jackva

• jackva 6 Jul 2020 8:36 UTC

  11 points

  on: The case for in­vest­ing to give later

  Thanks for writ­ing this, this is fas­ci­nat­ing!

  To me, the as­sump­tions around the is­sue of risk of loss seem quite op­ti­mistic for a cou­ple of rea­sons:

  • From ac­count­ing for the fact that not only ex­is­ten­tial catas­tro­phes but also catas­trophic risk could cause ex­pro­pri­a­tion you dou­ble the rate from 0.1% to 0.2%. But the uni­verse of sce­nar­ios where ex­is­ten­tial catas­tro­phe is avoided but there is enough desta­bi­liza­tion vis-a-vis sta­tus quo to drive ex­pro­pri­a­tion (or other ways in which the in­vest­ment be­comes un­usuable) seems much larger than on the same or­der as ex­is­ten­tial catas­tro­phes (which the mere dou­bling im­plies).

  • It is un­clear to me how the exit-rate of non-prof­its is a rele­vant refer­ence class here given a lot of the risk is not on the unit-level but on the sys­temic level, so things like eco­nomic up­heavals /​ hy­per­in­fla­tion etc. seem a rele­vant con­sid­er­a­tion (e.g. “how many non-profit in­vestors sur­vived the Great De­pres­sion with their as­sets in­tact?”)

  • As you write, prop­erty rights seem sta­ble now, but that—in its cur­rent level of sta­bil­ity more or less globally—is a rel­a­tively new de­vel­op­ment and not nec­es­sar­ily a given.

  
  

  From these con­sid­er­a­tions, 1% seems like a re­al­is­tic guess, but it seems—at least to me—un­likely to be con­ser­va­tive in the sense of “with high like­li­hood be­ing pes­simisti­cally bi­ased against the ar­gu­ment”.

  A re­lated “win­dows of wis­dom” ar­gu­ment would be that abil­ity to act in the fu­ture might be es­pe­cially valuable in times where ex­pro­pri­a­tion takes place /​ there is a cer­tain tur­moil, so in­vest­ing in non-fi­nan­cial as­sets that do not re­quire the cur­rent mar­ket or­der to per­sist could be rel­a­tively more valuable from that an­gle.

• jackva 26 Apr 2020 19:18 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Halstead’s comment on: How hot will it get?

  Re 2a, China, what mat­ters is the de­gree to which it has in­fluenced global av­er­age car­bon in­ten­sity. It is difficult to think of an event as im­pact­ful on global av­er­age car­bon in­ten­sity than the boom of the sec­ond largest coun­try pop­u­la­tion wise fueled by coal, at least as long as the es­ti­mate of car­bon in­ten­sity is global (pop­u­la­tion and gdp/​cap­ita mat­ter here as time in­creas­ing weights for car­bon in­ten­sity).

  Re 2b, the state of strong lo­cal cli­mate policy mat­ters in­so­far as it gives rea­son for global car­bon in­ten­sity de­cline go­ing for­ward and the ini­ti­a­tives of Cal­ifor­nia and EU coun­tries on elec­tric mo­bil­ity and re­new­ables have been very de­ci­sive changes be­gun the past 20 years but with most of their im­pact in the fu­ture.

  Re 4, it seems pretty likely to me that we will figure out some nega­tive emis­sions op­tions that are cheap, there will be strong rea­sons to try, there are many nat­u­ral and tech­nolog­i­cal ap­proaches and there is still time for progress on that. But can’t offer you more than that as jus­tifi­ca­tion, I guess I just have a differ­ent prior for that.

  Re 5, this might be more about se­man­tics then. I agree it would not be nat­u­ral to build this into the model (though the way you sug­gest would work) but I also think that for sce­nar­ios with more than 2 or 3 de­grees of warm­ing ex­pec­ta­tions about geo­eng­ineer­ing will drive a sig­nifi­cant part of the an­swer to your ques­tion of how hot it will get.

• jackva 26 Apr 2020 16:20 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Halstead’s comment on: How hot will it get?

  Hi John,

  Thanks for the clar­ifi­ca­tions and re­sponses!

  Re­gard­ing your points:

  1. Thanks for clar­ify­ing the mean­ing—so it is not a worst case, but more a baseline where ex­tra effort would be go­ing be­yond what we cur­rently see.

  It still seems to me what you model is sig­nifi­cantly more pes­simistic than that.

  I think av­er­age marginal car­bon prices are not a good proxy of over­all cli­mate policy effort, be­cause car­bon prices are usu­ally not the (i) only cli­mate policy, (ii) mostly not the dom­i­nant cli­mate policy (pos­si­ble ex­cep­tions of Swe­den and Bri­tish Columbia, but those are both neg­ligible ju­ris­dic­tions in terms of emis­sions) and (iii) other much stronger poli­cies ex­ist and drive car­bon in­ten­sity re­duc­tions.
  
  E.g. we both men­tion re­new­ables, elec­tric mo­bil­ity and ad­vanced nu­clear as (po­ten­tially) im­por­tant in­fluences on car­bon in­ten­sity trends, yet none of those has been brought about by car­bon pric­ing poli­cies, but by in­no­va­tion and de­ploy­ment policy. Across Europe, pro­gres­sive states in the US, and China, we have fairly ag­gres­sive poli­cies to stim­u­late low-car­bon tech, of­ten with im­plied car­bon prices (tech­nol­ogy spe­cific and re­al­ized via sub­sidies) in the 100s USD/​tCO2 range.

  So, I think even with­out ex­tra effort, there are sig­nifi­cant efforts un­der­way to drive cost differ­en­tials down, at least for elec­tric power and light-duty trans­port, and that is very clearly the re­sult of cli­mate policy (plus air pol­lu­tion policy).

  This is far from enough, but I don’t think it is well-prox­ied by the state of av­er­age car­bon pric­ing policy.

  2.
  
  a. On China: Yes, the growth fac­tor is in the growth pa­ram­e­ter, but it is *also* in the in­ten­sity pa­ram­e­ter as a weight, in the same pe­riod in which China rises quickly by burn­ing lots of coal its eco­nomic im­por­tance also in­creases strongly (i.e. its weight in defin­ing the trend).
  
  I would agree that we should ex­pect de­vel­op­ing coun­tries to es­cape poverty as cheaply as pos­si­ble, though the other as­pect there is that the sheer cen­tral­ized ac­tion ca­pac­ity and pop­u­la­tion size are anoma­lous for the Chi­nese case. Plus, availa­bil­ity and price of nat­u­ral gas and re­new­ables have some­what changed since China’s de­ci­sion to go all the way with coal.

  b. Cli­mate policy kick­ing off: I think we are talk­ing about differ­ent things here. Yes, global cli­mate policy is very weak and I would agree with you that we should, for ex­am­ple, not nec­es­sar­ily ex­pect a change in tra­jec­tory from the Paris Agree­ment.
  
  But de­spite that, strong cli­mate policy ex­ists in some places and will af­fect car­bon in­ten­sity once cham­pi­oned tech­nolo­gies do scale. And this is new and this has not been re­flected in car­bon in­ten­sity yet but likely will.

  c. Tech­nolo­gies in store: (I ac­tu­ally think the most sig­nifi­cant tech­nol­ogy for this to date will be elec­tric mo­bil­ity.) But even if it is so­lar and wind, I don’t think that “what so­lar and wind have done in Ger­many so far” is a good proxy for “what the tech­nolo­gies ac­cel­er­ated by some gov­ern­ments will do wor­ld­wide”, be­cause (i) Ger­many isn’t very sunny, (ii) we phased out nu­clear at the same time (ge­nius, I know!), and (iii) we are already ex­pe­rienc­ing value defla­tion which most parts of the world will reach sig­nifi­cantly later. (iv) Plus, the share of elec­trifi­ca­tion and thereby the im­pact of low-car­bon elec­tric sources will already in­crease in a “no ex­tra effort” case (v) And we are still in the be­gin­ning of see­ing the im­pact of those tech­nolo­gies globally (the data from which you ex­trap­o­late the in­ten­sity ends in 2014).

  d. New tech­nolo­gies in store: CCS and ad­vanced nu­clear both might or might not hap­pen and I hope we can make them more likely to hap­pen and hap­pen faster, but at least for Europe and pro­gres­sive parts of the US car­bon prices in the range of USD 50 by 2030 (or com­pa­rable non-price poli­cies) are part of my pre­dic­tion of “no ex­tra effort”. I agree with the rel­a­tive eval­u­a­tion of CCS and ad­vanced nu­clear.
  

  e. Poli­ti­cal co­or­di­na­tion: I think both your and my “no ex­tra effort” case as­sume es­sen­tially zero poli­ti­cal co­or­di­na­tion. When you as­sume car­bon in­ten­sity trends go­ing for­ward based on the last 30 years (and those end in 2014, i.e. pre-Paris), where there was very lit­tle co­or­di­na­tion on emis­sions (in the grand scheme of things, Ky­oto doesn’t re­ally mat­ter), there be­ing even less co­or­di­na­tion might be a plau­si­ble worst case, but just as­sum­ing con­tinued no co­or­di­na­tion should not change the es­ti­mate much. Like­wise, I think your es­ti­mate is pes­simistic not be­cause I am more op­ti­mistic about global co­or­di­na­tion, but be­cause I think you un­der­play the non-co­or­di­nated-but-pre­sent efforts by some gov­ern­ments to change rel­a­tive cost. If they have some effect, then car­bon in­ten­sity de­clines in the fu­ture should be higher than in the last 30 years as a mat­ter of de­fault no-ex­tra-effort-pre­dic­tion.

  g. Break­down of co­op­er­a­tion /​ arms race: I agree with that. That should widen our range of es­ti­mates, not sure it should shift the me­dian much (but the mean).

  4. Nega­tive emis­sions: As dis­cussed above, I think also in the no-ex­tra-effort sce­nario there is sig­nifi­cant effort do en­able low-car­bon tech, and it seems a fairly pes­simistic as­sump­tion that by the end of the cen­tury we will not have at least some cheap nega­tive emis­sions tech (not nec­es­sar­ily enough to offset all emis­sions, but sig­nifi­cantly more than hav­ing no effect in ex­pec­ta­tion). This is not the world I am see­ing when I see what UK, EU, pro­gres­sive gov­ern­ments in US are do­ing to fur­ther tech­nolog­i­cal de­vel­op­ment. We are not in a world where no one is try­ing to make low-car­bon solu­tions suc­ceed and get cheaper.
  And in par­tic­u­lar, it seems hard to imag­ine a world with high cli­mate sen­si­tivity, high growth and no one at­tempt­ing to bring down the cost of nega­tive emis­sions ap­proaches.

  This seems quite at odds with typ­i­cal dy­nam­ics of higher prob­lem sever­ity and higher ca­pa­bil­ity driv­ing a more ac­tive search for solu­tions, of which nega­tive emis­sions are at­trac­tive be­cause they can still work af­ter we failed on hav­ing fore­sight early on and avoid some of the more un­pre­dictable risks of geo-en­g­ineer­ing.

  On geo-en­g­ineer­ing: You seem to an­swer a differ­ent ques­tion here, the value of geo-en­g­ineer­ing. But if the ques­tion of the model is, “how hot will it get?”, then I think it makes sense to make an ex­plicit as­sump­tion about when you would ex­pect it be­ing used based on em­piri­cal ex­pec­ta­tion.

  In terms of conclusion

  You write:

  “All of this sug­gests that the es­ti­mates of car­bon in­ten­sity de­cline might be bi­ased a bit up­wards. The most im­por­tant fac­tors seem to be de­cline in costs of re­new­ables, elec­tric cars and po­ten­tially ad­vanced nu­clear, as well as fac­tors e and f.”
  
  I think that down­plays the is­sue and it con­flates two dis­tinct effects as if they af­fected the same vari­able (car­bon in­ten­sity), which they do not.
  
  From your list a-d (and g?) are re­sponses to effects on car­bon in­ten­sity (in my list the points un­der II).

  From your list e-f and the is­sues un­der III in my list af­fect the prob­a­bil­ity that all four vari­ables driv­ing warm­ing (pop­u­la­tion, GDP per cap­ita, car­bon in­ten­sity, cli­mate sen­si­tivity) vary in the same di­rec­tion with re­gards to their effect on over­all warm­ing prob­a­bil­ities, which is prob­a­bly less likely (we agree on that) and thereby will have an effect on ex­pected warm­ing quite differ­ent from the po­ten­tial up­ward bias in car­bon in­ten­sity.

  This lat­ter point is very differ­ent from ar­gu­ing for a mean/​me­dian change in car­bon in­ten­sity de­cline rate.
  
  As you sug­gest, I will try to play around with the model a bit and see what the effects of these differ­ent as­sump­tions are. Thanks for the good dis­cus­sion!

• jackva 23 Apr 2020 18:42 UTC

  12 points

  on: How hot will it get?

  Thanks—this is great and very use­ful, good to have a tractable model of the chain from emis­sions to warm­ing!
  
  A cou­ple of ques­tions, com­ments, and ideas on the emis­sions tra­jec­tory path of the model, very much in con­struc­tive spirit.

  Happy to help im­ple­ment them if you think this would be use­ful and grate­ful for any clar­ifi­ca­tions!
  

  I. What is the mean­ing of “ex­tra effort” and, re­lat­edly, what can we con­clude from this anal­y­sis?
  You write that the model is about con­struct­ing a baseline if we do not pur­sue “ex­tra effort”. It is not quite clear to me what would con­sti­tute “ex­tra effort” here, this is not only an is­sue with your model but with similar at­tempts as well (e.g. whether RCP 8.5 rep­re­sents busi­ness-as-usual or not). But this seems key for know­ing how to use this. From what you write, the main goal is cause pri­ori­ti­za­tion at the cur­rent mar­gin, but it seems to me that the emis­sions tra­jec­tory model more closely re­sem­bles a worst case that would bound “how bad can it get?”. I will ex­plain through the re­main­der why I think that. Also, just to clar­ify, I un­der­stand that this is a rough and sim­ple model, though it seems to me that the sim­plifi­ca­tions tend to up­wards-bias the es­ti­mate.

  II. Car­bon in­ten­sity as­sump­tions seem closer to worst case than “no ex­tra effort”

  The main vari­able that has past effort flow­ing into it (as­sum­ing we haven’t—at scale—fore­gone growth or kids for cli­mate, which seems re­ally un­likely for the last 30 years) ap­pears to be car­bon in­ten­sity and this is mod­eled based on the av­er­age trend from the last 30 years (right?). If that is so, then I think there are many rea­sons to think that this es­ti­mate is on the pes­simistic side, be­cause:
  
  (a) The over­ar­ch­ing im­pact on car­bon in­ten­sity over the past 30 years has been China’s un­prece­dented rise in coal con­sump­tion, which has weak­ened the car­bon in­ten­sity de­cline due to de­cou­pling in much of the OECD. China is not grow­ing as fast any­more and it does seem, ab­sent the growth shock sce­nar­ios via AI or other growth ex­plo­sions (which you ac­count for sep­a­rately), rather un­likely that an­other similarly sized re­gion will ex­pe­rience such strong fos­sil-driven growth.

  (b) For much of the last 30 years, cli­mate policy has not ex­isted in earnest in most parts of the world (The in­ten­sity vari­able goes un­til 2014, which makes this even more true). This is differ­ent now. While cli­mate policy is much weaker than we would like it to be, it is not non-ex­is­tent any­more.

  (c) Re­lat­edly, the last 10 years have seen tech­nolog­i­cal break­throughs that have not ma­te­ri­al­ized in their im­pact on car­bon in­ten­sity yet but that will drive down car­bon in­ten­sity and that ar­guably have not been busi­ness as usual but rather the re­sult of ac­tive cli­mate policy—pri­mar­ily, cheap re­new­ables (at least for low lev­els of pen­e­tra­tion) and elec­tric mo­bil­ity. If one thinks that past car­bon in­ten­sity trends have mostly been driven by forces other than cli­mate policy, then the ex­is­tence of cli­mate policy should have an ad­di­tional effect on car­bon in­ten­sity (not nec­es­sar­ily emis­sion to­tals) that we should be able to see go­ing for­ward.

  (d) There are many more of those in store (which we both heav­ily ad­vo­cate for :)) that would likely not hap­pen or hap­pen later ab­sent cli­mate con­cerns, e.g. ad­vanced nu­clear, CCS, cheap power-to-gas etc. We would hope those things to hap­pen sooner rather than later, but I don’t think it is right to think that “no ex­tra effort” im­plies that those things will never hap­pen or that they hap­pen at the same rate and with the same im­pact on car­bon in­ten­sity in which they have hap­pened be­fore. [Coun­ter­point: Long-run low oil prices]

  (e) Even if we were to think that there are other “Chi­nas” in store that would drive up both growth and car­bon in­ten­sity for a cou­ple of decades, ex­pe­riences with long-run growth tra­jec­to­ries seem to point to­wards lower car­bon in­ten­sity.

  III. Worst-case im­pli­ca­tions of as­sumed independence

  As you write, the as­sump­tion of in­de­pence is for sim­plic­ity and clearly false, but I do think the effect of this sim­plifi­ca­tion likely leads to a sig­nifi­cant over-es­ti­ma­tion of cli­mate dam­age for sev­eral rea­sons:

  (a) The in­de­pen­dence as­sump­tion means that high growth and high car­bon in­ten­sity over the 21st cen­tury is equally likely as low growth and low car­bon in­ten­sity. But, over such a long time frame, (i) Kuznets curve effects, (ii) af­fluence-in­duced post­ma­te­ri­al­ism and en­vi­ron­men­tal con­cern, (iii) more low-car­bon than high-car­bon in­no­va­tion, (iv) post-in­dus­tri­al­iza­tion etc. (not fully in­de­pen­dent rea­sons, hint­ing at the same pro­cess) would all seem to sug­gest that a high growth case would lead to a lower car­bon-in­ten­sity over the long run, i.e. some mod­er­a­tion that should make the ex­treme case of high growth and high car­bon in­ten­sity lead­ing to ex­treme warm­ing less likely.

  I find it hard to think of a sub­stan­tive re­la­tion­ship be­tween long-run growth and car­bon in­ten­sity that would make this more likely (but would be good to think about more, maybe I am too pos­i­tively bi­ased in my ex­pec­ta­tion here!).
  
  (b) I would also think that for the AI-growth sce­nar­ios and car­bon in­ten­sity the re­la­tion­ship be­tween growth and car­bon in­ten­sity would prob­a­bly be strongly nega­tive. If ev­ery­one gets a lot richer when there are lots of AI-break­throughs this might push emis­sions up in to­tal, but at least in terms of in­ten­sity a low­er­ing of in­ten­sity seems more likely than not (be­cause AI helps with re­source effi­ciency, with in­no­va­tion and with re­al­iz­ing prefer­ences and most rich peo­ple do not en­joy pol­lu­tion for its own sake, so even if they don’t give up on con­sump­tion there will be some pos­i­tive in­cen­tive for re­source effi­ciency and re­sul­tant low car­bon in­ten­sity) [I am more un­sure about this point than the other ones]
  
  (c) Over the time-frame con­sid­ered, we will be able to ob­serve warm­ing and at least nar­row our un­der­stand­ing of cli­mate sen­si­tivity some­what. As such, as­sum­ing that a high-emis­sions high cli­mate-sen­si­tivity case is as likely as a low-emis­sions low cli­mate sen­si­tivity case (i.e. as­sum­ing in­de­pen­dence) seems quite pes­simistic, at least when one—as you tend to sug­gest (and I agree) -- puts low prob­a­bil­ity on such abrupt and catas­trophic cli­mate change that re­ac­tion is im­pos­si­ble.

  IV. Other as­pects that make this model close to a worst-case

  Aside: From what I can tell, the model does not in­clude emis­sions from land-use, land use change and agri­cul­ture. E.g. you write that emis­sions are 35 GtCO2/​year, while with non-en­ergy emis­sions it is closer to 50Gt/​year. Luck­ily, many of those are short-lived pol­lu­tants, so we can some­what dis­card them for the pre­sent anal­y­sis, but forestry and land-use-change seems quite im­por­tant for mid-range sce­nar­ios of cli­mate progress.

  (a) As far as I can tell, the model as­sumes zero nega­tive emis­sions, while al­most all mod­els of suc­cess­ful cli­mate miti­ga­tion as­sume a sig­nifi­cant role of nega­tive emis­sions and there is strongly in­creas­ing in­ter­est in this space and no fun­da­men­tal rea­son to think that all meth­ods of stor­ing car­bon will always be ex­pen­sive. So, this seems fairly pes­simistic, es­pe­cially for those cases of most con­cern—as­sum­ing high growth, high cli­mate dam­age and no find­ing of nega­tive emis­sions tech seems re­ally un­likely.

  (b) The model also as­sumes zero geo-en­g­ineer­ing. But I find it quite hard to imag­ine a world where we have (i) high growth, (ii) high cli­mate dam­age and (ii) no geo-en­g­ineer­ing (maybe if Rus­sia threat­ens nu­clear war to par­ties ma­nipu­lat­ing the cli­mate, but that seems the only case I can think of). I tend to think of geo-en­g­ineer­ing as some­what bound­ing the bad­ness of cli­mate (and then invit­ing the po­ten­tial bad­ness of geo-en­g­ineer­ing), what makes you think oth­er­wise?

  
  

  In any case, great post and look­ing for­ward to your thoughts!

  What links here?

  • EA Fo­rum Prize: Win­ners for April 2020 by Aaron Gertler (8 Jun 2020 9:07 UTC; 24 points)

• jackva 9 Mar 2020 15:28 UTC

  24 points

  on: [Link] Up­dated Draw­down now available, incl. 2020 Review

  I think it is worth treat­ing Draw­down with a cou­ple of grains as salt, in par­tic­u­lar it is (a) not neu­tral but strongly bi­ased to fa­vorite solu­tions of en­vi­ron­men­tal­ists, (b) bases the im­por­tance of differ­ent solu­tions on a small set of pos­si­ble de­car­boniza­tion fu­tures, (c) fo­cuses only on ex­ist­ing solu­tions, (d) if use­ful for EA-style in­ter­ven­tion pri­ori­ti­za­tion at all then only as a first step data in­put, not a con­clu­sion.

  (a) is clear from how they dis­cuss nu­clear vs. re­new­ables (see Halstead’s com­ment), for ex­am­ple the de­scrip­tion of nu­clear men­tions al­most only nega­tives, whereas the de­scrip­tion of wind al­most does not men­tion nega­tive as­pects, treats in­ter­mit­tency of wind as if it was a minor is­sue (whereas it is a ma­jor is­sue as re­gions seek­ing to ex­pand re­new­ables ex­pe­rience), does not men­tion the en­vi­ron­men­tal im­pacts of ma­te­ri­als min­ing which are higher than for nu­clear (given lower en­ergy den­sity) nor the sig­nifi­cant op­po­si­tion to wind power ex­pan­sion in coun­tries. Then the po­ten­tial of wind power is as­sessed at at least 10x that of nu­clear by 2050 de­spite nu­clear now con­tribut­ing more zero-car­bon power than wind and not be­ing tech­nolog­i­cally con­strained in any rele­vant sense. Car­bon cap­ture and stor­age, a key tech­nol­ogy in al­most all en­ergy de­car­boniza­tion mod­els (e.g. those fea­tured in IPCC or by the IEA) is not even in­cluded in the list!

  (b) When we think about de­car­boniza­tion fu­tures, ex­am­in­ing just two sce­nar­ios seems way too few for ro­bust plan­ning and in­vest­ment de­ci­sions. When the IPCC or other groups of en­ergy mod­el­ers do these kind of analy­ses they ex­am­ine hun­dreds/​thou­sands of fu­tures which then al­lows to get a sense of the crit­i­cal­ity of differ­ent tech­nolo­gies (the de­gree to which they can or can­not be re­placed by other tech­nolo­gies and de­car­boniza­tion out­comes can still be achieved), this tends to raise the im­por­tance of tech­nolo­gies where there aren’t a mul­ti­tude of op­tions (such as, for ex­am­ple, zero-car­bon fuels for heavy-duty trans­port and avi­a­tion).

  (c) The fo­cus of Draw­down is on ex­ist­ing solu­tions. How­ever, as Hauke Hille­brandt, Halstead and my­self have ar­gued in differ­ent con­texts, en­ergy in­no­va­tion is hugely ne­glected and can cre­ate very sig­nifi­cant lev­er­age by re­duc­ing the tech­nol­ogy cost (if one had done Draw­down 20 years ago, so­lar would not have fea­tured, yet the poli­cies fo­cused to ad­vance so­lar have proven cru­cial to re­duce cost and make so­lar vi­able). So, the fo­cus on ex­ist­ing solu­tions dis­tracts from the im­por­tance and po­ten­tial of ac­cel­er­at­ing tech­nolog­i­cal in­no­va­tions. Just two ex­am­ples where this mat­ters: (i) There is no di­rect air cap­ture in the list even though ad­vanc­ing di­rect air cap­ture is plau­si­ble one of the most im­por­tant things one can do right now given the enor­mous im­por­tance of the tech and the rel­a­tive ne­glect to date. (ii) There is no ad­vanced nu­clear in the list, no ac­count­ing for ad­vanced geother­mal (men­tioned but not mod­eled), i.e. it is as­sumed the tech­nolog­i­cal land­scape from now to 2050 will be es­sen­tially the same though in the last 15 years we got both cheap re­new­ables + frack­ing, i.e. it seems un­re­al­is­tic to stay sta­ble for that long.

  (d) Re­lat­edly, apart from ne­glect that is ig­nored in the anal­y­sis (see Halstead’s com­ment for more de­tail) some­thing else that is ig­nored here is tractabil­ity, how easy these op­tions can be re­al­ized. So at best this seems like a list from which to take ideas, but then one needs to look at whether there are effec­tive ap­proaches to re­al­ize the po­ten­tials and whether those are un­der-re­sourced.

  I have found Draw­down use­ful, e.g. it alerted me to the po­ten­tial of peat­lands, but I think we should be care­ful in putting much faith into it as a last word on cli­mate giv­ing/​in­vest­ment pri­ori­ti­za­tion and rather treat it as one source amongst many.

  What links here?

  • EA Fo­rum Prize: Win­ners for March 2020 by Aaron Gertler (13 May 2020 10:09 UTC; 26 points)

Founders Pledge Cli­mate & Lifestyle Report

• jackva 11 Sep 2019 21:06 UTC

  16 points

  on: [up­dated] Global de­vel­op­ment in­ter­ven­tions are gen­er­ally more effec­tive than Cli­mate change interventions

  Very in­ter­est­ing.

  In my ex­pe­rience the de­bate about cli­mate dam­age is quite ide­olog­i­cally loaded so I am a pri­ori very skep­ti­cal of us­ing a sin­gle study for these kind of es­ti­mates, they always come with a host of as­sump­tions that are ul­ti­mately fairly ar­bi­trary.

  In ad­di­tion when you have a causal chain of at least three steps (cli­mate sen­si­tivity > im­pact of warm­ing > hu­man re­sponse) each with sig­nifi­cant un­cer­tainty that af­fects the next step it seems easy to get the es­ti­mate wrong by much more than one or­der of mag­ni­tude so the strat­egy of say­ing ‘even if we take a tenth of the es­ti­mate’ to save us from over­es­ti­ma­tion does not seem suffi­cient to me.

• jackva 3 Apr 2018 13:30 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: Hi, I’m Holden Karnofsky. AMA about jobs at Open Philanthropy

  Thanks, Luke!

• jackva 2 Apr 2018 17:52 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: HaukeHillebrandt’s comment on: Cost-effec­tive­ness of The Hu­mane League’s cor­po­rate cam­paigns: 2015-2017

  Wouldn’t you need to look at the price elas­tic­ity of egg con­sump­tion rather than ab­solute trends to con­clude whether /​ to which de­gree the re­duced de­mand by some is mod­er­ated by re­place­ment effects?

  It also seems that, at least in the medium term, lower prices can­not nec­es­sar­ily sup­port the same scale of egg pro­duc­tion so the mar­ket would, hope­fully, shrink, no?

• jackva 1 Apr 2018 14:44 UTC

  5 points

  on: Hi, I’m Holden Karnofsky. AMA about jobs at Open Philanthropy

  Thanks, Holden, for the AMA and ev­ery­one for their ques­tions!

  When look­ing at the ap­pli­ca­tion form ini­tially, there was a men­tion­ing of an ap­plied task as part of the ap­pli­ca­tion—as far as I can tell this has now been re­moved.

  Could some­one con­firm this change? Does that mean that the ap­pli­ca­tion now only con­sists of the Google Form plus re­sume in the first stage?

  Thanks in ad­vance!