Dan Stein

Karma: 661

Dan Stein 21 Aug 2026 19:41 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: jackva’s comment on: New Research: Climate Mitigation is Overlooked by EA
Hi Johannes, thank for all the detailed thoughts. I think we’re probably reaching diminishing marginal returns in debating point by point. I will say that we agree that the Rennert et al projections are too pessimisitic, and difficult far future projections can matter a lot with low discounting. Though I think we will need to agree to disagree on the magnitudes of these changes.
There is one technical point that I’d like to bring to your attention, though, that I think does critically matter. The Rethink application of a new discount rate is NOT a 0% discount rate. It is a 0% “rate of pure time preference”, which is one component of the discount rate. (I’m going to modify my original post to clarify.) Rethink’s calculation is built on calculations from the German Environmental Agency, so I will directly reproduce their explanations for how they did discounting:
“we use the social discount rate developed by Frank Ramsey (Ramsey 1928), which combines the two aspects above: expected consumption growth, weighted by its effect on the marginal utility of consumers, and the pure rate of time preference (PRTP).
In the GIVE model the consumption growth rate is a dependent variable. Therefore, it is not possible to specify the exact discount rate used for the climate costs”
I am not familiar enough with these models to get a good intuition for what discount rate would be, and therefore how much weight will be places on the far future. But as a reference, the Stern Review also used Ramsey discounting and a low (.1% PRTP), and resulted in an overall discount rate of 1.4%.
All of this to say, I think a simple mental model of “no discounting”, and therefore the vast majority of damages being in the far future, is not a good description of the Rethink analysis.

Dan Stein 21 Aug 2026 14:00 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Stan Pinsent’s comment on: New Research: Climate Mitigation is Overlooked by EA
Thanks Stan. I think this is a concise and reasonable critique- I mostly agree. A few thoughts.
1. My understanding is the CG recently did an internal calculation of SCC along the lines of the Rethink analysis, but one key difference is that they cut off damages around 2100 (not sure the exact year). This was just to have a like-for-like comparison with other interventions where they project benefits out for a fixed amount of time. They came to a conclusion of an SCC around 700. So if you take $1/ton as a reasonable benchmark for climate you get 700x, which doesn’t reach the CG bar but is in the ballpark. If I understand correctly, this CG SCC doesn’t include growth effects. So my point is that you don’t necessarily need long term and growth effects- with just one I think GDH gets competitive under reasonable assumptions, though perhaps not “winning”. (I haven’t actually seen this CG SCC analysis, but talked to people there about it. Hopefully it gets made public some day!)
2. For (b) I don’t think you need damages past 2200 to be competitive with GHD (especially if you do have endogenous growth effects), but the point is well-taken that you do need long-term effects, up to 2100 and beyond. My personal central estimate is that by 2100 we’ll have reached near net-zero, at warming of ~2.5 degrees C. But even though emission stops, the warming will persist for centuries, and therefore has the ability to continue to cause damages (compared to a no or lower-warming counterfactual). Of course adaptation is the wildcard. Will AI-powered growth radically increase resilience such that climate damages will drop to zero even in the face of persistent increased temperatures? I am not as optimistic as you are, but I see your perspective.

Dan Stein 20 Aug 2026 21:59 UTC
5 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Tony Senanayake’s comment on: New Research: Climate Mitigation is Overlooked by EA
Thanks a lot for these thoughts, Tony. I’m not sure I have all the answers, but a few ideas to throw in the mix:
- A lot of what we think of as cost-effective interventions in GHD are on-the-ground, direct-delivery type stuff (bednets, vaccines) that require a lot of logistics and therefore large, sophisticated orgs to manage them. This isn’t really true for climate (at least in my opinion) where we are focused more on charging policy, technology, and markets. There are still constraints in org capacity, but they look pretty different.
- The climate philanthropy ecosystem actually has a pretty impressive build-out of various funding vehicles that allow lots of money to move very quickly. For instance, there are big cross-sectoral regrantors like Climateworks, tons of sector and region specific regrantors (Industry Hub, Tara Climate Foundation), and focused research organizations working on specific topics (Carbon2Sea, Reflective). These organizations frequently see their missions as building up capacity in a topic as well as funding it. From someone with an EA-aligned perspective, if you believed that the mission of any of these orgs was super cost-effective, they would provide a vehicle to move lots of money quickly. For instance, Founder’s Pledge made a ~23M grant to Deploy/US based on this logic. We at Giving Green have so far shied away from giving to regrantors, since we think that keeping tighter control of our grants allows money to move faster (no middleman), and allows us to really focus on what we think is most impactful. But one could definitely debate that choice, and if lots more money came our way we would certainly revisit this assumption.
- As a grantmaker in climate, I haven’t felt the absorptive capacity of the field to be a huge constraint. Sometimes we have said “we really want to fund orgs doing XYZ, but can’t find people doing it”, but I’d say that’s the exception rather than the rule. Maybe if I was moving much larger amounts of money (like GW), I would feel these constraints more strongly.
- I really hope that organizations delivering really cost-effective GHD work can scale to meet the moment, that the OP/GW bar goes back up, and that the headline conclusions of this research are indeed softened. That would be great for the world!

Dan Stein 19 Aug 2026 21:38 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Stephen Kent’s comment on: New Research: Climate Mitigation is Overlooked by EA
Hey Stephen, we at Giving Green actually started a project looking exactly at this- trying to identify cost-effective interventions and funding opportunities at the nexus of health/livelihoods and climate mitigation. We put the research on pause because of other near-term priorities and some uncertainty over whether there was hunger for this kind of thing among donors. But it’s something we hope to pick up again next year.

Dan Stein 19 Aug 2026 19:41 UTC
12 points
2 ∶ 4
in reply to: jackva’s comment on: New Research: Climate Mitigation is Overlooked by EA
Thanks for the comments.
A couple of quick responses.
1. Regardless of what any individual thinks about the underpinning assumptions and methodology, the Rennert et al (2022) SCC is widely used and “mainstream”.
It is certainly true that there is high uncertainty around the SCC, and a wide range of estimates. But the Rennert et al (2022) paper is just about as mainstream, “blue-chips” of an estimate as you are going to get, and therefore I think is a reasonable anchor for the Rethink analysis.
A few data points showing how popular the Rennert et al (2022) analysis is (and the underlying GIVE model plus the probabilistic assumptions on emissions pathways that underpin it):
- This work was used heavily by the Biden administration’s EPA as part of a comprehensive update of their internal social cost of carbon, and their estimate was ultimately adopted. (detailed EPA report here.)
- The German Environment Agency uses a very similar approach built on Rennert, but applies some different assumptions (lower discount rate, equity weighting), and comes to an estimate of 345 EUR (assuming 1% pure rate of time preference)
- From Opus 5.0: “There is no single consensus number, but there is a fairly clear structure to where the field has landed. Short version: ~$190/tCO₂ (2020 USD, 2% near-term discount rate) is the de facto reference value”
Of course this doesn’t mean the paper or its estimated SCC is “right”, but I do think it’s a highly defensible reference SCC for Rethink’s analysis. As correctly mentioned by Vasco, there are numerous critiques of the Rennert paper, arguing that a lower SCC is more appropriate. But there are also influential critiques in the other direction. In the post I discussed how incorporating effects on economic growth can lead to much higher SCCs. For instance, a recent paper by Bilal and Kanzig (2026) argue for a much higher SCC of $1200 (even assuming a 2% discount rate).
1. Despite being “mainstream”, is Rennert et al (2022) unreasonably pessimistic about future outcomes?
If I understand correctly, Rennert et al (2022) use distributions of future states of emissions based on Rafferty et at (2017), which use historical data to assign probability distributions to the different IPCC emissions scenarios. If historical trends are not good predictors of future ones (for instance, due to rapid technological advancement), these estimates could be off.
Personally I’d agree with Johannes that the Rennert future emissions distributions feel pessimistic, but I would not agree with the modifiers “clearly extremely”. I think their mean estimate would fall within one standard deviation from the mean in my personal distribution.
But in any case, one could re-do the analysis with more optimistic distributions. Resources for the Future has a handy calculator that allows one to re-calculate the SCC with different models and different parameters. If we switch from the emissions distribution in Rennert (RFF-SP) and instead move to the more optimistic SSP-2 (which is the closest option to my beliefs, though I’d still be a bit more optimistic), SCC falls by 15%, from 185 to 158. Unfortunately the calculator does not allow us to move the discount rate to zero [edit: actually, we want to move the pure rate of time preference to zero, not the discount rate], which is really what we need to test the sensitivity of the Rethink estimate to different emissions futures. One would need actually re-run the models to calculate exactly, but a 5x wedge feels quite off to me.

New Research: Climate Mitigation is Overlooked by EA

Dan Stein18 Aug 2026 14:48 UTC

76 points

30 comments6 min readEA link

Dan Stein 20 Jan 2026 19:33 UTC
23 points
6 ∶ 1
on: Why Isn’t EA at the Table When $121 Billion Gets Allocated to Biodiversity Every Year?
Hi David, I agree that this is a huge opportunity. That’s why we at Giving Green are building a nascent biodiversity charity evaluator, funded by an anonymous donor in the space. We plan to publicly release our initial strategy report along with “Top Charities” in late February. If any potential biodiversity donors would like to see the reports before then, we can share privately. So stay tuned!

Dan Stein 23 Dec 2025 22:18 UTC
35 points
10 ∶ 0
on: Offering higher salaries than social-sector peers
I’m mostly aligned with the Seema’s view, though I think it’s systematic of a wider problem in which funders pay more than their grantees almost universally. I’ve experienced at both IDinsight (where I was Chief Economist) and Rethink Priorities (where I’m on the board) a steady drumbeat of top talent going to funders, including GiveWell and Coefficient. I don’t believe this happens because of any careful thinking on where talent is best allocated in the sector, but instead because (a) foundations just can pay more because they don’t have a binding budget constraint and (b) even if they do have enough money (which they typically don’t) nonprofits need to be careful about salaries because top salaries are public on 990 forms and donors will be scared away by large salaries.

When I’ve spoken with friends at funding orgs and brought up the issue of salary disparity, I’ve usually heard some version of attempting to align salaries with other foundations or the private sector. But that doesn’t address this imbalance between foundations and NGOs/grantees in their space.
After spending some side on both the donee side as well as the donor side (with Giving Green), my opinion is that giving away money is easier and more fun day-to-day than working for an org where you have to fundraise and/or serve demanding clients. Therefore I don’t fundamentally think that donor orgs need to pay more to attract similar level of talent as NGOs. But trying to fix the coordination problem required to shift norms in the sector is likely impossible.

Dan Stein 7 Nov 2024 21:03 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Advisors for Smaller Major Donors?
At Giving Green, we happily provide free consultations for donors in this range who are interested in climate change mitigation.

Dan Stein 16 Nov 2023 19:49 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: MatthewDahlhausen’s comment on: Announcing Giving Green’s 2023 Top Climate Nonprofit Recommendations
Thanks so much for the engagement. We at Giving Green share your concern around some of CATF’s activities around carbon capture, though I wouldn’t go as far as to say that CATF’s work on 45Q is “net harmful”. Instead we acknowledge there are tradeoffs from CATF’s strategy in this sector that have uncertain overall impacts. We have noted this element as a “Key Uncertainty” in our report. The relevant text is copied at the bottom of this post.
Our recommendation of CATF was primarily based on our assessment of their work in Shipping/Aviation and Enhanced Geothermal, which were two of our focus areas this year. However, we are not specifically recommending restricted donations for two reasons:
1. We think that CATF is an overall strong organization with many important work streams, all focused on climate change mitigation. In these cases, we have a strong bias toward unrestricted funding, as it allows the greatest flexibility for our recommended organizations.
2. For an organization like CATF that receives a lot of unrestricted funding, recommending restricted funding can be mostly meaningless, since the organization can always funge a restricted donation with unrestricted money.
From the ‘Key Uncertainties’ Section of our Deep Dive on CATF

”Advocacy for incentives for power sector CCUS and captured CO2 storage via EOR: CATF’s advocacy for enhancements to the US Section 45Q tax credit included continued eligibility for power sector applications of carbon capture utilization and storage (CCUS). There is concern that the tax incentives may extend the life of US coal and natural gas-fired power plants. One analysis suggests that 45Q could increase the operating years of an otherwise end-of-life coal plant into the 2040s, resulting in at least 6 million metric tons of additional CO2e emissions. CATF claims that it foresees little deployment of CCS in the US power sector but that the plants that use it will help bring down its cost through learning by doing, resulting in accelerated uptake in emerging economies. While Giving Green thinks CCS could be a valuable technology in contexts such as heavy industry or power plants in emerging economies, we share concerns about incentivizing its use for US fossil fuel power plants. In addition, CATF has continued to advocate for the inclusion of enhanced oil recovery (EOR) for storage of captured emissions or atmospheric removals in subsidies such as 45Q. CATF argues that EOR is climate beneficial, that it serves as the primary niche market for scaling capture technologies, and that it can help transition to large-scale saline storage. Others question the need to subsidize it, especially given concerns over environmental justice, the potential to prolong oil extraction, and the involvement of the fossil fuel industry in the trajectory of emerging climate technologies like DAC.

Dan Stein 7 Nov 2023 4:17 UTC
7 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Clean Water—the incredible 30% mortality reducer we can’t explain
Thanks, super-interesting!
On “We still need a RCT powered for Mortality”, someone from GW could confirm, but I heard through the grapevine that they are going to fund Kremer to do a large multi-country RCT powered for mortality to get at these very questions.

Dan Stein 11 Jul 2023 21:41 UTC
9 points
0 ∶ 2
in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: Why we’re funding clubfoot treatment through MiracleFeet
Hi Nick, thanks for the thoughtful response. I think you make a lot of good points and I agree that there are numerous incentives can can lead an M+E provider to bias results positively. That’s why there is a ton of bad M+E out there.
One main reaction: for an employee who works in an M+E org, there is arguably no worse situation than being pressured to skew your results positively, or even worse, taking on projects where you know a certain results is expected by your clients. It makes you feel you work is meaningless, and really sucks. And when you are put in this situations, you sure as hell don’t want to work for the same client again.
Yes, i hear you that for bean-counters in an organization (or those who get dividends in a for-profit org), there are strong incentives to make clients happy and get more contracts. But I think that the job-satisfaction incentive for rank-and-file employees skews the other way. And in the course of my experience, I think it is this latter incentive toward truth-telling that has dominated in most cases.

Dan Stein 10 Jul 2023 16:06 UTC
19 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: NickLaing’s comment on: Why we’re funding clubfoot treatment through MiracleFeet
[Disclaimer: I’m the Chief Economist of IDinsight, an M+E provider who has worked with GiveWell and many others. I have a LOT of experience with evaluators being pressured to sugarcoat results, or lack thereof. ]
Strong disagree on this conclusion that M+E providers are inherently biased.
Yes, there are situations where M+E have incentives that can lead to bias. For instance, if an NGO hires an M+E provider to do an external evaluation of themselves, the NGO is therefore the ‘client’ of the researchers. This can be problematic, since the NGO will need to approve deliverables before payments are made. I’ve been involved in these situations and it is tricky.
But in general, arrangements can be made to align incentives with the truth. For instance if a funder (like GiveWell) hires an M+E provider to do an evaluation of one of its grantees, the incentives of the M+E provider are aligned with the funder, who hopefully would like to know the unvarnished truth. We’ve done numerous evaluations for GiveWell (most notably the New Incentives RCT) and have never felt any incentive to skew results one way or another.
From an organizational perspective, a well-run evaluation organization has much stronger long-term incentives to have a reputation for being honest, transparent, and truth-seeking, rather than getting repeat business from any particular client.

Dan Stein 20 Dec 2022 20:56 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Process for Returning FTX Funds Announced
Thanks, super-helpful.

Dan Stein 20 Dec 2022 18:14 UTC
4 points
2 ∶ 1
on: Process for Returning FTX Funds Announced
Is it still true though that FTX Foundation Inc has not filed for bankruptcy? If that’s true, returning any funds from FTX Foundation through this mechanism seems premature. But well, I’m no lawyer.

Dan Stein 7 Dec 2022 19:28 UTC
−5 points
0 ∶ 8
in reply to: Habryka [Deactivated]’s comment on: Is Headhunting within EA Appropriate?
By “very careful”, I mean they shouldn’t make the case that their org is higher-impact than the current org unless they are damn sure. And this is an extremely difficult judgement call to make, when comparing two organizations whose mission is social impact. Given that impact is integral to an EA’s worldview, it would be a pretty incendiary accusation for a headhunter to make the case that org X is higher-impact than org Y, so someone should switch jobs. It’s one thing to make this case if hiring someone away from Exxon, but another to make the case within a community of arguably impactful organizations. I think these kinds of tactics have potential to cause major rifts within the community so should be avoided.

Dan Stein 6 Dec 2022 0:40 UTC
20 points
5 ∶ 3
on: Is Headhunting within EA Appropriate?
OP here. Thanks for all of the engagement with this post and for the varying opinions. People have brought up some important points on the benefits of headhunting (increased information, better outcomes for employees, overall better job matches, etc), and I agree with a lot of what is said. After taking these into account and mulling what has been said, here’s where I stand (subject to change):
1. It’s clearly ok for EA orgs to hire employees who work at other friendly orgs. Refusing to do so is illegal and I’d say also unethical.
2. I think it’s ok if you work at an EA org and you know someone who might be a great fit for a role at your org, totally find to reach out to them and let them know.
3. It’s not ok to use misinformation. I’ll be clear that in the headhunting instances I witnessed from EA orgs, I did not see any misinformation, and all communication was respectful.
4. I think recruiters and headhunters within the community should aim to inform rather than persuade recruits, which I do not think is the norm in the headhunting world. This can be a very fine line. The headhunting I witnessed was mostly in the “information” column, yet there was some stuff on the margin. For instance, I think a headhunter should be very careful about insinuate that they job they are recruiting for is higher impact than someone’s current job. In one of the emails I saw, the recruiter did not explicitly say this, but it was implied (or at least that was my interpretation). I’m not sure if this was purposeful.
5. I think it would be a positive norm for friendly orgs to alert one another if they plan to headhunt, especially if reaching out to multiple people for a role. This allows the original org an opportunity to do what they can to ensure that the employee is having their needs met in the current job. This did happen in one of the instances of headhunting that IDinsight encountered, and it was appreciated.
6. I think foundations/donor orgs have an extra layer of responsibility, as they wield a lot of power in the ecosystem, and in most cases pay more money than their grantees. When considering headhunting the staff of non-profits, they should be extra sure to follow best practices and ensure that they don’t destabilize the orgs they are poaching from. I’m not saying they shouldn’t recruit from NGOs, but I think they should be very careful about avoiding persuasion and alerting the recruitee orgs.
7. I think the bar for paid headhunters is even higher. For instance, if the EA Infrastructure Fund is going to fund headhunters for the EA ecosystem, I think that these headhunters should have a strong bias toward headhunting from lower-impact jobs. (Agreed this is not so easy to figure out what is high and low impact.) If they are instead just contributing to churn among high-impact orgs, I think they have an ambiguous amount of total social impact. Could be high if it increases information, improved job matches, improves employee satisfaction. But could be low if those positive elements are outweighed by switching costs of jobs and the cost of the headhunter themselves.

Dan Stein 2 Dec 2022 20:30 UTC
4 points
1 ∶ 1
in reply to: Kevin Kuruc’s comment on: Is Headhunting within EA Appropriate?
Good points- I take back my earlier “Clearly...” statement, and agree it needs to also include utility gains for the worker in the calculation.
Just to clarify, I wouldn’t be advocating that orgs don’t hire from peer orgs. Of course, post jobs, make them widely known, take and consider applications from all place. But I think it’s different to spend money on dedicated staff to directly target and aggressively recruit staff from friendly orgs within your ecosystem.

Dan Stein 2 Dec 2022 20:25 UTC
6 points
1 ∶ 2
in reply to: MHR🔸’s comment on: Is Headhunting within EA Appropriate?
Oh that’s very interesting! I had no idea, seems relevant. Also not a lawyer, but I think that this would just apply to agreements not to hire others’ employees, as opposed to an agreement not to aggressively recruit.

Dan Stein 2 Dec 2022 20:10 UTC
9 points
5 ∶ 5
in reply to: Will Bradshaw’s comment on: Is Headhunting within EA Appropriate?
Thanks for the comment- I see where you are coming from. As noted in a previous reply, I think a lot has to do with how much the headhunter informs vs convinces. There are a lot of parallels with advertising. Do we think that advertising performs a positive social function? Well, it could if it simply provides information about a new product and allows consumers to make more informed choices. But also the advertiser has incentives to increase sales, so why would we trust them to be truthful and have everyone’s best interests at heart? Headhunters/recruiters have incentives to fill roles, so I don’t think we should assume that they are playing a neutral, information-providing role.

Dan Stein

New Re­search: Cli­mate Miti­ga­tion is Over­looked by EA

New Research: Climate Mitigation is Overlooked by EA