Yes, we should clearly aim to avoid precision bias. I don’t actually make donation decisions using comparisons of this kind—I just wanted to point out what I saw as a lack of clear “final benefit” description along the lines of “assuming a middling outcome, we’d expect to prevent roughly X tons of carbon/Y degrees of warning”.
But I wouldn’t be surprised if some figure like that was embedded in the report and I just couldn’t easily find it.
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Also, it took me a while to find the section where the report explained potential reasons behind the (apparently) drastic undersupply of R&D funding: Here’s the explanation, which helped me get a better handle on why this cause has such high potential impact numbers behind it.
Have you spoken to Open Phil about this opportunity? Are you aware of any research they’ve done into R&D funding, or R&D policy grants they’ve made? It seems like this would fit under their “transformative basic science” or “global catastrophic risk” portfolios, and they’ve previously made at least one speculative grant with a small chance of sharply reducing emissions.
>>what I saw as a lack of clear “final benefit” description along the lines of “assuming a middling outcome, we’d expect to prevent”.
I think a thorough “final benefit” / “$ per ton of CO2 equivalent”/ “$ per degree of warming averted” calculation is not in principal outside of the realm of empirical investigation, but there are many difficulties here (e.g. the elasticity of clean energy demand, the comparative carbon intensities of other low carbon energy etc.). I might come back to that in case there is very strong demand for these numbers. But I also don’t think we need these calculations for the same reason that many high risks, high return grants lauded in the EA community do not need to include a “$ per life saved” calculation. I do have a bunch of what Bostrom calls crucial considerations in this report and I think EA research should head perhaps more in that direction.
But for what it’s worth we do mention the economic benefits of reducing global low carbon energy costs by several percentage points. They might be very large, because World Energy expenditure is in the trillions, [48],[49] and even a small reduction in cost by several percentage point might lead to large savings. Also there is a recent study which found that combining clean energy innovation with emission reduction policies reduces the costs of climate mitigation with a net present value of $3-6 trillion.[50]
Also, one economic model suggests that “if a carbon tax imposes a dollar of cost on the economy, induced innovation will end up reducing that cost to around 70 cents”.[73] Given that political acceptability is mainly a function of cost, making clean energy cheaper might make carbon taxes more likely. Just based only on this effect, it might make this a really good reason for donating to this, but again it’s hard to quantify the exact benefits.
>>Have you spoken to Open Phil about this opportunity?
I do not know OpenPhil’s official position on this, but there is a cell in “Open Philanthropy Project’s Public Priorities- Global Catastrophic Risks” spreadsheet which mentions that clean tech R&D might be a potential philanthropic opportunity. But the same spreadsheet also mentions says that Anthropogenic climate change (other than geoengineering) is not prioritized. I’ll definitely approach them though.
Yes, we should clearly aim to avoid precision bias. I don’t actually make donation decisions using comparisons of this kind—I just wanted to point out what I saw as a lack of clear “final benefit” description along the lines of “assuming a middling outcome, we’d expect to prevent roughly X tons of carbon/Y degrees of warning”.
But I wouldn’t be surprised if some figure like that was embedded in the report and I just couldn’t easily find it.
--
Also, it took me a while to find the section where the report explained potential reasons behind the (apparently) drastic undersupply of R&D funding: Here’s the explanation, which helped me get a better handle on why this cause has such high potential impact numbers behind it.
Have you spoken to Open Phil about this opportunity? Are you aware of any research they’ve done into R&D funding, or R&D policy grants they’ve made? It seems like this would fit under their “transformative basic science” or “global catastrophic risk” portfolios, and they’ve previously made at least one speculative grant with a small chance of sharply reducing emissions.
>>what I saw as a lack of clear “final benefit” description along the lines of “assuming a middling outcome, we’d expect to prevent”.
I think a thorough “final benefit” / “$ per ton of CO2 equivalent”/ “$ per degree of warming averted” calculation is not in principal outside of the realm of empirical investigation, but there are many difficulties here (e.g. the elasticity of clean energy demand, the comparative carbon intensities of other low carbon energy etc.). I might come back to that in case there is very strong demand for these numbers. But I also don’t think we need these calculations for the same reason that many high risks, high return grants lauded in the EA community do not need to include a “$ per life saved” calculation. I do have a bunch of what Bostrom calls crucial considerations in this report and I think EA research should head perhaps more in that direction.
But for what it’s worth we do mention the economic benefits of reducing global low carbon energy costs by several percentage points. They might be very large, because World Energy expenditure is in the trillions, [48],[49] and even a small reduction in cost by several percentage point might lead to large savings. Also there is a recent study which found that combining clean energy innovation with emission reduction policies reduces the costs of climate mitigation with a net present value of $3-6 trillion.[50]
Also, one economic model suggests that “if a carbon tax imposes a dollar of cost on the economy, induced innovation will end up reducing that cost to around 70 cents”.[73] Given that political acceptability is mainly a function of cost, making clean energy cheaper might make carbon taxes more likely. Just based only on this effect, it might make this a really good reason for donating to this, but again it’s hard to quantify the exact benefits.
>>Have you spoken to Open Phil about this opportunity?
I do not know OpenPhil’s official position on this, but there is a cell in “Open Philanthropy Project’s Public Priorities- Global Catastrophic Risks” spreadsheet which mentions that clean tech R&D might be a potential philanthropic opportunity. But the same spreadsheet also mentions says that Anthropogenic climate change (other than geoengineering) is not prioritized. I’ll definitely approach them though.