#148 – Johannes Ackva on unfashionable climate interventions that work, and fashionable ones that don't
If you want to work to tackle climate change, you should try to reduce expected carbon emissions by as much as possible, right? Strangely, no.
Today’s guest, Johannes Ackva — the climate research lead at Founders Pledge, where he advises major philanthropists on their giving — thinks the best strategy is actually pretty different, and one few are adopting.
In reality you don’t want to reduce emissions for its own sake, but because emissions will translate into temperature increases, which will cause harm to people and the environment.
Crucially, the relationship between emissions and harm goes up faster than linearly. As Johannes explains, humanity can handle small deviations from the temperatures we’re familiar with, but adjustment gets harder the larger and faster the increase, making the damage done by each additional degree of warming much greater than the damage done by the previous one.
In short: we’re uncertain what the future holds and really need to avoid the worst-case scenarios. This means that avoiding an additional tonne of carbon being emitted in a hypothetical future in which emissions have been high is much more important than avoiding a tonne of carbon in a low-carbon world.
That may be, but concretely, how should that affect our behaviour? Well, the future scenarios in which emissions are highest are all ones in which clean energy tech that can make a big difference — wind, solar, and electric cars — don’t succeed nearly as much as we are currently hoping and expecting. For some reason or another, they must have hit a roadblock and we continued to burn a lot of fossil fuels.
In such an imaginable future scenario, we can ask what we would wish we had funded now. How could we today buy insurance against the possible disaster that renewables don’t work out?
Basically, in that case we will wish that we had pursued a portfolio of other energy technologies that could have complemented renewables or succeeded where they failed, such as hot rock geothermal, modular nuclear reactors, or carbon capture and storage.
If you’re optimistic about renewables, as Johannes is, then that’s all the more reason to relax about scenarios where they work as planned, and focus one’s efforts on the possibility that they don’t.
To Johannes, another crucial thing to observe is that reducing local emissions in the near term is probably negatively correlated with one’s actual full impact. How can that be?
If you want to reduce your carbon emissions by a lot and soon, you’ll have to deploy a technology that is mature and being manufactured at scale, like solar and wind.
But the most useful thing someone can do today to reduce global emissions in the future is to cause some clean energy technology to exist where it otherwise wouldn’t, or cause it to become cheaper more quickly. If you can do that, then you can indirectly affect the behaviour of people all around the world for decades or centuries to come.
And Johannes notes that in terms of speeding up technological advances and cost reductions, a million dollars spent on a very early-stage technology — one with few, if any, customers — packs a much bigger punch than buying a million dollars’ worth of something customers are already spending $100 billion on per year.
For instance, back in the early 2000’s, Germany subsidised the deployment of solar panels enormously. This did little to reduce carbon emissions in Germany at the time, because the panels were very expensive and Germany is not very sunny. But the programme did a lot to drive commercial R&D and increase the scale of panel manufacturing, which drove down costs and went on to increase solar deployments all over the world. That programme is long over, but continues to have impact by prompting solar deployments today that wouldn’t be economically viable if Germany hadn’t helped the solar industry during its infancy decades ago.
In today’s extensive interview, host Rob Wiblin and Johannes discuss the above considerations, as well as:
- Retooling newly built coal plants in the developing world
- Specific clean energy technologies like geothermal and nuclear fusion
- Possible biases among environmentalists and climate philanthropists
- How climate change compares to other risks to humanity
- In what kinds of scenarios future emissions would be highest
- In what regions climate philanthropy is most concentrated and whether that makes sense
- Attempts to decarbonise aviation, shipping, and industrial processes
- The impact of funding advocacy vs science vs deployment
- Lessons for climate change focused careers
- And plenty more
Get this episode by subscribing to our podcast on the world’s most pressing problems and how to solve them: type ‘80,000 Hours’ into your podcasting app. Or read the transcript below.
Producer: Keiran Harris
Audio mastering: Ryan Kessler
Transcriptions: Katy Moore
