Thanks again, Dan & team, for your gracious and constructive comment! This is what I love about this community most. I think there are still lots of misunderstandings on the nature of the criticisms and severe and consequential disagreements on epistemics and empirics to which I reply to below. But before I do so, just a meta-point on why I engaged in this criticism in the first place.
Why I engage in this criticism
I do not enjoy criticizing. The fact that I engage in criticism is impact-related and not personal. Indeed, John (Halstead) and I spent much of the last year criticizing each other’s reasoning which is one of the reasons I believe the FP climate recs are very robust.
It is also not a criticism that I make as an FP-representative, it just happens to be the case that the goals of FP and of myself are perfectly aligned which is why I joined FP and why I now happen to lead its climate work.
So, that said, my criticism serves two purposes:
Clarify for the community what the current state of knowledge is on climate from an EA perspective.
Offering paths forward for GG to improve so that GG can realize its positive potential.
That said, and with constructive intent, onwards to the disagreements. I first discuss key-takeaways from the debate and then dive into one particular fundamental area of disagreement that is prominent in GG’s comment—on what we know and can now.
What are the key take-aways from this debate?
You write “Johannes thinks” a lot which, in my view, makes the debate unnecessarily personal but, more importantly, also misrepresents the debate. (I will use “GG” in the following exactly to make it less personal).
I did not add any new points in my original comment, I just expanded on points that were already in Alex’s original post, made them more explicit and explained them in a more stepwise manner, giving more evidence and context to make it easier to follow (though arguably tediously long, apologies!).
But essentially, Alex and I, and, by their comments, Sanjay and John Halstead, as well as many other commenters all agree on the critiques. In other words, rather than writing “Johannes thinks” it would be more accurate and less personalizing to say that ~all EAs that have expertise in climate charity evaluation disagree with GG on TSM and broadly think the same thing namely that:
1.From the weight of the evidence, it does not seem justified to think that we are unsure whether TSM or CATF is better, the evidence points in the clear direction of CATF > TSM
a. Note that saying “the weight of the evidence points in direction CATF > TSM” is not equivalent to saying “we know that CATF > TSM” or “we know that TSM = CATF”, it just says that, based on what we know now, we should assume that CATF > TSM. This is a more humble position than implied in the comment, about our current state of knowledge—not final truths.
b. This also means, to your point about humility, that further analysis into TSM is welcomed. Our work is never finished. I am open to finding TSM > CATF or that TSM and CATF are incomparable but both certainly good (which seems your position).
It would make my life a lot easier, because people like TSM so much and I could then treat directing people to TSM as high impact rather than convincing them of the opposite. This is another reason for skepticism on TSM being highly impactful, it would be a case of “suspicious convergence” is something that is like the “cat shelters” of climate change in terms of popularity would also be the highest impact option.
c. But it also means, via humility, that even if GG does not believe our criticisms, given that lots of people—many of which with significant experience in climate and on advocacy-charity evaluation—disagree with GG, it would be reasonable for GG to update rather strongly from that.
2.There are serious and, in our view, unaddressed concerns that marginal donations to TSM are net-negative, making the world worse, in expectation (not only about particular realizations, which, as you point out and everyone agrees, will always be true and should not be disqualifying).
3.Even if TSM is not net-negative, there appears near-consensus that—from what we know—it is likely that the impact of marginal TSM donations is very low—maybe positive, maybe negative—and unlikely to be large either way. This is quite different from CATF which means that there is concern that dollars that could go to CATF will go to TSM instead, with the TSM recommendation being net negative via that mechanism even if TSM alone is not.
4.When offsets and TSM are seen as a lot-lower impact than CATF or other high-impact recs, then “dilution” becomes an issue that needs to be modeled and managed to understand how good GG is from an EA perspective, how “dilution” plays out against crowding in additional money and how much that money is optimized.
I do understand the value proposition of Giving Green and I can imagine worlds where Giving Green’s approach, “meeting people where they are”, creates a lot of benefit even if these will often be comparatively low-impact options, because a lot of people are not willing to change their mind very much.
Indeed, I can imagine and hope for a world where the approach of Giving Green (optimizing giving of people not willing to change their mind much) and the approach of the wider EA community (incl. FP) focused on the highest-impact options is complementary.
So, I am not suggesting you should de-recommend TSM, I am just saying you should be clear to the EA community and—ideally, but I know this is a stretch—to your wider audience (e.g. on the website) that you have reasons to think that TSM < CATF in terms of expected benefit, just like offsets < policy.
To meet EAs “where they are”, GG should enable EAs that want to maximize positive impact in expectation. The charity that is most likely to lead to that in the climate space right now happens to be CATF.
On the flipside, I think this would also make many people here quite concerned about GG somewhat less concerned with GG if the risk—that impact-maximizing EA climate dollars go to TSM or offsets that are considered clearly worse—would be mitigated.
Also note that our theory of change is not only focused on energy innovation—we also examine other paths that lead to global leverage such as policy leadership and cascading effects (we evaluated CLC from that angle but came to the view that it won’t work).
What do we know and what can we know?
A lot of the discussion and disagreement seems to be about what we know and what we can know.
As I alluded to above, I agree with GG that humility is super-important—the entire endeavor of EA is doomed without epistemic humility.
I do, however, think humility in this context mostly points to GG trusting EA climate mainstream more (see above) for four reasons (which also explain a bit more how FP is thinking about research).
The TL,DR of it is as follows:
1. There is a lot of expert support for the CATF recommendation and there is a lot more uncertainty regarding TSM.
2. CATF looks very good on the theory of change/frame most relevant to effective climate action—maximizing global decarbonization benefit—and the argument for TSM on that frame is not made.
3. Charity evaluation methodology is our friend and allows us to draw useful inferences even in highly uncertain situations.
4. The length and depth of engagement that led to the CATF and similar recommendations should itself be a reason for confidence, more so than the GG comment suggests.
1. What can we learn from which experts?
As GG rightly points out, asking 50 climate (policy) experts for their favorite charities isn’t a scientific approach to identifying effective charities, but of course it is evidence of some kind for something. In this section, I will ask “what for?” as well as what I would consider the relevant expert evidence in support of CATF.
Why typical US climate experts are not experts for the question at hand
For the question “what are the most effective charities to support to have the most positive impact on climate?” – the questions that EAs asks when trying to identify the highest-impact opportunities – the typical US-based climate (policy) expert is not an expert. This is so for at least three reasons:
1. The US-debate is focused on the US, the typical expert does not ask “what is the most effective thing one can do to have an effect on global decarbonization?” but rather “what seems best in the US?”. As per theory of change discussion, those two things aren’t necessarily related very much at all.
2. The overall climate debate in Western countries is quite biased – and predictably and importantly so. Compared to their real importance, there is an overemphasis on renewables, energy efficiency, and electric cars, there is an over-emphasis on lifestyle changes vs technological changes and there is an underappreciation of the technological challenge – but rather an emphasis on the political challenge and a typical framing that all that is missing is political will.
All of this makes sense (is predictable) if we think about where mainstream environmentalism comes from – ideologically speaking – from an egalitarian philosophy that prefers to solve problems with virtue rather than technology, that prefers “small is beautiful” and “in harmony with nature” over big centralized solutions (such as nuclear power or large dams), that has a moral need to demonize large centralized structures such as the state or capitalism, etc. Of course, not all experts are steeped in this ideology and not all experts that are follow it to the fullest extent. But it is notable that the overall climate debate is very biased by a particular worldview, an egalitarian / green view, that systematically hypes solutions that fit into the ideological priors – such as decentralized renewables and micro-grids and appealing to individual morality – and, equally systematically, disregards others – such as nuclear power build outs or CCS or a large-scale innovation agenda in line with the climate challenge.
Of course, a naïve narrative that solely focuses on technological innovation is equally biased, which is why I stressed so much in my original comment that I did not come to this topic with techno-optimist priors. All of those simplified ideological stories have kernels of truth to them and we need to judge the overall bias of the debate.
But if you look at the overall climate debate in Western countries it is hard to argue that the innovation arguments are getting their fair share – that innovation is emphasized enough compared to its importance (also see theory of change section).
It is not surprising that in this biased conversation Sunrise comes out on top – it serves all the ideological priors of those voices dominating the climate conversation – but that does not make it correct.
[Aside: Indeed, I would argue that because of the unfortunate situation that the innovation arguments tends to be made by those more that do not really want to act, the innovation agenda is neglected compared to its importance.
Climate activists downplay it because they like existing solutions as well as a framing of the problem as one of evil corporations and the need for fundamental societal change (rather than a severe technological challenge that needs strengthened innovation policy and a move away from “100% renewables”), whereas they often suspect – and often rightly so – that arguments for innovation on the right are made in bad faith, as discursive responses justifying inaction.
This leaves us in a terrible situation where we are severely underinvesting in technological innovation despite it being the only solution to get to net zero globally. This is one of the reasons why at FP we focus on funding innovation advocates that are on the center left but that are more serious about innovation than the green mainstream and that are able to work with people making innovation arguments on the right]
3. The typical climate (policy) expert is not an impact-focused philanthropist – indeed they are not philanthropists at all.
The best philanthropic options are those with the highest expected marginal returns to additional funding, something that a typical climate (policy) expert has very little insight into. Rather, the expert – when prompted with that question – will likely answer with something that seems good to them, that is top-of-mind, that fits with the ideological inclinations of the expert, etc. This is not data about high-impact philanthropy, this is data about the discourse.
What is this evidence for?
I am not sure that the fact that CATF does not come out on top of many of those experts is evidence of anything, but, if it is evidence of something, it seems weak evidence in support of CATF—if it were popular with everyone we should not be funding it!
Indeed, this points to the “suspicious convergence” point on TSM v CATF. The fact that TSM is so popular and that CATF is not should make us fairly skeptical, by itself, that we should fund TSM rather than CATF, and that TSM is the most effective thing to fund.
In comparatively non-neglected causes such as climate we should be quite wary of funding the popular things. Indeed, the entire theory of value of CATF and other charities that FP champions is that these are charities that improve societal resource allocation in a field that receives a lot of resources but where those are spent fairly inefficiently.
In other words, it is precisely because CATF is focused on inconvenient and neglected things – CCS, advanced nuclear, zero-carbon fuels, industrial decarbonization, etc. – that we should not expect them to be popular but very much worthy of support.
Who are the relevant experts for the question at hand?
There are two types of experts that seem most relevant for finding high-impact climate philanthropy options:
1. Aligned climate philanthropists
Among aligned climate philanthropists – those that want to have the maximum impact on global decarbonization solutions with their dollars and approach this topic rigorously – CATF and/or the approach it stands for has a lot of supporters.
Most prominently that would be Bill Gates who does not get tired to advocate for innovation and technology pluralism. But there are also many climate philanthropists at US and European foundations that are strong supporters of CATF for exactly the reasons that we support them (not sharing publicly here, but happy to share in PM). As such, there are many relevant experts that would support CATF as a top choice.
2. Experts on sub-topics that help inform the theory of change, identify effective interventions, etc.
Experts are of course essential to form a view of effective interventions in the climate space and of effective organizations pursuing these.
Indeed, as I mentioned, the FP research is informed by hundreds of conversations with experts.
But apart from experts on particular organizations or interventions, the way expert views flow into the research is mostly via getting a sense of the most effective interventions, the bottlenecks, the neglected areas, the overall theory of change. There is a lot of information and expert opinion out there supporting the choice of CATF more generally that does not mention or is even aware of those organizations at all which leads me to my next point, “what is the appropriate theory of change?”
2. What is the appropriate theory of change?
Global decarbonization, not US policy change
GG states that there are several theories of (political) change and this is undoubtedly true.
It is important to recognize, though, that the theories of change that GG focuses on – theories of change in the US political context – are not directly related at all to a theory of change that focuses on maximal global decarbonization impact.
While this would be fine if the goal would be to identify the best charities reducing emissions in the US, it becomes problematic when it is claimed based on GG analysis that we are entirely ignorant about the expected value of donations to CATF or TSM.
If we ask “what’s the most effective climate funding opportunity to support at the margin that we know of?”, theories of political change in the US only matter insofar as emissions reductions “travel” – in a causal sense—through US political change.
Given that US emissions are only ~15% of global emissions and that this share is declining as the rest of the world gets richer and the US is decarbonizing (even if on current trajectory), but that the US has roughly half of the world’s energy innovation budget, is generally considered the most capable innovation economy, and that the US is – for the moment, in any case – the leading global power, it stands to reason that the most effective things one can focus on in the US with regards to climate are interventions that maximize indirect effects and that might be quite different from those maximizing US emissions reductions (in expectation).
This is at the heart of the misunderstanding of CATF as “incrementalist”. CATF might be framed in that way if one is focused on US emissions and US political change. OK.
But the reason that most EAs support CATF as high-impact climate org is not because of the reduced emissions in the US but, precisely, because of the large international benefits that innovation policy targeted at neglected technologies brings.
All of the major success stories we have seen in climate over the past 20 years – solar, wind, coal > gas in the US, electric cars and batteries – have been the result of relatively narrow and targeted policies, the kind of which CATF advances for technologies that are less popular with greens for reasons of ideology, not merit.
Indeed, to make this more explicit, a lot of my skepticism about TSM at the margin comes from scenarios where TSM right now is relatively close to its maximum potential – lots of sway on Democrats, little sway on Republicans – but where binding climate legislation or more sweeping legislation still remains off the table and will remain so for relevant periods (getting a binding climate target in the US in 2035 is not that useful).
In that world, TSM will put lots of pressure on Biden and Democrats to advance executive orders (we can already observe that) that are ultimately unstable and open to court challenges rather than seizing the opportunity that presents itself to make much stronger innovation policy happen. This is a real danger and this is why I am very wary of stating certainty of positive impact in expectation of marginal TSM donations.
While one might be quite fatalistic about mandatory climate targets of the kind we have in Europe for the US, the response to that shouldn’t necessarily be – just push harder and harder and some day the Democrats will get rid of the filibuster or find a way to make executive orders robust and then we will win – but rather to make the most of the opportunity that the US presents for climate – an unparalleled energy innovation system that has a serious shot at breakthroughs in CCS, advanced nuclear, etc. Ambitious economy-wide climate legislation in the US is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for climate progress globally.
Climate is not, fundamentally, a problem like civil rights or the other analogies where a solution will need a strong legislation passing Congress and for which a large grassroots movement and even one larger than Sunrise right now might be essential.
CATF and similar charities look very good on a theory of change focused on the global picture
And CATF looks very good on a theory of change focused on maximized global decarbonization impact when taking into account some of the most important stylized facts about the climate challenge (widely recognized as median views in the respective expert communities):
1. Global energy demand will grow and restricting energy demand growth is very problematic from a humanitarian perspective.
2. Effective global decarbonization requires a much larger set of technologies than those currently available. Most of those technologies are not on track and many necessary technologies are in early stages.
3. Attention to many of those technologies is not on par with their importance, there is systematic neglect of key solutions.
4. More active US energy innovation is expected to be a very cost-efficient way to reduce emissions in the US and, crucially, this does not even include the global benefits.
You can then combine this with two CATF-specific features:
5. CATF is a strong organization that translates money into effective advocacy. This is not controversial within the EA community, something GG agrees on. It was first established in the FP 2018 report and it appears that at least 4 EA orgs had multiple calls with CATF, often dozens, that reaffirmed this conclusion (FP, Legacies Now, SoGive, Giving Green).
6. CATF has very productive funding margins, projects that are currently unfunded and that make a lot of sense from the above stylized facts and the theory of change.
This is all you need to come to CATF as a likely local optimum in effective climate philanthropy.
None of this is controversial and – indeed – each of the claims above about the world in general (1-4) follow directly from median expert views on those respective topics and the CATF-specific claims (5-6) are even entirely uncontroversial across the EA community.
In contrast, motivating TSM as a top-choice requires a lot of controversial claims, such as (a) that we are sure that the impact of marginal TSM donations is not negative in expectation and (b) that additional effort can lead to significant change beyond what is already baked in despite the approach of Sunrise being partisan and thereby, quite plausibly, limited in its ultimate potential given the structure of the Senate and the Electoral College.
What is more, as Robin pointed out, the fact that CATF operates not only in the US is another source of believing in it to be higher impact—CATF can optimize marginal resources across many jurisdictions, many of which are often more fruitful than the US context, which is very fruitful now but might as well dry up significantly.
3. What can we know through charity evaluation methodology?
A lot of the arguments for GG’s skepticism about being able to figure out the goodness of CATF v TSM comes from non-marginal arguments, from the stated inherent incompatibility between different approaches.
While I do disagree with these incomparability claims—see my original comment—even if one agrees with these there is a lot of traction from the methods that “EA-style” (for lack of a better word) charity evaluation provides.
Neglectedness
Neglectedness is a proxy, but it is a very useful one. In a world with millions of funding margins which we can never all evaluate in detail, neglectedness gives crucial information (as a prior, also see my long comment).
If a field is flooded with attention and money, like progressive climate activism, then the probability that there are great things to be funded is low for three fundamental reasons:
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Declining marginal returns: A strategic actor will order projects such that the lowest value ones are at the margin and the further we are down that margin, the lower we should expect the value to be (ceteris paribus, which is key, e.g. CATF’s expansion into other geographies, changing its funding margins is an argument in another direction).
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Declining probability of true additionality: The more money and attention goes into a particular direction or org the less likely it is that additional funding there will be truly additional—it is more likely that actors “satisfice” and, when the funding environment is fertile, additional dollars will not always be additional, as there might be funding targets or, at the very least, a declining eagerness to fundraise more. That’s the point about 10,000 volunteers and inspiring the public imagination of an entire wing of the dominant American party—if in that situation you are seriously funding-constrained, this would be quite surprising.
3.** Declining probability of money being the impact-constraining resource:** The more money you have and the easier it is to get more money if you need it, the lower the probability that money really is your constraint on higher marginal impact.
While I won’t name names here, there are many great climate charities which I believe are doing incredibly important and good work, which we are not recommending because of such considerations—this is not something that only applies to TSM.
Aggregating expert views
When we have an issue where relevant experts disagree strongly—such as whether a more partisan approach to climate policy is good or bad—epistemic humility pushes us closer to a lower value (zero).
This is where a lot of the TSM skepticism comes from.
Not from saying “we are sure that TSM is bad” but rather “when observing the debate, we notice that this is an area of severe disagreement between reasonable people”—e.g. look at all the debates in the Democratic party between progressives and moderates on which path is more promising to ensure Democratic priorities are implemented (and the Democratic majority survives).
So, this would be an area where we would either need to set the marginal impact of TSM downwards or where more research would be needed to demonstrate that the moderate wing of the Democratic party is entirely wrong (or, more climate-specifically, that more centrist voices are unduly worried about a progressive over-reach that will backfire and lead to deadlock and no progress).
This argument is largely missing in the TSM analysis, instead it feels like an assessment that is based on the most positive expert interpretations of TSM, not the median ones, and not taking into account voices that would be critical of TSM’s impact.
4. Length and depth of engagement that led to CATF and other climate high-impact recs
This is about the “intellectual history” leading to the CATF recommendation, with the TL, DR that the recommendation is based on a lot deeper engagement than the GG comment is giving credit for.
The argument on which CATF comes out as the best recommendation we currently know of goes back to 2016 -- when the argument that EAs interested in climate should focus on (a) innovation for (b) neglected technology, (c) given a world of rising energy demand and real conflicts between climate and poverty alleviation, was first publicly made (to my knowledge). You can watch it here and, somewhat later, but more refined, here. There’s a write-up here (though I never quite finished it because I focused on embedding this argument in the EA debate, which was achieved with John’s and Hauke’s reports, leaving me to prioritize other things).
This argument was already informed by deep engagement with climate for about a decade, reading and talking to hundreds of experts and, arguably—in the process—becoming an expert at being better able to evaluate the strength of different claims as well.
These arguments then found their ways into both John’s 2018 report and Hauke’s Let’s Fund report, both of whom vetted this argument against competing arguments. I don’t know the details about Hauke’s report, but I know that John talked to at least 50 experts for the first report and I know—from, sometimes painful, experience :) -- that John does not accept any argument at face-value before he has not engaged with it himself. Crucially, both Hauke and John made charity recommendations that turned this argument into something actionable and thereby unlocking massive value.
After I joined FP in late 2019, John and I spent a lot of time revisiting our recs (which also led to not continuing some recs), working on a new report that more clearly motivates our theory of change, and identifying new recs.
The robustness of the CATF recommendation is one of the few things that stood the test of time, indeed by more clearly articulating our theory of change—improving societal resource allocation in light of decarbonization priorities, towards innovation in neglected technologies—we became somewhat more convinced of CATF being a “local optimum” (obviously, there might be other great options—I for one would never claim that we will never find something better than CATF, just that until now we haven’t).
This is also true for the EA community at large: while there have been many critical reviews of FP’s work on climate (e.g. concerns about CfRN), the CATF recommendation has stood the test of time and examination.
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).
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.
SOME MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT CATF
Before diving into the detailed comparison between CATF and TSM it is worth noting some misconceptions about CATF that matter for this comparison.
1. Is CATF “incrementalist”?
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.
2. Is there a serious chance that CATF is negative?
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.
REASONS TO EXPECT LOW MARGINAL IMPACT WHEN DONATING TO TSM
3. Grassroots activism might be good on balance, but still an implausible recommendation at the margin
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.
4. Grassroots activism might have been neglected ten years ago, but it is not neglected now
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.
5. Neglect is only a proxy, but it informs a prior on the usefulness of funding margins for which the TSM analysis provides little update
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.
REASONS TO BE UNSURE ABOUT THE SIGN OF IMPACT
6. The positive marginal case is pretty unclear
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.
7. Ways in which Sunrise could be negative at the current margin
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.
8. Ways in which Sunrise could be negative (in general)
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.
INTEGRATING CONCERNS
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.