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.
(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.