Transcript

Rob’s intro [00:00:00]

Rob Wiblin: Hi listeners, this is The 80,000 Hours Podcast, where we have unusually in-depth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems, what you can do to solve them, and whether policy to shape science advocacy is more or less impactful than advocacy to shape science policy. I’m Rob Wiblin, Head of Research at 80,000 Hours.

Last year I heard Johannes Ackva on another podcast, and knew very quickly that he was the person I wanted to interview next on climate change.

He just raised so many important considerations that I’d never thought about before, one after another, and then made a good go at figuring out what concretely they implied. And that’s just as well, because as the lead climate researcher at Founders Pledge he’s tasked with making substantial grants with the goal of tackling climate change most effectively.

Today we talk about:

• Why climate philanthropists shouldn’t try to minimise expected carbon emissions
• Why the emissions reductions you achieve in the near term are probably negatively correlated with your actual true impact
• Whether it makes more sense to focus on government policy, advocacy, or direct deployment
• Decarbonising aviation, shipping, concrete, and agriculture
• Clean energy technologies like superhot rock geothermal, nuclear fusion, and carbon capture and storage
• What’s most weird about how humanity has tried to stop climate change so far
• Where climate philanthropy is currently focused and what’s strange about that
• The future scenarios in which emissions end up being far higher than expected
• And plenty more

Johannes and Founders Pledge wanted you all to know going in that they’re currently hiring researchers for their climate-focused grantmaking programme.

They’re open to people at varying levels of experience that are keen to work on climate with an impact-focused perspective, pushing the research agenda Johannes and I are about to cover, and turning it into action via grantmaking. I’ll say more about that in the outro.

All right, without further ado, I bring you Johannes Ackva.

The interview begins [00:01:56]

Rob Wiblin: Today I’m speaking with Johannes Ackva. Johannes is currently the climate research lead at Founders Pledge, where he has been since 2019, and where he advises major philanthropists on how they can get the biggest bang for their buck with their climate change–focused giving. Over there he manages the Founders Pledge Climate Change Fund, which is Giving What We Can’s top suggestion for climate-focused giving.

Before that, he was a project manager at the International Carbon Action Partnership and Adelphi, working on carbon pricing and innovation policy. And long before that, he studied a range of social sciences with the goal of understanding what climate policies get adopted and why at Jacobs University, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, and the University of Chicago.

He’s been thinking about effective activism and climate since 2015 — when he first discovered the ideas, and for the first time had to justify to people why it was that he was working on climate change — and he’s been a lifelong environmentalist ever since getting excited about saving the Siberian tigers as a kindergartner.

Thanks for coming on the podcast, Johannes.

Johannes Ackva: Yeah thanks so much for having me, Rob. And great Dutch pronunciation on the Rijksuniversiteit. That’s always hard.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, it’s not so easy to say Groningen, but I have the benefit of a Dutch mother and having visited Groningen — so it would be embarrassing if I couldn’t do it.

All right, I hope we’ll get to talk about the most promising places to look for climate-focused giving opportunities and what concrete suggestions you make to philanthropists. But first, in brief, what are you working on at the moment and why do you think it’s important?

Johannes Ackva: Yeah, I’m going to talk about what me and what my team are working on — so very much the whole team, not only me, because we’re growing right now and doing lots of different things. In principle, what we’re trying to be is a research-based grantmaking programme, and on climate, we’re trying to find the best opportunities from effective altruist prioritisation. With this kind of agenda, we’re doing four or five things all the time.

Right now, we’re looking into research prioritisation. Because climate is characterised by lots of different uncertainties, we’re trying to understand what are the most action-relevant uncertainties that we should actually prioritise reducing. So that’s one thing we’re doing, which is really just important in terms of guiding ourselves, because there isn’t really a clearly laid-out methodology to do this.

Then somewhat more concretely, we’re doing some data work, which is understanding where climate philanthropy has been growing — which sectors and which technologies have been growing. That’s obviously really important if you think about additionality, and acting well in a crowded space.

And then the other side of this is that we’re looking at combining different datasets to understand where the affectable emissions actually are at. So not only where our future emissions are at — I think that’s pretty clear, like the world regions where they’re going to be — but where are those emissions that we can plausibly reduce with different kinds of interventions. So understanding that.

Those are the more fundamental parts. And then we’re obviously at any given point doing grantmaking. We’ve just finished a grant investigation into a grant in China. So that’s turning research into action, so obviously important for that reason.

And we’re doing stuff on better characterising theories of change around innovation advocacy, which is important to both compare different interventions in this space, but also compare innovation advocacy to other theories of change and other dimensions.

Rob Wiblin: Hey listeners, Rob here. Savvy listeners might have noticed we just muted the name of the project that Johannes mentioned, and we’re going to do that when the name comes up a few more times later in the conversation. That’s just because that grant is still in the works and they want to wait until it’s complete to publicly announce the project. But we’ll stick a link in to that announcement on the blog post with the episode whenever it goes out. OK, back to the interview.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, so that’s a lot of things that we’re going to get to over the next couple of hours. Just a note for listeners who are wondering what we’re going to be focused on: a lot of listeners have written in with questions that focus on the issue of how serious a risk is climate change relative to other risks that are out there, and where climate change falls in the scheme of all global problems. And at the end of the interview we are going to have some questions about that, but I feel like that topic has been addressed a lot elsewhere — including in a previous interview that we did, which we’ll link to — and it’s not Johannes’s main area of research.

So today we’re largely going to focus on what Johannes and his team think are the most impactful things to do — taken as a given that someone wants to focus on reducing the expected damage by climate change — which is what they’ve been looking into for many years.

Recent grants [00:06:17]

Rob Wiblin: Before we spend a lot of time walking through all that reasoning and the implications, I think it would be good to tease the audience with some conclusions. What’s a recent grant that you’ve made, and what activities was it intended to fund?

Johannes Ackva: The most recent grant — we’re just in the process of finalising this — is actually a grant to [name of grantee / project temporarily withheld] in China.

We’ve been funding a project there that’s focusing on three things. One of them is coal repowering: finding a solution to repower coal plants with advanced heat sources — either nuclear or advanced geothermal. That’s something we’re very excited about, because it deals with a really, really large problem in global emissions, which is the existence of a lot of very new coal plants in Asia that are not plausibly just retired, even if renewables are cheap.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, I’d never heard this term “repowering” before I was preparing for this episode. So this is where you have this problem that there are a whole lot of coal plants that have been built already or are still being built, and they’re standing there and people are going to be reluctant to completely shut them down and waste this thing that they’ve constructed. So repowering is where you take the same facility, the same big building, and you try to get it to generate electricity in a different way other than using coal. Is that right?

Johannes Ackva: Yes, that’s exactly right. The reason that’s so important is because, as you mentioned, essentially starting in 2000, China built a lot of coal [powered plants] over a decade. Not only China, but India, Indonesia, et cetera. So there’s lots of existing coal capacity that is very young. In Europe or in the US, the debates that we are having about early retiring coal are very different, because our plants are very old. But plants there are very young, so it would be extremely costly to retire them. It would also mean a lot of infrastructure would be wasted.

The idea of repowering is exactly that: essentially you’re replacing the heat source. So instead of generating electricity for burning coal, you either do it through nuclear fission, or advanced geothermal, or fusion, if fusion were to become a thing.

So you’re replacing this, and you’re having lots of cost-saving benefits there by using existing infrastructure. You’re also having really big political or political-economic benefits there, because most people that are used to working in the plant can still work there. You need to add a couple of nuclear engineers, et cetera, but overall this seems like a promising solution — and one that has been really underfunded or off the radar until like two or three years ago, essentially.

Rob Wiblin: OK, great. What’s another grant?

Johannes Ackva: Another grant I’m curious to talk about is not a recent grant, but the results have been recent. So essentially, after the Biden election we made two large grants: one to the Clean Air Task Force that focused on neglected decarbonisation technologies, and one to Carbon180 that focused on carbon removal. So we made two large grants to them, with the goal to influence what was then cast as Build Back Better — so the big infrastructure spending bills with the big climate component.

And obviously, last summer those bills passed, and we were really happy about the fact that those bills turned out in a way that’s much more technology inclusive and focused on global decarbonisation than it might have been otherwise. So that’s something we’ve been really excited about for the first time with the Climate Fund — the Climate Fund is now two years old and essentially we’re able to see results.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, point to something that’s been successful. So the grant there was to the Clean Air Task Force, to advocate for particular priorities within this broader climate change bill — things that they thought would be particularly useful. Is that right?

Johannes Ackva: Things that they and we thought would be particularly useful, yes. The Clean Air Task Force was one part of the grant; the other part of the grant was Carbon180. So we were essentially covering both neglected decarbonisation technologies in reducing emissions, as well as kind of sucking carbon out of the air — carbon removal — which has been booming recently, but was still quite neglected when we made that grant in 2020.

Rob Wiblin: OK, yeah. Is there a third grant that you’d be interested to share?

Johannes Ackva: Yeah, we made a series of grants on this repowering thing. I think we made two other grants in that same vein. One focused on different emerging economies — so Indonesia, China, India, et cetera — exploring that, to Qvist Consulting.

We also made grants in this vein to TerraPraxis. They’re following a different kind of idea; it’s also about repowering but it’s a more high-tech innovation version. And they’ve now partnered with Microsoft on this, and are building a consortium. Which is really impressive. They used to be two or three people when we started funding them; now they’re having a consortium with Schneider Electric, Microsoft, et cetera. So that’s I think a good example of the power of supporting small organisations and investing early.

Rob Wiblin: Getting something off the ground that otherwise might not exist.

Most important background facts [00:10:57]

Rob Wiblin: OK, so getting to the reasoning now, and zooming out a bit, I think it’ll be really useful to lay out what you and your team see as a few of the most important background facts that most end up influencing your thinking. What’s one of those that you would really like to draw people’s attention to?

Johannes Ackva: So there are a couple. I think when people come to climate, it’s a really confusing space, because we’re talking about a century-long problem. We’re talking about four or five uncertain, complex systems levelled on top of each other — like socio-technical systems, the climate system, technology, how emerging economies grow. So there’s a lot of complexity there.

And what we’re trying to do is understand what are the most important mechanisms to understand. One thing that I find quite useful is to just frame the overall challenge essentially as a competition between two really strong, trajectory-shaping mechanisms.

We’ve already talked about both of these mechanisms. The first one is innovation and technological change towards low-carbon technology. We’ve seen this with solar, where essentially the investment of Germany and California and a couple of other small countries essentially completely transformed the global picture for solar. This is very trajectory changing, in the sense that there were a couple of countries over a relatively short period of time that fundamentally changed the trajectory of solar over the century — and by that, transformed the emission trajectory of climate quite fundamentally. So that’s one piece, and we’ve seen similar things with electric cars, with wind, et cetera.

The other big mechanism is a little bit competing with that, and that’s carbon lock-in. This is the idea that we already alluded to earlier: if you have long-lived assets or infrastructures — stuff like coal plants and steel plants, but also transmission infrastructure for electricity, et cetera — you’re often having investments that will have consequences for decades, and will commit emissions for decades if there isn’t retrofitting, et cetera.

Those are the two mechanisms that I think, if you understand them and how they’re playing out, are a fairly useful way to think about what are the most important mechanisms.

Rob Wiblin: So it’s kind of a race between, on the one hand, clean energy generation is getting cheaper, and on the other hand, we’re kind of pre-committing now to continue using coal and emitting lots of carbon for decades to come — because we’re building all of this infrastructure that will make it in future extremely cheap to continue to do that. And the question is, which of these effects is going to win? And we want to try to help the former and reduce the latter effect?

Johannes Ackva: Yeah, that’s exactly right. And both of these dynamics have this characteristic that they’re like leverage points: they’re kind of moments in time that can have a large impact through time and space. Decisions related to those two are much more important than most other decisions.

Rob Wiblin: Is there another important force that people should have in mind?

Johannes Ackva: There’s kind of a force on top of this, which is obviously the political response, and how the norms shift around climate. We’ve seen this very clearly in how, essentially in rich industrialised countries, the conversation on climate has really transformed over the last five or six years. So I think that’s something else: if we’re essentially locking in the idea of net zero and really strong climate policy pressure, that’s another mechanism there as well.

Rob Wiblin: I think a lot of people have suggested — or at least my impression has been — that that is because renewable energy has gotten so much cheaper, such that it doesn’t seem like such an expense now to reduce emissions. So maybe the general phenomenon is that as these technologies become cheaper, the politics of the issue might continue to change as there’s bigger industries that are focused on the technologies that are now economically viable, and it just doesn’t seem so costly to prevent climate change anymore.

Johannes Ackva: Yeah, I think that’s definitely a big driver of it. And I think you’ll probably have debates — because this is one of those things where we only have one world history to observe, so we have a lot of room for interpretation. My take on this is that a lot of the early investments in renewables — which were actually not motivated by climate change, funnily enough — driving the cost reductions were obviously super important, and making things politically more feasible. But I think ultimately technology cost is often the driver of making things more politically feasible.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. A really common theme in a lot of your writing and other interviews is that renewable energy and energy efficiency loom really large in our current investments to stop climate change. Why do you think that they’ve been so much more successful than other ways that we could have tried to tackle the issue?

Johannes Ackva: I think for renewable energy, it is very clear that a large part of the reason that renewables are cheap now is that essentially renewables are very popular with a certain constituency. If we think about the emergence of modern environmentalism in the late ’60s to early ’70s, and ideas of small-scale social organisations, small is beautiful, locally distributed systems — this is something where renewables play with well that, and nuclear and coal play with poorly. The really large popularity of solar and wind has played a huge role in making it possible that we had extremely high subsidy policies in the ’90s and in the early 2000s that drove the technology cost down there. So I think that’s really a reflection of how the issue was framed.

Rob Wiblin: A lot of people, including me, would listen to that and think, might it not just be the case that wind and solar were very promising technologies from the outset? And they always had the potential to get as cheap as they are now, and so it was just sensible investments in the areas that had the most potential and the most likely cost decreases that caused people to focus on them rather than alternatives?

Johannes Ackva: That seems really wrong to me, in the sense that if we think about different energy technologies, and which energy technologies would be optimal from different standpoints, I think you would not usually come out with intermittent renewables being the optimal form of generating energy.

I’m much more of the view that technological change is essentially the function of sustained public support, which is essentially a function of political dynamics — and if history would have played out differently, we could have cheap nuclear fission now, or maybe we could have fusion right now. That seems more true to me based on what I read about political culture and looking at those things, and also looking at the fact that solar and wind are cheap now, marginal-cost-wise, but they’re very far from an optimal energy technology.

Rob Wiblin: Because of the intermittency?

Johannes Ackva: Not only intermittency, but also energy density and space requirements, et cetera. They are the optimal response towards decentralised production — and if you have a societal/ideological preference for decentralised production, then renewables look better than large-scale nuclear, for example.

Striking things about how humanity has responded to climate change [00:17:53]

Rob Wiblin: OK, yeah. What are some of the other striking things about how humanity on the whole has responded to climate change, and where we put our efforts now and where we don’t?

Johannes Ackva: I think up until five years ago or so — before the broader public really paid attention to climate — climate was like this environmentalist issue, and became the top environmentalist issue… Now over the last five years, wider society has been paying more attention to lots of things that seem very prominent in our climate discussion that are a reflection of that [earlier time]. The focus on renewables is, I think, also the large degree of moralising in the debate — like focusing on your lifestyle emissions, or focusing on cleaning up your backyard. At least in many countries, especially in Europe, there is a somewhat critical attitude towards solving the problem through innovation. So there are lots of these ideas that are kind of reflective of how this issue has come about, and which cultural force has been dominant in shaping the issue.

Just to be very clear, I don’t want to bash like environmentalists — I’m an environmentalist myself — I’m just saying, if you’re looking at an issue that is kind of dominated by a particular constituency, you’re importing the biases of that constituency. And that’s pretty much what has happened.

Rob Wiblin: OK, so you mentioned a few different things there. One of them was a focus on lifestyle change. I suppose how I often encountered climate change discussion, at least when I was a teenager or at college, was about changing the amount of emissions that you have by not driving a car or not taking flights. It sounds like you’re not too keen on that as a key focus for advocacy. Why is that?

Johannes Ackva: I mean, that’s also how I grew up. I literally grew up with this idea of like, “I need to save water, because otherwise the water will run out.” It wasn’t climate, but those kinds of things, right? Or like, I never got a driving licence for climate reasons, and all these things. But I think it’s not so much that I’m not a fan of this; I think that, as soon as it only a little bit crowds out your political action, that’s not the thing to focus on. That’s the way I would put it.

So I’m doing a lot of those lifestyle changes myself. But I think ultimately, political action in the broader sense is where essentially everyone listening to this can have more impact. And this can be different things: it can be voting, protesting, writing to your senator. For me, donating is really a form of political action as well.

Ultimately, the reason for that is because your lifestyle changes — even when you’re in the US, which is the highest per capita emitting rich country, and your emissions are something like 10 tonnes per year — can maybe reduce this a little bit. But ultimately, the most you could do is reduce that. And compared to other changes you can induce, this is just not that significant.

And that’s also not how we would solve any other kind of issue. Like, we would not solve crime by saying everyone should just not commit crime, right? That’s part of it, but we’re also having police, and we’re building a public response to this. Just to show that framing matters, I think it’s useful to think about how we think about other problems. And for other kinds of large social problems, we never think we’re solving them by like, billions of people collaborating on virtuous actions every day. This is just not a mode for how we solve other problems.

Rob Wiblin: Your point there is that with great effort, you could reduce your personal emissions by 20%, which I guess would be two tonnes in the United States. But really, what we need to do is reduce them 100%, and reduce them 100% within some reasonable amount of time. And it’s not the case that people are just going to decide to stop consuming any resources or using any energy at all. So it strongly implies that the only way that you could solve the issue is to figure out how to make a lot of energy without carbon emissions. So basically, it just depends on whether we can do that or not — and someone using their air conditioner less is not very here nor there in the big historical picture.

Johannes Ackva: I think that’s right. I mean, this is not about not doing it. It’s more like when I see advertisements that very much emphasise this, that’s kind of something that makes me mad. The carbon footprint, if I understand this correctly, was also invented by a fossil fuel company, essentially playing back the problem to individual consumption.

Rob Wiblin: Do you think it’s a bit of a scheme by people who would rather see society as a whole do less? To just say, “Well, it’s up to you personally to not drive a car, and that’s where it ends.”

Johannes Ackva: Yeah, I think it’s a bit of a scheme. It’s not only fossil fuel. It’s also the environmentalist ethic, which is about reducing your own consumption, treading lightly on the Earth, et cetera.

I think there’s something else there, which is about not appreciating how different the rest of the world is, or how the average human lives at this point in time. I think in general, with energy efficiency, or demand reduction, or lifestyle changes, all of those things would look a lot better on cost effectiveness if most of the world was rich and essentially wasting energy like we do. But the average human on this planet has almost no energy. I think that’s something that’s not really widely appreciated.

Rob Wiblin: It’s not really possible for them to reduce their energy consumption, because they’re on such a tight energy budget to start with.

If your overall kind of big-picture historical take is that we need to figure out how to generate lots of energy without greenhouse gas emissions — and everything will just turn on whether we can do that — does that mean that almost all of the grants that you make, or almost all of the changes that you’re trying to make, are going to pass through some sort of science or innovation R&D stage in order to make that happen? Is that always going to be a part of the theory of change of the grants that you make?

Johannes Ackva: No, absolutely not.

Rob Wiblin: Why is that?

Johannes Ackva: Well, what we’re doing is we’re thinking on the margin, right? So we’re trying to advise people on what they should do to have the biggest additional impact. And there’s two ways, I think, in which science and innovation accelerating those could be not necessary.

The first way would be that we’re already on a trajectory where innovation happens close to the maximal speed, or at least it’s not very affectable anymore. I think that’s something we should think about.

And the other one is if you’re saying that societally, this is not true, but you could still think philanthropically in terms of organisations you can fund — and it’s true that there’s essentially no additional room for funding, or no additional organisations that should exist to accelerate this process. So those are uncertainties to consider.

I think my current view is still, at this point, that innovation advocacy is probably one of the most promising things we can do. But with both lots of progress and lots of policy progress, I think it’s becoming more of an open question than like five years ago. I’ve already mentioned the Inflation Reduction Act, the infrastructure bill in the US. And the European Green Deal in Europe, and also a much stronger kind of innovation climate philanthropy, like Breakthrough Energy in particular — Bill Gates’s philanthropic effort.

I think five years ago, it seemed pretty obvious that this is where you should act on the margin. But right now, it’s requiring more research. That’s what I was talking about in the beginning, where we’re trying to make more systematic comparisons between additional innovation advocacy and engaging in carbon lock-in, for example.

Rob Wiblin: That reminds me: you said earlier that innovation was a bit controversial among people focused on climate change. I suppose I’m not up with the fashion; I didn’t realise that that is controversial. When I was more involved in climate change-related things at university, people seemed to often be quite into science and R&D on solar, wind, and so on. Is this a German thing? Among whom is innovation controversial?

Johannes Ackva: It’s not a German thing. It’s a dynamic that plays out in most places, I would think — most places I follow closely, anyway. I think what happens is that the political right has always kind of been talking about innovation, and that’s often not in good faith, but rather more as a delay tactic — or that’s certainly how it has been perceived on the political left. So you’re ending up in the situation where the political right talks about innovation, but doesn’t really want to act, or doesn’t really want to kind of get really engaged in climate; and the political left is really engaged in climate but doesn’t really want to do innovation, or is kind of sceptical of this as a response.

So we’re ending up in the space where innovation has a bit of a bad rap thing for the wrong reason. Because we should actually be very excited about a credible, serious innovation effort. That’s one of the most powerful things, or the most powerful thing, any single country can do to change the trajectory.

Risk management [00:26:22]

Rob Wiblin: OK, we’ll come back to direct spending versus innovation versus politics and advocacy later on. But now I wanted to turn to one of the coolest ideas that I encountered listening to your interviews — where I was like hitting myself on the head, thinking I really should have thought of that before, but I hadn’t at all — which is this question of kind of hedging and risk management across different possible climate-change scenarios.

So one thing that you’ve noticed — and ended up putting a lot of weight on in your analysis — is that it turns out that if you want to reduce the expected damage done by climate change, potentially what you want to do is quite different than maximising the reduction in expected greenhouse gas emissions that you generate. Can you explain the logic behind how those two things come apart?

Johannes Ackva: First, it would seem totally reasonable — and that was my first idea as well — that the goal is to maximise emission reductions, because that seems like the obvious thing to optimise for. But I think the most clear or robust finding we have on climate damage is that climate damage is very nonlinear in expectation, which means that a world of 3° of warming is much worse than twice as bad as a world of 1.5°, and 6° is much worse than twice as bad as 3°.

The way that economists usually talk about this was saying that the social cost of carbon was different, right? The social cost of carbon was always contingent on a given emissions trajectory. And that means that fundamentally, avoiding a tonne of carbon in a particularly bad future can be orders of magnitude more important than avoiding a tonne of carbon in a very benign future. So it’s this nonlinear damage structure that kind of breaks this at the first instance.

And then where it really becomes action relevant — because right now, it’s fairly academic — is as soon as we think we know something about what correlates with bad futures. So for example, Zeke Hausfather, the climate scientist, has said that we’re not in like 4° worlds where renewables have succeeded beyond expectation, right? Those two things do not go together.

So we know that if we’re in a high-damaging future — or we probabilistically know, like we have like evidence that something is very likely — then intermittent renewables must have failed in some way, right? And that tells us something about actions we can take that are particularly valuable in those worlds — for example, investing in other energy sources, such as advanced nuclear, et cetera.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, I see. So the logic is that each degree of warming is worse than the last — and potentially by quite a large margin, because we’re getting further and further away from what humanity is familiar with, and the change is happening more rapidly. So going from 0° of warming to 1°, maybe humanity can handle that reasonably well in the scheme of things. But going from 5° of warming to 6° is potentially a massive problem. Much, much worse. And so all else equal, you’d much rather reduce a million tonnes of emissions in the hypothetical scenario where we’re at 6° of warming than one where we’re at 1° or 2° of warming.

So for example, with renewables: if it’s the case that solar and wind are just going to smash it out of the park and massively reduce emissions, and we’re just going to electrify transport and use renewables to generate it, if that’s the future scenario that we’re in, then it doesn’t matter so much. Because that means that we’re going to be on a low-emissions trajectory and a low level of climate change.

So what you want to do, or one approach you could take, is to try to imagine what the scenarios are where emissions end up being really high, and there’s really high levels of warming, and what we could do to reduce emissions in those cases. Is that basically it?

Johannes Ackva: Yeah, that’s basically it. Just to give an analogy from another cause area: for example, if you think about advanced artificial intelligence, and you guess there are some futures where AGI is inherently safe — but that’s certainly not the focus of our efforts to reduce AGI risk, right? That’s kind of the analogous case, where there are certainly worlds, like with renewables we’ve solved intermittency, a lot of these things are easy, et cetera. And we’ve maybe wasted a little bit of money on hedgy climate philanthropy, but we should be very happy about that, because that is much better than the opposite, which is kind of piling on to the mainstream response and not being prepared for failure.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, I guess buying insurance against worst-case scenarios. That’s one way that you could try to get an edge. You think this is one of those important factors to think about as a new climate philanthropist today? Can you explain why this is such a big deal, rather than just one factor among many?

Johannes Ackva: I mean, I think it is one factor among many. I wouldn’t claim it’s the most important one; I think it’s generally the one that people think about least. And I think there’s a couple of reasons that are broadly about neglectedness, and neglectedness in a cognitive sense.

So if we look at the climate discussion right now, it is very dominated by talking about 2°, and how can we close the gap from where we are right now, which is something like going from 2.5° to 2°. Or like, how can we reduce the gap from 2° to 1.5°? This is what almost all of the discussion has focused on, and also that philanthropy is focused on — there are reports published that are evaluating actions by how much of the gap are they closing. It’s a very, very strong mental focus on this. So in that sense, this kind of leads to actions that are risk-aware to be underprioritised, because it’s very often this case of like, “Let’s think about how we get to a very good world, or a much better world,”.

So I think that’s a reason why it’s so important. Another reason why it’s important is because essentially, we’re in a really high-uncertainty situation. So thinking carefully about how these different uncertainties relate to each other is I think one of the best ways to take good actions, even though we’re in a really uncertain space. For example, saying that we’re uncertain about how far renewables will go, we’re uncertain about many other things — but we do know something about how those things relate to the world. So the damage we should care most about actually gives us a lot of leverage, even if we have large uncertainties that we cannot reduce, or not reduce on plausible timelines.

Rob Wiblin: OK, so we’ve got uncertainty about a tonne of different things, and it’s going to be really hard to resolve this uncertainty. We’ve got uncertainty about how many emissions we’re going to generate. And then we have uncertainty about how the climate will respond to those emissions. And then we’ve got uncertainty about how that change in temperature is going to actually affect us, and how much we can adapt to it. And it seems like there’s not a whole tonne that we can do to figure out exactly which scenario we’re in, and there’s a very wide range of possible scenarios. So we kind of just have to work around that as a background fact.

How things could go really wrong [00:32:47]

Rob Wiblin: Do we have a sense of how much worse each extra degree of warming is? Like, how much worse is it to go from 4° to 5°, rather than from 3° to 4°?

Johannes Ackva: There’s fairly little agreement on that. Obviously, it’s essentially predicting very much outside of the window that we’re at. And there’s also debates on like, what’s the relevant evidence? Or how do you measure this? So I think there’s little consensus already in the published IPCC literature. So you can kind of see lots of different curves. Most of those curves, the IPCC also states they have high confidence in this nonlinear shape. So that seems relatively clear, but the exact curvature of things is very much not clear.

I also think one issue that’s really important here: it’s very closely related to ethical assumptions that you make. Especially if you’re a longtermist, if you say all future lives, potential lives matter morally, to the same degree that the existing lives, then the damage function should probably be extremely, extremely nonlinear — because essentially, indirect existential risk from climate, at least to me, doesn’t seem very plausible on like 1° or 2°. I think it’s something we might be talking about at like 4° or 5°.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, so it’s most important to focus the philanthropy on helping in scenarios where the incremental damage is particularly high. One scenario that we imagined for that is one where it turns out that it’s really hard to integrate solar and wind into the grid and generate most electricity that way. Are there any other scenarios that people should have in mind for how things could go really wrong?

Johannes Ackva: I think the ones that we know — quote unquote “know,” because predictions are hard, especially about the future — but I think one that you mentioned was the failure essentially, of getting to 100% zero-carbon electricity.

The other kind of technical one is essentially about how far does electrification go? Because you can also imagine a situation where we get to 100% clean electricity, but electrification of other sectors is harder than we think. Currently, the mainstream very much makes the bets on renewables and on electrification. “Electrify everything” is kind of the slogan for this. So if this is harder — because only a third or so of energy emissions are actually electrified at this point — this could be another kind of technological failure point.

Then I think there are two or three other failure points that are often mentioned in the literature. One is, of course, about international cooperation. If international cooperation on climate kind of breaks down, or economies become more fragmented from each other — something we’re already seeing — that is a risk factor, potentially. And another one is lots of energy-intensive growth in emerging economies — because as long as you have a situation where it’s not trivial to build out lots of clean energy, then this will always increase the risk.

Rob Wiblin: So one scenario is where international cooperation breaks down a lot, so countries stop having an interest in meeting their carbon obligations. I suppose you could just have a broader breakdown in comity here between countries, more conflict, and people are less interested in doing things about climate change, say, because they appreciate that they’ll bear all the cost of their actions, but it will mostly benefit people overseas.

With the “renewables not working that well” scenario, it’s easy to see what that might imply about how you need to hedge against that, or buy insurance against that, by trying to figure out other energy-generation technologies that would be able to fill the gap that renewables can’t, as it turns out in these scenarios.

But what would you buy insurance against in the “cooperation breaking down” case? What becomes more useful in those worlds?

Johannes Ackva: Actually, by the way, I would put a distinction between “cooperation breaks down” and “willingness to pay for climate.”

But if we’re saying willingness to pay for climate goes down, what is robust against this? One thing that’s robust against this is essentially a situation where we’re avoiding the prisoner’s dilemma that you outlined. So essentially, cleantech is so cheap that it’s not a tradeoff anymore.

So I think that’s a reason to be excited about innovation — because innovation is kind of robust to low-cooperation worlds. Like solar will still be cheap, even if international cooperation breaks down. This isn’t fully true — there are supply chain issues, et cetera — but as a first approximation, at least, the technological learning part of solar getting cheap has been done, so it’s making this more robust. I think that’s one thing; that’s one class of actions that’s more robust here.

I think there’s also something converse, which is about actions that are not robust. So right now, we’re having a global carbon price. If you average it over global emissions, that’s maybe between like $0 and $5 per tonne, or even less.

Rob Wiblin: That’s the actual price that people are paying around the world on average?

Johannes Ackva: Yeah, on average. And then we’re having models of climate progress where we’re going to have a carbon price of $100 a tonne in 2030. So everything that those models imply is, by definition, not robust, right?

Rainforest protection is another of those issues that seems really not robust, because it requires really strong international collaboration.

Rob Wiblin: Can you explain the implication with the rainforest?

Johannes Ackva: So the predominant approach right now to saving rainforests is that there’s some international agreements, REDD+. This is essentially like an international carbon market. And European countries, especially Norway, have been very interested in essentially paying countries like Brazil to not reduce their rainforests.

And this has all kinds of problems in reality. So like, on paper, this looks really cost effective, right? Because essentially, you’re exploiting the fact that the rainforests are predominantly in poorer countries, so it should be relatively cheap to avoid deforestation. In practice, this is a lot more difficult, because it would require lots of contracts going right, because ultimately, it’s about rewarding a counterfactual: avoided deforestation. What is “avoided deforestation”? In the best cases, this is hard to model; in the case where it’s between sovereign states, it kind of becomes impossible.

And this is essentially not working right now, and this is the kind of thing that will clearly break down in a world where there’s less international collaboration. So even if it were true that it is cheap in the best-case world, this would be a very non-robust action to take.

Rob Wiblin: Right, OK. Another scenario was having lots of coal-driven economic growth in lots of different developing countries. What would seem particularly useful to do in those scenarios?

Johannes Ackva: Actually, this is more about energy-intensive growth. It doesn’t need to be coal, because right now, if we’re looking at regions that could grow a lot, like, sub-Saharan Africa would probably grow on gas. But what this implies is this puts a limit to the usefulness of energy efficiency. Because essentially, energy efficiency is more carbon-saving the lower the energy demand is. And if you’re in a situation where a lot of energy efficiency benefits are kind of eaten up by additional energy demand, it’s not necessarily going to reduce a lot of carbon.

So I think that pushes in the direction of focusing on cleaning up energy supply, rather than focusing on efficiency. This is one argument; there are many other good reasons to focus on efficiency, because it’s relatively cheap to do, et cetera. It’s not saying don’t do efficiency. It’s more like, on the margin, this is what this argument does.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, OK. So this seemed like a really big insight to me when I heard it. It seems very consequential. And I felt like I really should have thought of this one before and realised that this was a really important issue.

But I suppose if I was a climate change professional working in allocating funding, the way that you do, it seems like something that would be very natural for you to realise, in the course of your work; a very important factor to notice. And if you’re allocating funding at a really large level, kind of globally, it will be very normal to think, “We want to have a portfolio of different investments, and we want to hedge a bit, so that if Project A doesn’t pan out, maybe project B will fill the gap. We want to have a portfolio such that we are sure that some things will succeed.”

Why hedging isn’t more incorporated into climate philanthropy [00:40:49]

Rob Wiblin: Why do you think that this idea of hedging isn’t more incorporated into climate philanthropy — and climate-change-related public policy — than it is?

Johannes Ackva: I think the reason for that is fundamentally because both governments and the climate community have kind of coalesced around international climate policy and targets, and the Paris Agreement of 2015, which kind of enshrined this goal of the world should aim for 2°, ideally 1.5°. This has really locked in or really strongly framed the discussion, so seriously thinking about 3° or 4° worlds is not really happening very much. There are obviously academic studies, but on a policy level it’s a bit of a taboo to think in those terms, I think.

Rob Wiblin: I mean, it might make sense to really focus on not going above some threshold temperature change, if we were confident that we knew that there was some discontinuity in the damage — that, you know, if you went from 2° to 2.1°, then that would be really terrible, because that would set off some chain reaction that will be much more damaging than previous increases. But given that we don’t really know that it’s more just like smoothly increasing incremental damage, why is it that the focus is so much around these specific emissions targets and degree-change targets?

Johannes Ackva: This is really in the realm of speculation, but I’d guess there’s two forces here.

I think one is really the need to reduce uncertainty, or the need to reduce complexity. Because generally, if you entertain like 20 different scenarios, you cannot really act politically. So you need to kind of get a common denominator. I think that’s kind of like, how can you actually make policy work? Or not only policy, but also a wider kind of societal discussion.

And then there’s the other aspect, which is about how climate policy has emerged around setting ambitious targets far in the future. So those targets become very important, and then become broken down politically, essentially as a mechanism of political force. If you follow discussions in high-income countries on climate policies, you will often hear something like, “This country has to reduce emissions by this amount by 2030. Otherwise, we will not meet the Paris Agreement,” or “Otherwise, we will not stabilise temperatures at 1.5°.” Those statements don’t really make sense — those things are calculated from one scenario. But this is kind of the way to structure a political conflict space, and then you can have a debate about whether you want to meet this target or not. But that’s, I think, what’s happening.

Rob Wiblin: OK, and then it just has this effect that we’re then kind of blind to what would be particularly useful in scenarios where we don’t meet those targets.

You mentioned that it was kind of taboo to think about the 4°, 5°, 6° change scenarios. I slightly encountered this when doing research for a previous episode. It actually just seemed quite hard to find studies that would look at the effects of really high changes in temperatures, where we really blew all of the goals. Why is it taboo to look into that?

Johannes Ackva: Well, for the really high-temperature ones, it’s maybe because they’re just really unlikely, or it’s also hard to do good science on them. But I think the reason it’s taboo is that the climate community — and this includes the climate science community — by and large has the goal to motivate stronger action. And saying we might fail is not a very positive move, right? It kind of always has to be about how we should meet those targets, and we should not already plan for failure in a way.

So I think that’s kind of the mentality. You always want to emphasise the urgency or the absolute importance of those targets, right? I mean, what I mentioned in terms of how the policy debates turn out, like, “The UK needs to meet this target by 2030”: this makes no sense. The UK is less than 1%, and 2030 is only one decade of a century-long challenge. But that’s kind of how it’s broken down in terms of being politicised — how it’s turned into a political action, the political conversation.

Rob Wiblin: I suppose to be sympathetic, maybe that is the best way of approaching it politically, in terms of influencing people’s motivations and interests. But I guess it’s good that you don’t face that constraint, so you can just talk about whatever you think is most useful on the margin.

Most promising broad strategies [00:45:13]

Rob Wiblin: Pushing on from this risk-management, emission-hedging thing, let’s return to this issue of broad strategies, and which ones seem like they’re most promising.

In my mind, in climate philanthropy, I think that there’d be kind of three very broad methods that one might adopt. There’s direct impact, like deploying solar panels or planting trees. Then science and innovation and R&D, with a mind of making methods possible that previously weren’t possible — or if they are possible, making them cheaper. Then I guess there’s number three, which you might see as advocacy and advocating for policy change: trying to change regulations around cars, or shift government budgets one way or the other.

Am I missing something from the list? Or would you subdivide one of those categories further in order to get more clarity?

Johannes Ackva: I would very much want to subdivide the third category further. That’s a little bit like this Eskimo example, having lots of different words for snow. Political advocacy is a thing where most of the action is or should be. Because essentially, political spending, or overall societal spending, is like two orders of magnitude larger than climate philanthropy. So it would be very strange if philanthropy’s main purpose should not be improving societal response overall.

So I want to differentiate things there further — in particular, a couple of distinctions I find really useful. One is policy advocacy in this political space, to differentiate between increasing the pie — which is something that grassroots organisations are focused on, essentially increasing the salience of climate, increasing the resource allocation towards climate — and then improving the allocation of the pie, which is about essentially making sure that the resources we’re allocating to climate are used in a way that’s actually useful for global decarbonisation.

So those are, to me, very, very different, in terms of organisations doing the work. And I guess it’s maybe not surprising, but I lean much more towards funding the latter kind of groups that are focused on improving the societal response.

Rob Wiblin: So you’re saying public budgets, government budgets related to climate change are 100 times larger than climate philanthropy? And that’s one of the key factors that causes you to think that trying to influence that 100x larger budget, then 100x greater effort is going to end up being one of the most important things that you could do?

Johannes Ackva: I guess the way I would say it is that global climate spending overall — this is government budgets, but also policy-induced budget spending — is over $1 trillion. Climate philanthropy is about $10 billion or so, so it’s two orders of magnitude lower. And this alone does not give you the 100x multiplier — and I also would not claim 100x multiplier from advocacy — but I would claim it’s clearly, strongly, a relevant multiplier.

And that comes from this idea that I think I’ve touched upon, which I call “predictable brokenness.” There’s parts about the way that we’re spending our resources and attention on climate that are kind of broken in predictable ways, right? It’s often hyperlocal, it’s focused on the short term, it’s kind of driven by different ideologies — both green ideologies, but also other ideological mistakes. So there’s lots of reasons to think that philanthropy can actually play a role in overall kind of improving the societal response, so this is where the multiplier comes from. Plus, most problems related to climate can essentially only be solved through policy.

Direct impact [00:48:50]

Rob Wiblin: OK, let’s go through each of these in turn, and you can say what you think are the most salient or important factors about them.

Starting with direct impact: stuff like actually just spending money to roll out solar panels or plant trees or build wind turbines. What stands out about that approach?

Johannes Ackva: I think what stands out about this approach is that, if you’re doing this philanthropically, you’re essentially piling on to something which either the private sector or the government is already doing at much larger scales.

Another thing that is salient about this is that I think this is more useful for technologies or approaches where technological learning is higher. And this is something which is generally true for earlier-stage technologies. I’m much more excited about Google and Facebook buying carbon removal offsets, because they’re essentially accelerating some kind of direct air capture or other technologies — where what they’re buying is not really the carbon offset, but they’re also essentially making cost reductions on those technologies more plausible.

If you compare this to buying rainforests or installing mature technology — which will often look relatively cost efficient in terms of the near-term, local impacts — for reasons we already mentioned with trajectory changes as they are, it seems very hard to be anywhere close to the best thing we could do.

Rob Wiblin: So if you’re going to actually try to deploy something, then you get bigger cost decreases if you do it early on. And so if you’d deployed a bunch of solar panels in 2000, that would do a lot more to stimulate cost decreases in the panels than if you’d spent the same amount of money now. Am I hearing that right?

Johannes Ackva: Yeah, this is right. Generally it’s not only building stuff that reduces costs. So it also seems to be true that pure R&D is more useful earlier. But if you’re talking about the relationship of building more and driving cost reduction, both through economies of scale and learning, you have learning rate models estimator for this, and usually what they estimate is a cost reduction per doubling of cumulative capacity.

So this implies that earlier units have a much larger benefit — like buying a Tesla in 2004 was much more useful in terms of making electric cars feasible than buying a Tesla now. Sorry, I’m not sure whether you could buy Teslas in 2004.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, but some sort of electric vehicle. With the cost curve, you get kind of a constant percentage decrease in the cost for each doubling of the amount of the thing that has ever been built. And I suppose early on, when almost no one is using something like solar panels, you know, decades ago, that will be much cheaper to double the number of them that have ever been built than it would be to do that today. So that’s what’s driving the dynamic.

Johannes Ackva: Yeah. Yeah.

Rob Wiblin: This reminds me of one of the most famous climate policies, or at least one that I’ve heard about a lot. As I understand it, Germany spent a lot of money trying to encourage people to actually deploy solar panels in Germany throughout the 2000s. And I think I’ve heard people make a bit of fun of this, because, you know, Germany is a very odd place to deploy solar panels on on a global scale, because it’s not a particularly sunny place. And also solar panels were phenomenally expensive back in 2005, at least compared to today. So the amount of actual capacity that was constructed with all of this money was in absolute terms, not that large. But it sounds like you’re saying that that would be the wrong way to think about the impact of that policy, and you would think about it pretty differently?

Johannes Ackva: Yeah, I think this is probably one of the best things that Germany ever did for the climate. And I think this teaches us something really important about evaluating climate action overall, which is: in general, if we evaluate an action that we can do philanthropically, or through policy, it will generally be the case that the global long-run consequences and short-term political consequences are quite often not correlated, or even negatively correlated.

So like, if Germany would have wanted to reduce emissions cost effectively in the early 2000s, like we would have bought Russian gas — this would have been really cost effective. This would not have changed the trajectory of technology; this would have just increased gas demand by a little bit. Obviously, what we did is very different, but much, much more consequential for global emissions — not for local emissions, but for global emissions — in the long run.

And this is a pattern I think we see again and again. And that’s why I’m generally much more excited about driving change where trajectory change can still happen, rather than marginally accelerating something that’s already mature and that’s already kind of on the path to victory — which would have been true for Russian gas in 2000, and this may be true for renewables right now.

Rob Wiblin: You’re saying it might be negatively correlated, but it seems like very frequently, it is going to be negatively correlated — because of course it’s going to be cheaper in terms of immediate reductions in emissions from the deployment per dollar, that that’s going to be cheapest with the most mature technologies that have already come down the cost curve. Whereas if you did it with something completely new, like trying some new geothermal method, then it’s going to be incredibly expensive per immediate change in emissions, but then it might potentially create a new industry that otherwise wouldn’t have existed by demonstrating that it can work.

So it seems like you almost want to set aside, and almost completely ignore with your actions, what the direct emissions decrease is from generating electricity from the thing.

Johannes Ackva: Now we have a climate correlate of strong longtermism… So yeah, I think that seems right as a first approximation. It does not seem entirely right if you think about policy, because solar is cheaper, for example. So a much smaller solar subsidy can lead to additional deployments, for example. So I need to think about how different mechanisms kind of trade off against each other, but as a first approximation, this is exactly what I would say: that in general, there should be a negative correlation between these impacts.

And when I look at the Inflation Reduction Act, for example, there’s a lot of modelling about like, “How much will this reduce emissions by 2032?” And you can see it will be significant, and this will be mostly driven by renewables and electric cars. And if you look at this, you could come to the conclusion that renewables and electric cars are the most important part of the Inflation Reduction Act, or in general of the American policy change.

And I would strongly disagree with that. I would say the more early-stage technology support is much more consequential and much more important. I’m much more excited about supporting organisations that are working on increasing the amount of early-stage technology, compared to those that are focused on accelerating electric car adoption or renewables at a time where those technologies are already winning and it’s more about accelerating it by a couple of years.

Science, innovation, and R&D [00:55:29]

Rob Wiblin: Let’s push on to the second bucket, which is science, innovation, and R&D. It’s a bit funny, because it seems like you were saying the first bucket — direct impact — has impact overwhelmingly just by affecting this second bucket, which is science and innovation, in cost reductions. What else would you say about this second category?

Johannes Ackva: Sorry, just to correct that. I think for the first part, if you’re focusing on mature technology where the learning benefit is lower, then I think it’s plausible that the mitigation benefit is larger. I think what you have to control for then is policy additionality — so you have to do this in a jurisdiction where this either increases the ambition of the climate targets, or you don’t have an ambitious climate target. If you’re in a liberal state in the US or in the European Union and you’re just building more clean stuff philanthropically, there’s a very high chance that what you’re doing is actually not additional.

Rob Wiblin: So if you’re in a jurisdiction where there is some cap on the total amount of emissions that are allowed to be emitted, then any changes within that don’t actually affect the total, because if you reduce your emissions then that just reduces the carbon price and allows someone else to emit more. Is that the point that you’re making?

Johannes Ackva: So one example of this is what can be called the “waterbed effect” in carbon markets. Luckily, right now, most carbon markets are not designed in a way that this is still true anymore. This was an early block of early carbon markets.

But the general phenomenon is much broader. Something that generates the same effect is like a clean energy standard to force the jurisdiction to only have zero-carbon electricity by a given year. Or you often have this when essentially you’re having like lots of overdetermined decarbonisation action, both in ambitious states in the United States and in the European Union, that essentially whenever you’re doing something directly, you should discount it, and probably discount it quite significantly.

Rob Wiblin: OK, that’s useful to know. Coming back to that question, what are the key things that listeners should know about funding science and innovation?

Johannes Ackva: Philanthropically funding science and innovation, I’m not sure how much this is actually happening. It’s not a lot. It’s something that Bezos Earth Fund has been doing.

The reason I would not be excited about that in general as a philanthropic action is that essentially private investment, venture capital investment, has already ticked up strongly.

And it’s also strongly responding to policy signals. When I think about causality, I’m always most excited about what we’re going to talk about next, which is changing policy and policy signals — because in a way, private investment into R&D but also government R&D follow from that. So I don’t really see a large role for philanthropists funding R&D projects. Also, again, for the scale reasons we discussed before.

Rob Wiblin: I would have thought that maybe there was a role, because government budgets are the largest movement here, but governments are somewhat famously reluctant to invest in really early-stage R&D or very speculative ideas that are highly likely to fail — because then the public will criticise and feel like their money has been wasted if it doesn’t pan out.

You might also think there’s tonnes of venture capital flooding into industries that are imminently about to become a really big deal, like electric cars. But maybe venture capitalists would be less interested in funding early science and early R&D into something like hot rock geothermal, for example, that isn’t going to be very commercialisable anytime soon — such that anything that they learn is just going to be copied by others by the time one could actually build a profitable business here. Am I thinking about this wrong?

Johannes Ackva: I think you’re thinking about this right. And like, on the margin of what I would recommend in this space, this would always be the more early-stage stuff that is kind of underfunded, right? You can do this as philanthropy or as impact investing, so there are vehicles there.

I kind of don’t agree with what you say on the characterisation of political processes. To put it a different way, it’s certainly been a big problem, which you mentioned, that like if you look at the American context, the innovation pipeline was not in a good place. Part of the reason for that was that basic research is kind of bipartisan, and late-stage commercialisation is kind of low risk. But in the middle, you have several valleys of death. And then you have the Solyndra scandal, where Mitt Romney started his campaign with a very strong bias against technology support throughout the entire innovation pipeline.

But if you look at this right now — if you look at what has happened with the Inflation Reduction Act and with the CHIPS and Science Act, the bipartisan infrastructure bills — it looks much better. There’s actually an office now for Clean Energy Demonstrations, so we now have full innovation support throughout the entire chain.

And to link this to philanthropy, if you look at a very influential report published in September around that time in 2020 — which was called Energizing America and was essentially advice for the incoming Biden administration on how to reform the energy innovation system — by all accounts, this has been a very influential report. It was a report funded philanthropically, not by us, but by Breakthrough Energy.

So I think even if you’re quite down on what the current policy is, I think one should not underestimate how feasible it is sometimes to actually change and improve things for the better. And ultimately, if we cannot fix our public innovation system, then we’re screwed with regards to climate. I think it’s not very plausible to say we’re going to replace this all with private innovation effort.

Rob Wiblin: Right. Just because it’s so much smaller.

Advocacy and policy [01:01:00]

Rob Wiblin: Let’s push on to the third category then. Is there anything you’d like to say about advocacy and policy that you haven’t said yet?

Johannes Ackva: So people often ask me, “Are you for advocacy or policy or technology?” That’s a really strange question for me. Because when we’re in the high-income country context — where future emissions are small and innovation capacity is large — I’m mostly in favour of advocacy to improve technology policy. So it’s also about policy, about technology. So I often find that people are having a strange distinction in their head.

I think apart from that, this seems like still a really strong and promising theory of change to have an impact — because again, you have a situation where, by default, even when there’s climate attention, this climate attention will not be focused on what is globally most useful, et cetera. So there’s lots of potential to improve societal response through philanthropy there.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. I guess I had this vague impression that philanthropists can often be quite reluctant to get in on policy, or advocacy around government policy, because they feel it’s extremely uncertain what kind of impact they’re going to have, and it’s an extremely hard space to navigate. Is that true? Do you think it’s a correct impression?

Johannes Ackva: I think most strategic climate philanthropists are actually quite involved in policy. This is something I do encounter a lot, because I do talk to a lot of people in tech, given Founders Pledge and my role. There’s a particular class of donor that’s quite reluctant to invest in advocacy for that reason: because it seems really uncertain. Often also these people have beliefs that private investment seems a lot more certain, et cetera. But I think this is not true for institutional climate philanthropy, that they’re underinvesting in that. I think that those are mostly people that don’t understand the crucial role of policy.

Rob Wiblin: So it sounds like the tech scene looms reasonably large in climate philanthropy — I suppose because Bezos, as I understand it, is one of the biggest donors, maybe even a majority of philanthropy around climate change now. I guess many people in the tech space are kind of sceptical of government action, have had negative experiences or negative impressions. Does that then mean that it can be kind of a neglected approach, or are there any particular blind spots that you think might come from that particular industry?

Johannes Ackva: Yeah. I think each industry or each kind of group of people have their own blind spots, right? Like the blind spots of the mainstream greens is the technophobia, the anti-nuclearism, et cetera. But the blind spots of the Silicon Valley donor class, I guess, is kind of this scepticism towards advocacy, et cetera.

So this is absolutely a factor in some things. And a lot of my explanatory work — which is not so much the research itself, but making the argument for specific opportunities — is focused on explaining how crucial advocacy is: first by showing how crucial government policy is for innovation, but then also the fact that this can actually be meaningfully affected through philanthropy. Because I think this is a big limitation to impact.

Rob Wiblin: How can you demonstrate the importance of government policy for philanthropy to someone who’s intuitively sceptical?

Johannes Ackva: So I wouldn’t claim that I’ve found the last word on that, but I think one thing I can focus on, or one thing we did recently, is we worked on a talk together with the Clean Air Task Force. The talk was given by the Clean Air Task Force, but very much with the goal to explain how does philanthropy work, with the example of superhot rock geothermal. So this is very much a technological invention, and lots of people in Silicon Valley might be very excited about it when they hear about it. But I think the first thing that they would often do would be privately invest rather than fund the advocacy.

So we kind of teased out the different ways in which philanthropy matters here. One is that philanthropy matters for really putting something on the map, like building stakeholder networks, listening to relevant stakeholders, communicating with policymakers, building credible arguments. This is one really important part.

Another part is more classical, what we would call “public good provision.” So if you’re looking at a superhot rock geothermal space that has largely funded the companies from private investments, venture capital, then no one will necessarily do the public good for the entire industry. This might be more general lobbying. This might be stuff like understanding where actually the heat is concentrated. This might be about organising knowledge sharing between these actors. So there’s a lot of actors that for a more mature context, maybe a government would do this public good provision, but it might not just happen in early-stage technology development. But can be accelerated philanthropically. So I think this would be another one.

And then, of course, credible advocacy. If a climate NGO goes to a policymaker and says, “Hey, this technology could be really impactful,” that’s just a different story than if the private company interested in that is making that case. Those are a couple of those mechanisms.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. You’ve done quite a lot of research into where current climate philanthropy is actually going. Where is it focused out of these three or four different categories?

Johannes Ackva: So it’s actually not really easy to infer this along those dimensions. So we have good data — this is not our own data; this is data that the ClimateWorks Foundation has collected, and we’re doing some secondary analysis for this. That’s very good data on the different regions and the different approaches. But this is more about approaches — like different technologies or grassroots activism — this is not so much along the lines that you outlined. So I can’t really answer this from a purely data-driven perspective.

Overall, my impression is that most focus has been traditionally on the more policy stuff. Bezos Earth Fund, I think they have so much money that they’re also doing some of the more direct stuff. But I think it’s maybe what they would do as the last action if they’re fully maximising, and they feel like the advocacy is kind of saturated.

Geography [01:07:06]

Rob Wiblin: OK, let’s push on from method to location or geography as a vector — one of the different dimensions which you were thinking of optimising. Which regions and countries currently spend the most on climate change mitigation?

Johannes Ackva: Right now it’s essentially Europe and the US. Those are the regions spending the most by a large amount.

Rob Wiblin: So in thinking about crowdedness, I suppose we’re thinking about where the most spending is now in order to try to think about where spending would be neglected — where might you find low-hanging fruit that isn’t already being taken. In thinking about crowdedness, should we think about it in per capita, or per current emissions, or per expected future emissions, or per something else?

Johannes Ackva: That’s a really interesting question. I think we need a much more complex model for this. So this first idea around crowdedness or neglectedness in this is oftentimes too simple once you’re getting into the nitty gritty at this level. Here, for example, I think what we would ultimately want to get to is not something I think anyone has gotten to: it would be something like, “What is the decarbonisation value of a different region?” — which would be a function of both the emissions there, but also all of the indirect effects.

So I’ve emphasised the most important thing that Germany ever did was not reducing emissions; it was making solar cheap. And the worst thing was being anti-nuclear. Both of these things are mostly having effects outside. So I think that’s something we would want to get to ultimately. Obviously, this would be really hard.

But as a first approximation, in thinking about the importance of different regions, I think it makes sense to think about different theories of change, and then from the perspective of a given theory of change, evaluating the importance of a region. So let’s say you’re in the innovation theory of change, then you want to look at the innovation capacity in a given region and also how much can we plausibly still improve that, et cetera. So you’re kind of combining elements of importance and of improvability, which is about tractability, to form a view.

And for innovation, this would probably lead you towards maybe focusing on the US as the most potent economy in terms of innovation. We are also looking at Europe, not from the perspective that we think Europe is equally effective at innovation, but that in general, philanthropically speaking, innovation philanthropy is more neglected in Europe. So that leads us to think we might want to look at Europe as well. That’s juggling those kinds of considerations.

Rob Wiblin: OK, so inasmuch as you’re trying to stimulate science or demonstrations of new technologies, maybe what matters is not per capita at all or anything like that, but like a per number of scientists. I guess you’re saying innovation capacity.

Johannes Ackva: There’s something really important here, which is that when we think about neglectedness or crowdedness, we usually think about this in terms of increasing a direct effort. And what I’m talking about when I prioritise between reasons for philanthropy is like, essentially, I want to have the most leverage, right? And this can often lead to the opposite conclusion. Like I could say, everything else being equal, you want to fund philanthropy in the region with the largest innovation budget.

Rob Wiblin: Right. One line of reasoning would take you to where you want to fund something in the country that has no budget around climate change at all. But I suppose if you’re working on trying to shift what people are doing, then you want to do it in a place where there’s the most money available to shift, or the most effort available to improve. So, yes, the exact reverse logic.

What can we say then about location as something you might optimise for here? Because you’re saying the most money is spent in the US and Europe, I suppose because they’re the richest places, and so the governments have more to spend. And they’re more likely to spend money locally than to fund some project overseas. I guess they probably also have the richest philanthropists there who are interested in these topics, and people tend to fund things in the country that they’re from for some reason. But at the same time, it might be that it’s best to fund stuff there because they have the most innovation capacity or they have the most public spending available to be influenced and improved. Do you end up drawing any conclusions about where you would like to make grants?

Johannes Ackva: Yes. And we’re doing a lot of research, getting to more final or more updated conclusions. But I think a first conclusion would be that if you’re engaging in a high-income country, like if you’re in the EU — maybe you have 3–5% percent of future emissions and maybe you’re in 20–30% of global innovation capacity right now for cleantech — it’s very clear that the goodness of actions, as a first approximation in the EU, is determined by their effect on global emissions, through innovation or other mechanisms. So that’s kind of combining theory of change with engaging in regions. So that’s the first thing.

And then within innovation, maybe you want to look at the US, maybe the EU, maybe Korea, maybe China, Japan. Then it kind of ends with regards to plausible candidates for innovation philanthropy, because only those jurisdictions are plausibly producing large-scale technological change.

Looking at this from a different perspective, if you’re looking at this from the perspective of avoiding carbon lock-in — avoiding large investments that would commit emissions in the future — which regions you will prioritise will look very different. Then you will look at China, India, Southeast Asia, and you will think about how this compares to sub-Saharan Africa. Those are really hard questions, because there’s always lots of different considerations.

Right now we’re almost definitely going to invest more in China because that’s obviously important from both angles. For other regions, I think it’s usually clear what the considerations are. But for example, if you look at sub-Saharan Africa versus Southeast Asia, it’s kind of unclear — it depends on how you trade off our shapeability, how you think about the affectability of emissions. So that’s work that we’re doing right now, trying to get a better handle on those questions.

Rob Wiblin: OK, so you don’t necessarily end up saying, “There’s so little money spent in Nigeria, so we should try to make grants in Nigeria.” Instead, it’s more realising what is the comparative advantage of each different location, and what are the most important things that can be influenced there?

So with Europe, it potentially has quite a lot of universities that could do interesting science, but the fraction of future emissions globally that it accounts for is really quite small — so you can kind of ignore that aspect of it, and just think about what could they do that might influence the 95% of emissions that are going to come from the rest of the world.

Johannes Ackva: Yeah. I think another way to say it is that absence of spending is not sufficient for evidence of neglectedness. So in the sense that it could be entirely rational to not spend on a region, for example, it could be entirely rational to not spend a lot on Africa — because Africa right now has almost no emissions. And if one thinks that future emissions of Africa are mostly determined by technological change to something globally, then you would take the view that it doesn’t really matter to engage in Africa right now. This is not the view I’m taking; I’m just laying out a view one could take to illustrate that.

Rob Wiblin: So innovation is one of the things that we mentioned at the outset as being a particularly important trajectory-shaping thing. The other one was this carbon lock-in from construction. And you’re saying that you can just look at the number of like where the most coal plants are being constructed — and it’s going to be China, India, Indonesia, I don’t know, possibly Vietnam, Nigeria; you might know this. And then you think about what could plausibly be done to shape the amount of that that’s going on, or to repurpose the plants because it might just seem not practical to stop people from constructing them.

Johannes Ackva: I mean, repurposing is ultimately more on the innovation side of things. Yes, I think that’s probably right.

But to make this a little bit more concrete, if we compare, for example, China to Indonesia: China’s coal fleet is significantly larger. But China is also at a further stage in economic development, and also at a further stage in terms of climate policy commitments. So you could actually come out and say that you want to focus on Indonesia, for example, because there’s more new coal potentially being built. That’s a reason to engage there rather than China, so like a difference in affectability.

So that’s what I was pointing towards in the beginning, where we were saying just looking at the absolute numbers of current capacity or planned capacities, it’s not really enough. We want to get a better model of affectability that takes into account other considerations.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Have you tried coming up with a measure of affectability, or is that yet to be done?

Johannes Ackva: That’s something we’re working on right now. We’re working on compiling the data. We’re looking at data of future emissions, future emissions scenarios, and existing infrastructure — so committed emissions and then considered emissions, like what is being planned. And once we’ve collated this data, we can better inform this question about what you need to assume about the different affectability levels to prioritise different things. I think that’s where this exercise will probably end. There will be no definite answer there, but it will allow us to explore what you would need to believe to prioritise sub-Saharan Africa over Indonesia, or China over India, et cetera.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. This is making me think about when I was growing up in Australia and hearing a lot about climate change. Now, Australia, despite having a pretty bad record on a per capita basis, is just a really small country. So its emissions don’t amount to very much in the scheme of things, certainly considering all of the 21st or 22nd century. But most of the discussion is around, “How can we change Australia’s emissions right now? What can we do to reduce per capita emissions in Australia over the next 10 years?” — which you’re suggesting is a really big distraction.

But then I wonder, maybe that actually kind of is fine, because it prompts you to spend money on developing or deploying new technologies and that ends up driving down the costs. And in fact, that is a not unreasonable way to have a much larger effect, by influencing what other countries end up doing over the longer term. It’s kind of a case where you could be at least in the ballpark of being right, even though people are following a completely wrong logic.

Johannes Ackva: Yeah, there’s two things I would say to that.

One is that developing technology and driving down the cost is not usually what you’d prioritise if you’re looking at your place for the next 10 years. This is not where this actually leads to. If we look at why Germany was willing to subsidise renewables so much, this was not driven by climate: this was mostly driven by Germans really liking renewables, and Germans really wanting to phase out nuclear power. So the motivation was actually quite, quite different. So I think that’s kind of the problem here. But in general, the politically feasible way for countries to make a contribution is to drive down technology [costs]. So I think we very much agree on that. I mean, I think California is smaller than Australia, and California had a large impact on global emissions through innovation.

I think the other thing I’d say is that this fails when the world is very different from the high-income countries. Let’s say in Switzerland, the marginal demand of the most radical climate group there is to insulate all Swiss homes — which will really do approximately nothing for global decarbonisation, because most emission growth is in countries where insulation isn’t really the problem. Another example of this is carbon capture and storage, which we might very well do without for coal power in high-income countries. But the fact that we might do that without this is kind of a reason that the innovation there is low, and that it’s not really becoming an affordable option in those places where a lot of new coal is located.

Rob Wiblin: Right. So the technologies that you might end up deploying in Australia could just not be super transferable or not be the priorities if you’re thinking about much larger countries over a much longer time period.

Johannes Ackva: Yeah.

Grassroots activism and electrification [01:19:19]

Rob Wiblin: OK. Let’s finally turn to specific approaches, or specific technologies or more concrete projects, and how interesting they seem to you. Maybe I’ll run through a bunch of these and you can offer your takes on how excited you are by them relative to other people, and you can give a reason why.

I’ve chosen a selection of options that are a little bit less mainstream, but which I’ve heard people talk about over the last couple of years. I’ve got quite a few, so the audience should forgive you if your answers end up being reasonably brief here. Does that sound good?

Johannes Ackva: One thing I want to flag here before we go into this is that essentially I’m not talking in general about the technological attractiveness of a given solution. I’m talking about my all-things-considered view, given how good I think something is, and how appreciated or underappreciated it is.

Rob Wiblin: What do you mean by that?

Johannes Ackva: I mean that given that climate is such a crowded space, being excited about something, and being excited about something as a marginal funding opportunity, is often quite different — because a lot of stuff is already well funded compared to what is needed.

Rob Wiblin: So I suppose the archetypal case here might be that you’re very optimistic about solar panels in general. You think that we might end up generating a whole lot of electricity through solar panels in the fullness of time. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you think it’s underrated and it doesn’t necessarily mean that on the margin we need to make more philanthropic grants to fund that. The two things come apart completely.

Johannes Ackva: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I’m very excited about solar panels and I’m very unexcited about funding advocacy to marginally accelerate solar panels, yes.

Rob Wiblin: So we’ll think about how good these things seem relative to how much attention or how much effort they’re getting now.

Rob Wiblin: The first one is funding grassroots activism, like Extinction Rebellion or Sunrise or Just Stop Oil, all of which have been getting quite a lot of attention in recent years.

Johannes Ackva: I think this is a good example of what we just talked about. So I think especially the early Greta-style climate movement and Extinction Rebellion, et cetera, have certainly changed the conversation and had a big impact there — both in terms of increasing the pie, but also kind of narrowing the solution space. So I guess I’m a bit ambivalent about that.

But in general, once you hear about them in the national media, that’s not the time to fund them anymore. It’s a little bit like why you shouldn’t fund in disasters. Disaster philanthropy is a bad idea, right? Once something has national attention, that’s not what you want to fund.

I think the interesting question there is whether you could fund early-stage movements that will reliably produce good results. That’s where I would look in that space. But I wouldn’t be excited about funding any of those movements you just mentioned.

Rob Wiblin: The countervailing consideration that would jump to mind is you might think that they’ve managed to get so much attention, so they have a very big audience. Maybe they’re really competent and they’ve been able to build these really big movements, so maybe they should get more resources because they’re well able to use them. You think on balance that factor is dominated?

Johannes Ackva: Yeah, I think on balance that factor is dominated. I think they both get national attention as well as like broad approval, so there’s also large funds like the Climate Emergency Fund that are funding this work. And I think the other thing is also I have a certain ambivalence with regards to something like Just Stop Oil, that’s quite polarising, or some of those other movements — like how the effect actually looks.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Well, alternatively, how about funding progressive organisations that are focused on improving policy around popular solutions around electrification, like Rewiring America, how do they look?

Johannes Ackva: So Rewiring America is essentially really focused on that: rewiring America — so like near-term, mature technology: decarbonisation options like electrifying your home, electrifying your private transport, putting solar panels on the roof. I think that’s something that’s extremely popular, and political pressures exist that very much focus on this, because this is where the American labour is, for example.

So these are not organisations I would think it’s good to support, because they’re kind of shifting the discourse in the direction that’s removed from optimising global emission reductions. Like if Rewiring America alone would write the climate bill, it would almost be entirely focused on mature technologies, and would not capitalise on the innovation benefits. And that’s not where I would push on the margin.

Rob Wiblin: I see. Because they all focus maybe on job creation within America, which is just completely disconnected from the actual goals that you’re trying to accomplish.

Johannes Ackva: Yeah, and also those are the goals that already have strong constituencies, right? It’s not only with job creation; it’s also about getting near-term action done, and that’s very appealing. And I’m not saying it’s bad; I’m just saying that on the margin, it’s not the thing to focus on, I think.

Nuclear power plant designs and reactors [01:23:56]

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. OK, how about new nuclear power plant designs and reactors, and trying to get demonstrations of those built and then scale it up a whole lot? I’m sure there’s probably a bunch of different ones. I’ve heard of molten salt reactors, but I imagine that there are other ideas as well?

Johannes Ackva: I think this is something where it’s actually interesting, because I think there’s a fair amount of private investment, but philanthropically, it’s still fairly niche. So in that sense, supporting this philanthropically is something we have done and I think will continue to do.

It’s kind of similar to what I talked about for superhot rock: I think there’s things that philanthropy can do there that are quite useful and that also many traditional climate philanthropists will not do, because they’re anti-nuclear. So that’s something we’re interested in, especially in Europe, because even though Founders Pledge is a small climate funder, we’re among the largest pro-nuclear climate funders in Europe, because there are so few pro-nuclear climate funders in Europe.

Rob Wiblin: So when I’m thinking about these newer technologies that people talk about, newer energy and energy-generation technologies, my mind immediately goes to try to analyse whether the advocates for them are overstating the technical feasibility of these methods. Or if we could get molten salt nuclear reactors to work, would they be cheap enough to actually compete with alternatives?

How much time do you spend thinking on that kind of technical level, evaluating engineering details and experiments that people are running to see whether you buy into the overall case?

Johannes Ackva: In general, this is something we sometimes do. So we spent a lot of time on the techno-economic feasibility of repowering coal last year, because it seemed like a key uncertainty for several grants we were making.

But I think in general, this is not something we would generally spend a lot of time on for a couple of reasons. One is that it’s really about information economy: it seems like you can spend a lot of time on this and not reduce uncertainty very much — you’re kind of always ending up with many different plausible interpretations of the evidence.

On the other hand, there’s very robust evidence to think that traditional climate philanthropists are not investing in nuclear because they’re anti-nuclear. So essentially there are reasons that you know about the structure of the funding, that are independent of the technology, that lead you towards making that bet.

Another thing which seems important in this context is that — again, this is my policy-centric view — when you look at advanced nuclear, I think the main problems are not technological ones. Or like, there are clearly technological problems, but the fact that they’re not solved is essentially a function of sustained public attention or the lack thereof. So in that sense, my main uncertainty with advanced nuclear is not like, “Does the physics work?” My uncertainty is like, “Will we actually get a functioning advanced nuclear innovation system that solves these generally unsolvable problems?” And I think similarly for something like superhot rock, where the uncertainty is more on that level.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. It kind of makes sense to me that old-school environmentalists would be sceptical of nuclear, although as I understand it, at least the environmental movement in the English speaking world has been taking a sustained second look at nuclear power. But why would it be that climate philanthropists today as a group would be really biased against nuclear as an option?

Johannes Ackva: I think the anti-nuclear bias is much less than it was five years ago or so. So as a first approximation, the influx of the tech community of Silicon Valley wealth into climate philanthropy has certainly made climate philanthropy at large less technophobic or less anti-nuclear, for example. So I think this is much less of a problem than it used to be. I think it’s becoming more nuanced, especially in the US context. But the other thing that we talked about before is like, if you’re a tech donor, being excited about advocacy is kind of the exception, right?

Rob Wiblin: Right. Another nuclear-related proposal that I’ve heard is that rather than try to come up with new nuclear power designs that involve all kinds of new methods to try to make them safer or more efficient or cheaper or whatever, a bunch of innovation, that instead, what we should do is just take the existing best designs that have already gotten regulatory approval — and so have already gone through all the testing that can take years or decades — and just produce tonnes of really small versions of these, so really modular reactors. And that is something that could be done a whole lot faster, if you are making them sufficiently small that they could just be mass produced in factories and then rolled out at all kinds of sites. Have you heard of that idea? And if so, do you have a view on it?

Johannes Ackva: Yeah. This is just a form of small modular reactors, like both NuScale in the US and Rolls-Royce in the UK. So these small modular reactors are essentially using existing technologies, and I think those are kind of the lowest-risk versions. So in a portfolio of different advanced nuclear bets, technologically speaking, those are probably the lowest-risk ones, but also the ones that seem least exciting in terms of solving some of the other things that people don’t like about nuclear. But yeah, I think those are plausible candidates. Those are the ones that are generally furthest in the pipeline.

Rob Wiblin: So what are those groups trying to do there? I guess they’re trying to break through the regulatory barriers to building any new nuclear in many locations? Is that the thing they’re trying to confront?

Johannes Ackva: Yeah. So if it’s like a light-water reactor, you have a licensing process in place, for example, in the US, for the large light-water reactors. But essentially for newer designs, especially if you’re going further from that, you need new regulatory processes. And there’s a lot of lock-in there, regulatory lock-in, that makes this very hard.

It’s another reason why advocacy is good: you cannot fix a nuclear regulatory process through private investment. You need to exert political pressure.

Geothermal energy [01:29:57]

Rob Wiblin: How about geothermal energy? And as I understand it, there’s kind of two different categories here: there’s the classic geothermal energy, and then there’s this hot rock geothermal, which is where you dig much, much deeper, and you can get sufficiently hot rocks almost everywhere if you’re able to to go down far enough. Am I understanding that right?

Johannes Ackva: Yeah, that’s roughly correct. I think there are a lot more, but it makes sense to distinguish those two. So classical geothermal is very location specific, and it’s good when you have it, but essentially only available when you have volcanoes with very specific conditions. That’s kind of a niche renewable resource.

Groups like Clean Air Task Force or Project InnerSpace work on or are supporting the development of superhot rock, and what you’re looking at is drilling much deeper and then injecting water and getting the heat out. So “geothermal anywhere” is kind of the catchphrase here — making geothermal location-independent — essentially by utilising and further developing technological advances that were brought about by the fracking revolution in the United States. So we now are much better at drilling: let’s use this not for extracting gas, but for getting heat out.

Rob Wiblin: What do you make of it? Is that an underrated or promising thing to fund?

Johannes Ackva: Yes, absolutely. This is something we’ve been supporting pretty heavily, through supporting the Clean Air Task Force — which has, I think, the largest philanthropically funded program on this. It’s a really promising bet. If this works, you can essentially generate clean, low-carbon electricity that is also firm: that is available 24/7 and that’s relatively energy dense, so you could also do repowering potentially with this.

So this is very exciting from an energy standpoint, but extremely nascent. I guess because of the connotations with geothermal traditionally, it requires active work to change the perception of geothermal and to build the excitement to actually try those. This is another example where philanthropy can be helpful, because it’s not rocket science: one can do those things, but one needs public experimentation. One needs to drill those wells, et cetera — private capital will not do that. So you need to make those more likely, and the way to make this more likely is through targeted advocacy.

Rob Wiblin: Got to build some buzz so that the people pressure the government to try this stuff out. Like I guess money has been given to fusion for many years because people find it exciting.

What are the reasons why hot rock geothermal is most likely to not work out, and not be a fantastic way of solving this problem? I mean, it sounds really great if we could actually dig sufficiently deep and it wasn’t horrifically expensive.

Johannes Ackva: To me, at least, I think the most likely way it would not work out is if we’re not getting our act together in terms of making it work, right? Essentially, this requires some progress in material science, it requires experimentation, et cetera. So we want to walk down this technology path and try this out. But this will take a sustained policy effort. This is something that will take a decade and will take significant public investment.

So I think the main uncertainty is like, will this actually happen? So that’s the dimension that I think about. Obviously it could also not work technologically. But in general, it seems much lower risk technologically than something like fusion, because ultimately what you’re doing is you’re extending a set of technologies that you’ve already developed for the shale gas revolution and applying it to a new context. So this is kind of innovation, but it’s not rocket science.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. It’s interesting that from one point of view, you seem extremely optimistic. Because with many different technologies, you’re saying that if we put in the effort to make this work that we did with solar and wind, then we could just solve climate change if we had the sustained science behind it. And I guess it’s because of that view that causes you to think that the main problem here is that that’s not happening, or it might not happen — and the main reason it won’t happen is just that public policy and governments don’t get behind it on a sustained big scale. Is that kind of right?

Johannes Ackva: I think that’s kind of right. I think if we had the level of enthusiasm and public support for all climate solutions that we had for solar and wind, we can definitely solve climate change. I would be very confident about that being basically true. It doesn’t mean that I’m sure that any one of those technologies will definitely succeed, but there are enough really good bets worth making. And it’s not like solar was cheap in 2000; that was not obviously a great energy solution — there were lots of articles done about renewables never getting cheap, never being a significant part of the energy supply. So I think that’s evidence for how technological change, at a first approximation, is to a large degree the result of decisions.

I mean, I think it’s different for something like fusion, right? But for stuff that isn’t quite fusion, that seems generally quite true to me.

Nuclear fusion [01:34:59]

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Speaking of fusion, how about nuclear fusion?

Johannes Ackva: Yeah, nuclear fusion for me is something that I find interesting for the long-term potential for humanity. I don’t really see it as that relevant for climate timelines. And sometimes I’m a bit worried that people kind of look to fusion and then don’t take advanced nuclear or advanced nuclear fission seriously. So I do see this a bit as a risk. It’s not something I talk a lot about, because I see it on a different timeline, and it’s not really needed. We have a lot of other bets we could solve this problem with.

Rob Wiblin: I see. So the problem is just that it’s going to take too long to get it to a commercial price. The technical challenges are greater, and so there’s other things that you’re more optimistic about coming before nuclear fusion, basically.

Johannes Ackva: Yeah. And it would be kind of a shame if we would now all get excited about nuclear fusion and wouldn’t make sure that all of the advanced nuclear designs — like nuclear fission designs we now have in the pipeline — that we don’t get them to commercialisation by 2030.

Rob Wiblin: Is there some particular technical challenge that stands out to you as being the reason why nuclear fusion won’t be a common electricity source anytime soon?

Johannes Ackva: I don’t look into the technology there deeply, but I mean, we’re essentially pre-demonstration, and we’re many years away from demonstration. Many of the advanced nuclear fission designs have been demonstrated in the lab in the 1960s and 1980s. Obviously, you can always have an intelligence explosion and everything gets radically faster. I think that’s a very EA kind of uncertainty that I might have there. But if you’re going to think about technological changes roughly the way it has been in the past, then it seems clear that this is further away than advanced nuclear or superhot rock geothermal.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. I’ll stick up links to a couple of videos from the YouTube channel Real Engineering that I watched last year, which definitely made me appreciate just how challenging it is to make nuclear fusion work at a reasonable price. Although it’s super cool, it does seem like it’s some way off.

Decarbonising concrete, shipping, and agriculture [01:37:01]

Rob Wiblin: How about efforts to make concrete with less carbon dioxide? Because as I understand it, concrete is just an enormous source of emissions that at least I don’t think about very much.

Johannes Ackva: Yes. And I think for that reason, that’s one of the areas we should be focusing on, industrial decarbonisation and cement, et cetera. Generally, that seems more neglected. I mean, it is one of the foci of Bill Gates’s effort, Breakthrough Energy, and also the private capital efforts of this. So that kind of makes this neglectedness piece a little bit less emphasised. But in general, it’s probably still more neglected than most other things.

And it’s very much related to this carbon lock-in problem and to the geographical disconnect. So essentially, we could talk about this a lot less focused on countries where we have a lot of existing concrete infrastructure. But a lot of the world is going to need a lot more concrete as they’re building the economy. So the local importance has a higher global importance than what we would guess from where we are.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Remind me, cement is responsible for 5% of emissions globally, or something like that? And I don’t know whether there are many scientists or businesses working on figuring out how to do that without reducing so much CO2?

Johannes Ackva: I think on the order of 3 to 4% or something. I mean, it’s always hard to make these calculations in climate, because there’s always people working on it. Like you never get up to this extreme, extreme neglectedness.

Rob Wiblin: Are there any other similar kind of industrial processes that generate a surprising number of emissions that are not really part of the public discussion of decarbonisation?

Johannes Ackva: With industrial decarbonisation, steel is the other big thing there. The other thing is shipping, which I think is a similar ballpark in terms of emissions — international shipping in particular, because that is outside the scope of national climate policy. And it’s somehow much less salient than aviation for no real reason.

Rob Wiblin: I suppose people get on planes.

Johannes Ackva: Yeah, it’s not related to personal lifestyle choices, right? So yeah, shipping is a little bit forgotten, and agricultural emissions — so essentially the stuff that’s beyond electricity. I think at this point, beyond electricity and electric mobility is the stuff that gets talked about less, and it’s often the stuff that is both harder to solve and has the longer capital assets related to it. So there’s many reasons as a marginal philanthropist to focus on those sectors.

Rob Wiblin: So the fact that it’s difficult actually seems good here, because it suggests that it’s like a very early-stage issue, where additional effort might move the needle substantially. Can you explain the logic behind why it would be promising to focus on shipping, say?

Johannes Ackva: With shipping, the fact that it’s outside of national climate policy is already kind of evidence to think that there’s probably less attention on it than there should be. And then it’s kind of related to how it’s a hard technical problem, like you need energy-dense fuels. And it’s also a problem where I think the success of light-duty electrification, like the cars, misleads us to assume that we’ll be easily able to do this for all other heavy-duty transport as well. So I think that’s another reason there; those would be the considerations.

And the fact that it’s hard means that emissions in the future are more additional — the probability that those emissions are in the future is higher, right? If you’re thinking about electric vehicles, because electric vehicles are definitely winning, you’re less sure whether you actually make an additional impact.

Rob Wiblin: I see. So the issue is because it might be that it doesn’t get solved — maybe ever or not for an extremely long time — there’s more time for emissions from that source to accumulate. And so you can potentially have a bigger impact that way, whereas if you worked on cars, well, cars are going to be electrified soon within a reasonable amount of time anyway. So there’s just only so much you can do there.

Johannes Ackva: Yeah, that’s essentially the argument.

Rob Wiblin: What about emissions from farming or agriculture? I suppose famously animal agriculture stands out there.

Johannes Ackva: I mean, this certainly does not receive enough attention. It’s also generally hard to decarbonise for all kinds of different reasons. I think the thing I’m most excited about in this space are alternative proteins as kind of a modular technology that we could scale in a similar way that we scaled other modular technologies through public investment. So that’s something I’m quite excited about there compared to other opportunities, because that could work quite well.

Obviously, we’ll only have effects in the 2030s to 2040s. But to me, that seems all right, because methane emissions right now — on the view that I take — are not that important right now. Not reducing methane this decade, but reducing it in 2030s, there’s less kind of impact cost.

Rob Wiblin: How does working on these hard-to-decarbonise industries interact with the issue of mission hedging and wanting to focus on the worst-case scenarios, the cases where there’s lots of emissions? Is there an interaction there?

Johannes Ackva: There’s definitely interaction there. Pretty much irrespective of what happens, electric cars will replace combustion engines, et cetera. So even in the worlds where international climate policy falls apart, the air pollution arguments alone are sufficient reason to push towards electrification, given where we are right now with costs, et cetera.

I think another prominent interaction there is that “hard-to-decarbonise” is almost always about energy density. Essentially, it’s very strongly correlated with “difficult-to-electrify.” So in that sense, if you think about potential breaking points in the climate response, I think that’s another interaction there.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, and I suppose, maybe just the obvious one that was occurring to me, but I wasn’t putting my finger on it, is that in the scenarios where we emit a lot more than we expect, those might be worlds where we just never figure out how to decarbonise planes or shipping or concrete production or steel — it turns out to be really hard. And so focusing on finding a way to decarbonise those, where we might just never get on a trajectory of doing so, is more concentrated on the worst worlds, potentially.

Johannes Ackva: That’s exactly right. It’s a disproportionate share of future emissions, in particular in bad worlds. Yeah, that’s right.

Air pollution, geoengineering, and regulations [01:43:33]

Rob Wiblin: What about efforts to campaign against coal and other things that produce a lot of particulate matter that’s really bad for people’s health? You know, efforts to campaign against them on the basis that air pollution is killing people.

Johannes Ackva: I think this has actually been a quite successful part of climate philanthropy. It’s also a well-funded part of climate philanthropy; Bloomberg Philanthropies is very active in this space. This is one of the major ways that American and European donors have engaged philanthropically outside the OECD. So that sounds like it’s something that has clearly worked. It’s clearly well funded, so it’s not something I would put additional dollars in right now. But that’s clearly been quite effective.

Rob Wiblin: This might be one where maybe there are some countries where that message hasn’t gone out, but there is a lot of air pollution and people could be upset about it and maybe could be coordinated to help pass regulations about particulate pollution.

Johannes Ackva: Yeah. I think that the plausible candidate for that would be Southeast Asia. That’s actually something we might look into more later in the year. We looked at this a little bit when Open Philanthropy went into air pollution, and I was interested in air pollution and the intersection of climate.

And it seems generally true that India and China are relatively well funded in this space right now. I mean, India is partially contingent on Open Philanthropy. And I bet that there’s Southeast Asian countries that are less in terms of population, but maybe sometimes a bit forgotten philanthropically — because when everyone thinks about Asia, they think about India and China. So I think that’s maybe the most plausible region to focus on with that kind of philanthropy.

Rob Wiblin: What about research into geoengineering to reduce the temperature of the Earth directly, by potentially reducing how much of the sun actually gets past the clouds and into the atmosphere?

Johannes Ackva: This is something we have not funded traditionally. And I sometimes have conversations with people working in this space, but in general, it seems to me — especially given how much better the climate outlook is becoming — the case for that is becoming weaker. And also it seems hard to find very robust philanthropic actions we can take now to improve outcomes, because many philanthropic actions will increase the probability of this happening, which is unclear whether this will be good — like, whether this will actually happen or not in a good political context. So it’s something I’ve been staying away from so far.

Rob Wiblin: And then finally, what about attempts to make it easier to deploy solar panels and wind turbines by stopping NIMBYs from using zoning or other regulations to prevent people from getting building permits to put them down?

Johannes Ackva: That’s a very big problem that goes beyond solar and wind. We want to fix this. I think it’s one of the most plausible ways that the American response or the American momentum could fail: that there’s a lot of money, but there’s no ability to actually build stuff. So this seems important to work on more. Something on the list to look into more. I’m not super sure what the views are now on how this looks with regards to philanthropic neglectedness, because on some level, it’s also quite obvious that this is a really big problem.

Founders Pledge grants [01:46:44]

Rob Wiblin: OK, let’s return now to some of the actual grants that you’ve made, and we can bring together all of the above ideas in order to explain why you’re excited about them. Sound good?

Johannes Ackva: Yeah, that sounds very good. I mean, it makes a lot of sense, because in general, the reason we’re excited about grants is usually a combination of a lot of the different reasoning or the different arguments we’ve already talked about.

Rob Wiblin: Brilliant. So let’s bring it all together. What about the Clean Air Task Force?

Johannes Ackva: For the Clean Air Task Force, we actually made a couple of different grants to them. The first one, I think I’ve already mentioned at the top: one that came from the Climate Fund was focused on the Biden window in late 2020, trying to influence the innovation response in the US.

And we’re excited about that for the reasons we discussed. Essentially, the Clean Air Task Force shifting this bill in a direction that is more and more useful for global decarbonisation, focused on earlier-stage stuff, focused on more neglected stuff — stuff like industrial decarbonisation, hydrogen, superhot rock, advanced nuclear, et cetera. So that’s a reason to be excited about that, given the large leverage that the US has there. That was our first grant to the Clean Air Task Force.

We were anticipating that the American situation will become more crowded and also that the leverage there will decrease — because obviously Biden is facing the same fate as every president with the midterms — so we then invested in a CATF globalisation grant, which was very much focused on supporting the organisation to become a more global organisation that can work on carbon lock-in essentially in China, India, Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, et cetera. So trying to essentially build a more robust response to those problems.

Rob Wiblin: I would have thought that it would be very hard to have a US advocacy organisation trying to influence policy in China, and maybe even India as well, because as I understand it, India has become more hostile to foreign influence and philanthropy this way. Is that an issue?

Johannes Ackva: I mean, this is definitely an issue. And when we’re funding this, this is very much focused on them building local teams and having local leaders and local staff — because even if it’s not as restricted as China and India, the credibility and having local understanding of the context is important. So it’s not about exporting an American organisation, having American leads for all those regions. But in general, this is definitely a problem.

It’s definitely harder also to make grants in those regions. It requires more effort. But we’re also making more grants in this space. We just made a grant in China, partially also motivated by the fact that because it’s harder, it’s also more neglected.

Rob Wiblin: So how about the grant to [name of grantee / project temporarily withheld] in China? What was the reasoning there?

Johannes Ackva: There’s a couple of different reasons there. First of all, China is obviously a really large emitter, right? It’s like something like 25% or so of future emissions. And obviously, it’s also a major provider of clean technology, so like a really, really important region for how climate goes.

At the same time, it’s something like 6% or so of global climate philanthropy — so there’s fairly little philanthropic attention there. And also, the grant that we made there, part of it is focused on repowering with nuclear. So this is something where even though there’s the 6% of global climate philanthropy focused there, it’s probably otherwise not funded or very unlikely to be funded, because most climate philanthropists in China are generally more traditionally focused on solar and wind advocacy.

So that was the reason: high additionality and having a shot at addressing a really, really critical problem — and addressing it in a way that’s kind of different than the “high innovation with imported Western technology” kind of thing that will not work for China. But really rather trying to essentially increase the probability that China will do that by themselves with their own reactor, et cetera. So that’s a big part of the motivation there.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. Is there another grant that you haven’t mentioned yet that would be good to illustrate all the ideas here?

Johannes Ackva: Another set of grants that I’d like to mention is kind of small, catalytic grants to grow organisations. We did this with TerraPraxis in 2020, we did this with Future Cleantech Architects in Germany in 2021.

And essentially, I think what we’re finding — and we first found this with the Clean Air Task Force, which we were supporting at a later stage — was that we kind of really changed the trajectory of this organisation. And we find this in general to be something that’s really effective, investing in an early-stage organisation, because those are the organisations that are not able to profit from the large amounts of money in climate philanthropy, and giving them initial grants can be quite powerful.

At the same time, it’s lower risk than it looks, because in general, there is a lot of money in climate philanthropy — so once those organisations are growing, you can be relatively confident that they will be able to continue to grow. And that’s obviously an important strategy. It’s kind of a field-building strategy to have a larger impact as a smaller funder.

The most challenging things about Johannes’s role [01:51:54]

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. OK, moving on from that, what’s most challenging about the work that you do? What’s most challenging about your role?

Johannes Ackva: I think a couple of things. It’s often very challenging. Methodologically speaking, the challenge is really that we’re in a high-uncertainty space. We’re going to talk a lot about uncertainty, and this is just really crucial. We’re not in the GiveWell RCT-style-evidence kind of world; we’re in a world where it seems very plausible that there are decade-spanning mechanisms that we can make more likely, et cetera. It’s a very uncertain space, and we need to navigate this with methodology, build the methodology — because that’s not something for which we have an existing methodology per se. So that’s one piece.

The other piece that’s challenging is that — and I’ve talked about this — climate overall is a very crowded space. So if you’re trying to make the most additional impact, you essentially have to look for the blind spots of the mainstream response, which means you have to say unpopular things or fund unpopular things. It’s not that I like being a contrarian by nature, but if I engage in climate, that’s kind of what I need to do, if I can actually de-risk the response and reduce the expected climate damage. So that’s another thing that can be challenging, right? Because you’re very much hedging against the mainstream response.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, yeah. I guess if you’re not at least a little bit controversial, or you’re not making some contrarian bets, then you’ve kind of already lost from the outset.

So you’re mostly offering your advice to people who have made giving pledges? Is that right? Or they’re the main audience for your work?

Johannes Ackva: No, that’s not right. The Founders Pledge Climate Fund is public, so people can donate. It’s like the top option for climate from Giving What We Can, so you can donate there or every.org. It’s completely open to the public, and very intentionally so, because it’s an opportunity for small individuals essentially to act like strategic climate philanthropists, so you as well have the benefits of an advised fund.

Rob Wiblin: So if a significant climate donor listened to this and was impressed with your work, should they get in touch or should they just make a deposit basically to the Climate Fund?

Johannes Ackva: I mean, not everyone will give to the Climate Fund. Obviously we’re encouraging this and we think it’s a very, very high-impact option — because it allows pooling, allows grants in geographies that won’t otherwise have access to it, et cetera. But obviously we’re very interested in being in touch with larger funders, so they can reach out. And we’re growing: right now we’re tripling the capacity of the climate research team, and we’re not only doing this because of the directly advised funding from Founders Pledge, but we’re also doing this because we think there’s a need to do more analysis. And we also see, and we continue to see, that this kind of analysis has potential to steer larger amounts of money. That’s very much part of the mission.

Careers advice [01:54:40]

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. OK, so I guess until this point, we’ve mostly been focused on money and grantmaking, because you’re involved with the Climate Fund and advising major donors and trying to do the philanthropy side.

But technically, 80,000 Hours is a careers advice organisation, so we should also take a moment to think about careers advice and ways that that might be different. What are the main differences between the advice you gave about money above and what kind of organisations you might make grants to, and what people might need to think about if they’re planning out a career and trying to do as much as they can to prevent the damage of climate change?

Johannes Ackva: This is actually a really interesting question. I gave this a little bit of thought, but I think the key thing that jumps to mind directly is if I follow the research of 80,000 Hours directly, where it says that most of your impact is in your mid-30s or later — is that a roughly correct summary of your research?

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. I mean, obviously, it’s going to vary a tonne between people and what area they’re working in. But I think that for many people, that often is the case, because you can have more impact when you’re more senior and have been promoted for longer and have more skills.

Johannes Ackva: Yeah. So let’s say this is true in expectation, right? So then if you’re thinking about this, and let’s say you’re now like 22: let’s say by 2035, what is the impact to be had with climate?

I guess I generally take the view that affectable impact on climate is going down rather steeply because of the two mechanisms I kind of mentioned before: on the one hand, essentially technological innovation locking out high carbon, and on the other hand, carbon lock-in. So I think one should be on the margin more sceptical of starting a career in climate that will only kind of pay off in like 10 years, compared to giving money in climate now.

So I think that’s an important and possibly underappreciated consideration, because even if you think climate change is quite important, you probably still want to take this into account.

Rob Wiblin: Interesting. OK, the thinking here is that climate change is being progressively solved, and maybe the best opportunities to shift the trajectory are closing. Maybe it was better 10 years ago than it is today, and it’s better now than it will be in 10 years’ time and, and so on.

That suggests that if you think that you won’t be able to make much difference for decades, then that’s an argument against setting out in the first place. And I suppose if you were definitely going to work on climate change, it’s a reason to be a bit more neartermist and think about, “What can I potentially accomplish earlier in my career rather than leaving it until much later?” Is that right?

Johannes Ackva: Yeah, that’s right. And that’s obviously like an expectation argument, right? Because I mean, Greta Thunberg obviously didn’t heed that expectation, and she was right not to. But in expectation, I think that seems true.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. It feels like there’s an interaction here with the risk-management, mission-hedging thing, where you might want to think about your career in terms of, well, in 10 or 20 or 30 years’ time, what would the world look like? And what would the world need if we’re not on track to solve climate change? Maybe the most likely scenario is that in 20 years’ time, we’ll be feeling pretty good about our prospects. But I want to imagine, what skills will I wish that I had, or what thing will I wish that I had been looking into, if in fact we end up in one of the worst cases?

Johannes Ackva: Yeah, actually, that seems right. That’s interesting. I haven’t thought about this before. But that seems right. And I guess it will probably push me towards thinking about this quite a bit more. Obviously, there’s going to be lots of climate jobs in the 2030s, right? So in that sense, there’s always other considerations. But it just seems like if you’re thinking very much on the 80,000 Hours mould of counterfactual impact, you probably want to also hedge with your career.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. We have our climate change problem profile on our website, if people are interested to look at the advice that we potentially have for people there.

Are there any fields or any approaches that seem more starved for talent and suitable staff than they are starved for funding and grants? Is there any difference there?

Johannes Ackva: So I’ve actually asked this question to the charities, because I’m not generally looking into this very much myself. I asked how they perceive the talent landscape. One thing that was a recurring theme was that when something is not sexy, it’s probably more talent constrained. So like the electric car industry right now obviously attracts a lot of talent, and like something like cement that we talked about, concrete, or like high-temperature heat is a lot less sexy. So I think if you’re impact-focused, probably focus more on those areas.

Another response I got was focused on this issue of, essentially, we’re now moving into a stage where a lot of climate progress depends on working with institutions and understanding what the real constraints are, et cetera. So having expertise in policy or like actual decision-making processes, that kind of stuff is very useful.

But yeah, these are very, very tentative ideas. And they’re not really comparative to budget, I think, on this analysis, as far as I can see.

If you’re thinking about this from a hedging perspective, of wanting to be able to work on different causes, et cetera — like maybe you want to work on climate in 2030s, maybe you want to switch to another cause then if climate appears to be mostly solved — then that kind of pushes me towards thinking that working in government, or working in contexts where most of the transferable skill is working with an actor rather than specific knowledge, that this could be better, or could be a consideration.

How big a risk climate change is compared to other major problems [02:00:10]

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. OK, let’s push on and return to the topic that I said we would eventually get to at the very start of the conversation. So we’ve almost exclusively focused on preventing climate change, assuming that’s what you want to do. But lots of listeners are super interested to hear your views on how big a risk climate change is, relative to their impressions or relative to what they hear in the media.

What do you think listeners might not already know about the importance of working to reduce climate change, relative to other issues that they could think about?

Johannes Ackva: I think there’s maybe two ways to look at climate, if you look at this from a neartermist, current-generations angle. And I think something that’s generally quite underappreciated is that solving climate change, at least the energy part, like 80% of it is connected to other really pressing moral concerns — in particular, lifting people out of energy poverty on the one hand, but also reducing air pollution, which right now is killing like 6 to 7 million people every year.

So if you think about the importance of, say, the cost of clean energy abundance, rather than climate, you can maybe triple the importance of it, easily. So that’s, I think, something that’s underappreciated and especially relevant for neartermist prioritisation.

For the longtermist view, if you think about climate primarily as a catastrophic risk or an existential risk, I’m not sure whether that’s underappreciated, but I think that the meat there is really in terms of indirect risk and flowthrough effects that are kind of hard to model and hard to reason about.

Rob Wiblin: So your first point there was that if you’re thinking about what would make the world a better place over the next 50 years, or something like that, then focusing on producing pollution-free energy is potentially way more useful than people think. Because it’s not just about climate change; it’s also about air pollution, which is on a similar order of magnitude of a problem. And sorry, what was the third reason that you gave?

Johannes Ackva: Energy poverty, overcoming energy poverty. So one of the strongest correlates of economic growth is having more energy, right? And the connection was not necessarily causal, but while it’s clear that you cannot have a prospering world without much more energy, you know, it’s also clear that energy is generally quite helpful. And in that sense, creating a situation where energy is cheap and abundant would be much bigger than just the climate benefit.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, interesting. So the idea would be that if we could come up with better energy technologies that were cheaper and you could put in a wider range of locations, that could be fantastic for developing countries that are very poor, because they could find ways of producing much more energy more cheaply than is currently possible.

Johannes Ackva: Yeah, and more cleanly. Yeah.

Rob Wiblin: And then on the longtermist or the more risk-management side — where we’re thinking about worst-case scenarios for humanity as a species, or ways that this could have really long-lasting implications — you’re saying the thing that people should be focusing on here are indirect effects. So it’s not that climate change itself — storms and droughts and so on — are going to be the main way that humanity gets done in by climate change; it’s going to be that it prompts wars or prompts other indirect effects that then have follow-on implications for humanity as a whole. Is that what you’re saying?

Johannes Ackva: Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. I think there’s probably pretty broad agreement that that’s the majority of longtermist concern around climate. I think there’s probably quite a lot of disagreement about how likely those things are, but I think it’s probably clear that societal destabilisation, conflict, risk, et cetera are the dominant kind of concern.

Rob Wiblin: OK, yeah, we had a couple of listeners’ questions about that exactly. “Has Johannes thought about climate as a conflict trigger? My current impression is that people gesture at climate-induced migration and resource shortages around food and water as potentially causing serious wars. What was the likelihood of this? And what would examples of potential scenarios look like?”

Johannes Ackva: So the funny thing is that my first job was actually building a database on climate and conflict. So we thought about this quite a lot. I think in general, my view is that this is, epistemically — like in terms of what we can know about this — a very bad situation. It’s a bad situation to have knowledge about in the first place — because it’s very much about indirect causal chains; it’s kind of hard to know about to begin with — and it’s also a fairly politicised field of science, because there is clear motivated reasoning in both directions.

So I find it really hard to come to a conclusion there. Because there are always people that make this argument about the Syrian civil war being the result of climate, which has been mostly debunked by other people. So yeah, I think I’m fairly sceptical on our ability to narrow the uncertainty bars here.

Rob Wiblin: So you were building a database looking at conflicts that people said were influenced by climate changes. Is that right?

Johannes Ackva: This was environmental changes more broadly, but yeah.

Rob Wiblin: And did you learn something about the difficulty of attributing any particular conflict to any particular cause?

Johannes Ackva: Yeah, yeah. So this was like a public-facing tool; this was made for diplomats. But what we essentially ended up with was like, I think we had a causal graph of 30 different arrows, and usually five-step causal chains, right? And once you’re in that space, then things get very uncertain. And it’s multicausal, right? That’s the other aspect of it.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah. I suppose intuitively, I’m kind of sceptical of the idea that climate change would cause a lot of wars, especially great power wars. Because I just think the obvious ones would be basically China, Russia, the United States, maybe India at some point in future. I’m like, why would China and the US be significantly more likely to go to war, or Russia and the US, because of climate change? Just the stories that people tell about that don’t seem that intuitively plausible.

I mean, obviously this isn’t my area, but I do sometimes worry that there’s a certain vagueness in the thinking here that is allowing people to see risks where maybe if they tried to spell it out more specifically, it wouldn’t wouldn’t seem so likely.

Johannes Ackva: I agree with this. Yes. I think something interesting here between how longtermists think about this and other people think about this, is we give a very special importance to great power war.

Whereas I think the thing you probably should worry about more, from a climate risk perspective, is civil strife, et cetera. Like, these wars, which on current technology, are unlikely to be catastrophic. The thing I probably worry about the most on this angle is something like, essentially having a situation of large global grievances. So like a large perception that the world is pretty unjust — like essentially, there’s a lot of climate damage in poorer countries — and combining this with very available, destructive technologies. If you think biorisk is a problem because everyone can have a massively powerful bioweapon, then I think you should worry more than you do under current technologies about having a generally happy world.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, I see. Because just any conflict could end up being catastrophic if weapons get sufficiently powerful, if people are motivated to use them. That’s the idea.

Johannes Ackva: Yeah, I think the idea would be like, the reason that we right now prioritise these great power wars is because those are the only ones that are really like catastrophically risky — but that is a function of the fact that right now, the only really powerful weapon we have are nuclear weapons that are not available to the poorest countries in the world.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, that does seem like a potentially good point. I suppose if any civil war is going to be catastrophic for all of humanity, then we’re in a very bad situation. It’s gonna be hard to create complete peace globally anytime soon.

Rob Wiblin: I guess to give the climate change and conflict people their due, I think a model that they often have in their mind, which actually I’m kind of sympathetic to, is just that the world is this super-chaotic, unstable place where cause and effect is constantly ricocheting around everywhere.

And maybe you think it’s the case that the Syrian civil war wasn’t in fact prompted by climatic changes. But let’s say that it had been. And then that causes the migration crisis. And then that causes a conflict between different countries that are squabbling over how to deal with that crisis. And it causes maybe the conflict in Syria then bleeds over into Iraq. And so any specific story that you might try to tell about how things really fall apart because of climate change might not sound super plausible, but just the fact that bad things seem to prompt more other bad things quite regularly should maybe give us pause — just anything that’s making the world rougher and harder to survive in should be troubling.

Johannes Ackva: Yeah, I think that is basically my view. And it’s kind of the reason mostly to prioritise climate from a longtermist perspective. Like the climate change and longtermism report that John Halstead wrote, and the debate around this, was pretty much focused on that. And John was kind of coming from the perspective of the direct observable evidence and direct causal effects. And then there is a, from my perspective, really plausible critique of that, which is saying that we’re having a lot of indirect unforeseeable effects and generally a situation of decreasing political stability feedback loops.

The thing I would say there, though, is that all of that kind of requires pretty severe climate impacts still. So the fact that the climate picture overall has been getting so much better makes all of those things less likely, and we should be honest about that.

Rob Wiblin: OK, setting aside the indirect effects, do you have any view on the plausibility or probability of runaway climate change that directly causes a tonne of harm?

Johannes Ackva: So if we’re thinking about this in terms of like, if we meet with this direct runaway extinction, geophysical kind of extinction event, I think the probability of that is really, really low at this point. Just because the high-emission scenarios where this becomes more likely have become so much less likely.

And then I think it was already quite unlikely to begin with. I don’t remember the exact probabilities from Niel Bowerman’s presentation on that, but I think compared to when he gave the presentation three or four years ago, the climate picture, the emission picture has improved so much that it’s probably become an order of magnitude less likely compared to that.

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, it is interesting. I suppose, from one point of view, you might be seen to be playing down how bad climate change is here. But part of what you’re saying is that because we did all of this stuff — because we were worried about climate change, you know, 10, 20, 30 years ago — it’s because of that that the picture has become less catastrophic, and we don’t have to worry about these apocalyptic scenarios quite so much.

And of course, if we hadn’t done anything at all, and if no one was doing anything more now, then we really would be in a very, very troubling situation. But I guess on the margin, because people have woken up and many, many countries are making some meaningful contribution to solving the problem, we don’t necessarily have to stress that human extinction is going to be caused by this.

Johannes Ackva: Yeah, that seems right. I think being clear about where we are with regards to our climate response right now is not only important for cause prioritisation — I also think it’s not so clear what this means for cause prioritisation, because there’s always also this leverage argument, which kind of goes the other way — but it’s also really important for taking the right lessons in our climate response.

Because a lot of the climate movement, or young climate people, are very fatalistic saying that we’ve made no progress at all, et cetera. And it’s entirely untrue. And a big part of the solution kind of lies in plain sight, with what we’ve been able to do with solar, wind, electric cars. We need to do this for this other set of technologies. But for that, we need to be able to recognise that we’re actually able to make meaningful global change in actually quite reasonably doable steps.

Solvability and tractability [02:12:02]

Rob Wiblin: Yeah, we’re almost out of time. One thing I wanted to add on this question of climate change versus other issues that someone could work on, is that climate change really seems to stand out very strongly on solvability and tractability. We’ve just been talking about so many different angles, all of which seem somewhat promising, and we have such a smorgasbord of options that it’s more a matter of finding the cool thing that people aren’t already doing.

If I was going to go and work on climate change, I think it would be something around the fact that it seems so solvable, and there’s so many concrete things you can get on board with. And not only does it benefit people down the line, but also would have these big benefits, as you’re pointing out, to potentially economic development and to air pollution and quality of life and science and technology more broadly. Does that resonate?

Johannes Ackva: That resonates. That resonates totally. I mean, if we look at EA cause prioritisation as it stands right now, it’s a little bit the under-theorised dimension. If I think about how EAs generally think about climate, kind of saying that it’s less important, as an existential risk, than other existential or catastrophic risks. I agree with that.

I guess the interesting question really is like, how much of a difference does the tractability make? Because for climate, we really know what we can do. So I would really love to see a more systematic comparison there. And yeah, tractability or solvability is certainly the argument in favour of prioritising climate over other areas.

I also want to be very clear that I’m not a climate maximalist. My argument is not that the EA community should do five times as much climate work. I think it’s important that we’re doing smart climate work, but that’s not my argument.

Rob Wiblin: I think it’s fantastic. It’s fantastic whenever someone can work in an area and not become really narrow-mindedly thinking that it’s necessarily the most important thing, just because they happen to be involved with it. Your impartiality and objectivity is much appreciated.

On this theme of how there’s so many cool things to potentially get involved with with climate change, my final question is: if you had to go and work on some more object-level climate change project rather than doing this high-level research, which one do you think you might choose?

Johannes Ackva: I think I would probably… I’ve never thought about this. I think I was probably pretty interested in being like an innovation policy policymaker. I think they’re probably pretty interesting. Yes. But I’m actually really happy to be in the strategic space where I am right now. So yeah. I haven’t thought about that.

Rob Wiblin: I feel like you’re slightly cheating there, because that sounds like another sort of research role. Let’s say that you had to become an engineer, Johannes. What kind of technology would you like to be working on?

Johannes Ackva: Um…

Rob Wiblin: Wow. You’ve never thought about it. So you don’t think about it in terms of what stuff is really cool?

Johannes Ackva: I’ve decided I’ll not become an engineer when I sucked at physics 15 years ago. So this was too far out of my mental overton window.

Rob Wiblin: Maybe it’s best that you don’t think about this, because it ensures that you’re not too starstruck or you’re not guided by whatever technology seems most exciting and most cool — like, I don’t know, rockets or nuclear fusion or whatever. Maybe it says something about you that you don’t want to answer this question. You’re not that into the romance of it. You just want to think about what is most useful.

Johannes Ackva: Yeah.

Rob Wiblin: Cool. My guest today has been Johannes Ackva. Thanks so much for coming on The 80,000 Hours Podcast, Johannes — for this epic three-hour session without a break.

Johannes Ackva: Yeah, thank you very much. It’s been longer than Lord of the Rings. Thank you.

Rob Wiblin: Not the extended edition though.

Rob’s outro [02:15:50]

Rob Wiblin: Just a reminder that Johannes and Founders Pledge are currently hiring researchers for their climate-focused grantmaking programme and think listeners to this show are unusually likely to be a fit for the role.

They’re open to people at varying levels of experience that are keen to work on climate with an impact-oriented lens, pushing forward the research agenda Johannes and I just talked about, and turn it into action via grantmaking

They add that “you’ll be working autonomously to delve into climate research, from investigations into the existing landscape, to funding investigations into individual organizations, to shallow investigations of relevant methodological questions.”

They’re open to hiring people in the UK, Europe, or US, and salaries would vary from $95,000 to $120,000, depending on how much experience you have. Head over to the job ad if you’d like to learn more — there’s a link to it in the blog post associated with this episode or you could get there via founderspledge.com/careers.

All right, The 80,000 Hours Podcast is produced and edited by Keiran Harris.

Audio mastering and technical editing for this episode by Ryan Kessler.

Full transcripts and an extensive collection of links to learn more are available on our site and put together by Katy Moore.

Thanks for joining, talk to you again soon.