EA - New 80,000 Hours Podcast on high-impact climate philanthropy by jackva

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: New 80,000 Hours Podcast on high-impact climate philanthropy, published by jackva on April 4, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.This is a linkpost for a new 80,000 hours episode focused on how to engage in climate from an effective altruist perspective.The podcast lives here, including a selection of highlights as well as a full transcript and lots of additional links. Thanks to 80,000hours’ new feature rolled out on April 1st you can even listen to it!My Twitter thread is here.Rob and I are having a pretty wide-ranging conversation, here are the things we cover which I find most interesting for different audiences:For EAs not usually engaged in climate:(1) How ideas like mission hedging apply in climate given the expected curvature of climate damage (and expected climate damage, though we do not discuss this)(2) How engaging in a crowded space like climate suggests that one should primarily think about improving overall societal response, rather than incrementally adding to it (vis-a-vis causes like AI safety where, at least until recently, EAs were the main funders / interested parties)(3) How technological change is fundamentally the result of societal decisions and sustained public support and, as such, can be affected through philanthropy and advocacy.For people thinking about climate more:(1) The importance of thinking about a portfolio that is robust and hedgy rather than reliant on best-case assumptions.(2) The problem with evaluating climate solutions based on their local-short term effects given that the most effective climate actions are often (usually?) those that have no impacts locally in the short-term.(3) The way in which many prominent responses – such as focusing on short-term targets, on lifestyle changes, only on popular solutions, and on threshold targets (“1.5C or everything failed”) – have unintended negative consequences.(4) How one might think about the importance of engaging in different regions.(5) Interaction of climate with other causes, both near-termist (air pollution, energy poverty) and longtermist (climate is more important when disruptive ability is more dispersed, e.g. in the case of bio-risk concerns).For people engaging with donors / being potential donors themselves:(1) The way in which philanthropically funded advocacy can make a large difference, as this is something many (tech) donors do not intuitively understand. We go through this in quite some detail with the example of geothermal.(2) The relative magnitudes of philanthropy, public funding etc. and how this should shape what to use climate philanthropy for, primarily.(3) A description of several FP Climate Fund grants as well as the ongoing research that underpins this work.Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.