Thank you for your responses! I added edits to the essay to reflect this.
Overall, as I noted in the edits, this exercise has made me shift from being skeptical about all climate change interventions to considering shifting some donations from global poverty to climate change interventions. Not entirely convinced, but it seems a lot more plausibly effective than I first suspected.
Some things I don’t understand though:
It makes sense that with a convex harms curve, marginal harms will be worse than this back of the envelope linear calculation suggests. But it’s surprising that they’re 10 times higher. I guess it’s just very nonlinear, as you say, but that’s surprising to me.
The $1/ton estimate comes from CATF, which is a lobbying organization. Their cost effectiveness calculations account for money they spend lobbying, but not deadweight loss caused by taxes and regulations. How reasonable is it accept that sort of accounting?
1. To your question on accounting for deadweight losses etc., it is true that this is not included, rather this is an estimate of marginal changes from donations. But the factors not included in the calculation are not only deadweight losses (and other costs), but also lots of benefits, e.g. economic benefits from technological leadership. This is parallel to GiveWell analyses which only focus on mortality/direct income gains and ignore a lot of other follow-on benefits and costs.
2. The air pollution benefits of clean energy advocacy are plausibly in the same ballpark as climate benefits (depends on how severe climate change turns out) and benefits from overcoming energy poverty are also very significant (though hard to causally pin-down given the relationship between energy demand growth and human welfare is bidirectional, I explore this a bit more here).
3. One thing that is very different between GiveWell recommendations on global health and FP recommendations on climate is the attitude towards uncertainty—GiveWell recs have a high uncertainty avoidance whereas CATF and other estimates are meant to be risk-neutral estimates leveraging a fairly indirect theory of change (policy advocacy > policy change > technological change > changed emissions trajectory). So, in that sense the absence of risk-neutral global health recommendations biases the argument in favor of climate.
Thank you for your responses! I added edits to the essay to reflect this.
Overall, as I noted in the edits, this exercise has made me shift from being skeptical about all climate change interventions to considering shifting some donations from global poverty to climate change interventions. Not entirely convinced, but it seems a lot more plausibly effective than I first suspected.
Some things I don’t understand though:
It makes sense that with a convex harms curve, marginal harms will be worse than this back of the envelope linear calculation suggests. But it’s surprising that they’re 10 times higher. I guess it’s just very nonlinear, as you say, but that’s surprising to me.
The $1/ton estimate comes from CATF, which is a lobbying organization. Their cost effectiveness calculations account for money they spend lobbying, but not deadweight loss caused by taxes and regulations. How reasonable is it accept that sort of accounting?
(Working at Founders Pledge)
1. To your question on accounting for deadweight losses etc., it is true that this is not included, rather this is an estimate of marginal changes from donations. But the factors not included in the calculation are not only deadweight losses (and other costs), but also lots of benefits, e.g. economic benefits from technological leadership. This is parallel to GiveWell analyses which only focus on mortality/direct income gains and ignore a lot of other follow-on benefits and costs.
2. The air pollution benefits of clean energy advocacy are plausibly in the same ballpark as climate benefits (depends on how severe climate change turns out) and benefits from overcoming energy poverty are also very significant (though hard to causally pin-down given the relationship between energy demand growth and human welfare is bidirectional, I explore this a bit more here).
3. One thing that is very different between GiveWell recommendations on global health and FP recommendations on climate is the attitude towards uncertainty—GiveWell recs have a high uncertainty avoidance whereas CATF and other estimates are meant to be risk-neutral estimates leveraging a fairly indirect theory of change (policy advocacy > policy change > technological change > changed emissions trajectory). So, in that sense the absence of risk-neutral global health recommendations biases the argument in favor of climate.