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
I turned first to Appendix 5 on concerns about nuclear power and found this: "It needs to be borne in mind that all forms of energy production involve waste." Is this correct? What sort of waste do solar & wind power produce? if you are recommending nuclear power because the waste it produces is not as bad as that from fossil fuels, but have made an erroneous assumption about waste from renewable sources like solar and wind, then it invalidates the conclusion that nuclear power is a good sector to promote.
Furthermore, reliance on future technology which does not yet exist to deal with the after-effects is yet another instance of visiting the sins of the fathers on their children - it's reproducing the same behaviour that got us into our present fix (on the brink if not quite yet over it of catastrophic climate change) in the first place!
I'll read the rest (not all of it backwards!) and may have other queries/comments.
Hello, yes wind and solar also both produce waste - old wind turbines and solar panels have to be disposed of. AFAIK, solar involves the handling of hazardous toxic waste to produce the panels - this is why solar has higher death rates per kwh than nuclear, on some studies. Solar and wind are very energy diffuse which means they involve large amounts of hardware; nuclear is energy dense so involves much less land use and waste.
See this paper on wind turbine blade waste - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0956053X17300491
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