EA - Longterm cost-effectiveness of Founders Pledge's Climate Change Fund by Vasco Grilo

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Longterm cost-effectiveness of Founders Pledge's Climate Change Fund, published by Vasco Grilo on September 14, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Summary This analysis estimates the cost-effectiveness of reducing existential risk via the Climate Change Fund (CCF) of Founders Pledge (FP) (see Methodology). The results were obtained with this Colab, and the key ones are summarised in the table below (for more, see Results and Discussion). Comments about how to interpret them are welcome. The cost-effectiveness bar for reducing existential risk (8 kt/$) is estimated to be 3 times as high as (an overestimate for?) the cost-effectiveness of CCF (2 kt/$) (see Discussion). This suggests the best interventions to fight climate change are not amongst the most effective ways of reducing existential risk. ResultMeanExistential risk due to climate change (bp)1.00Cumulative GHG emissions between 2020 and 2100 (Tt)3.76Existential risk reduction caused by removing GHG emissions (bp/Tt)0.273Cost-effectiveness of removing GHG emissions via CCF (t/$)2.34 kCost-effectiveness of CCF (bp/G$)0.640Cost-effectiveness bar for reducing existentiat risk (bp/G$)2.17Cost-effectiveness bar for removing GHG emissions (t/$)7.94 k Acknowledgements Thanks to Alexey Turchin, Anonymous, David Denkenberger, Johannes Ackva, Luke Kemp, and Nuño Sempere. Introduction Removing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions decreases heat-related deaths: Bressler 2021 estimated the 2020 mortality cost of carbon to be 2.2610^-4 life/t. However, most of the benefits of reducing GHG emissions respect the decrease in existential risk due to climate change. This analysis estimates the existential risk reduction caused by removing GHG emissions, and the cost-effectiveness of CCF, which is compared with an estimate for the cost-effectiveness bar for reducing existential risk. Nonetheless, it should be noted that, according to this comment from Johannes Ackva: The goal of the Climate [Change] Fund is to optimize spending that is not cause-neutral, to have as big as possible a positive impact given constraints, it is not intended or marketed as "the top bet on reducing existential risk" and we are careful to not crowd in resources that would otherwise go to areas we think of as higher marginal priority. I encourage the readers to check this comment from Matt Lerner, FP's research director, to better understand FP's mission: To be absolutely clear, FP's goal is to do the maximum possible amount of good, and to do so in a cause-neutral way. Methodology The (marginal) cost-effectiveness of CCF was estimated from the product between: The existential risk reduction caused by removing GHG emissions, which was estimated from the ratio between: The existential risk due to climate change. The cumulative GHG emissions between 2020 and 2100 assuming current climate policies. The cost-effectiveness of removing GHG emissions via CCF, which was estimated from: The reciprocal of the cost to remove GHG emissions via CCF. The assumption regarding the cumulative GHG emissions is consistent with the current Metaculus' cummunity prediction of 2.6 ºC for how much greater (in ˚C) will the average global temperature in 2100 be than the average global temperature in 1880. According to the Climate Action Tracker (CAT), current climate policies are predicted to result in a global warming between 2.5 ºC and 2.9 ºC (interval which contains 2.6 ºC). The modelling of the cumulative GHG emissions would ideally consider more scenarios. Existential risk due to climate change The existential risk due to climate change was modelled as a beta distribution with: Mean equal to 0.01 %, which was determined from the geometric mean between: The 0.1 % guessed by Toby Ord in The Precipice for the next 100 years (2021 to 2120). The upper bound of 0.01 % guessed by 80,000 ...