In getting from the broad goal of emissions reductions to specifically support ITIF’s policy work, there are several key assumptions:
Energy related emissions from fossil fuels are the top priority
The priority should be on clean energy development in the most populous countries (India, China)
Reductions in energy related emissions are technology limited, rather than economic or policy limited; Adequate technologies do not already exist to in the most populous countries
Clean energy R&D can produce low or emissions-free technologies; there are substantial clean energy R&D opportunities with high impact on emissions reductions
Clean energy R&D is currently funding constrained, and there are high marginal returns for the next dollar to speed deployment of these technologies
The philanthropic sector, private/market sector, and governments have neglected clean energy R&D, or could substantially increase their giving in this area
Technologies developed in developed countries like the U.S. will lower costs and ease deployment in the most populous countries with negligible barriers to tech transfer
Lobbying to increase government R&D spending is likely to be successful, and specifically by ITIF
ITIF’s target R&D areas are broadly correct, and will surpass the challenges above
Responses to those assumptions:
Energy related emissions from fossil fuels are the top priority. Mild agreement. Agricultural, land use change, methane, and F-gas emissions account for ~25% of emissions, and there is substantial uncertainty how much is being emitted. There could be high impact interventions focusing on these emission sources. However, mitigation will certainly require eliminating emissions from fossil fuels.
The priority should be on clean energy development in the most populous countries (India, China). Agree.
Reductions in energy related emissions are technology limited, rather than economic or policy limited; Adequate technologies do not already exist to in the most populous countries. Mild disagreement here. I think this is true for the hard to mitigate emissions (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6396/eaas9793) from Cement, Iron, Steel, Aviation, Shipping, and the last ~10% of electric generation when 90% is served by renewables. These account for ~15% of total energy related emissions. Otherwise, the technologies exist are largely driven by policy. 75% of electricity use is in buildings, and we already have the technology to make them low or zero-carbon. It’s a matter of adopting rigorous building energy code. Electric vehicles are in the deployment stage, relying on infrastructure build out to support their manufacture and charging availability. Better batteries would help, and this is getting a lot of R&D interest from all sectors. Lastly, urban planning is largely the biggest lever in reducing developing country emissions, as they can design out the need for high transportation energy use. However, the ITIF fund is explicitly targeting the ~15% hard to eliminate emissions, so they are only focusing on the technology-limited emissions.
Additionally, I think the choice to use the German example of clean energy subsidies is unrepresentative. In the U.S., which is responsible for 35% of clean energy R&D, the ratio is much closer https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=35952 to 1:1 (post-ARRA). And while the subsidies in Germany didn’t go to R&D, they encouraged learning in manufacturing and production, which greatly drove down the price. While this isn’t included as R&D, it has a similar effect of making renewable energy cheaper.
Clean energy R&D can produce low or emissions-free technologies; there are substantial clean energy R&D opportunities with high impact on emissions reductions. Agree. Largely with batteries and liquid fuels.
Clean energy R&D is currently funding constrained, and there are high marginal returns for the next dollar to speed deployment of these technologies. Mild agreement. This is true for zero-carbon liquid fuels. New battery technologies are not funding constrained, and at a point where additional funding will not lead to faster development.
The philanthropic sector, private/market sector, and governments have neglected clean energy R&D, or could substantially increase their giving in this area. Mild agreement, though I disagree with the characterization that the philanthropic sector has neglected developing countries. In the philanthropic sector, the Packard and Hewlett foundations are the main funders in this space, and have made major contributions to the Energy and Climate foundations, who in turn have focused their grants on developing country emissions, largely around things the building code, vehicle electrification, and development policy. If the criticism is that the philanthropic sector is under investment in R&D, it is largely because they think policy priorities in developing countries are a more impactful mitigation strategy.
Technologies developed in developed countries like the U.S. will lower costs and ease deployment in the most populous countries with negligible barriers to tech transfer. Agree. This has been demonstrated with solar and wind, though I would have appreciated more in the write-up on tech transfer.
Lobbying to increase government R&D spending is likely to be successful, and specifically by ITIF. Neither agree nor disagree. I have no way to judge how successful ITIF will be with their lobbying. While they are well regarding, I’m not sure how much political power they have.
ITIF’s target R&D areas are broadly correct, and will surpass the challenges above. Mix of agreement and disagreement. There are 6 areas:
1) Advanced Nuclear Energy, particularly on SMRs (small modular reactors). The application here is for the last 10-20% of electricity generation that is hard to cover with renewables. However, ~80% of the costs of rankine-based technologies for power production are from the capital and maintenance costs associated with the rankine cycle (cooling towers, concrete, etc.). SMRs, even small ones on the 50 MW scale, even if their nuclear component is vastly cheaper than LWRs, are unlikely to be able to compete with renewables and storage on cost. There are other means of meeting this grid need with demand response or transmission, meaning SMRs will likely only find use in certain applications like shipping. Therefore, I don’t think greater funding in this area is climate-relevant.
2) Long Duration Grid Storage, seasonal storage. This is also for the last 10-20% of grid use. I agree this could use more funding, though it is speculative and technology specific.
4) Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS). CCUS is not competitive in the electric sector. The application will be for the industrial sector in cement and steel manufacturing, and for low-carbon liquid fuels. I think the investment needed here is less on the capture technology, and more on the robustness of sequestration and storage to prevent leaks https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04423-1.
5) Carbon Dioxide Removal Technology. I agree with this as a government research priority as there isn’t a market incentive.
6) Basic Energy Research. Basic energy research requires government investment, and gets a lot of the R&D share. It’s unclear to me what lobbying for this would entail. The current administration is more inclined to basic energy research at the expense of all other areas of energy and climate, so lobbying for this in the next few years may actually be counterproductive.
Overall, I think ITIF is broadly correct in the need for government-funded R&D in carbon-neutral liquid fuels, CCUS in industry, CO2 removal, and somewhat long-duration storage. I disagree with their Advanced Nuclear and Basic Energy research goals for practical and current political reality reasons. I don’t think ITF’s lobbying on their 6 focus areas rise to the level of “most effective climate interventions”, as ~60-70% of emissions are policy-limited, not technology-limited. And I think the U.S. climate philanthropic sector has largely correctly identified policy interventions in India and China as the highest priority. From an EA angle, I think the most neglected climate-interventions are in adaptation in poor countries that are most vulnerable to climate change, and in understanding and adaptation to extreme warming scenarios.
Thanks so much, Matthew for your detailed response. I will just briefly respond to a few points of disagreements.
Additionally, I think the choice to use the German example of clean energy subsidies is unrepresentative. In the U.S., which is responsible for 35% of clean energy R&D, the ratio is much closer https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=35952 to 1:1 (post-ARRA). And while the subsidies in Germany didn’t go to R&D, they encouraged learning in manufacturing and production, which greatly drove down the price. While this isn’t included as R&D, it has a similar effect of making renewable energy cheaper.
The US is the biggest funder of clean energy R&D, so yes the ratio is definitely better. However, globally clean energy deployment subsidies are >$120 billion whereas clean energy R&D is just $22bn.
I also disagree with your distinction between “technology” vs. “economic or policy limitation”. Policy tractability is a function technology. As clean energy gets cheaper it will get adapted more readily.
ITIF’s target R&D areas are broadly correct, and will surpass the challenges above. Mix of agreement and disagreement.
Note that recommendation of ITIF does not hinge on their technology missions. While you might have disagreements on the particular technology missions they propose, they too are experts on this topic, and there are many more experts that agree with them. We mostly believe that most of the value from this comes from encouraging all countries to increase their energy R&D through Mission Innovation. Generally, increasing in spending will lead to increases in the clean energy that the technocratic consensus deems most effective.
In the report we write (citations available there):
“Our analysis focused exclusively on the climate policy solutions that are most effective. This seemed to be our competitive advantage. We saved time by not analyzing in-depth the impacts of climate change (we had done a shallow literature review on this in a previous analysis ,). Instead, we relied on the scientific consensus on this topic. Also, unlike other analyses, we did not compare the effectiveness of different energy sources. For instance, is nuclear really good and its drawbacks are overstated? Are renewables like solar underestimated? Can coal perhaps be made clean through carbon capture? We intentionally steered clear of these controversies and have not engaged with these questions on a deep level. There seems to be no expert consensus on whether any one technology is much superior and unreasonably neglected than others. Instead, we feel there is some mild consensus amongst energy experts that the world’s future energy supply must come from a diverse mix of energy sources and it is best to opt for ‘technology neutrality’, i.e. being agnostic with regards to which low-carbon technology is best. We assumed that clean energy R&D budget increases will either lead to all technologies becoming better across the board or one technology will emerge more readily as the ‘winner’.
Relatedly, our views on the importance of clean energy innovation also seem uncontroversial within large parts of academia, but have not made it outside of academia yet. We came across a few recently published and unpublished papers that reached similar conclusions to ours and so we believe in the coming years our views might be more mainstream.,”
>> And I think the U.S. climate philanthropic sector has largely correctly identified policy interventions in India and China as the highest priority. From an EA angle, I think the most neglected climate-interventions are in adaptation in poor countries that are most vulnerable to climate change, and in understanding and adaptation to extreme warming scenarios.
On adaptation: I disagree that adaptation is more effective than what I outline in my report, as it is not a global public good. On the understanding to extreme warming scnearios I actually agree a bit, above I write:
Funding more research on such topics might be even be more cost-effective than clean energy R&D funding. However, the overall funding gap is likely much lower (perhaps in the hundreds of millions) than for clean energy R&D (which is in the tens of billions) and so diminishing returns will set in earlier. Consider that, in the US alone, climate change research funding is 1.7% of total research grants and about $1.5 billion annually. Thus, while investing in climate change research is quite cost-effective, there is an upper bound on the benefits. Put simply, the engineering challenges of creating cheaper clean energy technology are vast and need many more billions, whereas the value of information from climate change research might be very high, but there diminishing returns set in earlier, and we already have a lot of funding in place. “
I distinguish between R&D and economic/policy factors, because it matters where technology is at in the R&D pipeline. Solar and wind are mature technologies. There is some additional work that can be done in solar (e.g. perovskites) and wind (bigger blades, offshore), but the vast majority of the costs at this point are not associated with the technology itself, but rather the implementation, permitting, financing, etc. At this stage in technology development, costs get driven down by expanding the market, not so much additional early stage R&D. There can be more investment in >6 hr energy storage and zero-carbon liquid fuels, as many of the solutions are in early stage research.
Therefore, I’m more inclined to say that clean energy deployment in developing countries is economic and policy limited, not technology limited, given relatively low deployment rates and maturity of the most applicable technologies. I still agree with more R&D, but I don’t think that is limiting factor in a lot of countries right now. Major climate philanthropy seems to agree—focusing on policy around development, energy efficiency, and deployment of exist tech, rather than early stage R&D funding. Perhaps they don’t because the government already funds R&D at level greater than the philanthropic sector could ever meet. But if as you say, the R&D is more funding limited and has the better marginal return, then most of the philanthropic giving should be going to that.
I understand the desire to not dive into the specifics which technologies to focus on and in general just get more clean energy R&D funding. More clean energy R&D funding lifts all technologies. An analogy would be to global health. It would be good to get more general funding into global health, and most academics and EAs support that. But I think the EA angle could benefit from being more specific on which kinds of interventions/technologies, as like global health, the effectiveness of additional funds could vary greatly depending on where they are spent (e.g. energy storage vs. clean coal). This is a increase funding or use existing funding more effectively question. Your argument is that Clean Energy R&D funding is so low that it is much more important to increase the funding. I agree with you on this. I have a mix of thoughts on whether ITIF’s specific lobbying priorities within Clean R&D are correct, but don’t want to get into that too much.
I do want to address the points on adaptation and extreme warming. Adaptation gets funded through the UNFCCC framework is the fund has given out $1 billion, with support of $4 billion from other sources. This is total, not per year. https://www.un.org/ldcportal/least-developed-countries-fund-ldcf/ https://fiftrustee.worldbank.org/en/about/unit/dfi/fiftrustee/fund-detail/adapt I think R&D in adaptation is underfunded, and adaptation in one area is likely to be replicable in other places (making it a global public good, similar to clean energy R&D). This is about limiting the worst effects, and is neglected in the same way tropical diseases are neglected on the global scale. An analogy on this is a expansion of pond metaphor. The water level is representing greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere, and the pond is filled with adults (developed countries) and small adults or kids (developing countries). Some are already struggling. Mitigation will slow or stop the rise of water, but we should also spend some effort helping the smallest humans out before they can’t touch the bottom (e.g. life preservers, rocks to stand on). We can presumably get better at figuring out ways to do mitigation (Clean Energy R&D) and adaptation (helping people in the pond to not drown). Right now, I think helping the smaller people is more neglected than lessening the rise of water level.
Lastly to the comments on extreme warming scenarios. While there is a lot of research improving climate models and projections (largely computation limited), there is still a lot to be done on translating those extreme scenarios to impacts, and also geoengineering responses to lessen those impacts. This needs funding on the ~$1 billion scale and is vastly underfunded (funding got cancelled in the US given the current administration). I’m more inclined to think that this or adaptation are likely to yield better returns from an EA perspective.
Thanks for putting this together, and sorry for the delay in posting a response.
It’s great to see some more attention to effective climate interventions in the last year, starting with the founders pledge report:https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3poYR8mXfcr9YM34Z/new-research-on-effective-climate-charities
There is a lot of open debate in the EA community on how much to focus on climate change as a cause area:https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BwDAN9pGbmCYZGbgf/does-climate-change-deserve-more-attention-within-eaI’m going to skip over the questions of how much of a catastrophic risk it is, and what the appropriate split between mitigation and adaptation should be, and instead focus on the point you make of “What can we most effectively do to fight climate change?”.
In getting from the broad goal of emissions reductions to specifically support ITIF’s policy work, there are several key assumptions:
Energy related emissions from fossil fuels are the top priority
The priority should be on clean energy development in the most populous countries (India, China)
Reductions in energy related emissions are technology limited, rather than economic or policy limited; Adequate technologies do not already exist to in the most populous countries
Clean energy R&D can produce low or emissions-free technologies; there are substantial clean energy R&D opportunities with high impact on emissions reductions
Clean energy R&D is currently funding constrained, and there are high marginal returns for the next dollar to speed deployment of these technologies
The philanthropic sector, private/market sector, and governments have neglected clean energy R&D, or could substantially increase their giving in this area
Technologies developed in developed countries like the U.S. will lower costs and ease deployment in the most populous countries with negligible barriers to tech transfer
Lobbying to increase government R&D spending is likely to be successful, and specifically by ITIF
ITIF’s target R&D areas are broadly correct, and will surpass the challenges above
Responses to those assumptions:
Energy related emissions from fossil fuels are the top priority. Mild agreement. Agricultural, land use change, methane, and F-gas emissions account for ~25% of emissions, and there is substantial uncertainty how much is being emitted. There could be high impact interventions focusing on these emission sources. However, mitigation will certainly require eliminating emissions from fossil fuels.
The priority should be on clean energy development in the most populous countries (India, China). Agree.
Reductions in energy related emissions are technology limited, rather than economic or policy limited; Adequate technologies do not already exist to in the most populous countries. Mild disagreement here. I think this is true for the hard to mitigate emissions (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6396/eaas9793) from Cement, Iron, Steel, Aviation, Shipping, and the last ~10% of electric generation when 90% is served by renewables. These account for ~15% of total energy related emissions. Otherwise, the technologies exist are largely driven by policy. 75% of electricity use is in buildings, and we already have the technology to make them low or zero-carbon. It’s a matter of adopting rigorous building energy code. Electric vehicles are in the deployment stage, relying on infrastructure build out to support their manufacture and charging availability. Better batteries would help, and this is getting a lot of R&D interest from all sectors. Lastly, urban planning is largely the biggest lever in reducing developing country emissions, as they can design out the need for high transportation energy use. However, the ITIF fund is explicitly targeting the ~15% hard to eliminate emissions, so they are only focusing on the technology-limited emissions.
Additionally, I think the choice to use the German example of clean energy subsidies is unrepresentative. In the U.S., which is responsible for 35% of clean energy R&D, the ratio is much closer https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=35952 to 1:1 (post-ARRA). And while the subsidies in Germany didn’t go to R&D, they encouraged learning in manufacturing and production, which greatly drove down the price. While this isn’t included as R&D, it has a similar effect of making renewable energy cheaper.
Clean energy R&D can produce low or emissions-free technologies; there are substantial clean energy R&D opportunities with high impact on emissions reductions. Agree. Largely with batteries and liquid fuels.
Clean energy R&D is currently funding constrained, and there are high marginal returns for the next dollar to speed deployment of these technologies. Mild agreement. This is true for zero-carbon liquid fuels. New battery technologies are not funding constrained, and at a point where additional funding will not lead to faster development.
The philanthropic sector, private/market sector, and governments have neglected clean energy R&D, or could substantially increase their giving in this area. Mild agreement, though I disagree with the characterization that the philanthropic sector has neglected developing countries. In the philanthropic sector, the Packard and Hewlett foundations are the main funders in this space, and have made major contributions to the Energy and Climate foundations, who in turn have focused their grants on developing country emissions, largely around things the building code, vehicle electrification, and development policy. If the criticism is that the philanthropic sector is under investment in R&D, it is largely because they think policy priorities in developing countries are a more impactful mitigation strategy.
Technologies developed in developed countries like the U.S. will lower costs and ease deployment in the most populous countries with negligible barriers to tech transfer. Agree. This has been demonstrated with solar and wind, though I would have appreciated more in the write-up on tech transfer.
Lobbying to increase government R&D spending is likely to be successful, and specifically by ITIF. Neither agree nor disagree. I have no way to judge how successful ITIF will be with their lobbying. While they are well regarding, I’m not sure how much political power they have.
ITIF’s target R&D areas are broadly correct, and will surpass the challenges above. Mix of agreement and disagreement. There are 6 areas:
1) Advanced Nuclear Energy, particularly on SMRs (small modular reactors). The application here is for the last 10-20% of electricity generation that is hard to cover with renewables. However, ~80% of the costs of rankine-based technologies for power production are from the capital and maintenance costs associated with the rankine cycle (cooling towers, concrete, etc.). SMRs, even small ones on the 50 MW scale, even if their nuclear component is vastly cheaper than LWRs, are unlikely to be able to compete with renewables and storage on cost. There are other means of meeting this grid need with demand response or transmission, meaning SMRs will likely only find use in certain applications like shipping. Therefore, I don’t think greater funding in this area is climate-relevant.
2) Long Duration Grid Storage, seasonal storage. This is also for the last 10-20% of grid use. I agree this could use more funding, though it is speculative and technology specific.
3) Carbon-Neutral Fuels. This is the strongest R&D need. There are some recent big investments in the space https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-national-labs-partner-exxonmobil-100-million-joint-research, but it could get more attention.
4) Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS). CCUS is not competitive in the electric sector. The application will be for the industrial sector in cement and steel manufacturing, and for low-carbon liquid fuels. I think the investment needed here is less on the capture technology, and more on the robustness of sequestration and storage to prevent leaks https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04423-1.
5) Carbon Dioxide Removal Technology. I agree with this as a government research priority as there isn’t a market incentive.
6) Basic Energy Research. Basic energy research requires government investment, and gets a lot of the R&D share. It’s unclear to me what lobbying for this would entail. The current administration is more inclined to basic energy research at the expense of all other areas of energy and climate, so lobbying for this in the next few years may actually be counterproductive.
Overall, I think ITIF is broadly correct in the need for government-funded R&D in carbon-neutral liquid fuels, CCUS in industry, CO2 removal, and somewhat long-duration storage. I disagree with their Advanced Nuclear and Basic Energy research goals for practical and current political reality reasons. I don’t think ITF’s lobbying on their 6 focus areas rise to the level of “most effective climate interventions”, as ~60-70% of emissions are policy-limited, not technology-limited. And I think the U.S. climate philanthropic sector has largely correctly identified policy interventions in India and China as the highest priority. From an EA angle, I think the most neglected climate-interventions are in adaptation in poor countries that are most vulnerable to climate change, and in understanding and adaptation to extreme warming scenarios.
Thanks so much, Matthew for your detailed response. I will just briefly respond to a few points of disagreements.
The US is the biggest funder of clean energy R&D, so yes the ratio is definitely better. However, globally clean energy deployment subsidies are >$120 billion whereas clean energy R&D is just $22bn.
I also disagree with your distinction between “technology” vs. “economic or policy limitation”. Policy tractability is a function technology. As clean energy gets cheaper it will get adapted more readily.
ITIF’s target R&D areas are broadly correct, and will surpass the challenges above. Mix of agreement and disagreement.
Note that recommendation of ITIF does not hinge on their technology missions. While you might have disagreements on the particular technology missions they propose, they too are experts on this topic, and there are many more experts that agree with them. We mostly believe that most of the value from this comes from encouraging all countries to increase their energy R&D through Mission Innovation. Generally, increasing in spending will lead to increases in the clean energy that the technocratic consensus deems most effective.
In the report we write (citations available there):
“Our analysis focused exclusively on the climate policy solutions that are most effective. This seemed to be our competitive advantage. We saved time by not analyzing in-depth the impacts of climate change (we had done a shallow literature review on this in a previous analysis ,). Instead, we relied on the scientific consensus on this topic. Also, unlike other analyses, we did not compare the effectiveness of different energy sources. For instance, is nuclear really good and its drawbacks are overstated? Are renewables like solar underestimated? Can coal perhaps be made clean through carbon capture? We intentionally steered clear of these controversies and have not engaged with these questions on a deep level. There seems to be no expert consensus on whether any one technology is much superior and unreasonably neglected than others. Instead, we feel there is some mild consensus amongst energy experts that the world’s future energy supply must come from a diverse mix of energy sources and it is best to opt for ‘technology neutrality’, i.e. being agnostic with regards to which low-carbon technology is best. We assumed that clean energy R&D budget increases will either lead to all technologies becoming better across the board or one technology will emerge more readily as the ‘winner’.
Relatedly, our views on the importance of clean energy innovation also seem uncontroversial within large parts of academia, but have not made it outside of academia yet. We came across a few recently published and unpublished papers that reached similar conclusions to ours and so we believe in the coming years our views might be more mainstream.,”
On adaptation: I disagree that adaptation is more effective than what I outline in my report, as it is not a global public good. On the understanding to extreme warming scnearios I actually agree a bit, above I write:
Funding more research on such topics might be even be more cost-effective than clean energy R&D funding. However, the overall funding gap is likely much lower (perhaps in the hundreds of millions) than for clean energy R&D (which is in the tens of billions) and so diminishing returns will set in earlier. Consider that, in the US alone, climate change research funding is 1.7% of total research grants and about $1.5 billion annually. Thus, while investing in climate change research is quite cost-effective, there is an upper bound on the benefits. Put simply, the engineering challenges of creating cheaper clean energy technology are vast and need many more billions, whereas the value of information from climate change research might be very high, but there diminishing returns set in earlier, and we already have a lot of funding in place. “
I distinguish between R&D and economic/policy factors, because it matters where technology is at in the R&D pipeline. Solar and wind are mature technologies. There is some additional work that can be done in solar (e.g. perovskites) and wind (bigger blades, offshore), but the vast majority of the costs at this point are not associated with the technology itself, but rather the implementation, permitting, financing, etc. At this stage in technology development, costs get driven down by expanding the market, not so much additional early stage R&D. There can be more investment in >6 hr energy storage and zero-carbon liquid fuels, as many of the solutions are in early stage research.
Therefore, I’m more inclined to say that clean energy deployment in developing countries is economic and policy limited, not technology limited, given relatively low deployment rates and maturity of the most applicable technologies. I still agree with more R&D, but I don’t think that is limiting factor in a lot of countries right now. Major climate philanthropy seems to agree—focusing on policy around development, energy efficiency, and deployment of exist tech, rather than early stage R&D funding. Perhaps they don’t because the government already funds R&D at level greater than the philanthropic sector could ever meet. But if as you say, the R&D is more funding limited and has the better marginal return, then most of the philanthropic giving should be going to that.
I understand the desire to not dive into the specifics which technologies to focus on and in general just get more clean energy R&D funding. More clean energy R&D funding lifts all technologies. An analogy would be to global health. It would be good to get more general funding into global health, and most academics and EAs support that. But I think the EA angle could benefit from being more specific on which kinds of interventions/technologies, as like global health, the effectiveness of additional funds could vary greatly depending on where they are spent (e.g. energy storage vs. clean coal). This is a increase funding or use existing funding more effectively question. Your argument is that Clean Energy R&D funding is so low that it is much more important to increase the funding. I agree with you on this. I have a mix of thoughts on whether ITIF’s specific lobbying priorities within Clean R&D are correct, but don’t want to get into that too much.
I do want to address the points on adaptation and extreme warming.
Adaptation gets funded through the UNFCCC framework is the fund has given out $1 billion, with support of $4 billion from other sources. This is total, not per year.
https://www.un.org/ldcportal/least-developed-countries-fund-ldcf/
https://fiftrustee.worldbank.org/en/about/unit/dfi/fiftrustee/fund-detail/adapt
I think R&D in adaptation is underfunded, and adaptation in one area is likely to be replicable in other places (making it a global public good, similar to clean energy R&D). This is about limiting the worst effects, and is neglected in the same way tropical diseases are neglected on the global scale.
An analogy on this is a expansion of pond metaphor. The water level is representing greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere, and the pond is filled with adults (developed countries) and small adults or kids (developing countries). Some are already struggling. Mitigation will slow or stop the rise of water, but we should also spend some effort helping the smallest humans out before they can’t touch the bottom (e.g. life preservers, rocks to stand on). We can presumably get better at figuring out ways to do mitigation (Clean Energy R&D) and adaptation (helping people in the pond to not drown). Right now, I think helping the smaller people is more neglected than lessening the rise of water level.
Lastly to the comments on extreme warming scenarios. While there is a lot of research improving climate models and projections (largely computation limited), there is still a lot to be done on translating those extreme scenarios to impacts, and also geoengineering responses to lessen those impacts. This needs funding on the ~$1 billion scale and is vastly underfunded (funding got cancelled in the US given the current administration). I’m more inclined to think that this or adaptation are likely to yield better returns from an EA perspective.