky and path dependent, and I agree with you that the distribution has really wide bounds encompassing zero. For coal CCS specifically, I think that distribution is nearly entirely negative and there are clear downsides (at least 20% of continued coal emissions) with small potential for an upside. Why not just focus on industrial CCS only? That removes a significant know risk and learning probably happens across a wider array of industries anyways.
Regardless of whether you think CCS is important or not, I don’t see a case for why EAs should fund CATF doing advocacy in this space. CCS is an existential lobbying priority of the fossil fuel industry which massively outspends most other industries and environmental groups. 45Q got extended and increased as pork for Manchin and republican support on BBB and the infrastructure bill. Why is CATF necessary here?
UPDATE: The $85/ton 45Q credit passed in the Inflation Reduction Act. This credit was one of Manchin’s top priorities.
There are several planned coal and gas power plant projects that owe their existence to the increased credit. https://www.eenews.net/articles/climate-law-spurs-ccs-at-new-west-virginia-gas-plant/ Capture efficiencies range from 60-80%, many for enhanced oil recovery. These are not “low carbon” projects.
As one detractor of a new gas plant in West Virginia says, “if the objective is to decarbonize our energy sector at the lowest possible cost, with the greatest reduction of greenhouse emissions, and with the greatest amount of job creation, the development of renewable resources would do a much better job of all three.”
Much has been already discussed, but I wanted to add some clarifications and additional arguments on some points.
None of our grants was driven by the cost-effectiveness analysis that Matthew cites as justifying or being the basis of our grants.
All money that FP and Giving Green direct to CATF are philanthropic dollars.
Why philanthropic CCS support is valuable despite a powerful fossil lobby
Learning curves of CCS
And, more generally, on uncertainty and the relative uncertainty of different interventions:
Should we care about the degree of uncertainty?
If we care about uncertainty, we need to look at the entire theory of change
FACTUAL CLARIFICATIONS
1. None of our grants was driven by the cost-effectiveness analysis that Matthew cites as justifying or being the basis of our grants. This is also clear from the report, as we (i) only include it in the background section, (ii) have plenty of qualifiers about this explaining a logic / theory of change (indeed, it is first referenced in a section on theory of change, irrespective of a specific grant, p. 86), (iii) the cost-effectiveness example is a historical case from 2018 and we have only started making grants from the Climate Fund in 2020, and (iv) the rationale for our grants, including for CATF, is also explained in the report. From the two grants we made to CATF from the Climate Fund, the first was to capitalize on the Biden moment across the entire spectrum of technologies CATF focuses on (CCS, but also hydrogen, advanced nuclear, geothermal, methane etc.) and the second was for globalization of CATF activity and organizational investment.
As I emphasize whenever I talk or write about it, these cost-effectiveness analyses are clearly wrong and they (i) primarily serve as explaining a logic and important stylized facts (such as the stark difference between local and global effects) and (ii) they are not the only and certainly not the primary piece of analysis when making a grant – a lot of other kinds of evidence and considerations go into grantmaking.
Indeed, because these cost-effectiveness analyses are ultimately so arbitrary at FP we now focus on understanding the source of impact differentials – analyzing the climate philanthropy and action landscape – rather than getting more precise with specific analyses, as impact differentials are more important to make the right prioritization decisions (again, more in the report and also the reason we do not publish lots of BOTEC cost-effectiveness analyses these days; lots more on this in the report).
2. All money that FP and Giving Green direct to CATF are philanthropic dollars, c(3), not c(4), so they are not part of the lobbying budgets and expenses discussed above.
ON CCS
3. Why philanthropic CCS support is valuable despite a powerful fossil lobby:
2 gives part of the answer why CATF’s CCS work is valuable despite a powerful well-funded fossil fuel industry. Insofar as one accepts that CCS support is a bet we should take (Kim & Dan have elaborated on this so I won’t add detail here) from a climate angle, it does matter that there is one credible environmental org aligned with Democrats (there are also Republican climate orgs, like ClearPath) that pushes for it, it can make the difference between this being entirely dismissed as fossil fuel or Manchin demand to being an option that has support from clearly climate-motivated actors. CATF also has different incentives than fossil fuel lobbyists in shaping the legislation, so this is another positive aspect of CCS-philanthropic-funding that is not just lobbying expenditure.
4. Learning curves of CCS:
The learning curve that we assume for CCS is 10% (based on an 8% conservative rate in a report by Global CCS institute, see report for details), compared to a learning curve of 25% or so one would use for solar. So we do indeed adjust for the fact that for a technology like CCS, large-scale not easily mass manufacturable infrastructure, the learning rate is much lower than for more modular technologies. 45Q supports a whole lot of different CCS applications – coal, gas, carbon removal etc – and it doesn’t seem particularly plausible that none of them will have significant technological progress because of a more ambitious 45Q (as discussed above, we do not specifically focus on coal CCS, indeed I am personally more optimistic on other forms of CCS). Within the CCS bucket, there are technologies with high modularity where indeed we should expect higher learning curves than for coal CCS.
ON UNCERTAINTY
5. Should we care about the degree of uncertainty? There’s a bit of a semantic stop-sign dynamic in some of the discussions of uncertainty here, suggesting that higher uncertainty would be a reason to be less enthusiastic, more skeptical etc, to use it as a disqualifier. But from an impact-maximizing perspective there isn’t really a case per se for treating uncertainty as an impact-reducing feature. There are, of course, interactions between uncertainties and how they are resolved which we discuss in our report, but these considerations are around the interactions of uncertainties, not the width of uncertainty.I think there is something like intuitive risk aversion going on, where uncertainty leads to skepticism (“maybe it will have zero effect”), whereas the positive case is mentally discounted. But for uncertain technological trajectories as well as ambitious policy changes, the upside can be extremely large.
6. If we care about uncertainty, we need to look at the entire theory of change: As discussed, I don’t think uncertainty should be a qualifier from an impact perspective. But regardless, statements like “innovation advocacy is more uncertain than interventions to deploy mature tech” are partial and, for this reason, possibly quite misleading. We all agree that the innovation process is more uncertain than the deployment of existing technology, but here are a couple of uncertainties that run the other way (which are more uncertain for deploying mature technology) that would need to be taken into account in an overall account of uncertainty of different philanthropic bets:
Lower probability of policy success: policies to meaningfully affect the emissions trajectory in the short term will be larger, more restrictive, more expensive etc and, hence, have a higher risk of failure, certainly in the US federal context. The case in point is the CEPP, which had a low probability of passing (and which indeed did not pass) rendering Evergreen’s past impact ~nil, whereas there are multiple touchpoints every year to have a positive impact on innovation policy.
Lower probability of marginal impact of charity: Mature technologies have more clout in terms of special interest groups and political representation and these policies are often more politicized (a clean energy standard is more of a top-line item than additional innovation policy) so, prima facie, the probability seems lower and it seems more uncertain that a charity could have additional relevant impact.
Lower probability of policy additionality: Short-term emissions reductions in wealthy OECD countries rarely have full additionality. In the US case, lots of state policies undermine the additionality of federal policy targeted at immediate emissions reductions. Had the CEPP been implemented for its emissions reductions to be fully additional it would have been necessary that ambitious states like California and New York strengthen their own targets in proportion to the additional emissions reductions from federal policy, rather than just reaching their own targets a bit more cheaply (in terms of their own budgets). And this does not yet account for states making their policies more ambitious in what they perceive as federal inaction. On the flipside, the benefits of technological innovation are global (with most jurisdictions with less strict targets and hence more policy additionality) and trajectory-shaping beyond the near future for which existing policy commitments are credible, so the policy additionality is much higher (also see our report for more).
So whether or not uncertainty of Rewiring America or Evergreen or CATF or Carbon180 is higher is very much an open question. It depends on how the entire sequence of uncertainties from (i) funding additionality (will this be funded anyway?) to (ii) activity additionality (will the funded activity happen anyway, if not by charity X then by someone else?), (iii) probability of policy change, (iv) naive emissions reductions from policy change and (v) emissions reductions adjusted for policy additionality plays out. We cannot just single out (iv) and assign it to the entire intervention and conclude that innovation advocacy is more uncertain than mature tech deployment just because one step in the theory of change of the former is more uncertain.
“it does matter that there is one credible environmental org aligned with Democrats (there are also Republican climate orgs, like ClearPath) that pushes for it, it can make the difference between this being entirely dismissed as fossil fuel or Manchin demand to being an option that has support from clearly climate-motivated actors. ”… actually, this is just one more reason why what the CATF is doing is retrograde. Supporting and aiding development of CCS for, say, cement making is OK in my book and there is plenty of room for experiments there that are directly applicable to future need. This podcast is good on this point. The danger is that learning how to capture emissions from near end of life coal plants in the US may not tell us all that much that is useful to deploy CCS where it is needed.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-09/the-state-of-carbon-capture-is-more-promise-than-success?srnd=green-zero-emissions-podcast