Volts podcast: Johannes Ackva on effective climate altruism

In this episode, Johannes Ackva of Founders Pledge discusses his
thinking on the most effective forms of climate philanthropy.


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transcript)


(Active
transcript)


Text transcript:


David Roberts


Say you’re a private individual (or a company, or a foundation)
who cares about climate change and has some money to spend on it.
What’s the best way to spend that money? How can you ensure the
largest possible impact?


Similar questions about maximizing philanthropic impact have led
to an entire field of study and practice known as “effective
altruism,” which seeks to apply logical and empirical rigor to
do-gooderism. But it is only very recently that effective
altruists have turned their attention to climate change.


One of the leading EA voices on climate is Johannes Ackva. He’s a
researcher at Founders Pledge, an organization through which
business owners and entrepreneurs donate a portion of their
earnings to charity. For years, Ackva has been thinking through
the puzzle of how best to channel climate philanthropy, given the
structure of the problem and the politics around it.


If you’re interested in what groups Founders Pledge has chosen
for its donations, you can find a list on the website, but I was
more interested in the thinking that led Ackva to those
recommendations. Given the enormous spatial and temporal scales
involved in climate change, the many social and political
complexities, the extensive and irreducible uncertainties, how
can a well-meaning donor have any confidence in their choices?


I found our conversation quite enlightening — a new lens through
which to view this familiar problem — it and I think you will
too.


Johannes Ackva, welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming.


Johannes Ackva:


Yeah, thank you, David. Thanks for having me. It's an honor and
pleasure to be here.


David Roberts:


Let's start a few steps back since I'm not entirely sure that the
Volts audience will be familiar with the effective altruism
movement, even though it gained quite a bit of press attention
recently. So to start with, just tell us briefly, what is
effective altruism and what is it trying to do?


Johannes Ackva: 


So effective altruism is really a social and intellectual
movement that tries to answer the question, “how can we do the
most good possible?” And, not only answer that question in a
theoretical way, but in a very practical way, actually trying to
do as much good as possible. 


There are two components to it. The first one that I would stress
is, of course: altruism, which is about trying to be really
serious about helping other people and other beings. So,
effective altruists usually take a global take, including all
humans, also all future humans, also all animals. So, having a
really expansive form of altruism. And many effective altruists
donate a large part of their income to the global poor or change
their careers. So this is the altruism piece of it. 


And then there's this effectiveness piece, which is like thinking
really hard and long, and trying to use as much evidence as
possible to think about “how can we have the most impact?”, the
most positive impact. And one thing about impact here that I
think is crucial, because I think it will come up throughout our
conversation, is that a lot of what I'm saying on climate is
motivated by this notion of counterfactual impact. Given what
everyone else is doing, what is the thing that is additional,
should be done next? So, not only trying to have impact, but
trying to have impact that otherwise would not happen in the
world. And I think that's really key to how we think about
climate.


David Roberts:


And this is the concept of additionality, doing something that
would not otherwise be done?


Johannes Ackva: 


Yeah, doing something that would not otherwise be done. Yes,
that's the concept of additionality.


David Roberts:


I won't claim any deep familiarity with the ins and outs of the
movement, but my impression over the last few years is that some
of the most prominent spokespeople for effective altruism are
relatively down on climate change as a target for philanthropic
giving. I think the idea is that they're trying to think about
all humans today and all humans that will ever be. They're
thinking about what might cause the extinction of the human race,
and they say climate is unlikely to cause extinction, whereas,
you know, a terrible pandemic or an asteroid or an AI that
becomes sentient and does a terminator on us are much greater
threats of extinction. 


So why, within the context of effective altruism, do you think
that climate change is a worthy target for people's giving and
attention?


Johannes Ackva: 


First, I would say you're broadly right there. And it’s funny,
because I was a climate person before I was an effective
altruist, before I encountered effective altruism. So, it was the
first instance of having to justify myself. Why am I working on
climate? Growing up in Germany this was something I never had to
justify. So I think that's broadly right, most effective
altruists do not focus on climate and I think the reason that
you’ve outlined as to why is broadly right. 


Climate is a really big threat, and I think effective altruists
acknowledge that there are very serious threats from extreme
climate change, so the view is not that climate isn't a serious
problem. I think effective altruists take it very seriously. But
seeing a broad set of problems of similar magnitude (like nuclear
war, advanced artificial intelligence that you mentioned, or bio
risk) where many of those issues receive far, far less attention
than climate change is the reason that many effective altruists
would not first go to climate.


David Roberts:


But you think they're wrong about that, that climate is a worthy
target of giving and philanthropy? What is the effective altruism
justification for focusing on climate?


Johannes Ackva: 


Yeah, okay, so I think the effective altruism justification for
caring about climate has two different aspects. One comes from
thinking about humans alive today, or humans alive in the near
future. So obviously, I think we know from the literature on
climate impacts, that vulnerable populations in the Global South
will suffer the most from climate change, and helping them can be
quite effective, also because solving climate change is related
to solving some other really big problems, in particular air
pollution and energy poverty. So, if you think about clean energy
abundance as one possible solution for climate change, that would
actually solve all of those issues.


David Roberts:


Right. So you're solving three problems in one when you solve
this problem?


Johannes Ackva: 


Yeah, that's the first piece. I think the second piece comes if
you think about global catastrophic risk or if you think about
the importance of geopolitical stability and good international
cooperation. If you think about how climate change can go wrong,
how climate change can cause migration, international attention,
etc. I think that's another set of reasons to care about climate
change, just making the world in general less fragile, more
resilient, and trying to reduce geopolitical pressure.


David Roberts:


Yeah, because they say climate is a “threat multiplier”, right?
That's the term that you use. So in a sense, by decreasing the
threat of climate, you are also decreasing all those other
risks. 


Johannes Ackva: 


To add one little bit of nuance here, I'm not saying to effective
altruists: “do more on climate, do less of these other things”. I
just want to be very clear about this. What I gave you is what I
see as the strongest case for caring about climate change, but it
is true that there are other risks of similar order of magnitude,
in terms of risk, that we're spending a 100th or less of the
attention on. So I think it's probably right to think about
climate not as the most neglected issue, globally speaking.


David Roberts:


So even you would say, from an effective altruism point of view:
while climate is worthy of attention, there are other risks
worthy of attention that are getting less attention than climate.
Is that what you’re saying?


Johannes Ackva: 


I think that's what I would say if we only think about the
importance and neglectedness of those problems. There is,
however, another dimension. And I think that's also really
important in making the case for climate. And that dimension is
tractability, or the ability to make additional progress, and I
think climate looks extraordinarily good on that dimension
compared to many of those other problems that I mentioned for a
couple of reasons.


David Roberts:


Tell us about that then. Tell us why, in terms of tractability
(meaning there's progress to be made), there's “low hanging
fruit” available, you might say. Why should we think that climate
philanthropy in particular can produce results?


Johannes Ackva: 


Yeah, great question. So I think there are essentially three
reasons why I would believe that to be true. The first one is
that attention to climate overall, like societal attention
including policy, economics, etc. is actually really high, and is
at an all time high. We're now spending about a trillion or so in
the global economy, and climate policy has been a really
important part of Biden's agenda, and has been really important
in Europe for a long time. So, there's a lot of attention to
climate, I think that's the first piece. 


The second piece is that a lot of that attention is not spent
optimally, in terms of the ultimate goal (or, what I see as the
ultimate goal) of acting on climate, which is reducing climate
damage as much as possible. And there are some very predictable
biases. For example, the US and Europe maybe represent around 15%
of future emissions, so effective climate action should always
think about global emissions, but there are lots of political
incentives to focus locally. There's lots of ideological issues,
there's lots of special interests, so a lot of the attention on
climate is not spent optimally. That's the second piece. And the
third piece comes if you think about climate philanthropy as a
whole and the role that climate philanthropy can play. If you
conservatively assume that you can only shift how the public
response is improved by something like a 10th of a percent, or
something like that, that can still be extraordinarily valuable.
So essentially, it’s about leveraging the attention on climate to
try and help steer the climate momentum that exists in a way
that’s more useful for global decarbonisation.


David Roberts:


Right. So you’ve sort of got the raw material there, you've got
the attention and the will to do something, and you think a
little bit of nudging in a better direction could have a big
positive effect.


Johannes Ackva: 


Yeah.


David Roberts: 


I want to focus in on one of the things you said, and this is a
quote from one of your papers: “the goal of high impact climate
philanthropy is not to maximize emission reductions, but to
minimize climate damage”. It might not be obvious to people what
the distinction is there, so explain that a little bit and
explain what those two different approaches would imply?


Johannes Ackva: 


Yeah, no, that's not obvious at all, and it wasn't obvious to me
for a long time. I only really fully grappled with this last year
when I wrote the paper. So, I guess the first intuition when
thinking about maximum impact and climate philanthropy would
really be: okay, we want to maximize emissions reductions. But,
there's something particular about the climate challenge that I
think makes this intuition wrong, and that’s the fact that
climate damage is highly nonlinear. So, if we think about a 3
degree world, this is much worse than twice as bad as a 1.5
degree world. Again, a 6 degree world is much worse than twice as
bad as a 3 degree world. If we think about it in terms of a
concept like the social cost of carbon, the social cost of carbon
at different levels of temperature is very different. It's much
more valuable to avoid an additional tonne of carbon in the 6
degree world than in the 1.5 degree world. And this is standard
climate science and I would say this is really one of the most
uncontroversial facts about climate. 


But the key thing here is that we actually “know” things that
must be true if we're in a 4 degree world compared to a 1 degree
world. For example, if we're in a 4 degree world, Zeke
Hausfather, the climate scientist, has said “we're not in a 4
degree world and renewables have succeeded beyond all
expectations.”


David Roberts:


Right.


Johannes Ackva: 


This means that in this 4 degree world, there are solutions or
hedges which can be extremely valuable. One of them would be, for
example, advanced nuclear, which to some degree is a hedge
against failure of renewables. It might not play a big role in
the best case world, right? Maybe we’re in the best case world
where renewables succeed beyond all expectations, but if not,
there's an extraordinary hedging value from those kinds of
solutions. Maximizing emission reductions will not lead you to
this conclusion, whereas minimizing climate damage  leads
you to other kinds of conclusions.


David Roberts:


Right. So if you're trying to maximize emission reductions, you
would just go for the cheapest, most obvious reductions available
now, which will generally be renewables or something like that.
But it sounds like you're describing something more like trying
to reduce risk rather than emissions.


Johannes Ackva: 


Yes.


David Roberts:


And risk rises nonlinearly, so you think philanthropy should be
hedging against failure, hedging against the failure of
mainstream approaches basically. Does that sound right?


Johannes Ackva: 


Alright, let me answer this in two parts. First, it's not really
about time. It's not really about spending now versus long term.
It's not about spending on renewables now for the cheapest
buckets, it’s more about thinking about what correlates with
different climate futures. So for example, if you think about one
thing that's often described as very cost effective: forestry,
avoiding deforestation. Having agreements between Europe and
Brazil to avoid deforestation, that’s very cost effective in the
best of worlds where international cooperation and the quality of
agreements is stronger than it actually is right now. If we're in
that kind of setting we're not going to have a lot of climate
damage. So, even though that might maximize emissions reduction
in expectation, it wouldn't minimize damage. So it's not about
the timing, but what correlates with different kinds of
scenarios. 


So, what I'm talking about is always counterfactual impact, and
what to do given what everyone else is doing. So I'm absolutely
not saying we shouldn't focus on renewables, or we shouldn't
focus on natural climate solutions. It's more that given we have
a large focus on this now, what should we do next? And then, my
argument would always be about the value of hedging against the
failure of mainstream solutions, because right now we're in a
situation where mainstream solutions get a lot of attention. We
can also see the success of that, right? Future emission
trajectories have gone down a lot because of the success of
renewables, more than I think most people appreciate. So there
have been really big successes, and if we think about how things
can go wrong (how “s**t can hit the fan”) it’s not because we
spent 1% less additional climate philanthropy attention on
renewables, it's because something goes wrong there or something
goes wrong with another solution. Let's say international climate
policy falls apart, which looks more realistic now than a couple
of months ago. If something like that happens, this is how we get
into those worst worlds, right? And so we want to hedge against
those worlds, we want to look at solutions that on the one hand
are robust to those worlds, and on the other hand provide
explicit hedges and protect against failures that are likely to
occur in those worlds.


David Roberts:


Right, right. And another big piece of this (and this is
something I've run into a lot of times when I talk to both
individuals who are thinking about what to do with their money,
but also foundations and people who have access to big pots of
money), is that unlike some altruistic endeavors you could
imagine – like buying mosquito nets – this is the cliché example
but mosquito nets for children in Africa – you can calculate
pretty firmly and clearly exactly how many lives you will save
per dollar spent. But when it comes to climate change, the
problem is so big and sprawling, it's so long term and it's so
unclear what will work and what won't, that this sheer wall of
uncertainty is daunting to people and often pushes them toward
those climate solutions that are more short term and tangible and
measurable. But you're counseling against that approach, so talk
a little bit about how climate philanthropists should think about
uncertainty, and what uncertainty means for their giving.


Johannes Ackva: 


Yeah, I think that's right. I think the worst thing you can do on
climate is try to avoid uncertainty. I sometimes say, “It's much
better to probably have a large impact than to certainly have a
low impact.” And there’s a tradeoff, if you optimize for
certainty there's this huge trade off to be made there. And the
reason is, as I think you alluded to, that climate is incredibly
complex, right? There are three or four intertwined systems. How
much will economies grow? How emissions-intensive will growth be?
How will the climate system react to this? How much damage will
it cause? So it's a situation of vast, vast uncertainty and not
only in the climate response, but also on the solutions side. I
mean, you've covered this a lot. If you think about the debates
about 100% renewables, if you think about the debates about how
far electrification will go, there are a lot of debates where
there's really large uncertainty. And those uncertainties will
not be resolved in a time frame that is action-relevant, they
will be resolved when it's too late… Right? 


David Roberts:


Right. 


Johannes Ackva: 


So you have to think of this uncertainty as a fact of the
situation. And we need to make decisions under this deep
uncertainty, where we don't know anything for sure. So I think
the way to deal with this is to think about, first of all, what
do we know? What can we conclude from this? And I think there are
two or three key facts that guide a lot of my thinking and my
grantmaking. If you think about one thing that I mentioned
before, the nonlinear climate damage, higher failure at higher
warming levels is disproportionately worse. So I think that's
really important. The other piece is that there's already a fair
amount of attention on some of the mainstream solutions. And then
the third piece is, what do we know about those uncertainties and
how they might resolve? 


So, if we think about electrification or the success of
renewables etc., if all of those things resolve positively (and
positively here means “okay, they're resolving in a way that has
minimal climate damage”), that's pretty good. In those cases,
additional climate philanthropy will not be very valuable. If
those solutions resolve negatively, those are the worlds that
contain the most risk. So let's say a world with lots of growth
in emerging economies, breakdown of international cooperation,
and some limitations to getting renewables over 50%. These are
the worlds where by far the most risk is, even if those worlds
are not very probable, and I would not say those worlds are the
majority of my probability mass, but they're the majority of the
worlds that I care about because there's so much damage in them.
So that's where this comes from, hedging against the worst case
and thinking about the structure of how different uncertainties
relate to each other. I can talk a bit more about that as well.


David Roberts:


One of the points you make that I think is really good and worth
emphasizing is that even if we can't measure, in an absolute
sense, what effect particular solutions or particular giving
strategies might have, we can draw conclusions about their
relative impact. One set of solutions versus another. And those
conclusions are what you need to be able to act, right? A
prioritization of solutions, not necessarily final answers about
what they'll do, but just which are more likely to have positive
effects. 


Johannes Ackva: 


That's exactly right. Yeah.


David Roberts:


I want to get back to one of those uncertainties. But first, I
want to talk about (to get a little tangible here), one of the
things you pointed out. There are some great charts in your
reports about, you know, how you say that climate philanthropy is
on the rise and there's been quite a bit of money flooding into
this space in recent years, but there are two key imbalances in
where money is currently being spent. One of those is that most
of the money is going to the US and the EU, even though as you
say they are together responsible for maybe 15% of future
emissions, and the other is that most money is going to clean
electricity and natural solutions, i.e. trees and reforestation
and the like. And you know, as you say, it's not that those
things are bad. But, there are spaces being neglected, and this
whole notion of neglectedness plays a huge role in all the
effective altruism stuff I've read. So, tell us a little bit
about why you think those imbalances are bad, and what spaces
–important spaces in particular– you think are most neglected
these days?


Johannes Ackva: 


Yeah, just to be clear, I think the case that I want to make
about neglectedness is not that we're overspending on renewables
and trees. I think that the case is much more that we're
underspending on a lot of other sectors. If we think about where
the next dollar should go, it should probably go to those other
sectors. 


I guess the first piece of this is about the geographical
distribution –that about 15% of future emissions at most will
come from the US and Europe. And if you think about affectable
emissions, that share is probably lower, because in a world where
US and European climate policy is above average binding it means
that if you reduce an emission, and if you're in a liberal state
in the US or if you're in the EU, the additionality of that is
rarely 100%. So, the share is actually lower because there's
policy already determining this.


David Roberts:


Yeah, yeah. I want to pause and put an exclamation point on that
because I think it's an important point. If you’re in a place
where emission reductions are in statute, it's arguable that your
additional reduction thrown into that pot is not going to do
anything additional since the reduction is going to happen
anyway, by statute. So that's where you fail these additionality
tests: when you're operating in a place where the trends in law
and regulation are already mandating what you would be trying to
do anyway.


Johannes Ackva: 


Yeah, that's exactly right. And that's disproportionately the
case in those jurisdictions, I think that's the first piece.
Obviously I'm not saying that only 15% of climate philanthropy
should be focused on those regions, because if we look at climate
attention and if we look at ways to shape future emissions
through climate leadership, through innovation, etc., the US and
Europe do play a disproportionate role. So it wouldn't be right
to say what we should be aiming for is 15% for those
regions. 


But, we can still see various systematic effects. I think the
reason that there's so much spending on the US is not because
someone decided, “okay, this is the impact maximizing solution”.
The reason is because most climate philanthropy is from the US,
and most people find it much easier to donate to an American
focused organization. The reason that is problematic, or the
reason that I would say this leaves impact on the table, is
because there are dynamics related to future emissions growth
(and in particular carbon lock-in) that are dependent on where
you are in the world. So, they're not the result of global
innovation, they're the result of infrastructure decisions,
policy decisions being made right now. 


And, a lot of those 85% of future emissions come from regions
that are very strongly growing right now, and are making a lot of
infrastructure decisions about how to build grids, how to build
new coal plants or not, which will have consequences for decades
into the future. So those are really high leverage points for
intervention, and there's very little attention paid to these in
total. And if there is, it's very focused on a couple of key
sectors and key solutions. And then you have situations where
(for example, if you look at climate philanthropy targeted at
Indonesia, Indonesia is one of the places where coal is growing
the most) there's fairly little attention paid to this. You will
find that in many of these sectors, there are large parts of
future emissions that receive very little attention, and it's
probable that if you looked a bit more closely, if you started to
do some early philanthropic work, you would find some quite high
impact or high leverage points because early engagement is often
much more impactful than later engagement.


David Roberts:


Right. So the first dollar there is probably gonna have more
impact than, say, the millionth dollar in the US.


Johannes Ackva: 


Yes, that's exactly right. Crucially, the millionth dollar in the
US is easier to fundraise for than the first dollar there….


David Roberts:


Right, right. So, in terms of clean electricity, I sometimes
think (and I go back and forth on this), that there's almost too
much talk about clean electricity being a done deal, that we can
move on from it now and focus on other things. But you know, when
I hear that, I want to point out that clean electricity is on a
positive trajectory, but not anywhere close to the slope it needs
to be on or the speed it needs to be on. It's not, by any means,
a “done deal”. So what's the justification for turning attention
away from clean electricity, which I think you and I agree is
probably going to be the bulk of the solution. What's the
justification for looking elsewhere in your giving?


Johannes Ackva: 


So, at no point would I suggest we turn away attention from clean
electricity. It's more like we’re in a space in climate
[philanthropy] that is strongly growing, and the question is
where to put additional money right now. If you look at those
clean electricity numbers (and by the way, of this clean
electricity funding, 90% is renewables and I think 90% of that is
solar and wind), this philanthropic funding has played a huge
role in triggering the policies that led to cost reductions. So,
this has been hugely impactful, this was absolutely the right
priority to set. But if we think about, for example, super hot
rock geothermal or innovations in geothermal which are also
renewable, also about clean electricity, they receive a very,
very small share of that. I just talked to the Clean Air Task
Force yesterday, they have a program on super hot rock
geothermal, which is essentially the “geothermal anywhere”
solution, right? The solution that will make geothermal available
location independent.


David Roberts:


Potentially a huge, huge resource.


Johannes Ackva: 


Potentially a huge, huge resource, yeah. And potentially, exactly
attacking this problem that I think is the bottleneck problem in
clean electricity, which is firm sources or balancing. Right? So
you had Jesse Jenkins on the show. If you think about it, that
[advanced geothermal] could have a huge impact on clean
electricity, but there's like a 1 million or so philanthropic
effort to make it happen, right? And at the same time, we're
spending something on the order of 600 to 700 million on clean
electricity in general. So, I agree with you that clean
electricity is not solved, but the thing that can reduce risk
there is not the priority of current clean electricity
philanthropic spending, geothermal it’s instead probably a bet of
around 1 million philanthropically right now. And if you think
about advanced nuclear, or something else, it's probably
something like 10 million. So, within these categories, these are
what I think of as huge imbalances. 


I think the other part is also, what's the role of philanthropy?
The reason I think it was great to invest philanthropically
really heavily in wind and solar until maybe 10 or 15 years ago,
and that this would have been an absolute priority, is because
this really helped unleash the policy change which then led to
the technological change, which leads to a trajectory change in
emissions and future emissions. But we're not in that moment
anymore, right? We're not in the moment where solar and wind are
niche industries. At this point, these industries are growing.
And, while I think there are really hard problems to overcome
there, if I think about philanthropy as catalyzing early change,
I don't really see wind and solar failing because the next 10
million of climate philanthropy goes towards other solutions, let
me put it that way.


David Roberts:


Right. So we have some clean technologies that are on a positive
trajectory; whether they’re going fast enough or not, at least
they’re on a learning curve. And then there's a bunch of other
climate technologies that are widely expected to be needed, but
are not on those trajectories at all. They're not on the learning
curves at all. So to draw an analogy to what you were saying
earlier, the first dollar spent on getting one of those
technologies on a good trajectory will have more impact than the
billionth dollar spent accelerating the wind and solar
trajectory.


Johannes Ackva: 


Exactly, exactly. And I would say tremendously more impact. I
would say the differentials here aren’t like two times, my best
guess would be more on the order of 100 or 1000 times, because
there's essentially nothing happening. Super hot rock geothermal
is essentially (I mean quite literally) putting this idea on the
map. Building coalitions in government, getting innovation
funding for this, connecting the different industries to research
labs, connecting it to people who could implement it, etc. So
this is very early stuff with a really outsized impact,
potentially. 


And I mean, we’ve seen similar things like carbon removal, where
it's been clear from the scientific literature that we're
definitely going to need carbon removal if we want to get to 1.5
degrees. I think that’s been clear of carbon removal since 2015
or so at the latest, right? And this has taken time to sink into
policy discussions. And philanthropy, or NGOs that are
philanthropically funded (in this case, I want to mention another
grantee of ours, Carbon180) are quite important in early field
building, early attention building, etc. and can play a really
huge role. And now we have a stimulus in the US, or an
infrastructure investment bill, and it makes a real difference.
It’s clear there's going to be a huge climate component, but the
organizations that are going to be present there are shaping
this, so it makes a difference that there is an organization that
is really strong on connecting the science to the policy needs
for the most neglected technologies, this makes a difference.


David Roberts:


That gets us to innovation. My impression is that one of the
things that almost everybody in the effective altruism movement
who's thinking about climate agrees on is that innovation is a
good target. But the mirror (I don't know if this is the right
analogy) image of innovation is carbon lock-in. So we were
talking earlier about uncertainties, and one of the key points
you make is that not all uncertainties are additive (meaning you
just sort of multiply one uncertainty by another by another and
just get bigger and bigger and bigger uncertainty bars); some of
them are negatively correlated. So talk about how that plays out
in terms of innovation and carbon lock-in, those are two key
concepts here.


Johannes Ackva: 


Yeah. When I think about future emissions and what will determine
those, I think there are these two really big trajectory-changing
dynamics. One of them is innovation, as we've seen with solar, as
we're seeing with electric cars. Really radical changes which
were early decisions and geographically quite specific decisions,
not global decisions, can make a huge dent on global emissions,
changing the trajectory for decades to come. So this is the
innovation piece.


David Roberts:


Just to pause there, because you make this point well in the
paper, one of the key players in the early innovation in solar
was Germany. And as you say, if Germany had been approaching this
problem from a, “how can we maximize emission reductions per
dollar” approach, they never would have spent on solar. It was an
extremely inefficient way to reduce emissions at the time when
they were spending, but it catalyzed this trajectory, and so the
indirect effects were huge in terms of emission reductions.


Johannes Ackva: 


Yeah, the short term solution would have been to buy Russian gas,
this would have been the much cheaper way. And I think this is
really why we shouldn't ever evaluate climate actions by their
local short term effects, we should always evaluate them by their
global long term effects. So this is the innovation dynamic. And
then, there's this countervailing dynamic which is carbon
lock-in, which is infrastructure decisions and capital investment
decisions into new coal plants, new steel plants, etc., that
determine or really strongly influence emissions over decades to
come because once this asset is built the decision about how much
to produce is much, much lower [in influence] than compared to
like, just like “okay we're just gonna have this high emitting
asset there”. So if you think about these two dynamics as
competing, then you see that on the innovation front, pushing an
innovation forward five years is often much more valuable than
just five years of reduced emissions because it can act at the
lever points, like, before. Let's think about how the world would
look if we’d had cheap solar and wind when China started to
expand, the world would look very different today. So there's
these huge, huge lock-in effects. So of course, there are these
two dynamics. 


And again, uncertainty, my friend uncertainty is here. If we
think about the ultimate potential of acting on those two
mechanisms, on the one hand trying to avoid carbon lock-in and on
the other hand trying to accelerate and improve the success of
innovation, the relative potential of those two theories of
change is negatively correlated. What do I mean by that? So,
there's a world where carbon lock-in is relatively benign, let's
say it turns out that we can get renewables so cheap that it
becomes easy, renewables, storage, and we solve all of the
attendant problems, right? Let's say, we're in the very best case
world. And in this case, maybe it becomes realistic that we're
retiring coal plants early or we're replacing them with something
that we're working on is repowering coal, maybe we can replace
the heat source and coal plants with geothermal or with advanced
nuclear. This is a world where carbon lock-in has relatively less
influence because retrofitting is easy and premature retiring
becomes possible politically and economically. The maximum impact
of innovation will be in this world, a world where avoiding
carbon lock-in is relatively less important.


And this is important, of course, because there's also this other
world where it's not true, right? Where we’re maybe going to get
all of those innovations, but you know, those innovations will
not fully realize their potential because lock-in is really
severe. There's a lot of infrastructure, political clout,
invested capital,  that leads to a situation where we have
new, low carbon solutions but we're not adopting them at scale.
So, those two dynamics are negatively correlated which means one
of them -- if we're on the more bullish side of innovation, maybe
if we now invest in innovation and carbon lock-in and maybe in
that case the carbon lock-in investment is less valuable. The
other thing goes the other way, right? If carbon lock-in is more
severe, then investing in [avoiding] carbon lock-in is more
valuable. And if we're in a situation (and I think this is the
situation we're in) where we’re really genuinely uncertain about
those two theories of change and about the relative value of
additional investments, I want to diversify.


David Roberts:


Investment in innovation versus investment in avoiding carbon
lock-in?


Johannes Ackva: 


Yeah, I'm sorry, I meant philanthropic investment here. 


David Roberts:


Right. JASo yeah, I'm genuinely uncertain between those two
solutions. But again I think about the nature of climate damage,
and I'm reminded of the fact that my goal is not to maximize
emission reductions but to minimize climate damage, and now I
have these two really big uncertainties that are negatively
correlated. So in this situation, investing in both of them can
actually be impact maximizing because of this structure: if one
succeeds a bit more; the other fails a bit more. That's a more
robust investment, given the shape of climate damage and given
how much worse it is to fail, if that makes sense.


David Roberts:


Right. So each is a hedge for the other, in a sense.


Johannes Ackva: 


Yes. And I think something similar applies to investing in
accelerating decarbonisation and investing in carbon removal, for
example.


David Roberts: 


One of your conclusions you come to, and this is a quote too, is
that “the plausibility space for high impact climate philanthropy
primarily contains solutions and approaches that are considered
controversial, speculative, or remote”. So this is where your
logic takes you, it’s that if you're counseling people where to
give their climate philanthropy dollars you're probably
counseling them not to give to the sexy, popular solutions that
everybody's hyped about, but to some of the more obscure and
controversial stuff. Spell that out a little bit.


Johannes Ackva: 


Yeah. I mean first of all, this quote was written in December,
actually November, at the end of last year under the impression
that climate philanthropy and climate philanthropy foundations
had essentially doubled within a year, with the Bezos Earth Fund
playing a huge role. And these dynamics are essentially, to a
large degree, reinforcing the existing foci of climate
philanthropy: increasing the emphasis on clean electricity on the
one hand (particularly renewables); and on the other hand,
natural climate solutions.


David Roberts:


As a side note here, do we know where Bezos’s money is going yet?
Has it been laid out where his giving is going?


Johannes Ackva: 


So it's evolving, but we did include it in our November 2021
analysis. We used the data from ClimateWorks for the 2020
baseline, and then we looked at all of the Bezos grants that were
made in 2021 and tried to account for those. And that's what’s
included in the comparative charts we have in there. The main
takeaway for me was that, by and large, the Bezos commitment (at
least the early Bezos commitment) increased spaces that were
already relatively well funded. It also increased funding in
other spaces, but in absolute terms this was more or less
increasing those existing emphases. 


David Roberts:


So if you were counseling Bezos, or whoever's controlling that
pot of money, you are going to tell him to channel his money away
from those things, basically?


Johannes Ackva: 


Again, it’s always about the margin. So it depends on what
everyone else is doing, but given what everyone else right now is
doing and given how climate philanthropy has been increasing
really strongly and over a really short time, it's not that there
are a lot of great funding gaps left for popular solutions. I
think that's very implausible to say at this point. So yeah, that
means I would say: if you're looking for the highest impact
opportunities, trying to look at things that are controversial or
not on the radar, etc., is probably the way to go. Stuff like
super hot rock geothermal, stuff like carbon removal, stuff like
advanced nuclear… solutions that are not solar, wind, electric
cars, and trees. And not for the reason that those four aren't
great parts of the decarbonisation puzzle, they are, but they are
the ones that we all know and we all like and that we are all
already invested in heavily.


David Roberts:


Right, we’re back at hedging. So, the strategy you come down on
in terms of recommendations is robust diversification. Does that
just mean what we’ve been discussing? Sort of, hedging by putting
some of your money at the margins outside popular solutions? Or,
if not, what do you mean by robust diversification?


Johannes Ackva: 


Yeah, so I think there's a couple more dimensions. The robustness
here is robustness to uncertainty. I think as we've mentioned
before, there are really large uncertainties that will remain on
all relevant timescales, right? Like how far technologies will
go, how emissions will evolve, what will happen to the Paris
Agreement, etc. Part of it is about choosing a portfolio now,
which hedges against the failure of mainstream solutions - based
on the  logic I laid out before. Damage is much worse when
the mainstream solutions fail, and right now the mainstream
solutions are, relatively speaking, much, much better funded than
some of the hedgier solutions, and for systematic reasons. So
that's part of it. The other part is within your portfolio,
trying to diversify in a way that takes into account what I
mentioned, the negative correlation of the uncertainties. Because
again, you're not trying to maximize emission reductions, you're
trying to minimize damage. So you're complimenting your focus.
That's what we’re doing with our focus on, say, accelerating
decarbonisation, which we do with grantees like Clean Air Task
Force, Future Cleantech Architects, TerraPraxis. These are people
working on different pieces of that puzzle, then we’re combining
this with a focus on carbon removal: Carbon180 would be our
recommendation in that space. So, there's this negative
correlation there. And right now we're trying to take the next
step into looking at different theories of change and
diversifying there, always driven by this idea of the importance
of robustness against the worst worlds where the majority of
damage is concentrated.


David Roberts:


It's not really entirely different than a sort of financial
investment strategy. Johannes Ackva: No. David Roberts:It's a
portfolio approach for the same reasons.


Johannes Ackva: 


It's a portfolio approach for the same reasons, right.
Essentially, if you're doing this in financial terms, what you're
saying is, the marginal utility of money is decreasing, right?
So, you're not trying to maximize your income, you're trying to
maximize your well being. If you're a millionaire, getting to 1
versus 2 million is not as valuable. So it's exactly the same
logic, yes.


David Roberts:


Okay. And one of the things I found really interesting in your
work is that you end up really recommending advocacy and public
policy. Advocacy, as opposed to, you know…if I'm the Bezos Fund,
I could make strategic investments directly in early stage
companies, I could make investments directly in research or found
a research center or something like that, but you end up pushing
for advocacy. In other words, trying to get policy paths, trying
to change public policy. Why do you come down there?


Johannes Ackva: 


Yeah. So first, a clarification. I should be clear about this in
my writing, and I'm trying to be clear here. When I say advocacy,
what I really mean is trying to attract large scale societal or
social mobilization. This can be like changing policy etc., but
it can also be changing behavior of large corporate actors. So
that's one piece. And this is not only “on the Hill” lobbying,
this also does and can include stuff like doing research on new
technologies, the viability of new technologies, and putting
things on the map (just to clarify this a little bit).


David Roberts:


Advocacy, broadly construed.


Johannes Ackva: 


Advocacy, broadly construed. Not only Beltway lobbying. So, if we
think about why we’re focusing on that, I think there are two or
three answers. I think the first one is that even if you take the
most expensive sum of climate philanthropy (right now it's on the
order of around 10 billion), this is still at most a 100th or so
of the overall effort spent on climate.David Roberts:Right,
compared to public money. Johannes Ackva: Yeah, compared to
public money. So, this is one reason. If you think you only need
to have a small multiplier (it’s not like I'm not saying you got
a 100x multiplier), it’s still likely that given those numbers,
focusing on advocacy can have an outsized impact. There's also
literature on that, which shows that this works for other
fields. 


I think the other key part of the answer, which I think is the
deeper answer, is that ultimately solving climate change is a
policy problem, and it requires a huge amount of policy.
Technological change is not a garage factory thing, right?
Technological change is fundamentally the result of government
policy and government incentives being correct, and public
investment and innovation, etc. And this is not only true for
innovation, right? This is also true for other parts, like for
rolling out technologies. So for every garage entrepreneur
there's a policy behind that, that usually came before. So in
that sense, I think public policy is really crucial for
essentially all parts of the climate challenge. And if the policy
is set right, the private action, and the research, etc. will
follow. So the causal primacy –what I would call the causal
primacy – really lies with making sure that political conditions
are as good as they can be.


David Roberts:


I'm sort of curious about how philanthropists respond when you
pitch this, because we've talked about uncertainty but if I'm
Bezos, I'm an executive. I'm used to quantification and results,
I want to see numbers. And if I want that from my climate
philanthropy, I can spend on a forest and then I can see the
forest and I can measure the tonnes from the forest, or whatever.
Whereas advocacy, even broadly construed, is so uncertain. What
could move politics is so unclear. This is very much the central
dilemma of climate change: what can move public policy and what
can get things moving? So if you commit to that, you are very
much taking on the risk, the possibility, that you could be
wasting your money: you could spend a bunch of money on advocacy
and it could just not do anything. I think we've seen,
unfortunately, in the last year or so, an enormous, enormous
amount of really well organized and funded climate advocacy that
is starting to look like it is not going to come to anything. And
I can imagine if I'm a rich philanthropist, looking at that and
saying “screw that, I'm just gonna go get some verifiable tonnes
where I can”. So, how do you address that, and how do people
react when you pitch this?


Johannes Ackva: 


Yeah, that's a great question, there's lots in there so let me
try to answer all of those different aspects. So, the first one
is that I'm not making it easy for myself saying that. I talk to
a lot of entrepreneurs and executives that have, I think, as you
outlined, very different intuitions on that. There are people
that want to do impact investing or that want to do stuff that's
fast and certain. And me saying “let's invest on this policy
thing that's highly uncertain” is not the thing that maximizes
the giving I can influence. It's a position I take because I
believe it very strongly. And I think that's also an additional
reason why we should think it to be, relatively speaking,
underprovided.David Roberts:


Right. It goes against a lot of intuitions.Johannes Ackva: Yeah,
and against a lot of intuitions in particular of new climate
money. So if we think about new climate money coming into the
philanthropy space, a lot of that is coming from people who got
rich in tech. They apply their own mental models and their own
success stories, so for them it's much more natural to do impact
investing, or start their own company, than to say we're going to
do this policy advocacy thing. So again, if you think about this,
this is once again one of these psychological factors, one of
these systematic features that should make you expect that
advocacy is underprovided (relatively speaking to its impact).
Because, while it's much more uncertain, even if it's highly
effective, oftentimes you will not know it. Because the best
advocacy is the advocacy where an organization will influence a
policymaker, and they will never talk about it publicly, because
talking about it publicly would destroy the entire impact. The
whole point of it is that the policymaker thinks they came up
with it themselves.David Roberts:Right, it's thankless. Johannes
Ackva: Yeah, it's thankless work. But that's why it's so crucial
to support it. And I think one thing I would disagree with a
little bit here is saying there's been this huge effort and
nothing came of it. We also invested hugely in the wake of Biden
wins here in the US advocacy space, and I wouldn't say nothing
came of it. There is the infrastructure bill there, there is the
Build Back Better plan. The infrastructure bill is not what we
hoped for, it would be much better if Build Back Better had
passed as well, but there is a lot of stuff in the infrastructure
bill that's helping with relatively nascent solutions. So I don't
see that all of our bets there were a failure.


David Roberts:


Right, well, maybe I was too cynical. And I think you could say,
even if Build Back Better ends up not passing, which is very much
a possibility at this point, advocacy was successful in causing
Biden (and really the Democratic Party in general) to prioritize
climate, which is a long term effect. It's not necessarily
measurable by just what gets passed these past two years. 


Johannes Ackva:  


Yeah, absolutely. And also, these philanthropic investments are
still small compared to investments in direct technology, or what
we're spending overall on climate change. So I think one really
shouldn't be too cynical on advocacy at all.


David Roberts:


By way of wrapping up, let’s pull this back to (because I know a
lot of listeners ask) a question anybody who writes or talks
about climate change in public gets asked a lot. I'm sure you get
it a lot, and it’s about individuals who want to do something but
don't know what to do. You obviously get a lot more leverage
affecting what Bezos wants to do than the average Joe off the
street, but nonetheless, it would be nice to have guidance for
“normal” people. And I think there are a lot of the same dynamics
here in terms of uncertainty in the sense that individuals think,
“well, if I buy an EV, there's a measurable impact, it's not
huge, but it's certain and I did it”. Whereas tossing money out
to an advocacy group can feel a little bit like throwing dollars
out into the ocean and then never knowing what came of them. So,
is your pitch to individuals more or less the same? Or, to put
the question more simply, what should individuals do? If they
have climate money to spend, how do they maximize their impact?


Johannes Ackva: 


Yeah. The first thing I want to say is that I don't think
consumption choices or behavior change and giving is an either
or. So for myself, I'm a vegetarian, I actually don't have a
driving license because of climate reasons. 


David Roberts:


You also get to live in a country where that’s possible.Johannes
Ackva: Yeah. And I do my fair share of lifestyle changes. At the
same time, I don't believe (and this is not only because of my
professional role, but also just in general because I'm a middle
income person in a rich country), this is anywhere close to the
maximum impact I could have. And the reason for that is twofold.
If you're a typical middle class person in the Western world, in
the US let's say, you're emitting something like 11 tonnes or so,
something on that order, per year. And again, you can reduce that
to zero, but it's really hard to reduce that to zero. Even if you
did reduce it to zero, which would take really extreme measures,
a lot of that reduction would actually not be additional for the
reasons we alluded to before. David Roberts:


Right, because policy is in place already. Johannes Ackva: Yeah,
so I think that's the first thing. And the second part is:
reducing emissions by 11 tonnes per year is actually really
unambitious if you think about what you can do. It’s kind of like
saying your responsibility is only towards your own emissions,
not towards the emissions related to the fact that the West got
rich on fossil fuels. So, it doesn't really make sense as a
benchmark either, even from this perspective. So that's the first
part. 


The second part is if you focus on effective philanthropy, you
can probably avoid a tonne of carbon for $1 or something. Even if
you're 100 times more pessimistic than me, if you're doing
lifestyle changes and also donate $1,000, you already have the
same impact with your philanthropic investment. And of course,
you don't need to stop there, right? There's no natural bound on
what you can do philanthropically, while there is a very natural
bound to what you can do with your lifestyle changes.


David Roberts:


Right, yeah. One of your charts that really made an impression is
where you chart the tonnes of carbon impact of various lifestyle
changes. And you grant that in the chart, if you buy an EV and it
inspires 10 other people to buy an EV, even if you 10x all your
lifestyle choices, you're still not going to have anywhere close
to the impact you would have, the direct impact you would have,
by giving your money to a climate organization – a climate
advocacy organization basically. 


Johannes Ackva: 


Yeah, again, I guess I would add the caveat here: a climate
organization that tries to maximize impact at the margin.David
Roberts:Right, a good climate organization. Johannes Ackva: But
one thing I really want to stress in this case, because I think
it's the most common misunderstanding, and the thing that makes
people really uneasy, is: I would really not think about this as
offsetting. People sometimes ask me, “how much do I have to
donate to a charity to reduce my impact,” and this is really the
wrong mental frame. The mental frame that I want people to take
is really different. It's more about, not offsetting, but acting
morally in the world and in accordance with your values and
trying to have a positive impact. 


The other thing is that for me, donating is not an offsetting
choice, it's a political action. So in the same way as going into
the streets, participating in a protest, or calling your
representative. It's in that bucket of activities. It's also
structurally similar in that these activities will always have
more impact because they're addressing the problem. There are
multipliers to be had here, and the same kind of multipliers that
you can have in your civic engagement apply (probably somewhat
stronger), that is, the same kind of logic applies. So if you
think that going into the street or calling your representative
is higher impact than your lifestyle choices, and I think in
almost all cases this will be true, then you should believe the
same about philanthropy and you shouldn't see it as offsetting at
all. It’s a form of political action.


David Roberts:


The whole focus on offsetting is such a weird artifact of Western
individualism. It's such a bizarre way to approach the problem of
climate change. Like, “if I can just eliminate my tonnes, I'm
good”. It just doesn't, it makes no sense in the context of
climate change as a global problem.


Johannes Ackva: 


No, no, it absolutely makes no sense at all.


David Roberts:


In conclusion, let’s say I'm an individual, I'm hearing your
message and I'm convinced and I want to give to a good climate
organization. Is there somewhere I can go where you lay out which
climate organizations you think are good and effective, like a
guide to individual giving? Is there somewhere people can go for
some help?


Johannes Ackva: What we, as Founders Pledge, have on this is a
Climate Fund where we’re trying to make the best commitments –
philanthropic commitments –- we think are possible. The logic
that lies behind this is explored in our reports, which we
publish on our website. For example, one of them that we’ve
discussed a lot today is the Changing Landscape report from last
November. You can go to founderspledge.com and find the report
there, and we can also include the links in the show notes. The
charities that we’re highlighting right now are: the Clean Air
Task Force, with a focus on neglected solutions in
decarbonization; Carbon180, with a focus on carbon removal;
Future Cleantech Architects in Germany, which is focused on
innovation in hard to decarbonize sectors, with a European focus
where there’s less attention philanthropically to innovation but
a lot of policy action; and then TerraPraxis, which is focused on
advanced nuclear.


David Roberts:What if I’m on the other side of things? I’m in a
climate organization, a climate advocacy organization, and I want
to get on your list to make the case that I’m a worthy recipient
of your funds. Is there any formalized process for that, or do
you guys just go out and look, or is there some application
thing, how does that process work?Johannes Ackva: So, what we’re
trying to do, or what we layed out today and what we lay out in
our reports, is that we’re really trying to understand systematic
things about the space and then find the organizations that are
doing high impact things in the most neglected areas. So we don’t
have an application process as such. That being said, I’m happy
for people to reach out to me on johannes@founderpledge.com, but
this is not our usual process. Our usual process is to dive into
the field, understand how it's changing, where the margins are,
and try to support solutions at the margin that we think of as
great bets for counterfactual impact.David Roberts:And I promise
this is the final question, it just occurred to me, say you do an
analysis and you find a neglected space that you think could be
high impact and there is no organization devoted to that space,
have you ever thought about trying to spin off or create
organizations to fill those spaces? Johannes Ackva: Yeah, that’s
absolutely something we’re open to doing. Until now this has been
a little bit beyond our capacity, but I think we have been doing
a lot (that I also think of as high impact – a high impact
solution in general) is to support organizations that are either
one or two people strong, because those are the organizations
that do not have the bandwidth to apply to large foundations for
funding. So this is actually a really important part of our
strategy, to support those kinds of organizations. And we’re
taking high risk bets, we’re very risk tolerant. We’re not
expecting an organization of two people to have the same
strategic plan. We’re making bets on people, we’re making bets on
working on neglected solutions.


David Roberts:Yeah, diversification. Alright, well thank you so
much Johannes. It’s been really interesting reading your work and
watching the logical step-wise process by which you go through
the space and think about the shape of the space and the shape of
the uncertainties and everything. It’s quite clarifying and
interesting, so thanks so much for coming on.Johannes
Ackva:  Yeah, thanks so much for having me.


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