I develop software tools for the building energy efficiency industry. My background is in architectural and mechanical engineering (MS Penn State, PhD University of Maryland). I know quite a bit about indoor air quality and indoor infectious disease transfer, and closely follow all things related to climate change and the energy transition. I co-organize the local EA group in Denver, Colorado.
MatthewDahlhausen
Criticisms:
Manageable, with further work:
Sorting out the ethics of animal suffering and catastrophic risk.
Weights marginal benefit heavily over systematic change. This may be inappropriate for very wealth philanthropists, or a group of pooled funders that may achieve the same effect.
Doesn’t give appropriate weight to stopping problems before they become a crisis, especially for inter-generational effects. E.g., there hasn’t been a lot of rigor in how EAs assess family planning.
Difficult to overcome:
devaluing of systematic change, and ignoring the biggest money flows. E.g., the amount of money that goes to aid is a fraction of a percent of the capital flight, foreign debt repayments, and natural resource capital/wealth that leaves poor countries. EA asks people to give, but doesn’t approach the problem of stopping the biggest leaks of wealth from where it is needed most. This has a lot to do with challenging wealth directly and supporting systematic change.
Crippling, if true:
Limits to growth is more or less the reality, meaning strong sustainability is a much better model than weak sustainability. Lack of sufficient effort locks us in an Energy Trap and makes us likely to suffer an irreversible (Type-N) collapse. Uncertainties would dominate such a scenario, weakening the usefulness of a lot of EA tools and techniques.
I don’t think there is enough information to rule out the strong sustainability hypothesis. (This is not to say it is true, just that there isn’t enough information to go either way).
It’s not just about what technologies we have to discover, it’s about how fast they can be discovered, developed, and implemented to overcome problems. Technology is value-neutral; sometimes it solves problems, sometimes is makes new one, sometimes it does both. There are good reasons to think that we are much more robust to pressures that collapsed a lot of earlier civilizations, but the scale of the problems we face is also unprecedented. Biocapacity and energy throughput concerns have proved impressively stubborn to technical solutions in the last several decades. And we don’t have a infinite amount of time to figure them out before they become serious collapse pressures.
When does the game end?
Anyone else want to match the amount?
+1 to the importance of geography. The deworming RCTs, though highly effective, were location-dependent. I imagine the same goes for other interventions for global poverty/global health.
Thanks for the excellent survey work. I will take out the blindness cure example we use in our tabling/giving games, and replace it with Toby’s lives-saved opportunity example.
“I assume voting was implemented in the way it is currently in order to ensure posts weren’t up and downvoted simply based on their headline. This was sound rationale, but I believe it has not succeeded in practice.”
How about placing the voting at the end of each post, above the comment section? Then people have to at least scroll through a post to vote, and maybe will read something on the way.
Of the issues you mentioned, rich people in developing countries moving their money out of the country legally or illegally is particularly damaging. Here is a good resource for that: http://www.taxjustice.net/2014/01/17/price-offshore-revisited/
Echoing the Cotton-Barratt & Todd 2015 link too. If you give to the worlds poorest, their available personal investment options are much better than the stock market both in financial returns and wellbeing returns.
CO2 has been used a marker for acceptable ventilation since the 1920s. Commercial building ventilation systems are often linked to CO2 sensors in the return air, and increase or decrease outdoor ventilation air to meet a set target. Typically 800-1000ppm. This is known as “demand control ventilation”, and is pretty common, especially in newer buildings. A tricky thing with this is that the sensors are notorious for drifting out of calibration over time, so many system have minimum damper positions built in to make sure enough fresh air is getting to the space.
Residential and commercial ventilation is regulated under ASHRAE standard 62.1 and 62.2 https://www.ashrae.org/resources—publications/bookstore/standards-62-1--62-2 The standards are set by committee, and are a big battle/tradeoff between (1) energy cost from heating, cooling, and moving all that ventilation air (2) odor, (3) air quality risks (like NOx, particulates, VOCs), and (4) impairment from CO2.
In the most recent update, ASHRAE finally removed the infiltration allowance for residential buildings. Before, residential buildings could be built with just exhaust fans, with the fresh air being made up through infiltration, meaning air coming through cracks around walls, windows, doors, etc. But there was disagreement as to whether this air is really fresh. Insulation tends to “filter” the air and remove particulates, but it can also pick up bad stuff like mold spores, VOCs, etc. The decision was to no longer count infiltration, largely because buildings are getting tighter and shouldn’t be leaking that much. Plus infiltration can pull in warm, moist air which can condense in walls if the building is air conditioned, causing mold and water damage. Now, residential must match commercial buildings in supplying fresh, filtered dedicated supply air. That will be BIG change in residential construction practice if/when states adopt it. (1/3 of states don’t follow it, 1⁄3 are keyed to old 2004,2007,2010 standards, 1⁄3 are recent). For now I recommend cracking open windows, running bath fans occasionally, and ESPECIALLY installing and using a cooking range hood exhaust fan while cooking. Can’t emphasize the kitchen range hood enough—thats probably #1 most important thing to do to improve air quality. Well, I’m assuming you’re not smoking indoors and not having campfires in your backyard. Those are worse.
There is some question as to whether the ventilation recommendations should be stricter. CO2 is a good proxy for a lot of other air pollutants that are harder to measure. So performance or other benefits from reducing CO2 levels may be coming from getting rid of other air pollutants in the space (VOCs, NOx in particular). However, some recent work out of LBNL has found some slight differences in performance between 600 and 1000ppm.
http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2012/10/17/elevated-indoor-carbon-dioxide-impairs-decision-making-performance/ http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/1104789/ (study) It would be very tough to stay at 600ppm for most buildings, because that would require a LOT of ventilation air. Doable with natural ventilation, but in places with cold winters? That gets really expensive.For CO2, OSHA permissible exposure limit for workers is 5000ppm. And NIOSH’s short term exposure limit is 30,000ppm, though that would be really bad to be in. There will certainly be cognitive impairment at these levels, but it probably won’t cause damage.
If your concern is productivity, work in a ventilated space. Or just open windows / turn on the bath fan / range hood just before you start until after you finish working at home.
If you really want to see some elevated CO2 levels, get in a car with a few other people and go on a road trip without rolling down the windows. And then understand why everyone gets groggy and tired.
ASHRAE also sets ventilation standards for moving transport (airlines, trains, buses), but people are in charge of ventilation in their personal cars or trucks and don’t ventilate as much. Or big trucks like semis, where the drivers are already impaired from driving long hours. eek.If you want more information on air quality and ventilation, check out LBNL’s indoor air group: http://indoorair.lbl.gov/ Or NIST’s group: http://www.nist.gov/el/building_environment/airquality/
Happy to answer more questions about ventilation / air quality. Interesting field. the elevator “why this is important” (1)http://vizhub.healthdata.org/gbd-compare/ air pollution is a big risk factor a lot of health problems (2)humans spend most of their time indoors (90% + in developed world) (3)a lot of that time is spent sleeping. (4)lots of the world still cooks in their homes with biomass, unventilated. And this pollutes the air in the whole neighborhood. Big problem. Make sure your kitchen, bedroom, and workplace are well ventilated.
Another recent study that shows just controlling CO2 doesn’t yield the same performance losses. Maybe it is something else in the air? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26825447
re-posting my comments here from the FB group a while back: https://wattsandwagers.wordpress.com/2016/01/10/searching-for-effective-environmentalism-candidates/ Some thoughts: 1) There is sufficient overlap with end factory-farming / meat production, and my initial estimate of calculating savings from vegan advocacy was that it as about ~1/3 as effective as Cool Earth. 2) “Environmentalism for the people” concerns. Much of environmentalism used to be about local air and water quality, whereas now it has shifted to global concerns about more subjective topics like the biodiversity value of a certain species. There is still a LOT of support and human health impacts from air and water quality, as the are among the most significant risk factors for DALYs https://vizhub.healthdata.org/gbd-compare/. 3) Some concepts like carrying capacity, finite elemental resources, and guaranteeing an energy supply are largely ignored by the EA community, which assumes more is better (signing up for cryonics, etc.). It is possible there could be an energy/resource pinch, and this could be a major existential risk. 4) Energy and food waste represent an enormous drain on economies. It is relatively easy to make great improvements in this area. For example, California is making it building code that new residential buildings be net-zero energy by 2019, and new commercial buildings by 2030.
Edit: copying some other good resources here too: http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/post-index/
Key article from this forum: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/is/how_valuable_is_movement_growth/ Developing positive impressions of EA is much more important than near-term growth. If we align with partisan political causes, we risk greatly limiting the eventual scope and impact of EA. Because our movement goal is inherently very different (long term size and positive impression, vs. immediate policy changes), I don’t think the organizing knowledge is transferable/useful. Also, much of organizing around left the left is founded in a justice as the core value framework, rather than an impact as the core value framework. There are many posts/arguments in the social justice community explicitly arguing against impact (e.g. arguing against metrics for charity) because these can undermine more speculative causes and deprioritize grassroots/marginalized activists. If we align EA with these movements, we risk undermining the core quantitive and utilitarian values in EA. Because of these risks to EA, I’m partial a firewall between EA and social justice themed organizing, meaning EA orgs do not endorse partisan political causes. This isn’t to say EAs should never participate in politics. As you pointed out, there is a lot in international aid that is nonpartisan or very weakly partisan, and the good from doing so is likely to overcoming the risks above.
If we engage in more controversial leftists political causes, EA work would be better spent in cause research, rather than direct political activism. Also, we can prioritize implementing laws that are already passed more effectively, rather than proposing new partisan legislation. This was the aim of the EA policy analytics project. I echo the above comments that elevating organizing to an “obligation” is inappropriate given the speculative nature of impact and possible externalities.
There is quite a lot to respond to here. I used to be of the same mindset on limits. I followed the The Oil Drum while it was still running and attend a few limits to growth conferences (the ones where attendees called themselves “Doomers”). After engaging with that material, I don’t think the projections are accurate and think the catastrophizing is unwarranted. In particular, I don’t think resource limits are likely to be a significant issue to humanity in the 21st century. Peak oil concern just isn’t a reality; resource economics just doesn’t work like that, and demand is elastic. The Oil Drum shut down partly in recognition that Peak Oil wasn’t a useful concept anymore, and academics had long since departed from it.
Some more specific points: Factor 1 - Land Grabbing Can you provide citations and sources for the % of population this is happening to?
Factor 3 - Climate “As a consequence, the Sahara will expand well over a hundred kilometres south, a process called desertification.” Increasing desterification is a concern, but 100 kilometers advancement across such a large continent isn’t going to make a difference. “vast parts of land will become unsuitable for agriculture and hence will force hundreds of people to leave their homes.” I would not call hundreds of people a humanitarian crisis. It’s not clear that the issues you cite are enough to trigger the catastrophic famine and migrations you prophesize. People respond to droughts and other agricultural challenges in different ways—switching crops, using different water sources, relying on more imports, and finding other income. EA fund a lot of efforts that help this part of the world, malaria eradication and deworming in particular, which yield significant economic gains and life improvement. Development and increasing incomes improves resiliency. You are suggesting that despite these efforts, the factors you describe will overwhelm all of the health and development work being done. You present limited information, and will need more data, models, and economic models to justify the level of concern you are raising.
On Limits To Growth (LTG). Statements along the lines of “The LTG collapse scenario has been fairly accurate to date” imply that there are real world metrics mapped to LTG variables, and that the they expect the underlying model dynamics to remain roughly accurate. I’ve been able to find one published piece of work where someone explicitly details the variables they use to match to LTG. That report was by Graham Turner, the author of the Guardian Piece you cite. The report is not peer-reviewed, and was published by the institute where Graham is a senior fellow. It is based on a 2008 paper that was peer-reviewed. The author picked per capita electricity consumption and literacy rates to represent global “services per capita”. This is misleading. One can pick almost any available variable remotely tied to represent “services per capita” that matches the shape of the LTG model, scale it, and claim that the “LTG standard run is close to reality”. There are so many spurious correlations out there. Even then, the majority of trends are 20%, 50%, 100%+ off from the “LTG standard run”. The report does not include statistical fit or calibration statistics. How can one meaningful track global pollution? Or non-renewable resources remaining?
It was never the intent of the work to be a predictive forecasting tool. The variables are lumped together proxies to represent categories of real world things, and the authors were explicit when they made the report that these did not represent real world variables; they were to just trying to show the dynamics of their theoretical model. Subsequent updates to the LTG model haven’t been able to resolve which collection of real world variables get weighted together to match to which LTG variables. It’s easy to cherry pick data to match the trend, especially if you aren’t precommitting what constitutes a fit. And even if there is a good match to trends, that doesn’t mean that a specific model is the correct representation of reality; there may be many models with wildly different assumptions of the dynamics that produce the same result. Vaclav Smil’s review of the LTG is a longer deconstruction of the LTG modeling exercise and worth a read.More importantly, Dennis and Jorgen (living original authors who I’ve met) repeatedly say these forecasts are not to be taken literally. Jorgen Randers has a new (2014) forecast which looks very different from the “resource crisis” scenario in the 1972 LTG model. Jorgen now claims the climate crisis is the key concern and the driving force in the model. Even then, he still assumes the same overall model dynamics, but doesn’t detail the mechanisms for how the variables will actually influence each-other. For example, in using carbon emissions as his pollution variable, he assumes climate change will greatly increase overall death rates, overwhelming all factors that reduce death rates. There are many models out there (30+) that make assumptions on how climate change impacts human society in the future of which Jorgen’s new work is just one. None assume overall death rate increases as Jorgen does, especially in the near term. Be wary of projections from a single model/source. The point is, it is misguided to get doomy about older model forecasts from one model that the authors say are no longer reflective of reality, especially when there is a much wider variety of more complex, robust forecasting models in existence today that have different scenarios.
The causal chain you propose is:
A) peak oil → energy scarcity → humanitarian crisis from ?
If not A), then:
B) emissions → climate change → agricultural loss → humanitarian crisis from famine (with land grabbing exacerbating the crisis)
Let’s jump to the crux of Rander’s update to the LTG model, since that is the most recent work most closely attached to the concept. The fundamental collapse prediction comes from the pollution—death rate linkage that I mention in the previous comment. What basis is there to assume the overall death rate will increase? And how does the model explain the decreasing death rates in that part of the world? Is it based on a presumed energy scarcity? “when we can assume with relative safety that in 20 years we can only extract half the oil relative to now and that the current pace of global energy transition would need to be multiple times faster to rectify the shortages thereby created” Where do you derive the assumption that oil production will be cut in half in 20 years for reasons of scarcity? U.S. EIA forecasts relatively flat curves. And how do you distinguish good substitutions from shortages? Concerns about peak oil presume a fixed consumption per person, meaning no fuel substitution or demand elasticity. I think this is incorrect. Oil consumption is responsive to price, and even in the least elastic sector where it is used (transportation), there is still a tradeoff in size vs. efficiency for cars people buy. You can go on Gapminder and see how the trend in oil consumption per person can vary quite a bit over several years. Electricity consumption per person (what Turner used as his proxy for “services per person”) has actually been decreasing in the U.S. because of large-scale efficiency. I expect we’ll see more of that in other sectors including transportation, with lower energy use but greater energy services overall.
Given the substitution and efficiency arguments, and how none of the climate-economic models in IPCC’s modeling exercises show an energy scarcity or pollution induced collapse, I don’t think causal chain A you propose is a reality we can expect.
So that leaves causal chain B. The World Bank report is for a 4-degree temperature rise, and is by no means a fait accompli. I think what we do now looks a lot like what EAs are currently funding in the region—improving health and encouraging inclusive development. When people have greater incomes and are less dependent on agriculture, climate change effects are less severe. This is the assessment of a follow-up report the World Bank did to the 4-degree report which is worth reading: Shock Waves Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty.
Thank you John Halstead for putting this report together. Climate change is a significant issue in popular culture, and one of the most widely known catastrophic risks, with relatively little analysis in the EA community. So I’m glad you took it on.
Some general comments on this report:
COMMENT 1 - IMPORTANCE VS. MARGINAL TRACTABILITY REGARDING CLIMATE CHANGE Something I’ve been puzzling over with climate change specifically is that I think funding at the margin might miss the largest emissions reductions needed to stay under a warming target.
For example, I’ve contributed to Cool Earth with the goal of rainforest protection. At the margin, this is an amazing bargain for carbon storage—and can be equated to very cheap carbon emissions reductions at $1 or so per tonne CO2e. However, there is a limited supply of rainforest protection we can do, and if other areas of emissions are unaddressed, the Amazon may turn into a savanna anyways at current projections of warming, releasing all that carbon. At higher expected warming, rainforest protection becomes less useful. This was not considered in the report. Relevant recent papers on that: http://www.pnas.org/content/113/39/10759 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-15788-6
It’s the sort of problem where you may get good returns at the margin for the first 10% of emissions reductions, but you need to hit 80% of the reductions or more to achieve the desired outcome. Another way to say it is that in most EA causes, marginal tractability counts more than overall importance/scale, but for climate change, these concerns are more equal.
I think an analogy to this is how energy is priced in a deregulated market—generators bid in their power at a price, the grid operator buys it, and everyone gets paid the price of the last MWh purchased, the highest price on the marginal cost curve that meets the total load.
I expect the best use of my marginal dollar for climate philanthropy will depend on the current landscape of funding and projections for how quickly we are reducing emissions. On our current track, we are set for 3-4C of warming, so I’m more inclined to put dollars towards adaptation efforts and economic development / global health for the worlds poorest to lessen the damage than I would be if we were farther along in our decarbonization efforts.
COMMENT 2 - RENEWABLE ADOPTION POTENTIAL A recent report out of the Electric Markets and Policy Group at LBNL (https://emp.lbl.gov) and related work at NREL https://www.nrel.gov/analysis/re-futures.html (disclosure: I’m an NREL employee) have found that we could probably push renewable generation up to 80% of total annual electric production without a significant cost increase. I think the 2016 reference cited in this report saying >50% would be cost prohibitive with storage is outdated. This year, renewables + storage beat out gas generation on cost in both California and Colorado markets. The last 20% of storage will be expensive, and there is ongoing work at the national labs to finds ways to reduce that cost or shift times of energy demand.
I’ll need to review the sources used to do the importance calculation for renewables and EE ( https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Bvm8exmAdOUDF1wM1BM5qXBhs5jHIRF6qGGL2le17D4/edit#gid=0), but my initial read is that they are already 4-5 years out of date given recent research. (As is to be expected; academic meta-reviews lag a few years behind reviews, which lag a few years behind potential studies).
The electrification of the transportation sector is ignored in this report, but is a necessity towards greater emissions reductions goals, and will greatly increase the importance of renewables.
COMMENT 3 - MARKET ADOPTION AND COST Part of the reason why Nuclear is underfunded in the philanthropic sector is that it cannot compete on cost with renewables. /9https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/7/11/17555644/nuclear-power-energy-climate-decarbonization-renewables/0 Philanthropists have largely moved on from funding this, except for some fundamental research in reactor designs, simply because market economics means that more plants won’t get built, even with a carbon price. In this case, philanthropic neglectedness is a measure of the philanthropic sector’s pessimism that more $ towards advocacy would result in greater nuclear power build-out. The scoring in the report treats neglectedness as a positive for nuclear advocacy when there is a strong reason behind the neglectedness that should decrease the score.
COMMENT 4 - COMPARISON TO RELATED WORK AND OTHER INTERVENTIONS Drawdown https://www.drawdown.org/ is another recent project that does a more thorough calculation of carbon mitigation potential for the interventions considered. It reaches different estimates of mitigation potential for some interventions. (10x difference for nuclear for example) I would have liked this report to have considered other GHGs besides CO2, namely methane and refrigerants. Refrigerant emissions reductions have made major progress in recent years with the Kigali Accord (https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/15/world/africa/kigali-deal-hfc-air-conditioners.html), but there is much to be done in the space of recovering and controlled destruction of existing refrigerants, refrigerant alternatives, and compressor-free cooling designs. Clean and plant-based meats to replace animal agriculture and associated methane emissions was excluded from this report for lack of time to evaluate it. It has importance comparable to or greater than many of the interventions considered and is vastly underfunded in comparison. I hope it is included in a subsequent analysis.
COMMENT 5 - SELECTIONS OF SPECIFIC CHARITIES I think both Clean Air Task Force and Coalition for Rainforest Nations were excellent choices for funding between 5-20 years ago, and this report does a great job of synthesizing their impressive accomplishments. I do not share the outlook that their future work will be as impactful. Given that nuclear (even with new designs) and fossil fuel generation are losing the market competitiveness battle to renewables, and that nuclear, CSS, and power plant regulations are the vast majority of the funding gap for CATF, I expected CATF to have very little impact per $ of additional funding in their campaigns over the next several years. This is the opposite conclusion of the report.
I’m also cautious of the potential for Coalition for Rainforest Nations funding given the projections of future warming and the impact on rainforests as carbon sources/sinks.I don’t have strong candidates for charities I’d recommend in their place, but I’d be happy to contribute to a short-list for the next round of analysis.
1 “Concerns about your gains from preventing deforestation being reversed should be accounted for in your marginal cost-effectiveness estimate.” Well yes, if we account for the fact that current best marginal emissions reductions at present might fail in later years into our marginal cost-effectiveness estimate then we can still use the marginal cost-effectiveness estimate. If I did that, it would show rainforest work having mediocre cost-effectiveness because emissions reductions aren’t robust. So we reach different conclusions on best interventions, despite claiming to adhere to the same principle. I agree with the position “we should act on the best marginal effectiveness”. It’s just that rainforest work is not independent of other interventions. Its cost-effectiveness is co-dependent on the cost-effectiveness of other interventions—needing to hit sub 3C century end warming. So my cost-effectiveness estimate cares more about the 80th percentile on the cost abatement curve from future projects, while a simpler analysis may just focus on the cheapest marginal abatement cost intervention at present yearly emissions.
This is heavily related to the concept of lock-in (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-018-0100-6). Even though some interventions may be more expensive than others, they may represent a substantial enough amount of emissions and lock-in threat that on a longer time horizon they become the best marginal cost-effective interventions at present.
Once we’ve accounted for lock-in, largest emissions interventions, robustness, etc., THEN we can start moving down our new inclusive-forecast-century-weighted abatement curve of best interventions. I just think this will look different from McKinsey’s abatement curve and yield different interventions than the ones you’ve selected in the report.
2 I agree the aim is to decarbonize, not get as much renewables growth as possible. My statement wasn’t cheerleading renewables, it was making the observation that in actual grid capacity purchases and planning at present—the current market—renewables are more bullish than they appear in the reports you reference. IEA World Energy Outlook has abysmal prediction accuracy on renewable install rates (https://www.vox.com/2015/10/12/9510879/iea-underestimate-renewables), and the integrated assessment models in AR5 are similarly conservative in their estimates.
This is good news given the amount of emissions that come from the power and buildings sectors.I’m confused by your comment “Also, this is only electricity not all energy, so other stuff like CCS and nuclear will be necessary to get us all the way to decarbonise” Where does nuclear contribute besides the power sector? Your “emissions averted by different energy technologies” has nuclear’s impact only from displacing coal and gas electric power.
4 Yeah, I wish Drawdown was more explicit in their calculations. I found an error in their documentation on plant diets, but couldn’t track down if that was just in the documentation on the calculation too. I only reference drawdown because it gives explicit GtCO2e estimates. For instance, it’s nuclear estimate is 16 GtCo2e https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/electricity-generation/nuclear, while yours is 136 GtCO2e. It’s wind and solar estimate in total is 171 GtCO2e, while yours is 135 GtCO2e. Not enough to change things on a log scale. Obviously, you have to look elsewhere for philanthropic neglectedness calculations.
On points 3 & 5 - Recent bids for renewables with storage are cost competitive with gas, and cheaper than nuclear, even at the $60/MWh quoted in the report.
The intermittent and non-intermittent power source debate is about a decade old, and doesn’t reflect the reality that additional intermittent contributions to the grid have made the grid more reliable, not less, at least in the United States. Energy markets are structured to provide a reliable electric grid—they price capacity and when electricity can be produced—and nuclear isn’t competing in this environment. Recently in the U.S. the nuclear lobby has hitched itself to the coal lobby to argue for emergency interference in energy markets by the government to require subsidizing large plants, precisely because they could not compete in the hourly capacity market.
Your comment about Germany doesn’t seem applicable; renewables reduced emissions compared to the proper counterfactual where they hadn’t been installed AND the nuclear plants were taken offline.
Again, this isn’t me cheerleading renewables at the expense of nuclear. It’s an observation of the current energy market that no one is even thinking about starting a new nuclear plant build because of how outrageously expensive they are compared to other options. There are 2 reactors under construction in the U.S. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Plant#Planning_phase, 2 recently abandoned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil_C._Summer_Nuclear_Generating_Station, with the primary contractor filing for bankruptcy last year. All vastly overbudget.
Given the state of affairs with nuclear, CATF’s large share of funding towards nuclear seems like pissing money away, especially since the government already funds this heavily through the DOE for reasons other than emissions reductions and competitive energy. I think the argument for CATF has the best donation target relies on their CCS work solely.
We can have different perspectives on this, and I share a different outlook, so I propose a bet: If a nuclear plant is built in the US: 1) at least 150 MW in size, 2) in the next 10 years, 3) with construction started 2019 or later, 4) and sells its power in a competitive bid process for an electric grid, I will pay you $100. If not, you pay me $100.
Also—can you respond or publish on why you didn’t include an analysis of the other charities in the report that you include but do not recommend? Why were they rejected?
Thanks for putting this together, and sorry for the delay in posting a response.
It’s great to see some more attention to effective climate interventions in the last year, starting with the founders pledge report:https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3poYR8mXfcr9YM34Z/new-research-on-effective-climate-charities
There is a lot of open debate in the EA community on how much to focus on climate change as a cause area:https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/BwDAN9pGbmCYZGbgf/does-climate-change-deserve-more-attention-within-eaI’m going to skip over the questions of how much of a catastrophic risk it is, and what the appropriate split between mitigation and adaptation should be, and instead focus on the point you make of “What can we most effectively do to fight climate change?”.
In getting from the broad goal of emissions reductions to specifically support ITIF’s policy work, there are several key assumptions:Energy related emissions from fossil fuels are the top priority
The priority should be on clean energy development in the most populous countries (India, China)
Reductions in energy related emissions are technology limited, rather than economic or policy limited; Adequate technologies do not already exist to in the most populous countries
Clean energy R&D can produce low or emissions-free technologies; there are substantial clean energy R&D opportunities with high impact on emissions reductions
Clean energy R&D is currently funding constrained, and there are high marginal returns for the next dollar to speed deployment of these technologies
The philanthropic sector, private/market sector, and governments have neglected clean energy R&D, or could substantially increase their giving in this area
Technologies developed in developed countries like the U.S. will lower costs and ease deployment in the most populous countries with negligible barriers to tech transfer
Lobbying to increase government R&D spending is likely to be successful, and specifically by ITIF
ITIF’s target R&D areas are broadly correct, and will surpass the challenges above
Responses to those assumptions:
Energy related emissions from fossil fuels are the top priority. Mild agreement. Agricultural, land use change, methane, and F-gas emissions account for ~25% of emissions, and there is substantial uncertainty how much is being emitted. There could be high impact interventions focusing on these emission sources. However, mitigation will certainly require eliminating emissions from fossil fuels.
The priority should be on clean energy development in the most populous countries (India, China). Agree.
Reductions in energy related emissions are technology limited, rather than economic or policy limited; Adequate technologies do not already exist to in the most populous countries. Mild disagreement here. I think this is true for the hard to mitigate emissions (https://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6396/eaas9793) from Cement, Iron, Steel, Aviation, Shipping, and the last ~10% of electric generation when 90% is served by renewables. These account for ~15% of total energy related emissions. Otherwise, the technologies exist are largely driven by policy. 75% of electricity use is in buildings, and we already have the technology to make them low or zero-carbon. It’s a matter of adopting rigorous building energy code. Electric vehicles are in the deployment stage, relying on infrastructure build out to support their manufacture and charging availability. Better batteries would help, and this is getting a lot of R&D interest from all sectors. Lastly, urban planning is largely the biggest lever in reducing developing country emissions, as they can design out the need for high transportation energy use. However, the ITIF fund is explicitly targeting the ~15% hard to eliminate emissions, so they are only focusing on the technology-limited emissions.
Additionally, I think the choice to use the German example of clean energy subsidies is unrepresentative. In the U.S., which is responsible for 35% of clean energy R&D, the ratio is much closer https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=35952 to 1:1 (post-ARRA). And while the subsidies in Germany didn’t go to R&D, they encouraged learning in manufacturing and production, which greatly drove down the price. While this isn’t included as R&D, it has a similar effect of making renewable energy cheaper.
Clean energy R&D can produce low or emissions-free technologies; there are substantial clean energy R&D opportunities with high impact on emissions reductions. Agree. Largely with batteries and liquid fuels.
Clean energy R&D is currently funding constrained, and there are high marginal returns for the next dollar to speed deployment of these technologies. Mild agreement. This is true for zero-carbon liquid fuels. New battery technologies are not funding constrained, and at a point where additional funding will not lead to faster development.
The philanthropic sector, private/market sector, and governments have neglected clean energy R&D, or could substantially increase their giving in this area. Mild agreement, though I disagree with the characterization that the philanthropic sector has neglected developing countries. In the philanthropic sector, the Packard and Hewlett foundations are the main funders in this space, and have made major contributions to the Energy and Climate foundations, who in turn have focused their grants on developing country emissions, largely around things the building code, vehicle electrification, and development policy. If the criticism is that the philanthropic sector is under investment in R&D, it is largely because they think policy priorities in developing countries are a more impactful mitigation strategy.
Technologies developed in developed countries like the U.S. will lower costs and ease deployment in the most populous countries with negligible barriers to tech transfer. Agree. This has been demonstrated with solar and wind, though I would have appreciated more in the write-up on tech transfer.
Lobbying to increase government R&D spending is likely to be successful, and specifically by ITIF. Neither agree nor disagree. I have no way to judge how successful ITIF will be with their lobbying. While they are well regarding, I’m not sure how much political power they have.
ITIF’s target R&D areas are broadly correct, and will surpass the challenges above. Mix of agreement and disagreement. There are 6 areas:
1) Advanced Nuclear Energy, particularly on SMRs (small modular reactors). The application here is for the last 10-20% of electricity generation that is hard to cover with renewables. However, ~80% of the costs of rankine-based technologies for power production are from the capital and maintenance costs associated with the rankine cycle (cooling towers, concrete, etc.). SMRs, even small ones on the 50 MW scale, even if their nuclear component is vastly cheaper than LWRs, are unlikely to be able to compete with renewables and storage on cost. There are other means of meeting this grid need with demand response or transmission, meaning SMRs will likely only find use in certain applications like shipping. Therefore, I don’t think greater funding in this area is climate-relevant.
2) Long Duration Grid Storage, seasonal storage. This is also for the last 10-20% of grid use. I agree this could use more funding, though it is speculative and technology specific.
3) Carbon-Neutral Fuels. This is the strongest R&D need. There are some recent big investments in the space https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-national-labs-partner-exxonmobil-100-million-joint-research, but it could get more attention.
4) Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS). CCUS is not competitive in the electric sector. The application will be for the industrial sector in cement and steel manufacturing, and for low-carbon liquid fuels. I think the investment needed here is less on the capture technology, and more on the robustness of sequestration and storage to prevent leaks https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04423-1.
5) Carbon Dioxide Removal Technology. I agree with this as a government research priority as there isn’t a market incentive.
6) Basic Energy Research. Basic energy research requires government investment, and gets a lot of the R&D share. It’s unclear to me what lobbying for this would entail. The current administration is more inclined to basic energy research at the expense of all other areas of energy and climate, so lobbying for this in the next few years may actually be counterproductive.
Overall, I think ITIF is broadly correct in the need for government-funded R&D in carbon-neutral liquid fuels, CCUS in industry, CO2 removal, and somewhat long-duration storage. I disagree with their Advanced Nuclear and Basic Energy research goals for practical and current political reality reasons. I don’t think ITF’s lobbying on their 6 focus areas rise to the level of “most effective climate interventions”, as ~60-70% of emissions are policy-limited, not technology-limited. And I think the U.S. climate philanthropic sector has largely correctly identified policy interventions in India and China as the highest priority. From an EA angle, I think the most neglected climate-interventions are in adaptation in poor countries that are most vulnerable to climate change, and in understanding and adaptation to extreme warming scenarios.
I just logged on to my GWWC pledge dashboard and noticed I was under 10%, even though I’ve been giving 10-20% the past 4 years. It seems that my reported incomes were each included twice, possibly leftover from the site migration.
I’m wondering if this happened to other people—can you check if there multiple or duplicate entries for the same date ranges?
I distinguish between R&D and economic/policy factors, because it matters where technology is at in the R&D pipeline. Solar and wind are mature technologies. There is some additional work that can be done in solar (e.g. perovskites) and wind (bigger blades, offshore), but the vast majority of the costs at this point are not associated with the technology itself, but rather the implementation, permitting, financing, etc. At this stage in technology development, costs get driven down by expanding the market, not so much additional early stage R&D. There can be more investment in >6 hr energy storage and zero-carbon liquid fuels, as many of the solutions are in early stage research.
Therefore, I’m more inclined to say that clean energy deployment in developing countries is economic and policy limited, not technology limited, given relatively low deployment rates and maturity of the most applicable technologies. I still agree with more R&D, but I don’t think that is limiting factor in a lot of countries right now. Major climate philanthropy seems to agree—focusing on policy around development, energy efficiency, and deployment of exist tech, rather than early stage R&D funding. Perhaps they don’t because the government already funds R&D at level greater than the philanthropic sector could ever meet. But if as you say, the R&D is more funding limited and has the better marginal return, then most of the philanthropic giving should be going to that.
I understand the desire to not dive into the specifics which technologies to focus on and in general just get more clean energy R&D funding. More clean energy R&D funding lifts all technologies. An analogy would be to global health. It would be good to get more general funding into global health, and most academics and EAs support that. But I think the EA angle could benefit from being more specific on which kinds of interventions/technologies, as like global health, the effectiveness of additional funds could vary greatly depending on where they are spent (e.g. energy storage vs. clean coal). This is a increase funding or use existing funding more effectively question. Your argument is that Clean Energy R&D funding is so low that it is much more important to increase the funding. I agree with you on this. I have a mix of thoughts on whether ITIF’s specific lobbying priorities within Clean R&D are correct, but don’t want to get into that too much.
I do want to address the points on adaptation and extreme warming.
Adaptation gets funded through the UNFCCC framework is the fund has given out $1 billion, with support of $4 billion from other sources. This is total, not per year.
https://www.un.org/ldcportal/least-developed-countries-fund-ldcf/
https://fiftrustee.worldbank.org/en/about/unit/dfi/fiftrustee/fund-detail/adapt
I think R&D in adaptation is underfunded, and adaptation in one area is likely to be replicable in other places (making it a global public good, similar to clean energy R&D). This is about limiting the worst effects, and is neglected in the same way tropical diseases are neglected on the global scale.
An analogy on this is a expansion of pond metaphor. The water level is representing greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere, and the pond is filled with adults (developed countries) and small adults or kids (developing countries). Some are already struggling. Mitigation will slow or stop the rise of water, but we should also spend some effort helping the smallest humans out before they can’t touch the bottom (e.g. life preservers, rocks to stand on). We can presumably get better at figuring out ways to do mitigation (Clean Energy R&D) and adaptation (helping people in the pond to not drown). Right now, I think helping the smaller people is more neglected than lessening the rise of water level.
Lastly to the comments on extreme warming scenarios. While there is a lot of research improving climate models and projections (largely computation limited), there is still a lot to be done on translating those extreme scenarios to impacts, and also geoengineering responses to lessen those impacts. This needs funding on the ~$1 billion scale and is vastly underfunded (funding got cancelled in the US given the current administration). I’m more inclined to think that this or adaptation are likely to yield better returns from an EA perspective.
“The real question is not whether the cost to you is small, but whether you could do more good for the same small cost.”
From what I gather, the “cost” you are referring too is the cost of forgoing the perceived personal benefit/pleasure of eating meat on a per-occasion basis. However, eating a diet with no animal products or much less meat gets a lot easier over time—and the preference flips. Which is why I don’t think the social cost on a per-meal basis is really that useful.
Also, my perception is that diets that limit or avoid animal foods are driven by a combination of three reasons: 1) concern for animal suffering 2) environmental harm from most meat production 3) health benefits from eating less meat or certain particularly harmful meats. These reasons all provide a benefit of some sort compared to the standard western diet, and the later two aren’t considered here. From my experience, the difficulty of changing my diet to eating a lot less meat was trivial compared to the benefits it brought—especially nutrition knowledge and cooking experience. I eat animal foods on occasion now, but it’s from sources that are at the boundary questions of animal ethics—non-sentient animals (scallops), scavenged foods (freeganism), hunted meat, farm animals not explicitly raised for the purpose of meat consumption, etc. Limited animal foods on occasion can provide most of the nutrition benefit, while averting most of the animal suffering.