Founders Pledge has recently completed a large report on climate change, which recommends two new cost-effective climate change charities - the Clean Air Task Force and Coalition for Rainforest Nations. This is on our research page here (which also has a report on mental health and will be supplemented with a number of other in-house reports over the next few months). I know some EAs are interested in climate change and it is something we are often asked about. We have been relying on old GWWC research for a while so this should be a useful update.
It may also be of interest because both charities work on policy rather than doing direct work. Finally, there is some discussion of why we do not recommend Cool Earth.
Edit: there is also a discussion of the link between nuclear power and nuclear weapons that may be of interest to ex risk people
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.
Thanks for these very insightful comments.
#1
I dont think the considerations you mention are a good reason not to think on the margin. Concerns about your gains from preventing deforestation being reversed should be accounted for in your marginal cost-effectiveness estimate. Even if our aim is to reduce emissions by 80%, the best approach is to move down the options on our marginal abatement curve in order of cost.
I should make clear that I do not think those Cool Earth cost-effectiveness estimates are accurate for the reasons I outline in the report rela... (read more)