Climate change: Fund the authors of this paper on the $10 trillion value of better information about the transient climate response. More on Value of information.
Interesting paper-the reason information is so valuable is because they are talking about spending ~$100 trillion on emissions reductions. Since we are only talking about spending around a few billion dollars on AI or $100 million on mitigation strategies for nuclear war, and because these risks are significantly bigger than climate change, it shows you how much lower a priority climate change is. Solar radiation management (a type of geo-engineering), which you refer to, can be much cheaper, but it still cannot compete (and it potentially poses its own risks).
I take your point that because on the cause level AI safety is somewhat more neglected, it scores better on the ITN framework (I actually think all of military spending is kind tangled up in the nuclear security scale /​ tractability, and so maybe it would actually score worse than climate change).
In any case, I think given that this research has a net present value of $10 trillion and it would also liberate funding and talent to go to other causes it is still worth considering and might on the margin be better than a mediocre AI safety grant.
Also, note that I have written this list explicitly so that there is some flexibility in what one can pitch to different donors, who might care particularly about climate change as a cause. Within climate change, I believe this might be a particularly good research area to fund, even before geoengineering projects.
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 I have done some unpublished calculations on what the actual monetary return on investment might be.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.
Interesting paper-the reason information is so valuable is because they are talking about spending ~$100 trillion on emissions reductions. Since we are only talking about spending around a few billion dollars on AI or $100 million on mitigation strategies for nuclear war, and because these risks are significantly bigger than climate change, it shows you how much lower a priority climate change is. Solar radiation management (a type of geo-engineering), which you refer to, can be much cheaper, but it still cannot compete (and it potentially poses its own risks).
I take your point that because on the cause level AI safety is somewhat more neglected, it scores better on the ITN framework (I actually think all of military spending is kind tangled up in the nuclear security scale /​ tractability, and so maybe it would actually score worse than climate change).
In any case, I think given that this research has a net present value of $10 trillion and it would also liberate funding and talent to go to other causes it is still worth considering and might on the margin be better than a mediocre AI safety grant.
Also, note that I have written this list explicitly so that there is some flexibility in what one can pitch to different donors, who might care particularly about climate change as a cause. Within climate change, I believe this might be a particularly good research area to fund, even before geoengineering projects.
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).