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.

1. Via pressure on Democrats to pursue proposals that fail in the legislative process.
2. Via pressure on Democrats to pursue more executive action that is challenged in courts rather than pursue more incrementally seeming policies through Congress.
3. 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

1. 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.
2. 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.

Hi, this is Dan from Giving Green. As you might imagine, I have a lot to say here. 

First though, let me thank Alex for going about this criticism in what I would consider the right way: he brought his concerns to us, we had a discussion, and he changed some things based on the discussion. He also offered us a chance to comment on his draft to ensure he hadn’t said anything blatantly factually inaccurate. And then he aired his disagreements in a respectful post. So thanks for that Alex. 

That being said, I fundamentally disagree with the majority of Alex’s points, and believe that the judgement calls we have made at Giving Green allow us to be impactful to a wider audience.

But let’s start with something else: Giving Green is a young organization, and I think we have a lot of room to improve and pivot. So criticism is welcomed, and some of Alex’s suggestions did resonate with us. 

First, I think we could do a better job in promoting the donation options we think are “better” (ie policy, instead of offsets.) I think the offset research is valuable (as described below), but I agree that it’s not totally obvious to users of the website that we recommend policy over offsets, so that’s something we’d like to improve.

Second, although I do think we have some fundamental disagreements about the value of modeling uncertain situations, I do think there would be value in modeling the cost-effectiveness of offsets more explicitly. I think this is a case where the modeling assumptions are tractable, and we could provide users useful cost-effectiveness data, and may even promote certain offsets over others. This is something we’ve wanted to do for a while, but haven’t had the time to implement. (As Alex noted, we have limited funding and have relied heavily on “side of the desk” work to create Giving Green.)

Now onto the disagreements. I think to respond to every point I would have to write a book, but let me tackle the main ones. 

Recommending Offsets:  I made an argument defending recommending offsets (even though we believe they are less cost-effective than policy charities) on a comment previously on this post. The main idea is that there’s a tradeoff between certainty and high-risk, high-reward options, and I think there’s a market for both. I’ll paste the most fun part of the argument below. 

“Finally, at the risk of going down a rabbit hole, one more point. There are a lot of parallels to this offset debate within international development/global health, an area in which EA is much more developed. Within EA communities, most people are quite comfortable with the recommendations from GiveWell, which are all direct-delivery of health services, and therefore things that can be measured with a high level of certainty. (Like offsets!) So why don't big international development agencies (World Bank, etc) concentrate only on direct delivery of health services? It's not because they are just stupid. It's because they think they can have more bang for their buck investing in systemic changes that can't be well-quantified with an RCT (like institution-building, macroeconomic stability, infrastructure, etc). Kinda like...funding charities that work on climate policy. So I would find it curious if the final consensus from EAs on global health is all about certainty, but in environment it is firmly for less-certain policy interventions. My argument would be that there is a clear place for both. “

Quantitative modeling: Alex is of the opinion that because we haven’t explicitly quantitatively modeled some of the tradeoffs we face, that the analysis isn’t to be trusted. I think we just have a fundamental difference of opinion on the value of modeling in situations of extreme uncertainty. Look, I’m a trained economist and am pro-modeling in general. But if you’re going to make a model where the outcomes are decided by key parameters that you have to make uninformed judgement calls on, what is the value of the model? Why not just make your judgement call on the outcome?

 I know that modeling is in vogue in the EA community so perhaps this makes us outsiders, but I fundamentally believe that modeling in these circumstances leads only to science-y false precision, and does not actually give more clarity. 

Let’s take an example, which leads into a discussion below. Let’s say we were trying to weigh the value of a donation to the Sunrise Movement Education Fund (TSM) vs Clean Air Task Force (CATF). Ok, you could model it, but at some point you’re going to have to make a judgement call on the fundamental tradeoff: CATF is more likely to cause incremental change (though some would argue that this is at the expense of entrenching fossil interests and hurting long-term progress), while TSM has a lower chance of causing more fundamental change (though at the potential expense of increasing polarization and jeopardizing incremental progress). So tell me, how are you going to get an unbiased, data-driven estimate of this key parameter that will determine the outcome of your model? I don’t think it’s possible, so don’t want to go down that rabbit hole. 

Recommendation of Sunrise Movement Education Fund (TSM): Understanding how donations to organizations lead to policy change is an exercise in fundamental uncertainty, and is going to involve tough judgement calls. I understand that people could make a different judgement call on the tradeoffs with TSM and come to a different conclusion. To be honest, we’ll know a lot more over the next couple of years, as now is the time for TSM to flex its muscles and get climate on the agenda of the Biden administration (and democratic congress.) But for now, we stand by our research and think it’s a good bet. You can read our justification on the site. 

A couple of specific points: it’s true that TSM’s budget has grown massively over the last few years (as has CATF’s for that matter), but I think that’s a poor proxy for neglectedness. I think that there is very little effective climate activism happening out there, and there’s huge room for effective growth. 

I’m really not compelled by the “uncertainty about the sign of impact” argument, though i don’t really have a way to argue against it quantitatively since it’s theoretically possible. I would just say that this argument is lobbed at a lot of organizations, since people have different theories of political change. For instance, above I linked to an article making a similar argument about the 45Q tax credit, which is one of CATF’s big claimed accomplishments. It’s messy. 

Burn Recommendation: I really think that much of the criticism is off the mark here. Berkouer and Dean (2020) focuses a lot of their analysis on credit and demand curves and other fancy economics because that’s how economists get papers published, but underpinning the paper is a strong RCT that convincingly estimates the effect of purchasing a BURN stove on fuel use. Yes, it would be nice if the sample size used for long-term follow-up was larger. And yes, this is just one study but it’s important to realize that it’s a carbon offset certification (which has a number of validation criteria) plus an RCT, which is rare and gives multiple layers of certainty. Given the difficulty of many carbon offsets, I think this is a unique level of rigor that justifies our recommendation of BURN.

The worry that purchasing offsets will not actually lead to more stoves getting distributed is more valid, as this is very hard to verify. But I’m fundamentally willing to believe that if a company like BURN gets more revenue from every stove they sell, they will sell more stoves. In other words, I think the supply curve slopes up, like it usually does. 

Climeworks: 

This one is a little tougher. Like Alex said, we did not take cost into account when recommending offsets, because we were just looking for any offsets that we felt offered near-certainty. And Climeworks really does offer unparalleled certainty and permanence. But yes, Climeworks is expensive (and we are up front about that on the site). In order for it to be worth it, you have to believe that direct air capture and storage of CO2 is going to be an important part of the climate solution in the future. I don’t find those Metaculus numbers Alex listed too relevant, since you are betting on the technology, not the company. But I can see how reasonable people could disagree here. 

Hello everyone. Well, this forum has blown up, and we (GG) have taken some punches. I want to list a few take-aways on my end:

1. One thing we’re hearing loud and clear is that there is a lot of worry among this group that having  recommendations in categories that are not the most cost-effective will do more harm than good. I think this is worth considering, though I don't totally agree. What I do agree with is that our site could be designed to lead people to the most cost-effective recommendations, and make deviations from this ideal more obvious. Based on this feedback, we’ve made some changes already to the site, changing ordering and adding text to be clear that we believe policy is the most effective donation category. We would like to make deeper changes in the future.
2. One argument in this thread that particularly resonated with me is that there would really be a lot of value for conducting some more rigorous cost-benefit analysis for the offset recommendations. While we still believe at this moment that our offset recommendations are solid, I think there is value in performing more explicit cost-effectiveness analysis and using this to re-evaluate our choices. This is something we intend to do in the near term. 
3. There’s clearly a lot of disagreement over activism and our recommendation of the Sunrise Movement Education Fund (TSM) in particular. I’m still on the side of defending this recommendation, but hear and respect the arguments put forth and believe they deserve consideration. At the very least, we need to re-work our materials from this recommendation to lay out our assumptions and arguments better. I’ll write briefly more about activism and TSM a bit below.
4. Do you want to help? We’re currently at a place of limited funding, so we are not actively conducting research at the moment. That makes it hard to do all the improvements we’d like (and have promised above). Our plan was to spend the next couple of months fundraising before turning back to research, but this thread is making us reconsider that a bit. We’d be interested in taking on a volunteer or short term contract from the EA community to help put some of the legwork in shoring up our existing research (and looking at a couple of new things.) Interested? Have some experience in climate issues and thinking through cost-effectiveness in an EA framework? Reach out at givinggreen@idinsight.org

One thing that I’d like to make clear: our mission at Giving Green is to create the most social impact we can through our recommendations. This, notably, does not necessarily mean that we just find the most cost-effective charity and recommend it solely. I truly believe that by offering ‘best in class’ recommendations in different categories, we can reach a wider audience and increase the pie of money that we can influence. That’s why we do offsets. That is (partially) why we felt it important to search for donation options outside of the narrow mechanism of action advocated by Founder’s Pledge (“(i) advocates (ii) focused on accelerating (iii) neglected yet critical decarbonisation and carbon removal technologies” in the US). While we find FP’s arguments clear and compelling, I don’t share the confidence that this is the mechanism of action with the highest expected value of donations (more later on this). This lack of confidence plus the ability to widen the pool of donors we influence is why we think there is a lot of value in exploring other donation categories. I do understand the concern about dilution from the most cost-effective places, but believe this can be mitigated through clear (better than now) design and information on the website. 

Now, just a little bit more on the meat of the disagreement, which is the TSM recommendation. If I understand Johannes’ argument, he agrees with the importance of activism for making policy, both for putting electoral pressure on legislators as well as agenda-setting for current legislators. But, if I were to summarize, there are two main arguments against activism: timing, neglectedness, and one more argument against TSM in particular: strategy. 

First timing: Johannes declares “Biden has declared climate as one of his top four priorities,” as an argument that activist energy is no longer important in the current situation. First, I think it’s pretty clear the TSM can take huge credit for this being the case. They flexed their political muscles in the last election, won a seat at the Bernie-Biden task force, heavily influenced Biden’s climate strategy, and succeeded in putting it at the top of the agenda. While I understand the argument that this victory is now in place, I don’t think we should take this climate priority  as a given and assume that it will stay in place without further activist pressure. Yes Biden has taken some executive actions on climate already, but there’s no concerted push (as far as I can tell yet) for concerted legislation. At one point Johannes asked what success looks like for TSM. My answer: It’s ensuring climate policy is a priority (in executive and regulatory action, as well as legislation), and indeed shifting the Overton window of climate policy. (Agree with Johannes that the “Green New Deal” is not a realistic piece of legislation.) And for that you need continued pressure.

Second, Neglectedness: Ok, we hear you that some of those numbers in our report on activism spending are out of date. Sorry. The late 2020 numbers from the ClimateWorks Foundation helps, but it appears that the quoted category of “Public engagement” spans a lot more than policy-focused activism, so I’m not sure this is so helpful either. We should probably do some work to get some better numbers, but overall I’m not so convinced that the amount of money spent tells us all that much about the marginal benefit of the extra dollar. For TSM in particular, their budget really ballooned in 2020 (financial reports aren’t out but we heard almost $10 million), so that’s a reason to give some pause. That being said, I don’t see a compelling case for diminishing returns at this level of funding, especially since activism relies on sheer numbers to be effective. But yes, I hear this argument and I think it’s something we should consider more closely. 

Finally, strategy: A lot of the previous arguments have revolved around TSM potentially having a negative effect due to its polarization of the climate policy. I really think strategy (ie polarization vs compromise) is a deeply difficult issue that is the subject of many debates within US politics. It’s important to realize that this is a feature, not a bug. TSM has chosen to take a “radical” position and linked with other progressive priorities as a way of building a strong and cohesive political movement. It’s a strategy that has historical precedent, and has borne dividends at numerous other times in US History (civil rights movement, tea party). Does that mean it will work this time? Unclear. Is it risky? Sure. But to argue that you need a bipartisan strategy to influence policy in DC I believe ignores political realities. I agree that sometimes the solutions put forth by TSM (no CCS, etc.) are not ideal, but again this is part of the strategy to build a fired-up coalition. Like Johannes said, Sunrise are not going to be the ones at the table hammering out policy anyway. It’s just their job to get people to the table, and put power in the hands of the climate negotiators. 

Our recommendation of TSM also stems on our philosophy of supporting multiple theories of change. There are lots of different ways that political change happens, and I think that the best way to enact the desired change is to accept this, be humble about deciding ex-ante which theory is right, and support multiple avenues. 

All of this doesn’t really address Johannes’ main concern, which is that one needs to make the case not just for TSM to be “Good”, but to really be better than CATF at the margin. Based on our approach of providing recommendations in multiple categories and subscribing to multiple theories of change, I don’t think we need to show perfectly that TSM is better or equal to CATF. But we should be able to provide a compelling argument that impact is in the same ballpark. Johannes thinks it is not. I think it is. But also I think we need to do a better job of crafting this argument in our documents. That’s something we are going to work on. 

Finally, one more thing. I think that there is a little bit of risk as an EA community of over-committing to a single method of action (“(i) advocates (ii) focused on accelerating (iii) neglected yet critical decarbonisation and carbon removal technologies” in the US) and very small set of organizations dedicated to this method. Like I said, I find FP’s arguments compelling and think their central recommendation of CATF is very solid. But I would be careful about overconfidence here. In our research, we interviewed 50+ experts from various sectors of the climate space. At some point in the conversation we always asked “If you could allocate money in the most cost-effective matter to fight climate change, what would you do?” we got a lot of different answers, but notably no one said CATF unprompted.  We usually followed up and asked about CATF directly. When prompted, some people said “Oh yeah, they are great.” But others didn’t agree, and pointed out various issues with their approach or influence. I know this is not a scientific approach and don’t want to put too much weight on it, but I do just think it’s important for EAs as a community to approach this space with humility. 

This is a really great discussion piece and a very mature response from Giving Green (GG) to it. I would mostly second jackva’s comments, and will just raise a few additions points. 

There seems to be a misapprehension on the core criticism. The fundamental criticism of this article is not just that GG don’t do things quantitatively, but that they have completely neglected the “cost” side of cost-benefit analysis. The qualitative metrics don’t attempt to account for either the actual scale of money needed to do anything, nor the potential negatives of the actions. It appears designed to convince me that the charities accomplish anything at all, rather than that they do good things efficiently. 

Minor disagreements with the article
(Flagged to avoid the impression of consensus here rather than to divert the discussion onto these topics)

I would challenge the article’s assertion that CATF has no significant downsides. Quite apart from CCS debates, the new distributed nuclear faculties it proposes have elevated risk of enabling nuclear terrorism, which (besides being bad itself) can trigger further backlash against established nuclear generation. There are fundamental safety reasons why nuclear technology develops so slowly now, and why it isn't widely distributed. There are fundamental geology reasons why CCS at high flow rates is hard, and the trend of attractive-looking test cases that are ultimately distracting failures is historically real. 

I'm also confused by the article’s criticism of BURN, which seems to be a valid company that sells carbon offsets. It clearly has social co-benefits from pollution reduction, and it's not claiming anything other than high-confidence emissions reductions. The write-up about BURN is worded misleadingly but not conceptually flawed. 

Disagreement with the response and additional problems

In terms of analytic models, I agree that GHG emission changes are hard to establish with exactitude, but not obviously harder than the social benefits of any other intervention. In many cases I would expect the error bars in GG’s analytic evaluations to be smaller than So Give’s, and have a fairly uncontroversial choice of meaningful unit (e.g. tCO2-equivalent/$) unlike in social problems. Given that several options are pre-packaged as carbon offsets for a particular price, GG really just need  an estimate of the probability that the emissions will really be trapped/avoided for some lifetime. 

Ironically, the large range of things that are fundamentally difficult to include quantitatively are lumped into a single category: “co-benefits”. I don’t know who this is for. If I was donating from a pot of money that cared about development per se, I would go to Givewell or So Give to work out how. If I care about community buy-in (a really important aspect in the success of many projects), I need to know how those co-benefits are distributed, not just that someone somewhere benefits, and this should really be a part of “Causality”. If I care about biodiversity or literally any other green metric than global warming, I would be consistently disappointed by how little was written here. 

Finally, I struggle with way this entire discussion revolves around US policy change. I suspect the amounts of money spent on lobbying in the USA is hugely more than in most countries, but I don't see any consideration of neglectedness at the country level. Your research priorities document claims: “We focused on US policy because the US is the world’s second-largest emitter, it has outsized global influence, and because Giving Green’s staff are most familiar with the US policy systems.” The first two are not sufficient to demonstrate it's optimal (it's not even the first choice!), and the third is a problem with GG rather than the basis for a conclusion. Have you looked at state-level interventions? The whole world is even bigger than the US (and China), so why not look at global movements? Can you not either diversify your staff or expand their sphere of knowledge? 

Conclusions
The amount of opinions expressed here should be interpreted in three ways: firstly that a lot of people are really unhappy with the current GG methodology, secondly that they are willing to offer free advice and assistance, and thirdly that what GG are trying to do is really valuable, hence why it’s so important to get it right. 

Thank you to everyone participating for the thorough discussion and raising the issue. I'm Henri Thunberg, the sole FTE of geeffektivt.se, the Swedish site picking up Giving Green's research that was mentioned early on in Alex's post. I wanted to elaborate on our reasoning to include Giving Green research. Nearly all of the decisions below were taken by me, and do not reflect the opinions of colleagues, volunteers, or other supporters.

A major data point for us to include climate as a cause area on our site was the fact that climate constituted 32% of the money raised by effektiv-spenden.org (a German regranting organization) in 2019. This spoke to our intuition that there are lots of inefficient solutions within climate, and that people are asking for promising organisations to donate to. We were particularly interested in bringing non-EA donations to the site, and thought climate would be an excellent way to do so in Sweden. We saw an opportunity to do so because of the ongoing debate around carbon offsets/personal footprint creating awareness of the risk for relatively bad solutions in a much more widespread way than for global health and animal welfare.

I was considering referring to Founders Pledge's research rather than Giving Green. The reason I didn't in the end was to some extent a worry that some of our users who are not familiar with FP might have a hard time understanding why we're using the research of such an organization in particular when recommending climate charities.

I would like to thank Daniel Stein from Giving Green for making time to talk to me in December when we were launching the climate section of our site. Personally, I root for their mission and, like many others, I have been impressed with Giving Green's work in such a brief time, and would very much like to see them grow. Partly to have more time for researching their recommendations, but also to reach a wider audience. I think a way that our site can contribute to making that happen is to show that there is a demand for this kind of research, and to see what level of impact GG would have through us.

Notes on BURN & the Sunrise Movement

Regarding the Sunrise Movement, we saw at least two reasons to be doubtful; the evidence seemed tenuous, and there were concerns about (local) opposition to nuclear energy and CCS.  In the end that was the only charity out of the Giving Green recommendations that we chose to not put on our website. At the time we saw it more as it being "put on hold" than a definite rejection of TSM, but it seems like the critique in this forum post will further decrease the chances of us recommending them.

As I was a bit concerned about the general critique against cook stoves and relying on a single RCT for BURN, I have been in contact with experts from Stockholm Environmental Institute to get further external input on the evidence. Their response was initially positive regarding BURN, to the point that we have not excluded that recommendation. That communication with SEI is still ongoing, and hopefully something I can get their permission both to relay to Giving Green and post in this thread. We think many of our donors might appreciate the economic and health benefits that come with BURN, as our typical user chooses global health as the preferred cause area.

Our donation data so far within climate

After around one month with the Giving Green recommendations on our site, we stand at around €1,363 in climate donations out of our €38k total (excluding Facebook fundraisers). At this point, it should be stated that global health has been on our website as a cause for about twice as long (since early December 2020) compared to animal welfare (~€970 raised) and climate. This is especially skewed since that extra time was during giving season/launch. 

Out of the 36 donations to climate as a cause area, 58% of the money (16/36 donations) chose the option "Let us choose within climate" rather than a specific charity. I expect the climate donations that we dispose of freely to go to Clean Air Task Force. Furthermore, those who chose a specific charity went mostly for CATF with 17.5% (11 donations). A total of  25% went to BURN, Climeworks and Tradewater through three donations each. Unfortunately, our systems are not yet well prepared to answer any question on the reasoning of our donors that made Clean Air Task Force the prevailing choice.

Reflection moving forward

Both before and after this forum post I have had some thoughts on how we could include climate on our site in a way that is in line with what we want to achieve.

• It seems a major concern of this original post is putting Giving Green research on equal footing with GiveWell. We will add a text highlighting how much work went into the GiveWell research. We will describe Giving Green as a new and promising organization starting to do similar work within climate, while also mentioning their strategy to guide a wide audience with particular preferences in addition to cost-effectiveness.
• We will include a text about the importance of choosing cause area wisely somewhere close to the descriptions of GiveWell, ACE, and Giving Green.
• We will keep having Clean Air Task Force as the first and thus most visible option on the site
• We have now made the estimated cost-effectiveness per CO2e more visible to users to underline that there is a difference.
  • As far as I understand we're currently lacking such number estimates for BURN and Trade water, but from Daniel's comment above it seems like Giving Green might aim to get such estimates in the future.
  • This could possibly be emphasized further through some kind of "badge" in line with "Most cost-effective", in addition to the text we already have, although I suspect many unfortunately won't read that far. I appreciate the language used by Giving Green to highlight the differences between their recommendations, and those might be what we go for.

I would appreciate further input on how we, especially with regard to climate, could act in a way that is intellectually honest, minimizes EA reputational risks and maximizes the good we do through raised donations.

As Giving Green is still recommending donations to TSM in spite of what seems to be the majority opinion here, I'd like to highlight a recent letter to the White House cosigned by TSM (among dozens of other groups). The letter argues that the United States should be less "antagonistic" towards China in order to focus on cooperating on climate change.

In reality, the United States and China have already agreed to cooperate on climate change. So TSM et al are not proposing any obvious change in US-China climate policy. Apparently they want us to be more generally friendly toward China in other domains, so that the already-agreed-to climate cooperation can run more smoothly.

The first problem with this is that it's not clear that US-China cooperation on climate change can achieve much anyway. The idea that America should cooperate with China on climate change is a trite line that gets repeated constantly as a superficial aspiration but to me seems rather deficient in policy substance. Exactly how this cooperation on climate change is supposed to work is generally a mystery if you try to think beyond vague outlines. This letter states that the US and China can cooperate because they have 'complementary strengths', but this isn't even really true. The letter says "For example, the U.S. is the world leader in clean technology research and controls immense financial resources; China is the world leader in industrial capacity across a number of clean energy industries and is a major source of infrastructure financing across the Global South" but this is almost the same two strengths stated in slightly different ways. Clearly, both are financiers. China does have serious clean tech research and the US does have serious clean tech industry; maybe there is a comparative advantage in American research and Chinese manufacturing, but in practice you cannot separate green research and green manufacturing very easily (most of the recent green tech progress is innovations and scale arising from manufacturing), and there aren't severe trade barriers stopping American green technology ideas and Chinese manufacturing products from crossing the Pacific anyway.

No doubt there is room for some reforms of trade, travel and immigration to improve green technology transfer between the US and China. But in broad strokes, both the US and China can provide both financing and clean technology, this is classic economic competition. It is at least as likely that competition between the United States and China will lead both sides to put more effort into financing clean infrastructure and exporting clean technology. After all, China's motivation for infrastructure projects has been partly geopolitical, and there have been many calls in the US for financing similar infrastructure projects around the world in order to compete with China.

I am not alone in suggesting this. Numerous foreign policy experts have cut through the trite assumption echoed by that letter and shown how climate progress fits equally or better into a framework of competition with China.

Competition With China Can Save the Planet | Foreign Affairs

Why the United States should compete with China on global clean energy finance (brookings.edu)

Want to Compete with China? Deliver on Climate Security for the Indo-Pacific - Just Security

Productive Competition: A Framework for U.S.-China Engagement on Climate Change | Center for Strategic and International Studies (csis.org)

The second problem with TSM et al's idea that America should generally be more friendly with China is that it (obviously) has implications beyond climate policy. It is yet another example of TSM attempting to influence broader political issues besides environmental policy, an activity which can be either good or bad but definitely adds to the complexity and undermines the robustness of Giving Green's recommendation.

While TSM does not say so explicitly, the apparent subtext is that the United States should exercise little or no serious policy response to China's infliction of mass suffering through concentration camps in Xinjiang and its treaty-violating destruction of political rights in Hong Kong. Their only statement on human rights is that the United States should work together with China to support international best practices on human rights... this is a bizarre thing to say considering that China is one of the biggest current violators of international best practices on human rights. It can only suggest that either the letter signatories are ignorant of severe systematic human rights violations in China or they believe that we should turn a blind eye on them in order to focus on cooperating on other issues (almost certainly the latter).

The letter also has the subtext that the United States should exert less effort in deterring a Chinese invasion of Taiwan and should be more reluctant to defend Taiwan in the event that China does invade that island nation, that the United States should tolerate China's allegedly unfair trade practices (I admit that I agree that the US should be more tolerant here, but some climate donors may disagree), and that the United States should tolerate China's efforts to change international institutions and international law. (I delve into the complexity and probable harmfulness of China's international political aspirations in this essay.)

In my estimation this letter is probably net harmful, and I would like to see anyone affiliated with EA exercise extreme caution before recommending donations to an organization which seems to implicitly discourage reasonable efforts to curb ongoing massive human rights violations.

Edit: here's another notable story. TSM cancelled an event in which they were planning to study protest tactics from Hong Kong, because sympathizers with the Chinese Communist Party were offended by the implication of legitimizing Hong Kong protestors. The mere fact that TSM is not holding events to study Hong Kong protest tactics is of course not a problem in itself, but backtracking and capitulating like this suggests that TSM suffers from moral rot and/or excessive influence by unsavory authoritarians.

Edit2: see Matt Yglesias' recent article suggesting that TSM is probably doing more harm than good. For completeness, here is a reply, which seems completely unconvincing, except the link to this article is something noteworthy to think about.

>I would be very excited to see research by Giving Green into whether their approach of recommending charities which are, by their own analysis, much less cost effective than the best options is indeed justified.

Several confusions I have:

• When did they say these were much less cost-effective? I thought they just failed to analyze cost effectiveness? (Which is also troubling, but different from what you are saying, so I'm confused)
• What do you mean by it being justified? It looks like you mean 'does well on a comparison of immediate impact', but, supposing these things are likely to be interpreted as recommendations about what is most cost-effective, this approach sounds close to outright dishonesty, which seems like it would still not be justified. (I'm not sure to what extent they are presenting them that way.)
• Do they explicitly say that this is their approach?

Thanks for sharing this. I wasn’t very familiar with Giving Green and you bring up interesting points. I would like to push back against two of your points: 1) that progressive groups are the ones making climate change partisan, and 2) that searching for consensus is the best way to find legislative success in our current political climate. You say that "making climate change a partisan issue might look promising in the short-term given the current Democratic trifecta, though the wafer-thin majority and existence of the filibuster somewhat dampens the case even there, but in even the medium term there is an obvious and potentially very large downside to such an approach."

Climate change is already a partisan issue. I’d argue that it's partisan mostly not because of what progressive climate activists are doing, but rather because of right wing climate denialism. In my opinion, progressive groups dialing it down wouldn’t make the Republicans any less obstructionist, but rather further defang the left and create even less of a chance for change. Let's imagine several scenarios:

Scenario 1: Republicans are obstructionist, most/all Democrats push for compromise with Republicans, orgs like CATF push for bipartisan initiatives, orgs like Sunrise don't do much. Likely outcomes: 

1. Republicans make minor concessions and mildly more progressive climate legislation passes, OR
2. Republicans continue to be just as obstructionist as they've been for the past 15 years and nothing passes (unless the filibuster is eliminated).

Scenario 2: Republicans are obstructionist, some Democrats push for compromise, while others push for more radical change in conjunction with orgs like Sunrise. Likely outcomes: 

1. The issue becomes even more partisan and divided and nothing changes OR
2. Republicans and moderate democrats bow to strong grassroots pressure and strong climate legislation is passed.

This framing would suggest that strong progressive climate action would offer both higher risk and higher potential reward, which seems accurate to me.

My opinion is that it’s going to take a lot for progressive climate legislation to be passed, and I think if we keep saying “the Republicans are effectively controlling the narrative re climate change and that will never change, we have to push gently so as to not ruffle feathers,” we’re only going to get tiny amounts of change (or none at all). Climate change seems like an issue where we can’t afford to wait. Furthermore, narratives aren’t static; they can change! Think of cases such as the civil rights movement in the ‘60s: changing the narrative around civil rights and achieving legislative success came not from finding consensus with recalcitrant segregationists but by an aggressive progressive movement willing to make noise. Of course, the analogy you choose makes a big difference. Feel free to share an analogy that would point to the opposite conclusion, but I’m having trouble thinking of one. 

Thanks for reading, and I’m very eager to hear any rebuttals that folks have. 

I appreciate you writing up these comments! There are some great suggestions here as well as things I disagree with. As the author of the "extremely positive" post let me share some thoughts. (I'm by no means an expert on this so feel free to tell me I'm wrong.)

1. Quantitative cost-effectiveness analysis

Summary of my view: I'm pretty torn on this one but think we may not want to require a quantitative CEA on charities working on policy change (although definitely encourage the GG team to try this exercise).

On one hand I think it's great to at least attempt it to develop a better understanding of one's causal model as well as sources of uncertainty, and getting a ballpark estimate if possible (though sometimes the range is too wide to be useful). On the other hand requiring quantitative cost-effectiveness estimates can restrict the type of charities one can evaluate. I took a brief look at Founders' Pledge's model on the Clean Air Task Force, which seems to be a combination of 1) their track record, 2) their plan, 3) subjective judgements. While the model seems reasonable (I haven't taken a deep enough look to tell how much I agree) I do think requiring such a model would preclude evaluating orgs like the Sunrise Movement -- or, if we take your concerns about them seriously (which I'll address below) let's just say orgs like that, of which there are many in the climate space: those with a more complex theory of change than say CATF, and any model would involve inputs that are mostly extremely subjective (compared to the CATF one) which makes it less meaningful. Perhaps you would say these orgs are precisely the ones not worth recommending -- on this I agree with Giving Green that we should hedge our bets among different theories of change and hence look at different types of orgs (even though as I'll elaborate later I agree with having a stronger recommendation for CATF, I think potentially recommending orgs more similar to TSM is valuable).

So I think it is definitely good to attempt a quantitative CEA and I highly encourage the GG team to do so, even for an org like TSM. (I would have liked to engage with Founders' Pledges' models more but didn't end up doing it -- that would be a nice exercise.) But I'm unsure about requiring that in a recommendation especially when you work in a space with so much uncertainty. (I was trying to look up other EA charity recommenders and saw that Animal Charity Evaluators also don't seem to have quantitative CEA for any/all their top charities -- I haven't checked all but here's an example without. Not saying this is a sufficient argument though.)

I have to say I'm pretty uncertain about how much to use quantitative CEA and I am happy to be convinced that I'm wrong.

I do agree Giving Green should communicate with less confidence in their recommendations as say GiveWell, which explicitly recommends charities that are amenable to be evaluated with higher quality evidence (e.g. RCTs) and hence have lower uncertainty.

2. Offsets

1) Offsets vs policy change

My read is that GG recommends offsets because they see a huge market especially among companies that want to purchase offsets, and it's hard to convince them to instead donate the money to the maximally impactful thing. However, I agree that they should communicate this more clearly: that for more "flexible" donors they strongly recommend policy change over offsets.

2) Cost-effectiveness of offsets

I agree it would be good to come up with cost-effectiveness estimates for offsets even though they will also be pretty uncertain (probably something between the uncertainty of GiveWell current top charities and climate change orgs working on policy change). In addition to telling people to buy offsets with real additionality, it's probably also good to put a proper price tag on things especially if they differ a lot.

3. The Sunrise Movement (TSM)

Summary of my view: I'm more positive than the author on the impact they achieved (and perhaps their impact potential), and less negative on the potential for negative impact, although I'm really unsure about it as I'm far from an expert. I do agree that GG should recommend CATF more highly than TSM.

Impact they achieved: The fact that Biden and some other Democrats adopted climate change plans similar to what's proposed by TSM (see the "Policy consensus and promotion" section of GG's page on TSM) is some evidence of their influence, although of course we can't be sure. (This article argues it was valuable for groups on the left to have a more unified framework for addressing climate change, and it seems like TSM is one of the multiple groups that had an influence in the process.)

Potential for negative impact:

• In terms of actual policies: I mostly trust Biden and overall the Democratic members of Congress (rather than the most "progressive" ones) to go for policies that will be less polarizing than the most radical proposals, and I'm not too worried about TSM pressuring them into doing things they don't think are good ideas.
• In terms of public opinions: Will TSM make climate change a more polarizing issue than it already was? On one hand we do see the majority of Americans being concerned about climate change; on the other hand the extreme level of polarization (even in the absence of the TSM) already shape people's view on many things. so I'm not sure.
• (I think my arguments are pretty weak here though because I don't understand the US political system very well.)

Why GG should recommend CATF more highly: 

• Outside view perspective: even if the expected values of the two orgs look the same we should account for the fact that CATF has much more of a track record.
• Inside view perspective: under the Biden administration it seems like CATF has a very clear vision of what they can do (see here); for TSM it's less clear -- even if they achieved some impact before the election in getting candidates to take climate change more seriously and adopt a more unified platform, it's less clear how they will influence policy now. If I were choosing between the two at this moment it's definitely CATF.
• (Right now they sort of do this:  labeling CATF as "good bet" and TSM "shows promise", although we probably want something more clear than those labels, and apparently the team did not mean to recommend CATF more highly.)

This is a bit of a random  point on offsets, and one where I agree more with Giving Green than some of the commenters, but when we include offsets in the portfolio (which I lean against but leaving this aside), I don't think it necessarily makes sense to focus on cost-effectiveness.

Most actors use offsets to compensate a particular amount of emissions and will not change the amount of offsetting based on cost. Consumer surplus of people rich enough to buy offsets is not necessarily very morally relevant (if at all).

So, there are other considerations that might be more important. In my mind, these are two:
1) How large are the benefits that are co-benefits beyond the carbon saved?
2) How likely is it that this offset recommendation will lead to more effective behavior in the future (or, even better, that the page in which the offset is presented directly leads to a better action in the present), e.g. to donations to advocacy charities? [Edit: I actually believe this >70% of the importance, because the gain from shifting people to effective charity is much more significant given the impact of direct action (offsets) will always be low which then also holds for the co-benefits]

This is why I think Climeworks is the best offset in the Giving Green set. 

Yes, it is obviously very expensive, but rich people can afford it. But it has relatively clear co-benefits (driving down of cost curve) and -- crucially -- it embeds with the reader the lesson that driving down technology cost is an important lever to make progress for climate. 

One could then also combine it with a focus on Carbon180, saying something like "Hey, if you REALLY REALLY want to be certain you can buy those Climeworks offsets, but here is an idea: Why don't you give the same amount to Carbon180 instead, a charity that not only focuses on direct air capture, but rather that is focused on policy advocacy on accelerating all carbon removal technologies. From all we know, this will be much more cost-effective and more robust  because this will also be good if we find in  5 years that direct air capture will never be cheap."

Given how expensive Climeworks is I think even those of us more skeptical of the enormous cost-effectiveness  of advocacy charity would agree that this statement is true (you only have to believe that Carbon180 saves carbon for less than 1000 USD/t, which is an incredibly low bar for an advocacy charity with proven track record of policy influence such as Carbon180).

 

Whilst I do agree with a good amounts of the point in this critique, such as the need for cost effectiveness, I also have some strong concerns about a few things said in both the general post, as well as some comments.

For context, I've been working with Extinction Rebellion UK (XR UK) full-time for almost two years, since just after they launched, as well as with the slightly newer Animal Rebellion.

To start with, some concerns from the original post:

Similarly, within the field of climate change, progressive climate activism hardly seems neglected.  

and

The case for donations to TSM being impactful on the margin feels thin; The Sunrise Movement has thousands of volunteers and is not obviously funding constrained.

Speaking from my experience at XR, I definitely do think that certain kinds of impactful climate activism are neglected. To give some anecdotal evidence to start, let's talk about XR.  XR was found to be the largest influencer on climate change according to research presented at COP25. Yet, I would say XR is extremely funding constrained currently, having just an income of £46,000 in December 2020, whilst still having thousands of volunteers across the UK.  Two key points I would like to make here are:
 

1. Just because a movement has thousands of volunteers, it does not mean it has a large and steady income stream. You seem to assume this about TSM however logically I don't think it carries any weight. I know for XR and I would wager for TSM too that 50%+ of all donations come not from individuals, but from grant-making bodies or individual philanthropists. My point here is that once this assumption falls, there is no justification for saying TSM is not impactful on the margins, or that TSM isn't funding constrained. I would actually argue the opposite; As TSM has thousands of engaged volunteers, if it had greater funding capacity, it could look to take on some volunteers into full-time staff positions and greatly increase the capacity and impact of TSM.

2. That not all progressive activism is equal. Something I believe that both you and jackva allude to (or directly say)  is that we can lump together a groups such as Friends of the Earth and WWF with TSM and Extinction Rebellion. I think there is a huge distinction between your traditional NGO (FoE and WWF) versus a movement whose priority is shifting public support, mobilising volunteers and using civil disobedience as a theory of change. 

On the second point, I think there is an abundance of traditional NGO climate campaigning - WWF, Greenpeace, FoE and so on. I would say the main theory of change they apply is advising policy and public education.  Whereas if you look at the number of groups who are trying to mobilise a large base of people to engage in non-violent direct action for the climate, I would say there is only two meaningful groups left in this regard: TSM and XR. This is a huge topic that I might make another post generally on the EA Forum about but for the time-being, I'm going to link to an article by someone from Open Phil discussing the necessity for an ecology of change that includes mass protest and civil disobedience as a key and neglected piece in recent times. In addition, here is a full report funded by Open Phil on the topic of funding social movement doing civil disobedience. In short, I think that it's not possible to equate the money given to other progressive "activist" groups and money given to TSM as being given for the same theory of change, as they are fundamentally different. So whilst climate NGOs are not neglected, social movements for the climate are. 

More worrying, TSM’s explicit strategy of attempting to polarise the debate rather than looking for consensus, seems like it could backfire extremely easily.

I think there is a misunderstanding here in what TSM's strategy around polarisation is. From my understanding of Momentum-Driven Organising, the methodology applied by TSM and XR,  that the explicit goal isn't to literally polarise the debate so it becomes more partisan. Rather, the goal is the move people on the spectrum of support from neutral or passive, to active supporters. This might be through taking actions that by consequence polarise the debate, but the explicit goal is never to actually push people further away and I think it's disingenuous to suggest that it is. As we've spoken about at XR, a good action is one that bring more people over to our active supporters side than we might push away, as the aim in our movement is always building people power and public support. While this may feel like a pedantic point to make, I think it's an important distinction.

Also I couldn't find the exact quote from yourself however I get the general gist from your post and comments that funding groups like TSM is sub-optimal relative to CATF due to the difficulty in qualitatively measuring the outcome of such a complex system. I worry this risk-aversion in our funding will constrain us to options that are limited to technological innovation and very discrete policy change (CATF basically) whilst excluding the more opaque, yet still valuable, systems of social movements and people-powered campaigns. 

I believe this has been a large problem throughout EA for years and I can't recall any EA groups giving money to social movements in the past 4-5 years (besides Open Phil giving to Ayni Institue in 2016) which seems ridiculous, given that we've just been talking about the huge impact that groups like TSM, XR, Fridays for Future or people like Greta have had on the climate movement. Generally it seems EA funders are too risk averse to fund social movements early on because they don't have enough quantifiable metrics to prove our impact or people just don't certain practices  (the latter was said to me in a grant application to ACE). Then 3-5 years down the line, we see comments like those by jackva above, saying that groups like TSM would have been a great bet 4 years ago. Whilst this is a more general point and off the topic of TSM specifically, it seems like we should reconcile this and start funding social movements earlier.
To close, the comment by jackva:

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.

I understand the desire to quantitatively measure impact, but from my experience working on impact measurement in climate projects and programs, I believe that much of this measurement is bullsh*t. I say this from the perspective of having really believed rigorous measurement was possible and would make climate decision-making better for a few years, until I realized most of it was smoke and mirrors (there are many reasons for this, including huge margins of error for carbon estimates, but also overambitious stated emissions reductions, poor accounting/reporting, and systemic problems like additionality and double counting). So I’m with Giving Green on this side. 

I do think they should make clearer that they believe policy change is the most important place to donate. The science is clear that most fossil fuel reserves need to stay in the ground. That is the most important way to stop climate change, not offsetting. Offsets are, as mentioned, susceptible to the same large margins of error that can make their measurement almost meaningless (e.g. people do RCTs of clean cookstoves but neglect to notice that people don’t use them, or they use them IN ADDITION to the indoor fires they used to use). Offsets also create the dangerous illusion that we can continue to burn fossil fuels, so long as we purchase offsets elsewhere. The offset markets are flawed in many ways; they are NOT airtight.

Because it is so hard to measure impact and cost of a marginal output in advocacy and activism, in my opinion Giving Green should recommend donating to a portfolio of promising policy change and activism organizations. Thus I think Giving Green should focus on doing a more extensive search for policy and activism orgs, select 10-20 promising ones, and potentially create a fund that splits donations between those orgs. They should also branch out beyond organizations that have a proven track record to those that are potentially very high impact but do not measure their impact or have shiny websites. I’m talking indigenous land defenders who are physically blocking pipelines. They are doing much to stop fossil fuel extraction on their traditional territory and are overlooked by traditional funders. They are changing policy debates (see the resistance to Keystone XL pipeline).

I know this might be against EA’s general frames of thinking but if we spend all our time trying to figure out how to measure impact in climate policy, we might miss the opportunity to really affect change within the 10-year window we have to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. Donating effectively will inherently have some risk of failure attached but we need to risk it because the climate emergency is that urgent and important.

The post mentions 

Giving Green agrees with the consensus EA view that the framing of “offsetting personal emissions” is unhelpful

To some degree such a consensus seems natural, though I believe the issues with the idea of offsetting do not automatically mean helping people in search specifically of effective (or thus maybe least ineffective) offsetting possibilities is by nature ineffective. 

I wonder: is the mentioned "consensus" detailed/made most obvious in any particular place(s) - blog, article, ... ?