I am agnostic wrt to your general argument but as the fund manager of the FP Climate Fund I wanted quickly weigh in, so some brief comments (I am on a retreat so my comments are more quickly written than otherwise and I won’t be able to get back immediately, please excuse lack of sourcing and polishing):
At this point, it seems the dominant view on climate interventions seems to be one of uncertainty on how they compare to GW style charity, certainly on neartermist grounds. E.g. your own Regranting Challenge allocated 10m to a climate org on renewables in Southeast Asia. This illustrates that OP seems to believe that climate interventions can clear the near-termist bar absent democratic pressures that dilute. While I am not particularly convinced by that grant (though I am arguably not neutral here!), I do think this correctly captures that it seems plausible that the best climate interventions can compare with GW-style-options, esp. when taking into account very strong “co-benefits” of climate interventions around air pollution and reducing energy poverty.
The key meta theory of impact underlying the Climate Fund is to turn neglectedness on its head and try to leverage the large societal attention to climate and improve how it is spent through targeted advocacy addressing blindspots of the mainstream response. Ultimately, as we are after maximizing impact, not maximizing ITN scores. it is quite plausible that neglectedness naively construed misleads us, neglectedness is an impact multiplier in expectation but not a good in itself, and, I’d argue, the ability to leverage large resource streams through advocacy is another impact multiploier, a mechanism by which high cost-effectiveness in a field as crowded as climate becomes at least plausible as long as one focuses on improving the vast resource allocation rather than just piling on. AFAIK, OP also believes that advocacy generally provides an impact multiplier when being risk neutral.
Given that GiveWell interventions are direct service delivery interventions that do not leverage any mechanisms such as advocacy or induced technological change, it also seems possible that leveraged climate interventions are competitive even if climate looks strictly worse than helping the poorest humans on a cause level. Put differently, the impact penalty imposed by risk aversion (if one is risk neutral wrt impact) or the different structure of the impact space (maybe in GHD, direct interventions are indeed better than more leveraged approaches) could make climate and other interventions competitive to GW style charity as well.
In case this sounds like I am very sure that climate should be included, this is not so.
I am just trying to say that it seems less clear than it would look on “naive” ITN grounds and that the “right” answer here might be independent of “democratic dilution”.
Sure, I think you can make an argument like that for almost any cause area (find neglected tactics within the cause to create radical leverage). However, I’ve become more skeptical of it over time, both bc I’ve angled for those opps myself, and because there are increasingly a lot of very smart, strategic climate funders deploying capital. On some level, we should expect the best opps to find funders.
>> E.g. your own Regranting Challenge allocated 10m to a climate org on renewables in Southeast Asia. This illustrates that OP seems to believe that climate interventions can clear the near-termist bar absent democratic pressures that dilute.
The award page has this line “We are particularly interested in funding work to decarbonize the power sector because of the large and neglected impacts of harmful ambient air pollution, to which coal is a meaningful contributor. i.e. it’s part of our new air quality focus area. Without actually haven read the write-up, I’m sure they considered climate impact too, but I doubt it would have gotten the award without that benefit.
That said, the Kigali grant from 2017 is more like your framing. (There was much less climate funding then.)
Sure, I think you can make an argument like that for almost any cause area (find neglected tactics within the cause to create radical leverage).
Thank you for your reply and apologies for the delay!
To be clear, the reason I think this is a more convincing argument in climate than in many other causes is (a) the vastness of societal and philanthropic climate attention and (b) it’s very predictable brokenness, with climate philanthropy and climate action more broadly generally “captured” by one particular vision of solving the problem (mainstream environmentalism, see qualification below).
Yes, one can make this argument for more causes but the implication of this does not seem clear – one implication could be that there actually are much more interventions that in fact do meet the bar and that discounting leverage arguments unduly constrains our portfolio.
However, I’ve become more skeptical of it over time, both bc I’ve angled for those opps myself, and because there are increasingly a lot of very smart, strategic climate funders deploying capital. On some level, we should expect the best opps to find funders.
That seems fair and my own uncertainty primarily stems from this – I do think overall climate philanthropy has improved significantly over the last years and, in particular, with the influx of climate philanthropy from tech has become more ideologically diverse which seems good and more balanced overall (different biases from different funders).
>> E.g. your own Regranting Challenge allocated 10m to a climate org on renewables in Southeast Asia. This illustrates that OP seems to believe that climate interventions can clear the near-termist bar absent democratic pressures that dilute.
The award page has this line “We are particularly interested in funding work to decarbonize the power sector because of the large and neglected impacts of harmful ambient air pollution, to which coal is a meaningful contributor. i.e. it’s part of our new air quality focus area. Without actually haven read the write-up, I’m sure they considered climate impact too, but I doubt it would have gotten the award without that benefit.
It might be that this grant needs air pollution benefits to put it over the bar, but – as far as I can tell – there is no reason to think this grant is more strongly correlated with air pollution benefits than many other climate grants.
Cause areas are mental abstractions and whether one abstracts as “climate” or “clean energy acceleration” then seems to affect whether or not they can meet the bar. The Climate Fund is quite explicit about taking the integrated perspective and generally makes grants that also have significant co-benefits in the form of avoided air pollution and driving down the cost of clean energy.
It seems to me that consistency would require that we should assume other climate grants can meet the OP bar as well and that, by implication, the featuring of the Climate Fund on GWWC seems unproblematic.
FWIW, I strongly agree with you that most climate grants do not meet the bar and one needs to spend a lot more time per grant than in other areas and one needs an explicit model of the blindspots left by the mainstream climate response.
>> To be clear, the reason I think this is a more convincing argument in climate than in many other causes is (a) the vastness of societal and philanthropic climate attention and (b) it’s very predictable brokenness, with climate philanthropy and climate action more broadly generally “captured” by one particular vision of solving the problem (mainstream environmentalism, see qualification below).
Vast attention is the mechanism that causes popular causes to usually have lower ROI on the margin; i.e. some of all that attention is likely competent.
I’m not sure what other causes you have in mind here. I think the argument with your two conditions applies equally well to large philanthropic areas like education, poverty/homelessness, and art.
>> It seems to me that consistency would require that we should assume other climate grants can meet the OP bar as well
Absolutely, I agree they can. Do you publish your cost effectiveness estimates?
Thanks Dustin!
I am agnostic wrt to your general argument but as the fund manager of the FP Climate Fund I wanted quickly weigh in, so some brief comments (I am on a retreat so my comments are more quickly written than otherwise and I won’t be able to get back immediately, please excuse lack of sourcing and polishing):
At this point, it seems the dominant view on climate interventions seems to be one of uncertainty on how they compare to GW style charity, certainly on neartermist grounds. E.g. your own Regranting Challenge allocated 10m to a climate org on renewables in Southeast Asia. This illustrates that OP seems to believe that climate interventions can clear the near-termist bar absent democratic pressures that dilute. While I am not particularly convinced by that grant (though I am arguably not neutral here!), I do think this correctly captures that it seems plausible that the best climate interventions can compare with GW-style-options, esp. when taking into account very strong “co-benefits” of climate interventions around air pollution and reducing energy poverty.
The key meta theory of impact underlying the Climate Fund is to turn neglectedness on its head and try to leverage the large societal attention to climate and improve how it is spent through targeted advocacy addressing blindspots of the mainstream response. Ultimately, as we are after maximizing impact, not maximizing ITN scores. it is quite plausible that neglectedness naively construed misleads us, neglectedness is an impact multiplier in expectation but not a good in itself, and, I’d argue, the ability to leverage large resource streams through advocacy is another impact multiploier, a mechanism by which high cost-effectiveness in a field as crowded as climate becomes at least plausible as long as one focuses on improving the vast resource allocation rather than just piling on. AFAIK, OP also believes that advocacy generally provides an impact multiplier when being risk neutral.
Given that GiveWell interventions are direct service delivery interventions that do not leverage any mechanisms such as advocacy or induced technological change, it also seems possible that leveraged climate interventions are competitive even if climate looks strictly worse than helping the poorest humans on a cause level. Put differently, the impact penalty imposed by risk aversion (if one is risk neutral wrt impact) or the different structure of the impact space (maybe in GHD, direct interventions are indeed better than more leveraged approaches) could make climate and other interventions competitive to GW style charity as well.
In case this sounds like I am very sure that climate should be included, this is not so.
I am just trying to say that it seems less clear than it would look on “naive” ITN grounds and that the “right” answer here might be independent of “democratic dilution”.
Sure, I think you can make an argument like that for almost any cause area (find neglected tactics within the cause to create radical leverage). However, I’ve become more skeptical of it over time, both bc I’ve angled for those opps myself, and because there are increasingly a lot of very smart, strategic climate funders deploying capital. On some level, we should expect the best opps to find funders.
>> E.g. your own Regranting Challenge allocated 10m to a climate org on renewables in Southeast Asia. This illustrates that OP seems to believe that climate interventions can clear the near-termist bar absent democratic pressures that dilute.
The award page has this line “We are particularly interested in funding work to decarbonize the power sector because of the large and neglected impacts of harmful ambient air pollution, to which coal is a meaningful contributor. i.e. it’s part of our new air quality focus area. Without actually haven read the write-up, I’m sure they considered climate impact too, but I doubt it would have gotten the award without that benefit.
That said, the Kigali grant from 2017 is more like your framing. (There was much less climate funding then.)
Thank you for your reply and apologies for the delay!
To be clear, the reason I think this is a more convincing argument in climate than in many other causes is (a) the vastness of societal and philanthropic climate attention and (b) it’s very predictable brokenness, with climate philanthropy and climate action more broadly generally “captured” by one particular vision of solving the problem (mainstream environmentalism, see qualification below).
Yes, one can make this argument for more causes but the implication of this does not seem clear – one implication could be that there actually are much more interventions that in fact do meet the bar and that discounting leverage arguments unduly constrains our portfolio.
That seems fair and my own uncertainty primarily stems from this – I do think overall climate philanthropy has improved significantly over the last years and, in particular, with the influx of climate philanthropy from tech has become more ideologically diverse which seems good and more balanced overall (different biases from different funders).
It might be that this grant needs air pollution benefits to put it over the bar, but – as far as I can tell – there is no reason to think this grant is more strongly correlated with air pollution benefits than many other climate grants.
Cause areas are mental abstractions and whether one abstracts as “climate” or “clean energy acceleration” then seems to affect whether or not they can meet the bar. The Climate Fund is quite explicit about taking the integrated perspective and generally makes grants that also have significant co-benefits in the form of avoided air pollution and driving down the cost of clean energy.
It seems to me that consistency would require that we should assume other climate grants can meet the OP bar as well and that, by implication, the featuring of the Climate Fund on GWWC seems unproblematic.
FWIW, I strongly agree with you that most climate grants do not meet the bar and one needs to spend a lot more time per grant than in other areas and one needs an explicit model of the blindspots left by the mainstream climate response.
>> To be clear, the reason I think this is a more convincing argument in climate than in many other causes is (a) the vastness of societal and philanthropic climate attention and (b) it’s very predictable brokenness, with climate philanthropy and climate action more broadly generally “captured” by one particular vision of solving the problem (mainstream environmentalism, see qualification below).
Vast attention is the mechanism that causes popular causes to usually have lower ROI on the margin; i.e. some of all that attention is likely competent.
I’m not sure what other causes you have in mind here. I think the argument with your two conditions applies equally well to large philanthropic areas like education, poverty/homelessness, and art.
>> It seems to me that consistency would require that we should assume other climate grants can meet the OP bar as well
Absolutely, I agree they can. Do you publish your cost effectiveness estimates?