As someone who has worked in sustainable energy technology for ten years (wind energy, modeling, smart charging, activism) before moving into AI xrisk, my favorite neglected topic is carbon emission trading schemes (ETS).
ETSs such as implemented by the EU, China, and others, have a waterbed effect. The total amount of emissions is capped, and trading sets the price of those emissions for all sectors under the scheme (in the EU electricity, heavy industry, expanding to other sectors). That means that:
Reducing emissions for sectors under an ETS is pointless, climate-wise.
Deciding to reduce the amount of emission rights within an ETS should directly lead to lower emissions, without any need to understand the technologies involved.
It’s just crazy to think about all the good-hearted campaigning, awareness creation, hard engineering work, money, etc that is being directed to decreasing emissions for a sector that’s covered by an ETS. To my best understanding, as long as ETS is working correctly, this effort is completely meaningless. At the same time, I knew of exactly one person trying to reduce ETS emission rights based in my country, the Netherlands. This was the only person potentially actually achieving something useful for the climate.
If I would want to do something neglected in the climate space, I would try to inform all those people currently wasting their energy that what they should really do is trying to reduce the amount of ETS emission rights and let the market figure out the rest. (Note that several of the trajectories recommended above, such as working on nuclear power, reducing industry emissions, and deep geothermal energy (depending on use case) are all contained in ETS (at least in the EU) and improvements would therefore not benefit the climate).
If countries or regions have an ETS system, successful emission reduction should really start (and basically stop) there. It’s also quite a neglected area so plenty of low hanging fruit!
Context: I’ve worked in carbon pricing / emissions trading systems for several years before joining FP and I am generally not shy to criticize efforts that have low additionality (indeed, I partially left that role because of impact concerns).
1. It is true that it *used to be true* that reducing emissions in EU ETS sectors had zero impact on European emissions because of the dynamics you outline (the so-called “waterbed effect”). However, this has not been true for several years now with the introduction of the Market Stability Reserve (MSR). Now everything is a lot more complicated, but at least the effect of “no effect” is somewhat mediated.
2. Maybe not from the activist community, but from economists and other policy wonks, there is a lot of attention to the EU ETS and there has just been a recent strengthening of the EU ETS. It is the one thing every economist agrees on.
3. Given Europe’s low share of future emissions and high share of innovation capacity, the fact that actions do not matter much more for Europe (because of the partially existing waterbed effect) is not as damning as it sounds. A lot of actions can still be very important. For example. Germany’s massive support for renewables is sometimes criticized to not have reduced emissions because it was in an EU ETS sector (electricity) at a time when the waterbed effect was still fully in place. While this is true, it kind of barely matters because by far the largest effects of these policies were indirect anyway, changing the global trajectory of solar and driving emissions reductions in sunnier countries unwilling or unable to make the initial investment that Germany and some other made to drive down the cost.
Crucially, though, this waterbed effect does somewhat affect “local” prioritization, e.g. it is an additional reason to prioritize action based on global consequences (e.g. changing trajectory of early-stage technologies) because local emissions reductions matter even less than on emissions ground alone. E.g. one should be even more excited for changing the trajectory on cement vs adding a bit more solar than one should already be.
(No sources here, but I discuss this is more on the recent 80K Podcast)
Thanks for your reply. I mostly agree with many of the things you say, but I still think work to reduce the amount of emission rights should at least be on the list of high-impact things to do, and as far as I’m concerned, significantly higher than a few other paths mentioned here.
If you’d still want to do technology-specific work, I think offshore solar might also be impactful and neglected.
I think the list here is optimized for engineers, i.e. people with backgrounds that are better at working on technology than lobbying, so this is likely the proximate reason it is not on the list (I had no input on the list).
That said, whether working on emissions rights is a top priority after the recent reforms is a question that would require more work (I think it is plausible to say we are close to having maxed out on ambition, and also changes in emissions rights are primarily driven by changes in general climate policy support, it seems).
As someone who has worked in sustainable energy technology for ten years (wind energy, modeling, smart charging, activism) before moving into AI xrisk, my favorite neglected topic is carbon emission trading schemes (ETS).
ETSs such as implemented by the EU, China, and others, have a waterbed effect. The total amount of emissions is capped, and trading sets the price of those emissions for all sectors under the scheme (in the EU electricity, heavy industry, expanding to other sectors). That means that:
Reducing emissions for sectors under an ETS is pointless, climate-wise.
Deciding to reduce the amount of emission rights within an ETS should directly lead to lower emissions, without any need to understand the technologies involved.
It’s just crazy to think about all the good-hearted campaigning, awareness creation, hard engineering work, money, etc that is being directed to decreasing emissions for a sector that’s covered by an ETS. To my best understanding, as long as ETS is working correctly, this effort is completely meaningless. At the same time, I knew of exactly one person trying to reduce ETS emission rights based in my country, the Netherlands. This was the only person potentially actually achieving something useful for the climate.
If I would want to do something neglected in the climate space, I would try to inform all those people currently wasting their energy that what they should really do is trying to reduce the amount of ETS emission rights and let the market figure out the rest. (Note that several of the trajectories recommended above, such as working on nuclear power, reducing industry emissions, and deep geothermal energy (depending on use case) are all contained in ETS (at least in the EU) and improvements would therefore not benefit the climate).
If countries or regions have an ETS system, successful emission reduction should really start (and basically stop) there. It’s also quite a neglected area so plenty of low hanging fruit!
Context: I’ve worked in carbon pricing / emissions trading systems for several years before joining FP and I am generally not shy to criticize efforts that have low additionality (indeed, I partially left that role because of impact concerns).
1. It is true that it *used to be true* that reducing emissions in EU ETS sectors had zero impact on European emissions because of the dynamics you outline (the so-called “waterbed effect”).
However, this has not been true for several years now with the introduction of the Market Stability Reserve (MSR). Now everything is a lot more complicated, but at least the effect of “no effect” is somewhat mediated.
2. Maybe not from the activist community, but from economists and other policy wonks, there is a lot of attention to the EU ETS and there has just been a recent strengthening of the EU ETS. It is the one thing every economist agrees on.
3. Given Europe’s low share of future emissions and high share of innovation capacity, the fact that actions do not matter much more for Europe (because of the partially existing waterbed effect) is not as damning as it sounds. A lot of actions can still be very important. For example. Germany’s massive support for renewables is sometimes criticized to not have reduced emissions because it was in an EU ETS sector (electricity) at a time when the waterbed effect was still fully in place. While this is true, it kind of barely matters because by far the largest effects of these policies were indirect anyway, changing the global trajectory of solar and driving emissions reductions in sunnier countries unwilling or unable to make the initial investment that Germany and some other made to drive down the cost.
Crucially, though, this waterbed effect does somewhat affect “local” prioritization, e.g. it is an additional reason to prioritize action based on global consequences (e.g. changing trajectory of early-stage technologies) because local emissions reductions matter even less than on emissions ground alone. E.g. one should be even more excited for changing the trajectory on cement vs adding a bit more solar than one should already be.
(No sources here, but I discuss this is more on the recent 80K Podcast)
Thanks for your reply. I mostly agree with many of the things you say, but I still think work to reduce the amount of emission rights should at least be on the list of high-impact things to do, and as far as I’m concerned, significantly higher than a few other paths mentioned here.
If you’d still want to do technology-specific work, I think offshore solar might also be impactful and neglected.
I think the list here is optimized for engineers, i.e. people with backgrounds that are better at working on technology than lobbying, so this is likely the proximate reason it is not on the list (I had no input on the list).
That said, whether working on emissions rights is a top priority after the recent reforms is a question that would require more work (I think it is plausible to say we are close to having maxed out on ambition, and also changes in emissions rights are primarily driven by changes in general climate policy support, it seems).