Actually, the mitigation strategies for nuclear war risk I was referring to were alternate foods, which fare much better on the ITN framework than climate change.
But it is very interesting to think about your point of freeing of money for other causes. I have shown that the return on investment of alternate foods in terms of saving lives (with a value of statistical life) is something like 100% to 40,000,000%. I have done some unpublished calculations on what the actual monetary return on investment might be. The origin of the monetary return is that if we do not have alternate foods, the price of stored food would become extremely high, and I estimate a total expenditure of $90 trillion. With alternate foods, even though many more people would be fed, the total expenditure on food would be much lower. So I was thinking it might be possible for EAs to fund alternate foods in exchange for a huge sum of money if a global agricultural catastrophe did occur and alternate foods saved governments a lot of money (because they would likely be footing much of the bill to allow some people to afford food). Of course if it is not guaranteed that the global agricultural catastrophe will occur before artificial intelligence becomes dominant. But if it does, we could potentially turn tens of millions of dollars now into hundreds of billions of dollars that could be used for AI or other causes (and of course even if the governments did not give us some fraction of the value of our services, we would still be saving many lives and reducing the chance of loss of civilization). It looks like the return on investment of alternate foods from the monetary perspective would be even greater than from the perspective of saving lives.
Actually, the mitigation strategies for nuclear war risk I was referring to were alternate foods, which fare much better on the ITN framework than climate change.
But it is very interesting to think about your point of freeing of money for other causes. I have shown that the return on investment of alternate foods in terms of saving lives (with a value of statistical life) is something like 100% to 40,000,000%. I have done some unpublished calculations on what the actual monetary return on investment might be. The origin of the monetary return is that if we do not have alternate foods, the price of stored food would become extremely high, and I estimate a total expenditure of $90 trillion. With alternate foods, even though many more people would be fed, the total expenditure on food would be much lower. So I was thinking it might be possible for EAs to fund alternate foods in exchange for a huge sum of money if a global agricultural catastrophe did occur and alternate foods saved governments a lot of money (because they would likely be footing much of the bill to allow some people to afford food). Of course if it is not guaranteed that the global agricultural catastrophe will occur before artificial intelligence becomes dominant. But if it does, we could potentially turn tens of millions of dollars now into hundreds of billions of dollars that could be used for AI or other causes (and of course even if the governments did not give us some fraction of the value of our services, we would still be saving many lives and reducing the chance of loss of civilization). It looks like the return on investment of alternate foods from the monetary perspective would be even greater than from the perspective of saving lives.
I agree about being able to pitch to multiple donors, which is one reason I point out that alternate foods are a cost-effective way of addressing abrupt regional climate change and extreme global climate change (slow increase of more than 5°C).