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?
Thanks, Luke!
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
Yes we are, though not necessarily with a portfolio approach in the sense described above.
I think it is worth asking whether the EA community should pursue a portfolio approach to climate. Overall, EA funding levels of climate orgs are still quite low and one could make the argument that we should focus on funding the most effective organizations first before designing a broad portfolio, the latter seems more a task for a potential future where EA aligned donors are influencing a larger amount of climate funding.
That being said, we are looking at a broader portfolio of options and will certainly feature some diversity in the Climate Fund. But it will unlikely be distributed across all intervention areas since some seem much more effective than others.
Very impressive and interesting piece, thanks for this! I am a colleague of smclare at Founders Pledge and work a lot on modeling policy advocacy across charities. Would be great to have a chat.
It’s a great and very useful summary of the literature, hugely valuable.
That being said, I am less convinced by the approach taken in the cost-effectiveness model which seems to somewhat contradict the prior analysis which stresses (a) contextuality and (b) strategic choice. As far as I can tell, the modeling tries to be entirely general (contradicting a)) and assumes (b) independence between variables that are very likely related (such as spending and success probability). Please let me know if I completely misunderstand what you are doing!
My sense from doing this kind of work in charity evaluation is that we would want to move towards a “suite” of models for different situations—e.g. (i) pushing genuinely new ideas, (ii) opportunistically exploiting policy windows (such as stimulus season), (iii) pushing high-impact low probability policies, (iv) averting policy rollbacks etc. and that the cost effectiveness for these kinds of things will be very different and essentially unrelated to a generic estimate such as the one featured at the end of your piece.
To me it seems that this kind of classifying into the sub-models will be the only way to realistically bound parameters of interest and also that the dynamics underlying are sufficiently different that they should probably have their own models.
Some minor points/comments: Something I found missing is a bit are standard explanations for why there is so little money in politics, namely (1)because dominant firms in districts have lots of indirect power via employees voting so that they do not need to spend money. (2) It also seems that the report somewhat under-emphasizes the idea of lobbying equilibria where marginal increases by one side would be quickly countered, which would make it look like additional money could be effective when in effect it is not.
I also think that the conclusion which, I believe, mostly draws from Baumgaertner ” (80%) Well-resourced interest groups are no more or less likely to achieve policy success, in general, than their less well-resourced opponents.” is quite surprising and I would be curious to find out why you think that / in how far you trust that conclusion.
Hi Matt,
Thanks for your reply and sorry for the slight delay!
Would you like to present your work in a session at Founders Pledge (we have a Journal Club where we discuss relevant research and having you as a guest speaker there sounds like a good idea)?
On the cost effectiveness model
On the model generality, I think my view is that even a general and simple model should not be unrealistic / systematically biased; because we trust the models more than our intuitions and generally fail—I think—to do intuitive adjustments on the model (e.g. we probably underestimate intuitively how much independence/dependence assumptions matter).
On the substance of that question, I am not sure I understand your reasoning (but see point above :)). To me it seems that when expenditure is positively correlated with success probability—what seems to be implied by a view where actors are strategic and at least mildly successful at being so—would that not (a) increase the cost effectiveness and (b) reduce the overall uncertainty?
Because we often trust models more than we should, I weakly lean towards having less models—personally, for me the conclusion “this is a really fascinating piece and now we need to think about building models for these different situations and considerations” would be fine whereas with the very rough model I see the risk of incorrect updates, e.g. people not looking into it more because they think that the model fairly represents the uncertainty and under the given range it does not look attractive for some interventions (where the benefit is less large).
But these are just personal philosophical views on modeling, weakly held.
On Baumgartner
Thanks for this, this is really clarifying.
The rephrasing makes this a lot clearer, I had originally read this as “giving more money might be useless” which would undermine the whole case for investigating advocacy charities from an EA perspective, so I am glad I misunderstood that and that this is now clearer.
I would agree that one should not update too much from this correlational evidence. Mostly, because what seems to be the dependent variable here—success probability—is itself confounded by a strategic choice to engage with issues so it is not clear that the same success probability across different levels of resources expresses no difference in strength, rather than being confounded by smaller groups not trying harder things.
On money in politics
(1) On employees as explanation of influence, I do think this is a pretty strong explanation for a couple of reasons.
(i) While employees and employers might not see eye to eye with regards to such as issues as labor policy, they have essentially the same interests with regards to the companies they own/work for—and this is where the lack of money paradox is focused, the lack of money in pork barrel political settings.
(ii) The argument does not rest on explicit voting intentions of employees, but can simply work with references to employment levels in districts, etc., it hands a very powerful argument to local business leaders vis-a-vis their political representatives.
(iii) Campaign finance as well as general influence of business leaders can lead to a situation where the political representatives are already “captured”, where there is no need for additional spending.
(iii) Empirically, it seems well-supported (or so I remember from my political science days, but I cannot find the paper so I might recall that wrongly).
(2) On lobbying equilibria, I am unsure who the relevant experts would be—but I would trust the political science / political economy literature there more than people with very local “inside view” expertise (as it is a dynamic system-level feature, something that seems more accurately to observe with data than based on individual experience).
And just to conclude on this, I think there are many cases where lobbying is probably very good, I just think that the introduction overstates this in not fully considering explanations that make this less surprising and give reasons to think that there can also be many situations where additional money will not lead to additional influence, just higher spending.
Hi Matt,
1) I don’t see incompleteness as an issue—what is good for Journal Club is bringing in lots of interesting ideas which your post certainly does, updates you made and are working on are fine. So if that would work for you, I would suggest you as a speaker for Journal Club and we could see when it would fit over the next month or so?
2) My reading of your model—which might be wrong—was that you assumed independence between variables related to cost/effort and variables of success probability. It seems to me that when they are positively correlated rather than independent, cost efficiency would increase and become more narrow, because what this says is that worlds of high spending and success will be more likely to co-occur and worlds of high spending and no success less likely to occur than under independence. Does this make sense?
3) I think on money in politics my understanding is that a couple of intensely motivated politicians—e.g. the representatives where headquarters of companies are—can be quite sufficient for pork barrel style politics because they tend to fill committee positions important for their respective economic interests and they can easily bargain with other legislators.
Thanks for the link, this is interesting!
A couple of quick thoughts from glancing at the paper (more hopefully later):
1) It is a first draft / working paper, not peer-reviewed (though the website frames it as if it was a finished study).
2) Some of the central assumptions seem quite selected for finding maximum impact, e.g. the 73 death per 100,000 people comes from a model run with RCP 8.5 which is currently seen as an extreme case, not business as usual but considerably worse, https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/3c-world). The combination with SSP3 as the socio-economic scenario also seems to point in the direction of worst case assumption as this is a scenario of low/difficult adaptation, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378016300838 ). So, yes, 73 deaths per 100,000 from heat is possible but it is probably in the top 5% of the distribution of worst outcomes based on what we now think is realistic.
3) Something else that made me a bit worried about the bias in the direction of finding high impact was this statement “This projection accounts for adaptations to climate that populations are likely to make, given historical patterns of adaptation.” One of the key features of expectable changes in the world to 2100, especially in high emissions scenarios, is that currently poor countries get a fair deal richer and use a lot more energy (in RCP 8.5 we could all burn lots of coal). So, it seems that the accounting for adaptation seems minimal compared to what one might expect, more adaptation beyond historical patterns as those countries get richer and have more resources available.
4) I am not saying it is a bad study and I am not really qualified to assess that on the deeper details, but I often find a lot of the climate-impact related literature to work with assumptions that seem very focused on finding maximal impacts (or with article titles exaggerating what the paper actually says, even in journals like Nature/Science etc.), a kind of publication bias that has made me quite skeptical of any single study.
Offsets are at least 15x worse than high impact charity on climate, I recently re-did the numbers on this and even on very conservative assumptions came out with the most effective work of CATF at something like 10 cents/t (https://youtu.be/TCretlmREXk?t=773). This is their best work and certainly they will not always be that cost effective so we can multiply it by 10 to get to USD1 but the best offsets are probably at USD 15 or so (the analysis on BURN by Giving Green mentions that they don’t expect 1 offset to really express 1 t).
So whenever you include offsets in a portfolio of options alongside high impact options, maybe because they are more tangible, one needs to ask “how much more money does this crowd in?” compared to “how much does this crowd out from high impact options? ” Because the impact differential is so large it can quite easily be the case that even a moderate dilution, say a 10% reduction in giving to high impact, leads to a net negative outcome because the additional crowding in of money is not sufficently large.
Apart from that offsets and the surrounding logic of compensation can possibly be quite bad for popularizing the goal of impact maximization, the idea of offsettting is incredibly unambitious compared to what we inspire people to strive for.
For those reasons I think offsets should have no place in a high impact portfolio.
Addendum: I guess one should always take the precise cost effectiveness estimates with a grain of salt, but it is easy to see from basic principles that offsets cannot be cost effective because offsets are always about direct interventions, whereas the world as a whole is spending hundreds of billions on climate and this is spending that can be affected by advocacy.
For offsets to be anywhere near the best advocacy charities, such as CATF and Carbon180, it would need to be true that there is almost nothing that can be done to improve societal resource allocation on climate.
This is deeply implausible because it is one of the most striking facts about climate how poor societal resource allocation is, leaving vast rooms for impact for charities that move the needle so that government budgets are spent more in line with global decarbonization priorities.
I discuss this in a lot more detail in our new report on implications of Biden win for high impact philanthropy: https://founderspledge.com/stories/the-implications-of-bidens-victory-for-impact-focused-climate-philanthropy
Addendum 2: Just to be clear 15x differential is not my best guess, but a very conservative guess biased towards finding offsets good. My best guess would be more in the range of high-impact charity focused on accelerating neglected technologies through advocacy is 100x-1000x better, but I know that this sometimes seems like a sales pitch or implausibly large, so the goal of my post was to give a bit more of the mechanics / underlying reasons and a very conservative estimate.
I would also add that we have revised our view on CfRN so that we don’t think these numbers to be the case anymore, though those revisions were for reasons that do not affect the logic on the differential to expect (it is because of a different view on what they were advocating for, not on more pessimism on the potential of advocacy more generally).
I haven’t looked into CoolEarth myself, but I think the standard view is that the analysis on the extreme cost effectiveness of this was faulty, based on very optimistic assumptions that are unlikely to be true (indirect protection of forests etc, I believe you could find posts on this searching the Forum) .
We will discuss our findings on REDD in our upcoming report (Q1/21). I discuss it a bit here (last question):
Thanks, Alex, for writing this important contribution up so clearly and thanks, Dan, for engaging constructively. It’s good to have a proper open exchange about this. Three cheers for discourse.
While I am also excited about the potential of GivingGreen, I do share almost all of Alex’s concerns and think that his concerns mostly stand / are not really addressed by the replies. I state this as someone who has worked/built expertise on climate for the past decade and on climate and EA for the past four years (in varying capacities, now leading the climate work at FP) to help those that might find it hard to adjudicate this debate with less background.
Given that I will criticize the TSM recommendation, I should also state where I am coming from:
My climate journey started over 15 years ago as a progressive climate youth activist, being a lead organizer for Friends of the Earth in my home state, Rhineland Palatinate (in Germany).
I am a person of the center-left and get goosebumps every time I hear Bernie Sanders speak about a better society. This is to say I have nothing against progressives and I did not grow up as a libertarian techno-optimist who would be naturally inclined to wanting to solve climate change through technological innovation. Indeed, it took me over a decade of study, work in climate policy, and examination to get to the positions I am holding now which are very far from what I used to believe.
I should also state upfront that my credence in CATF and other high-impact climate charities does not come primarily from the cost-effectiveness models, which are clearly wrong and also described as such, but by the careful reasoning that has gone into the FP climate recommendations. John spent nine months working on the original FP Climate Report (to which I advised), I spent the majority of the last year reviewing many charities—including CATF, CfRN, CLC, ITIF, Carbon180 and TerraPraxis—and recommending some of those as high impact. Do I literally believe any of John’s or mine or anyone else’s model of an advocacy charity? No, of course not.
But the process of building these models and doing the research around them—for each FP recommendation there is at least 20 pages worth of additional background research examining all kinds of concerns -- combined with years of expertise working in and studying climate policy, has served the purpose of clearly delineating the theory of value creation, as well as the risks and assumptions, in a way that a completely qualitative analysis that has a somewhat loose connection between evidence, arguments, and conclusions (recommendation) has not.
The fundamental concern with Giving Green’s analysis that I, and I think (?) Alex, have is not the lack of quantitative modeling per se, but the unwillingness to make systematic arguments about relative goodness of things in a situation of uncertainty, rather treating each concern as equally weighted and taking an attitude of “when things are uncertain, everything goes and we don’t know anything”. The impression one gets from reading the Sunrise recommendation and its defense is that a grassroots activism recommendation was needed for organizational variety reasons (given Giving Green’s strategy to reach a wider audience of segmented donors).
While one can have different opinions about the value of that given dilution concerns that Alex also mentioned, this is in principle not problematic with regards to the analysis. Where it becomes problematic is when pretending that the same rigor and reasoning that underlies a recommendation of CATF has been applied to the Sunrise analysis, which does not seem to be the case (while I lead the climate work at FP now, I should state here that John Halstead did the original analysis recommending CATF, so this is not quite as self-serving as it sounds).
While I am concerned about recommending offsetting in general and—as Alex mentions in his post—think we should be very carefully modeling dilution effects before advertising offsets alongside high-impact options (or generally, before advertising low impact options), I did not read the offsetting recommendations in detail, so I will leave my comments to the TSM and TSM-CATF aspects in this comment.
I think there are a bunch of ways in which CATF is wrongly portrayed here and, in addition, many additional reasons beyond Alex’s that should make one doubtful about the claim that “we dont know whether TSM or CATF donations are better at the margin”.
While we do, of course, not know for certain, the evidence that we have points in a clear direction—that donating to CATF and other similar charities (such as those featured in the FP Climate Fund) is much more impactful than donating to the Sunrise Movement Education fund (TSM in the following). Indeed, from the evidence we have, I would argue that there is a significant probability that donating to TSM at this point is net-harmful. Luckily, there is also a high probability that it is very low-impact at the margin.
Let me explain (after the summary).
As I stated in my EAGx Virtual talk last year, I would like to understand the goodness of grassroots activism better. As such, I was quite excited to know Giving Green to be working on this and to read the analysis.
But reading the analysis, I don’t find myself having learned a lot about the expected goodness of the Sunrise movement because it appears more like an analysis of the positive case rather than a balanced all-things-considered-view.
As Alex has raised and I have expanded here, there are serious concerns both about (a) low marginal impact and (b) about the direction of that impact. These find no parallel in recommendations such as CATF.
While not impossible, it would be very surprising if something with (a) low marginal additionality and (b) severe uncertainty about the direction of marginal impact—whether it is positive or not—was the best thing we could fund in climate (or, undistinguishable from the best thing).
The main claim why we should expect that—if I understand Giving Green correctly—is the transformative nature of Sunrise, what they are doing just being that good. As I discuss below in the sections on “misconceptions about CATF” the claim that what Sunrise is doing is more transformative than what CATF is doing is—at the very least—controversial and not obviously true.
This leaves me in a situation where I would like to learn more about the goodness of the Sunrise movement from an all-things-considered analysis but where—with the current information—I don’t see strong reasons to think that Sunrise is anywhere close to the best things we can fund.
We are very confident that CATF and similar charities are an excellent translator of money into climate impact. We don’t know this for TSM and the weight of the evidence does not point in the direction of it being particularly likely that it is high-impact to donate to TSM at the margin.
Before diving into the detailed comparison between CATF and TSM it is worth noting some misconceptions about CATF that matter for this comparison.
The dominant frame in Dan’s comment and in the Vox piece with regards to CATF v. TSM is that CATF is “incremental”, “moderate” vs. TSM being “radical” and more likely to lead to transformative change. That there is something essential that can only happen if Sunrise and other progressive climate activists have more success.
I think this framing, while discursively resonant in current American debates between progressive and moderate Democrats, misses the point.
This is because the challenge of climate change is one of global technological transformation, not national politics and, as such, this frame is a lot less applicable than in issues where this framing might be more helpful (such as, say, civil rights).
While it is true that what CATF is doing—not focusing primarily on a national target for the US etc. or advocating for a symbolic Green New Deal—looks moderate and incremental, it is not when we consider the nature of the climate challenge which is allowing 9 billion humans to live poverty-free lives without cooking the planet. Solving this challenge has one necessary and, almost sufficient, condition—ensuring that across all use cases low-carbon energy/industrial products are preferable to high-carbon ones or are so minimally inferior that realistic climate policy can bridge the differential even in settings with low willingness-to-pay for climate.
Because the US energy innovation system is so powerful and because the leverage from cost reductions and improvements is so large (~85% of global energy is fossil, US has a declining share of emissions and is now around 15%, cost reductions are the main driver of lowering carbon intensity in electricity etc., technological spillovers are the best way to make progress in a low-coordination, low willingness-to-pay setting), stuff that looks incremental—advocating for tax credits for neglected technologies etc here., for a clean energy standard that also includes nuclear and CCS there etc—is indeed quite transformative.
A better frame to compare CATF and TSM, in my view, than “incremental” vs. “transformative” is to understand CATF as an organization mostly taking political realities as a given (though doing some coalition building) that is laser-focused on ways in which they can make important differences—with “important” informed by their deep knowledge of the issues and their proto-EA focus on things that are overlooked by the mainstream but critical to the overall puzzle. This is a transformative proposition of thought leadership, of changing the conversation, changing policy and, ultimately, the underlying technological base that allows us to decarbonize.
Indeed, it is quite plausible that this type of “quiet” climate policy—focused on accelerating globally neglected technologies—is far more potent than a Green New Deal that would primarily be focused on solutions that are far down the learning curves, already popular, selected for co-benefits such a job creation, etc.
TSM’s proposition is also transformative, though in a different way—trying to increase attention to climate far more than what it is and push ambitious climate policy, embedding it in priorities that Democrats already have. This is also a transformative proposition.
In other words, we should not let our perceptions of “incremental” vs. “transformative” be guided by partisan conceptions of those terms; if we look at the climate issue closely and understand the importance of technological change at the heart of achieving global net-zero emissions those meanings might very well switch. Even if it doesn’t switch then at least both what CATF and what TSM are doing is transformative.
There is also the assertion that CATF might be negative because, by heavily focusing on carbon capture and storage (CCS) and other technologies that help existing industries become close to carbon-neutral, they are giving a life line to fossil fuels or otherwise inhibiting climate progress.
While it is true that if we got CCS to work cheaply and efficiently, this would reduce the argument for transitioning away from fossil fuels for part of the energy mix, that’s a feature not a bug. The goal of climate policy is net-zero emissions, not 100% non-fossil fuels.
Leaving aside that OilPriceInternational is not exactly a neutral voice, let’s put their estimate into perspective.
They estimate that the 45Q tax credit could lead to something like 50 million tons of additional US emissions per year in 2035 through enhanced oil recovery (EOR) emissions. (Given the trajectory of US climate policy, this seems implausible). At the same time, right now 45Q is the most important carbon capture incentive policy in the world and it is the median expert view that—if we are to achieve climate targets—different forms of carbon capture (all of which covered by 45Q) will be used at Gigaton scale and that government incentives will be essential to drive down the cost and increase adoption.
So, if 45Q only leads to moving forward CCS deployment by 1GT a year, this “cost” of also including enhanced oil recovery in the 45Q bill would be a 5% cost on what would still look like an amazingly good outcome for the climate. Sure, it would be better if there were no increased emissions, but in the grand scheme of things—and given how policy works—better to have that policy with that negative side effect rather than having no CCS incentive policy at all.
This kind of cost is not analogous in magnitude to the very real cost of risks around Sunrise, such as an additional increase in polarization gridlocking important incrementally looking but transformative (see above) climate policy progress. It appears like a case of false equivalence.
This is an important point that is easily missed when discussing TSM as some of the discussion on TSM here and elsewhere is focused on non-marginal arguments, grassroots activism being generally useful as an outside-pressure force in an outsider—insider model.
I would probably agree with the argument that the rise of progressive climate activism over the past four years has been net-positive, though there are also important caveats to this such as increased polarization of the climate issue, increased focus on catastrophic framings that are not in line with climate science, overly focused on 100% renewables vs. technology-inclusive decarbonization visions etc. But I take it as a given for the remainder that “on the whole” the world is better with Sunrise than without.
However, this does not at all mean that we should donate to TSM at this point. I agree TSM could have been a great philanthropic bet 4 years ago.
As Alex points out, the data for the neglect of grassroots activism are outdated—and importantly so. Using data from 2011-2015 to evaluate the neglectedness of climate activism today is like using data from the nineties to say that the internet is not a big deal. Climate activism as a mass form of engagement has risen to the prominence with Greta Thunberg, with Extinction Rebellion, with Sunrise, with the Paris Agreement and the subsequent IPCC 1.5 degree report—all of those happening at the earliest in late 2015 and many significantly later.
Luckily more current data on climate activism philanthropy are readily available.
For example, the ClimateWorks Foundation published a report in September 2020 which shows that US-focused public engagement—the category under which grassroots activism falls—received about 100 million on average between 2015-2019, which is about 27% of total US-focused climate philanthropy by foundations, a lot more than what the 2011-2015 numbers that underlie the neglectedness analysis suggest. It is also the largest share of any item in the US and far larger than the total global philanthropic spending for key neglected technologies such as negative emissions tech (25 million) and CCS or advanced nuclear (not even having their own positions, buried under clean electricity, but this will be heavily focused on renewables).
Importantly, this does not even include individual giving—the major component of climate philanthropy—which is likely tilting more towards grassroots activism and mainstream green solutions than elite advocacy for unpopular but critical solutions such as CATF’s. We discuss this more and why this makes it unlikely that grassroots activism is neglected in our report, quote from here (quoting in full as this is from a long report no one reads, but contains lots of material relevant here):
“According to this analysis, in the 2015-2019 period, about 100 million have been spent on public engagement in the US per year, more than a quarter of the climate philanthropic spending by foundations in the US in total. What is more, Jeff Bezos—now the largest climate philanthropist in the world—has focused his first round of grants on well-known Big Green groups that have a long history of raising awareness of the climate challenge, probably making that “public engagement” bucket significantly larger in future iterations of the ClimateWorks report.
Beyond philanthropy, the largest environmental NGOs have hundreds of thousands of members and even relatively new grassroots movements, such as Sunrise, have volunteers in the 10,000s, making environmental NGOs and grassroots a major political force.
At the same time, global philanthropic support for decarbonising sectors that are usually considered among the hardest to decarbonise—transport and industry—is less than that USD $75 million.12 Carbon dioxide removal, the technology considered most in need of additional innovation policy support, received only USD $25 million in global philanthropic support. These numbers do not allow differentiating by type of philanthropy so only a subset of these overall numbers will be focused on advocacy increasing overall societal resource allocation to these approaches; in other words these numbers are an overestimate for the type of advocacy work we are interested in assessing.
We tend to think that this presents an imbalance, given the large value of improving the allocation of public funds towards neglected technologies providing a strong proposition for advocacy. But, of course, increasing the pie is also critical and the imbalance proposition is, ultimately, a fairly hard-to-test hypothesis and almost philosophical question (we will attempt to gain some traction on this in 2021).”
Note that, while this states some uncertainty about assessing neglect, this was published before I had a chance to look in detail at the trajectory of Sunrise and progressive climate activism—given Alex’s numbers and analysis, I would be fairly confident (> 80%) at this point that grassroots activism right now is significantly less neglected than CATF-style work.
As an EA working on climate, I am very sympathetic to the argument that neglectedness is a proxy and can lead astray.
But in Dan’s comment above this mostly reads like shifting goal-posts, the argument for neglect was justified with financing numbers that were outdated. Even if they are just a proxy, the fact that those numbers are importantly outdated and wrong should lead to changes in the analysis (an advantage of quantitative analysis).
While it is true that the funding for CATF has increased strongly over the last few years, it has not increased by orders of magnitude. More importantly, the reason it has increased has been—to a large part—because of the EA community starting with John’s 2018 report and, as such, is not reflective of a wider societal trend towards the CATF-style of advocacy leading us to expect everything of that style to be funded (And, CATF has increased its geographic reach thereby extending productive funding margins (because funding margins for advocacy are a function of the goodness of improving resource allocation / policy in a jurisdiction).
Indeed, it is more likely that the opposite is the case.
After the failure of cap-and-trade in 2010 it became conventional wisdom in climate philanthropy that more grassroots activism was needed, as also stated in Giving Green’s Deep Dive.
While it is not clear that this belief was true—the failure of Waxman-Markey in 2010 was severely over-determined with lots of plausible interpretations—this belief had causal force.
It is thus no accident that attention to public engagement funding has increased so strongly. In other words, in climate philanthropy, the grassroots wing has been winning rather than being most neglected.
In addition, Sunrise has emerged as an important flank of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and the Democrats having outraised Republicans on much smaller average donations (more grassroot-y) in the recent elections.
As such, saying Sunrise is neglected is—absent more current numbers that make the case—similar to saying “Jon Ossoff’s Senate campaign is neglected” in late December after he raised more than 100 million USD. Sure, it is conceivable that there are things that Jon Ossoff would have funded with marginal donations that would have been highly effective, but we should be skeptical of such arguments precisely because a reasonably strategic actor that is not obviously funding-constrained will have a funding margin with relatively low-value activities.
In that way, neglectedness serves as a prior on the expected goodness of the funding margin. That prior can be updated by additional considerations that make something in a non-neglected field good, but this requires strong arguments. In a field that is financially well-resourced or easy to be well-resourced (when you have 10,000 volunteers and you have lots of high-value funding gaps at the margin, some more of those volunteers should focus on fundraising), it would be surprising if there are great marginal funding opportunities.
Of course there could be.
Indeed, the argument that John Halstead, Hauke Hillebrandt, and myself have been making in various forms over the last years is that there are such opportunities within climate—namely, around supporting (1) neglected technologies and (2) a neglected part of technology support, support for innovation, via (3) decision-maker focused advocacy that improves how the vast resources allocated to climate are better spent.
The long and short of it is that there are systematically neglected technologies and many ideological and other reasons for this neglect, that innovation is generally neglected for reasons of various market failures, as well as ideological factors, etc. In other words, there is a systematic argument for why the CATF/C180/ITIF/TP style of advocacy should be really high impact despite climate not being neglected overall.
But there is no parallel argument made—to my knowledge—for why in case of Sunrise we should move away from the prior that something that has increased 40x-fold in funding over the last years and has captured the public imagination and support of an entire wing of a major US political party, would have great room for funding left.
Dan’s response to this concern raised by Alex is this:
“I think that there is very little effective climate activism happening out there, and there’s huge room for effective growth.”
Essentially, the only argument for why it should be particularly high impact to give to TSM right now is a claim about the ineffectiveness of current climate activism and a proclaimed large effective growth potential, without any justification that spending more money on climate activism will lead to more effective climate activism.
With this level of unspecific justification, almost anything can be declared a highly effective funding margin to fill.
It is not clear how we would evaluate success of the Sunrise Movement—whether this would be passing the Green New Deal or whether it is just generally shifting the Overton window of climate policy. The more charitable interpretation is probably to say “Sunrise shifts the overton window of climate policy” given that the Green New Deal is mostly a symbolic policy without real prospects of passing.
This is the approach we took in our Biden report—conceptualizing grassroots movements as “increasing the pie” (the opportunities, not only strictly budgets) and orgs such as CATF focused on improving how the pie is utilized for maximal decarbonization benefits. Quoting here (emphasis new):
“But, while it is difficult to make a statement about the relative balance [between pie-increasing and pie-improving], we think it is clear that now that we have a very climate-friendly administration—likely under divided government, if not with razor-thin majority [this was published in November] -- the value of policy advocacy to improve how the attention to climate is spent strongly increases, easily by a factor of 4 or more (taking a conservative average from the advocacy value of the next four years, based on our timing analysis above) compared to a second Trump term.
At the same time, it is difficult to see how the value of funding advocacy focused on increasing the pie could have increased by the same amount based on the outcomes of the election.
Indeed, insofar as mass mobilization and climate grassroots activism are strongly tied to the Democratic party and making Democrats more ambitious on climate, it seems likely that the value of this advocacy has decreased due to the relative underperformance of Democrats in Congressional races and the likely less Democratic-leaning environment in the midterm elections.13
On balance, we think that the election directionally shifts the balance towards advocacy to improve resource allocation and policy rather than advocacy focused on increasing overall resource allocation (increasing the pie), so we feel more certain in the relative prioritisation of this kind of advocacy in our philanthropy.”
Now that we have more information with the Georgia win and the laser-thin Democratic majority we can say a bit more than this directional shift, about the marginal impact of Sunrise in this moment.
We are now in a situation where Biden has declared climate as one of his top four priorities, where the pivot in the Senate is Joe Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat, who really likes CCS and really doesn’t like the Green New Deal.
In this situation, any passage of bills requires support from very conservative Democrats and, if not all Democrats are on board, of some Republicans (even for reconciliation, filibuster-proof climate policy is out of the question anyway).
Unless Sunrise has a great way to influence fairly conservative Senators, which is not what they have focused on to do to date, it seems a bit unclear what good a marginally stronger TSM at this moment accomplishes.
To be sure, the pressure of TSM and others is very valuable, in principle. But now that climate is on top of the agenda of things and we face a pretty thin majority situation for the party aligned with Sunrise, is it really plausible that making this movement marginally stronger is very important?
While one could make that case, e.g. that a stronger TSM is needed now because pressure on relatively progressive legislators is still a bottleneck, or because Biden will forget about climate if we do not further strengthen TSM, this does not seem very plausible.
While arguments have been made that TSM is sitting at the table with the Biden administration and that this is a reason to fund them, this kind of reasoning would require confidence that TSM directs Biden’s climate action in the best direction.
TSM is a grassroots organization specialized in raising attention to climate, not in advising on effective climate policy. That is something that CATF et al. specialize in. Furthermore, funding the Sunrise Movement Education Fund would not directly influence the already existing representation of TSM at the table.
When stating confidently that giving to TSM right now is highly impactful, it would be good to clarify what the exact path to impact is.
The broad description in the theory of change of “climate change becomes a government priority” and “climate bills that reduce emissions get passed” is not very clear, and—in particular—does not refer to a marginal case, that more is needed to make this as likely as TSM can make those outcomes.
Just to be clear, I am not suggesting that the answer to all of these questions is negative for TSM. I am just pointing out questions that would need analysis to make claims of high impact more credible.
Indeed, there are many ways in which existing or additional support for TSM can contribute to negative outcomes:
A stronger TSM could make it more likely that pressure on Democrats (fear of being primary-challenged etc.) leads to shifts towards the left that lead to losses in the House in 2022 and the loss of the trifecta.
A stronger TSM could intensify pressure on Biden to prioritize executive orders over legislative politics, because this looks more appealing than more incrementally seeming legislative politics even though legislative politics would ultimately be more impactful and/or more robust over time.
A stronger TSM could lead to an overemphasis on renewables at the cost of other clean technologies that need more support to be brought down the learning curves.
The list could go on.
Again, my point is not that these are all damning concerns but that these large uncertainties about the severity and probability of negative effects of marginal TSM donations pushes the estimate downwards.
More generally, beyond the current marginal case, there are other more general concerns.
Alex makes valuable points about how Sunrise could have negative impacts and I have mentioned some of them as well before (e.g. in my talk at EAGx Virtual last June) and in other contexts. Dan adds some additional ones.
So, there are at least the following five pathways in which Sunrise could be negative:
A. Sunrise further polarizes the US climate debate thereby reducing the chance of useful climate legislation to become reality.
Via pressure on Democrats to pursue proposals that fail in the legislative process.
Via pressure on Democrats to pursue more executive action that is challenged in courts rather than pursue more incrementally seeming policies through Congress.
Via giving credence to the Republican straw man that Democrat climate action is about fundamental social transformation rather than addressing a problem that both Republicans and Democrats should be able to agree on exists.
B. Sunrise promotes a view of the climate challenge that reduces the support for effective solutions
Via pressure on Democrats to focus climate policy more on favorite solutions of progressives—renewables etc. -- rather than a technology-inclusive vision that has more bipartisan support and is more in line with decarbonization priorities.
Via framing the climate challenge overly focused on 2030 US targets instead of global decarbonization—and as a consequence under-prioritizing driving globally useful energy innovation (e.g. just phasing out coal in the US rather than getting CCS off the ground, for the US and—more importantly—the rest of the world).
From spending the last ten years studying and working in climate policy, I can say with confidence that both of those lines of concern are major considerations, major ways in which—in the past—climate activism has been harmful and major worries of very serious climate analysts about current grassroots climate activism.
These are serious concerns that warrant thorough investigation rather than a false equivalence reply claiming there is a similarly serious concern with CATF and similar orgs.
Of course these concerns are not all there is, there is a positive case, too. But those concerns need to be integrated when forming a view on TSM as a funding opportunity.
How does this all fit together?
Size of impact
The assumption in the TSM analysis is that there is something transformative / unique / high value in TSM that only TSM or grassroots activism can deliver. As I argued in the “Some misconceptions about CATF” section above, this claim does not seem well-supported because both technological change driven through incremental policies and climate laws could be transformative. There is no reason to assume that TSM > CATF on this at this point. One could try to model this.
Low marginal additionality (neglectedness)
Because of the explosion of attention to TSM and the increase in TSM and general grassroots funding, additional dollars change relatively little about TSM’s activities (relatively speaking), are more likely to not be counterfactually additional (if funding goals are just met in any case), and are likely to fill activities that are relatively far from the most valuable ones.
Sign of impact
If one does not study those concerns about direction in detail and convincingly shows that these are not applicable to marginal TSM funding, then what Alex states is totally justified—there is uncertainty about the sign of the impact.
Crucially, that uncertainty is about the expected mean, not particular outcomes (something that, I think, Dan misunderstood in his reply to Alex).
Even if that uncertainty does not move us into negative territory with regards to the mean, it pushes the expected value downwards. There are just many plausible futures where marginal TSM funding is negative and that pushes the expected value towards zero or into negative territory.
If one combines these three factors what emerges is a funding opportunity where we should expect a low expected value; whether we fund or not makes little difference and it is relatively unclear whether it will have a positive impact.
It would be pretty surprising if that was anywhere close in marginal impact than giving to CATF.
It could, of course, be the case, though. But to state that as likely would require a lot more research and, with current information, it does not seem warranted.
Thanks!
To answer your question there are two pieces here:
1) Sunrise is most useful right now in pressuring Democrats, it is quite partisan and does not hold as much sway over Republicans. As such, when the overall situation is less Democrat-leaning, the usefulness of Sunrise is lower overall. Sunrise-candidates will not challenge Republican incumbents so an important mechanism of creating pressure on Democratic officials does not exist.
2) Yes, of course Sunrise could hurt Democrats’ election chances. This was, with regards to moderates and progressives more generally, an active debate after the disappointing (compared to expectations) election in November. One mechanism would be that pressure on Democratic candidates moves them closer to the left to deal with that pressure, which then reduces their election chances. Another mechanism would be that the progressive wing’s perception hurts candidates in moderate/conservative districts. Going forward, a mechanism would be that the Sunrise/progressive agenda is perceived as a partisan overreach that leads to a “punishment” in the mid-terms.
Just to be sure, these are active debates within the party and I am not suggesting that the moderates blaming progressives are always right. I am just saying that when we form a distribution over outcomes of the goodness of Sunrise we should include those mechanisms as well, because they are a plausible part of the overall story (they are explanations held by many people, and the TSM analysis by GG does not refute it). That is a mechanism that pushes the EV of funding Sunrise down.
“Finally, I struggle with way this entire discussion revolves around US policy change. I suspect the amounts of money spent on lobbying in the USA is hugely more than in most countries, but I don’t see any consideration of neglectedness at the country level.”
This is actually another important and independent reason why we should expect CATF > TSM, CATF can optimize marginal resources across different geographies whereas Sunrise is limited to the US environment.
CATF operates in China, albeit with a small program (but one could fund that to grow!). They are also generally expanding and have recently been funded to set up a somewhat significant presence in the EU as well.
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!