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
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 relating to leakage, permanence, verification etc
#2 This seems to be an area with some disagreement, with studies varying between 50% to 80% renewables in certain least cost electricity systems (the latter with huge expansion of intercontinental transmission). I don't think the reference given is outdated (only two years old), and I have read other recent or soon to be published papers drawing the same conclusion, some of which are cited in the report.
The importance estimates are from AR5 IPCC report integrated assessment models, so yes 4 years old, but reputable. Another option would have been to use the latest IEA World Energy Outlook estimates, which I think would bump solar and wind up a bit, but it wouldn't make any difference to the ITN ranking. I'm not sure the extent to which these models account for transmission and actually matching demand, and it would be very hard to build a model that does this for the entire global electricity system. Accounting for these things tends to disfavour renewables. 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
The main thing that justifies deprioritising solar and wind is that they are not neglected, not that they won't have a big part to play. Electrification of transport is ignored in the report but would likely fare poorly because it's already receiving lots of attention.
I'm very pro-renewables, but I did want to counteract the view, which you implicitly endorse in your comment, that the aim is to get as much renewables as possible. The aim is to decarbonise, and we should do that in the best and cheapest way possible with all technologies at our disposal.
#3 I haven't looked through that paper and will try to have a look, but if it uses levelised cost for each energy source, rather than system levelised cost, then it is misleading. Technology levelised cost is not a fair way to compare intermittent and non-intermittent power sources because it doesn't account for value to the grid, which is better for non-intermittent sources. Energy markets are also not structured to reward nuclear for these services, which is why it sees its margins eaten up by the price volatility associated with renewables.
One's prior should be that the 'dominant renewables' narrative is surprising given that renewables currently provide very little global energy, whereas nuclear supplies 25% of low carbon energy, and has been doing for ages. There are concerns about nuclear cost, which I discuss in the report, but CATF has a plausible path to actually reducing these costs, which is what needs to be done, otherwise we're screwed.
The track record of heavy renewables focused countries in actually reducing emissions is not great. Germany has spent billions upon billions on renewables subsidies and yet has not actually reduced emissions per head because it is shutting down its nuclear plants. Decarbonised electricity systems exist today and can be done - they all involve massive reliance on nuclear, hydro or geothermal. Renewables will be able to supply a bigger part of the pie in the future but I feel a lot of the debate is getting ahead of itself.
#4 Yes I looked at drawdown a bit, but my concern was that it's very unclear where they got their numbers from and since it was done technology by technology and not at the system level, it would get misleading answers. For electricity, getting the system right is what matters and the cost of abatement varies depending on the combination of technologies.
Drawdown doesn't consider neglectedness of any kind in prioritising interventions. It also looks at things from the point of view of society, whereas I'm looking at things from the pov of the philanthropist.
I agree that methane and SLCPs are important, and CATF does a lot of work on these. I now think their importance may be overstated at present relative to CO2. (https://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/briefings/Short_Lived_Promise.pdf) Open Phil has funded some refrigerant stuff.
The stance on clean meat is discussed in the report - I agree it should be included in future if we have time to properly research it.
#5 I don't agree with your view that CATF's and CfRN's best days are behind them. Only this year, CATF won a tax credit for CCS in the US (discussed in the report) which stands to have massive climate impact. it would be surprising if they went from conceiving campaigns reducing emissions by megatonnes to having no impact starting right now. It has directly and greatly influenced US government nuclear policy going forward. I disagree with your dim view of nuclear's prospects for the reason outlined above. Again, I think you are only focusing on electricity, not all energy, and renewables can't do much for most of industry and half of transport - we need CCS, nuclear and synthetic fuels there. CATF continues to produce great research on all parts of the climate puzzle (even the neglected bits) and has a pretty staggering record of getting things done.
I agree that is a concern about CfRN, but even on pessimistic scenarios of climate-induced forestry protection reversal, delaying climate damages by a number of decades would be highly valuable for adaptation and buying time to develop low carbon technologies. The tonnes of CO2 that CfRN could sequester permanently or for multiple decades if fully funded are extremely large.
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 interven... (read more)