Thanks John. I happen to have done a BOTEC on this; I’ll post it here b/c this seems like a canonical place for conversation. It’s pretty scrappy, and you shouldn’t feel obliged to respond, but I’d be interested to know if you think it’s going wrong anywhere (I think my bottom-line is slightly more negative than your “might be a good option for donors who would otherwise have lower impact”).
What does success look like?
Large amounts of fossil fuels remain in the ground but accessible for re-industrialization in the event of civilizational collapse
Mostly targeted at civ collapse in 50+ years (since early enough there’s plenty of coal left) but pre-singularity (or we presumably have more effective ways of improving robustness to collapse)
How good is that?
2% estimated risk of civilizational collapse on relevant timescale (mostly in worlds where AGI is very far off)
50,000 microdooms from chance of no industrial recovery given civ collapse
⇒ 1,000 microdooms affectable
Doubling available fossil fuel reserves maybe cuts 5% of the risk
⇒ doubling fossil fuel in the ground averts 50 microdooms
On default trajectory expect to have 5% of mineable coal stay in the ground
So extra 1% of fossil fuel staying in the ground is worth 10 microdooms
If coal is half of relevant fossil fuel, extra 1% of coal staying in ground worth 5 microdooms
What does it cost?
At scale?
$
Guess elasticity of coal consumed with available coal = 0.5 (i.e. have to buy twice as much as you’d naively think to get a given effect)
Worth of global coal reserves = $25T
About $50T at current prices. This is for reserves not resources, so things that people are pretty confident they know how to get out. The price of extraction should reduce this somewhat, I guess by a factor of 2
(my naive guess before looking things up was $2.5T)
⇒ cost to pay for an extra 1% of coal to stay in ground = $500B
Labour
Negligible
⇒ CE = 0.01 microdooms/$B
This is pretty low!
Maybe by being tactical about which mines one buys one can bump this up by a factor of 2 or 3? It feels like it’s out of reach to make it a good buy, though
Pilot
I think the at-scale cost is sufficiently bad that we shouldn’t put aligned dollars into this
Is there a way to leverage public funds into this? If so possible a pilot could be cost-effective
However, my suspicion is that this is a less leveraged way to keep fossil fuels in the ground than the things goverments spend dollars on by default to encourage transition to green economy (e.g. clean energy R&D; also subsidies for clean energy stuff, which indirectly feed back into R&D)
Transition to clean energy economy will presumably happen when tech is sufficiently advanced
Advancing tech by 1 year means we can expect 1 year more of current consumption to be left in the ground (if we’d complete transition before fossil fuels run out), or an increased chance of completing the transition before fossil fuels run out
I guess we’re consuming around 1% of reserves per year at the moment, so guess this would be worth 1% of all fossil fuel staying in ground (not just coal)
(Plus probably bigger effects in intermediate years)
Clean energy sector R&D budget = approx $10B/yr (I found recent energy R&D = $22B, of which “less than half” on clean energy)
Guess 5x budget would double rate of progress
⇒ $50B/yr worth 10 microdooms
Think smart choices about where to invest R&D can probably beat that by a factor of 10 for EAs
⇒ 0.2 microdooms/$B for governments, or 2 microdooms/$B for EAs
I therefore think buying coal mines is most likely net negative to pursue, although it’s close enough to untargeted clean energy R&D on my calculations that it could be worth getting more careful calculations (maybe from economists, maybe from someone like McKinsey)
FWIW, your calculation seems still optimistic to me, still, e.g. assuming quite a high elasticity (cost of coal is not such an important part of the cost of producing electricity with coal) and, if I understand your reasoning correctly, a fairly high chance of additionality (by default, coal is in structural decline globally).
Makes sense; thanks for flagging. I’m tempted to conclude “robustly a bad idea”.
Maybe the parameter that I can most imagine someone pushing on to make it look better is that I’m assuming 5% of mineable coal will stay in the ground on default trajectories, and you might think it would be significantly less than that. I don’t think this would make it look better than generic clean energy R&D, but it’s not impossible (my cost-effectiveness estimate is >1000x below where I’d put the threshold for interventions I’m excited about, so it seems pretty much impossible for it to reach that if my calc is currently skewing optimistic in places).
Thanks John. I happen to have done a BOTEC on this; I’ll post it here b/c this seems like a canonical place for conversation. It’s pretty scrappy, and you shouldn’t feel obliged to respond, but I’d be interested to know if you think it’s going wrong anywhere (I think my bottom-line is slightly more negative than your “might be a good option for donors who would otherwise have lower impact”).
What does success look like?
Large amounts of fossil fuels remain in the ground but accessible for re-industrialization in the event of civilizational collapse
Mostly targeted at civ collapse in 50+ years (since early enough there’s plenty of coal left) but pre-singularity (or we presumably have more effective ways of improving robustness to collapse)
How good is that?
2% estimated risk of civilizational collapse on relevant timescale (mostly in worlds where AGI is very far off)
50,000 microdooms from chance of no industrial recovery given civ collapse
⇒ 1,000 microdooms affectable
Doubling available fossil fuel reserves maybe cuts 5% of the risk
⇒ doubling fossil fuel in the ground averts 50 microdooms
On default trajectory expect to have 5% of mineable coal stay in the ground
So extra 1% of fossil fuel staying in the ground is worth 10 microdooms
If coal is half of relevant fossil fuel, extra 1% of coal staying in ground worth 5 microdooms
What does it cost?
At scale?
$
Guess elasticity of coal consumed with available coal = 0.5 (i.e. have to buy twice as much as you’d naively think to get a given effect)
Worth of global coal reserves = $25T
About $50T at current prices. This is for reserves not resources, so things that people are pretty confident they know how to get out. The price of extraction should reduce this somewhat, I guess by a factor of 2
(my naive guess before looking things up was $2.5T)
⇒ cost to pay for an extra 1% of coal to stay in ground = $500B
Labour
Negligible
⇒ CE = 0.01 microdooms/$B
This is pretty low!
Maybe by being tactical about which mines one buys one can bump this up by a factor of 2 or 3? It feels like it’s out of reach to make it a good buy, though
Pilot
I think the at-scale cost is sufficiently bad that we shouldn’t put aligned dollars into this
Is there a way to leverage public funds into this? If so possible a pilot could be cost-effective
However, my suspicion is that this is a less leveraged way to keep fossil fuels in the ground than the things goverments spend dollars on by default to encourage transition to green economy (e.g. clean energy R&D; also subsidies for clean energy stuff, which indirectly feed back into R&D)
Transition to clean energy economy will presumably happen when tech is sufficiently advanced
Advancing tech by 1 year means we can expect 1 year more of current consumption to be left in the ground (if we’d complete transition before fossil fuels run out), or an increased chance of completing the transition before fossil fuels run out
I guess we’re consuming around 1% of reserves per year at the moment, so guess this would be worth 1% of all fossil fuel staying in ground (not just coal)
(Plus probably bigger effects in intermediate years)
Clean energy sector R&D budget = approx $10B/yr (I found recent energy R&D = $22B, of which “less than half” on clean energy)
Guess 5x budget would double rate of progress
⇒ $50B/yr worth 10 microdooms
Think smart choices about where to invest R&D can probably beat that by a factor of 10 for EAs
⇒ 0.2 microdooms/$B for governments, or 2 microdooms/$B for EAs
I therefore think buying coal mines is most likely net negative to pursue, although it’s close enough to untargeted clean energy R&D on my calculations that it could be worth getting more careful calculations (maybe from economists, maybe from someone like McKinsey)
FWIW, your calculation seems still optimistic to me, still, e.g. assuming quite a high elasticity (cost of coal is not such an important part of the cost of producing electricity with coal) and, if I understand your reasoning correctly, a fairly high chance of additionality (by default, coal is in structural decline globally).
Makes sense; thanks for flagging. I’m tempted to conclude “robustly a bad idea”.
Maybe the parameter that I can most imagine someone pushing on to make it look better is that I’m assuming 5% of mineable coal will stay in the ground on default trajectories, and you might think it would be significantly less than that. I don’t think this would make it look better than generic clean energy R&D, but it’s not impossible (my cost-effectiveness estimate is >1000x below where I’d put the threshold for interventions I’m excited about, so it seems pretty much impossible for it to reach that if my calc is currently skewing optimistic in places).
What’s a BOTEC
Back of the envelope calculation
Bottom Of The Envelope Calculation
Thanks for this. Yeah, I haven’t crunched the numbers on cost per microdoom and probs don’t have time to go through your calcs.