This year, Giving Green’s recommendations were adopted by The Life You Can Save, an EA nonprofit co-founded by Peter Singer, a Princeton bioethics professor. Read: Democrats may be on the verge of climate disaster The climate problem throws EA, which often looks for interventions so simple that they seem apolitical, back into the world of politics. Climate change will harm extremely poor people, but most carbon pollution comes from rich or middle-income countries-and so it must be addressed at the (very expensive) source. But focusing on climate change reveals some of the limits of this strategy. ![]() But according to the nonprofit Givewell, which makes EA-informed charitable recommendations, only $3,000 can save the life of someone in Burkina Faso or Côte d’Ivoire by providing them with free vitamin-A supplements.Įven though I don’t always agree with it, I find EA’s answers to the problem of how to be a good person fascinating. It might take hundreds of thousands of dollars to cure an American of a chronic disease, for instance. EA tends to target the world’s most impoverished people for assistance, both because they presumably suffer the most and because their problems are the cheapest to solve. Or it’s just giving very poor people money. The answer is almost always making a small addition to a very poor country’s health system, such as distributing mosquito bed nets or vitamins. Where, the movement’s adherents ask, can a marginal dollar do the most good? On what causes can spending the smallest amount of money prevent the most suffering? Giving Green is an experiment in effective altruism, a social movement that fuses traditional charity, classical economics, and a particularly cosmopolitan strain of utilitarianism to form a new approach to philanthropy. The only reliable carbon-removal firms are fully booked for the next few years as well, according to Giving Green’s research, meaning that even if you paid them to remove a ton of carbon from the atmosphere today, they wouldn’t do it until 2023. But it “really, really, really does not recommend” that individuals who can donate to political causes give to these offsetting or removal groups, Stein said-the bang for your buck is just much higher passing a bill. Among these are Tradewater, which finds and destroys industrial refrigerant gases that are thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide at trapping heat in the atmosphere, and Climeworks and Charm Industrial, two start-ups that remove carbon from the atmosphere directly. Giving Green’s list does include a few groups that will offset carbon pollution or remove it entirely. Read: The best way to donate to fight climate change (probably) Evergreen “has very quickly become very influential, in terms of figuring out how to take the broader ideas of the progressive climate movement and turn into actual laws that can be passed,” Stein said.Īnd Giving Green has continued recommending the Clean Air Task Force, which works with politicians from both parties to deploy technologies, such as carbon removal and even carbon capture and storage, that will ultimately be necessary in a zero-carbon world. In its place are Carbon180, which advocates for policy to accelerate direct carbon removal, and the Evergreen Collaborative, a policy shop composed of veterans of Jay Inslee’s climate-focused presidential campaign. (It also needs individual donations less than it did, Stein said, because it has secured more institutional support.) Gone from the list is the Sunrise Movement, which Stein lauded-“I really do believe that the existence of Sunrise has led, at least to a certain extent, to major climate bills being passed in the Biden administration,”-but which is going through an internal restructuring and has yet to publish a strategy for the next few years. Its list of recommendations has changed slightly since last year. It tries to answer one of the most common questions I get as a reporter-“Where should I give my money to fight climate change?”-but with some degree of quantitative rigor. “We think it’s something like 10 times more effective to give to policy than to give to one of these projects that are directly doing emissions reductions.”Ī year ago, I profiled Giving Green, a new organization that applies the principles of effective altruism to fighting climate change. “If you’re like Joe Schmo, and you’re looking to do something for climate, I think you should give to policy,” Stein told me. ![]() ![]() ![]() And if you’re an American, he has three such groups in mind: the Evergreen Collaborative, Carbon180, and the Clean Air Task Force. The economist Daniel Stein has a clear answer: You should give to groups that lobby for aggressive climate policies. On a dollar-for-dollar basis, where will your money do the most to fight climate change?
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