(upbeat music) - Dan, welcome. - Thanks so much, Ben, so happy to be here. - So we live in a world today where some people deny that the climate is changing to humans altogether, but even many people who believe in climate change think, oh, there's nothing we can do about it, it's a hopeless situation. Is that really true, is it hopeless? - It is absolutely not hopeless. I mean, at least if it is hopeless, I'm sure doing a lot of things wrong in my life. The way I see it, there are so many possible outcomes in the world, there are some in which life becomes a lot more miserable for humans and lots of people die and we have tons of lost economic outcomes. And there's other ones where we basically solve the issue and do fine, and we can see pathways towards solving the climate change issue and whether or not we actually solve it and prevent the worst outcomes is totally up to us as a society. - So we'll get into some methods that you believe are effective for improving the climate. But first, let's talk about some things that a lot of people do that may not be effective. So planting trees, right? You see all these initiatives to plant trees, we see all these YouTubers getting together to plant trees. Does this actually work to improve our climate? Why or why not? - So there's not exactly a worker doesn't work answer. If we were to manage to drastically increase the amount of forest cover on the earth and leave it there, you know, like permanently increase the amount of forest cover, it would make a difference in terms of climate because trees grow and they store carbon and that's carbon that's not in the atmosphere. So technically it's a fine solution. I think the question is more the practicality of it. You have example after example of example of high profile tree planting projects that just haven't worked. And the reason for that is that, you know, first of all, it's not just planting trees, you have to keep them alive for a long time and lots of times the funding for these projects just goes into planting or maybe a couple years of care and then the trees die or there's a land conversion change. The other thing is like, the reason why we're losing forest is fundamental economic pressures. So pressure for firewood in Africa, pressure for palm oil in Indonesia, agriculture in South America. And those pressures are still there. So if you start planting trees, planting leaves, planting trees without removing the economic pressures that are causing people to expand into those areas or chop down trees for one reason or another, it means you probably don't have a permanent solution. Another thing is it's just seen as a kind of like very easy and very popular solution. Like, oh, this doesn't hurt anyone. We're just going to plant trees. So it's already something where there's a lot of money and effort towards. And I would say like the marginal effort, marginal dollar toward solutions, this is not the most high impact place you could put it. - So when one of these trees that's planted grows up, is the idea that it captures like a fixed amount of carbon in the body of the tree? But then if the tree dies, then that goes back into the atmosphere? - Yeah, that's pretty much right. It's not like fixed. There's this curve where it, as it grows, it kind of absorbs more and more carbon. And then when it comes to maturity, it absorbs carbon a bit more slowly. But yes, it's like you could think of the tree embodies carbon that is taken from the atmosphere and just holds it. If the tree dies, like if it burns and it immediately releases all the carbon, if it dies and is let to rot, it slowly releases the carbon. But once it's not living, that carbon normally finds its way back in the atmosphere eventually. - And what about carbon credits as a strategy? Could you tell us what that is and how effective do you believe that is? - Yeah, a carbon credit means that somebody takes some action, which according to them, means that they are emitting less than they would have otherwise. Like maybe they are managing their farm in a way that reduces the emissions or they are not cutting down trees that they would have otherwise. And then they generate their awarded a credit by some credit granting agency. And then they can sell those credits on the open markets to normally companies, but sometimes individuals who want to say undo their own emissions by saying like, I've emitted a certain amount. So I'll buy these credits that will undo my personal emissions. - So it's just to clarify. So essentially creates a financial incentive to adopt better practices, in theory at least, because you essentially get paid if you switch to using better practices, right? - Right, that's right. So I think there's two high-level issues with this. The first is that if our goal is to get to zero emissions, this isn't gonna work, because ultimately everyone has to stop emitting. And if I'm emitting and I'm paying you to not emit, we still don't get to zero. We get to less, but not zero. - But they could still be effective on the margin, right? Like even if it's still be effective on the margin. - Except for the second problem, which is that like most of these credits are trash to put it very bluntly. There's various problems with carbon credits. I think the biggest one is additionality, which is that if I'm saying I'm not doing this thing because you're paying me, like I'm not cutting down this forest if someone pays me. The incentives are totally aligned there for you to say, well, I'm gonna cut down this forest and I'm gonna cut down this forest unless someone pays me, and then you wait for someone to pay you and not cut it down, but you're maybe not gonna cut it down anyway. And I think that's a problem is so many credits in the market are essentially people trying to get paid for stuff they were gonna do anyway. It's extremely hard as a consumer in the market to figure out what is what. And we actually had given agreement in earlier incarnation, we did a lot of research in the market, this market to try and figure out, if this is gonna be a commodity, you need real certainty that you have a causal reduction in emissions when you buy this thing. And I think that certainty is extremely hard to find in this market. Various studies have been done that say that you know, 80% of carbon credits are bad and 90% of carbon credits are bad. It's not like a little problem on the market. It's like most of the carbon credits executed are very likely not reducing emissions to the extent they say they are or possibly zero. - Is there a strange incentive where they're willing to sort of exaggerate the most, can make the most money and so you kind of get a race to the bottom? - Yeah, I would say that there's just a really major incentive to try to get credits for stuff you're already doing. And then when you're doing it, just try and get as many credits as you can. So you apply, I'm doing this, this, and this, and according to the formula that these offset creditors give you, it should give me X amount of credits. And yeah, there's incentives at all steps of the way to exaggerate, to get paid for stuff you're already doing, to not worry about what's called a reversal. If you like, promise not to cut down the trees, but then you go ahead and cut them down a few years later. No one in this entire process is incentivized really to get it right. The credit granting providers are, the projects are their customers, right? They get paid to issue credits. The project developers are getting money. The companies that are buying the credits want to tell everyone that they're buying these awesome credits so that they're net zero or reduce their carbon footprint. Like, there's no incentive within the system for a whistleblower. And I think that causes a fundamentally damaged system. Right, you need people to be so discerning, they just care so much about the truth about, it actually reducing it, to do all the research and the reality is, most purchasers are just not going to do that research. Right, right. And the sad part is when third parties have tried to do that research, they find almost nothing good, right? It destroys the market. So none of the intermediaries want to be that super high quality intermediary because it really destroys supply. I know that something like plastic straw removal is not targeted global warming. But when I see that it's so much attention, I kind of feel despair about it because I think rather than being a stepping stone, people care about plastic straws and then they're going to care about the big questions. I think it is sort of performative, rather pointless actions that actually have almost no impact but make people feel good. And I'm wondering, how do you feel about things like that? Do you think they could be stepping stones or do you think they are actually worse than nothing because they kind of make people feel like they're doing some virtuous, even though it doesn't really have much impact? No, I'm with you, Spencer. I think these things, on most cases, are pretty frustrating. I think that the question of whether individual actions matter is a complicated one. I think there's some individual actions that I would support. But the plastic straw example, yeah, it has nothing to do with climate change. Very little to do. It's also a bad example because the replacement for plastic straws are so bad. I saw this TikTok video the other day of someone who was comparing Texas in and out to California in and out. You know, it's supposed to be funny. Like, does it taste the same? And the thing that came up was in California, they had the plastic straws and the guy was so pissed off. He was like, this is terrible. It's, sorry, they had the paper straws in California, 'cause they were just so bad. I was like, "California, he's not going to have plastic straws." And he was like, "This is terrible." It's like, my Coke taste bad, the straws disintegrated. This is the worst. So it's something that, I mean, A, it doesn't really have a big upside. And B, it has a big downside in the public sphere because it pisses people off. And they say, "Why am I being asked to do this ridiculous thing?" In the name of who knows what, environment, or climate. It doesn't even matter. And I think it causes people to reject some of the more reasonable policies and programs and throw out the baby with the bath water. But how could you feel good about yourself if the paper straws actually worked, right? It's because you have to suffer these in the paper straws and then you can feel like you've done something virtuous. - Yeah, I think so. I think, I mean, I think this is part of the, you didn't quite ask about this whole issue of carbon footprint, but this is some of the things that people are trying to do with offsets, like measure your carbon footprint and then reduce it. But this kind of gets back to another issue I have with offsets, which is like, that is incredibly lacking ambition. If you think that what you're gonna do for climate is to offset your own emissions, whether you're a corporation or a person, the locus of intervention is so small. It's just what you do, you know, what you spend your money on, how you drive your car. Whereas the problems that we have are so much bigger and systematic. So all these small actions, even if you do a really good job and totally reduce your carbon footprint, it's just a drop in the bucket and it's not addressing the bigger issues. - I wonder about that. So there's some cause areas, right? Like causing harm to factory-farmed animals, where I think it's reasonable to say that if someone becomes a vegan, let's say, that there might be a dozen or more animals each year on average that don't get created in this factory-farm system because of them. And now you can't say it's like exactly a certain number because it's probabilistic, right? Like we know that when consumers change the supply when they reduce the demand, we can calculate roughly how much it will be. With any given consumer, it may or may not happen, but we can say for, you know, when end consumers do it, it's going to reduce it by K units, right? You can kind of get an average. And a question I have is, is climate change like that where you could say, "if I personally stop polluting "all together, does it really make any difference at all?" You know, or is it just kind of whether it is a sort of, you know, a drop in the bucket kind of thing where it doesn't matter. And we really need collective action. It's not the sort of thing where my actions will save, you know, will prevent the suffering of 12 animals or whatever. - Yeah, I think that the analogy doesn't really work with climate because if you, okay, let's say that I go off the grid and drop my emissions to completely zero. And so I think average American, I don't remember, it's like two tons of carbon per year. So I take those two tons off and maybe that reduces warming by 0.00001 degrees or whatever. You know, I think it's actually imperceptible in terms of, in terms of life for humans and animals on the planet. - I imagine that's way less than one second of, you know, it's like going to take an extra, you know, microsecond or whatever to get to the level and had you not done that, right? - One thing that I do have a little bit more optimism about individual actions is sending market signals. So, for instance, if I just go off the grid and don't consume anything, I think that's almost nothing. But one thing that I do think is super important is bringing new technologies to market. And so one thing that it's always a struggle for new technologies when they're early in their development cycle and are a little bit more expensive or whatnot. So I do think there's something to be said for being an early consumer of important technologies and spending a little bit of money to say by a heat pump or an impossible burger or an electric car, because, you know, in the early days, these companies don't have a lot of customers, you know? So it's not like, it's not like your point 0.001% of their customer base. You know, you can chop a bunch of zeros off up there and it could actually be meaningful to make this purchase and tell your friends about it and maybe crowd a few other people in. - And it sends a signal to the market when they go fundraising. Like the number of customers is gonna be a big factor so you can kind of magnify your impact a little bit when they can market. Oh, luckily, of all these people purchasing. What about individual action as a strategy? Because I see these environmental groups all the time trying to push individual action as a solution to climate change and I know from my perspective, I feel like, I'm not gonna say that's literally impossible, but I feel like we've refuted that as a form of strategy that it's been pushed on for, you know, whatever, 20 years and it doesn't seem to have gone anywhere. - I agree. I think that that's, I think that ultimately, humans are people who, humans respond to incentives and I think that people, especially in the US, where I'm the most familiar with, are not going to take massive, systematic, altruistic actions and self-sacrifice for the climate. So I just think it's a losing battle and I think it's just, I think it's a losing battle that can also backfire because if people think that the only way that we're gonna solve the climate crisis is to make huge sacrifices like giving up hamburgers, then you've got a huge PR problem on your hand. I do think you've seen a little bit of a difference in Europe where some of these, like the pressure for individual action has caused meaningful changes and say energy usage and energy efficiency, but it's also caused political schisms in Europe where you get, you get right-wing political movements that are kind of aligned with anti-climate, like the Yellow Vest in France. And so it's not like it's a slam dunk there either. Overall, I'm pretty skeptical in these approaches and I just don't think they're gonna scale. - I wrote an article a number of years ago about what I see as the only sort of realistic solutions to climate change and I wanted to get your feedback and tell me if I'm wrong. - Sure. - I'd run it by you. So originally, I had two strategies in there, but my friend who works in climate convinced me that a third. So the first strategy I talked about is government collaboration, right? So if the major world governments of the largest countries, so we're talking China, the US, India, as well as probably Europe, all collaborate and just made sort of common sense regulations, like taxing carbon, setting deadlines for industries to go to the industries that pollute the most to become more green, et cetera, that this could have just an incredible difference. But it's essentially just a political battle about having the right leaders in place who care and working cross culturally to really get collaboration because you can't just do it unilaterally. You have to have all these different countries collaborating. What do you think about that? - Well, that has been arguably the premier potential climate solution that we've seen in the past 30 years. You have the IPCC and you have the UN's COP and coming up with various agreements like the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Climate Accords. I certainly would agree with you that it is a potential solution is one that I think we should keep working on. But I would say it's been relative failure so far. We've had gotten a bunch of toothless promises. And I also think if anything, the political economy of the world seems to be moving in the wrong direction. Like both, among the great powers, there seem to be splitting into various camps. They seem to be going it alone. Obviously in the US with Donald Trump, we have this kind of new America first view. It doesn't really seem like a US or time bound issue. I think you see similar parties in Europe. And I think you have this really fundamental issue with this cross-country collaboration, which is that people can get in a room and make an agreement, but that agreement needs to last for a long period of time. And all of those people are going to be out of office in a few years. We see in so many countries flipping back and forth between political parties and political views. And you can see in the US where in the Paris Agreement, they were out of the Paris Agreement, then we're in the Paris Agreement. We're out of the Paris Agreement. I think the more this happens, the more it just really decreases any type of confidence in these global agreements. So I'm pretty pessimistic about global coordination, playing a really central and meaningful role. I hope I'm wrong. I don't think it's impossible, but it currently seems to be headed in the wrong direction. Yeah, everything you say makes sense. I wonder if the US had a strong leader, post-Trump, who really cared about this, whether they would have the ability to make these negotiations and to do it in a way that has more teeth and more staying power. Obviously, it would require electing the right leader. But do you think it's sort of as a fundamentally flawed idea? Or do you think that there is a way, the right leader of the US or the right leaders of Europe, et cetera, could make it happen? I think that it's only possible if you get broader-based support from the electorate. So I'm more optimistic in Europe, where in many European countries, you have very solid majorities, let's say climate change is an important issue. We think our leaders should be doing something about it, et cetera. If you look in the US, it's extremely polarized by party, but even within Democrats, it's not a super high priority of most voters. I saw some statistics recently that it was like, it was basically saying, "There are no climate change, Americans." And the idea was, "Nothing nobody cares about it." But if you ask people, what's your number one priority? Almost nobody listens. There's your number one priority in America. Yeah, yeah. So ultimately, our political leaders follow to some extent the views of the populace. And as long as we're super divided on it, and there's not agreement, as long as it's not a huge priority of the population, there's huge disagreement among parties. It's hard to see the US being a credible climate leader. Even if we get as one super pro-climate president, everyone's gonna understand that the pendulum could just swing the other way in four years. In this article, the second big strategy that I felt was potentially promising for climate is just technological innovation. And obviously, there's lots of companies working on technology related climate, but the idea here would be massive government prizes or massive incentive programs, et cetera. Maybe with like really clear milestones, like if you hit this milestone in battery technology, we give you a billion dollars or 10 billion dollars, right? If you solve this particular challenge that we don't have to solve, or you get carbon capture down to this cost or whatever. So the idea would be just saying, "Look, if we could, we know that people are unlikely to do a lot of actions to improve the climate, where it's not in their self-interest to do so, but with technology, we can make it easier for them to do, to take good actions, we can make it more and more in your own interest to be green because it's easy to be green and sheep to be green, et cetera. Maybe it's even easier to be green that it is to not be." So yeah, what do you think of that as a broad kind of approach? - Yeah, that's much more aligned with my views. I think that if there is a way out of this issue, like if we have a pathway to really stop slowing or stopping climate change, it's going to come primarily through technology. I think that people will not massively change their actions out of altruism, but they will, because a better and cleaner product has come to market. A lot of people in the climate community are labeled as techno-optimists. I'm sure I've been labeled that before, but I'm not, and that's basically people who think like, "Oh, we're going to refine technology "is going to solve all the issues." I don't think I'm a techno-optimist because I don't feel super confident that all the technologies will be developed that we need or that ultimately the technology that's developed will be cheaper than the emitting status quo, even if we have a good technology. There's no like golden law of nature that says the clean technology must eventually be cheaper than the emitting technology. But I do think that we have, this is the one place where we've seen success. So we've seen solar panels go from this niche, extremely expensive technology to one of the cheapest energy sources. We've seen batteries drastically drop in price. I have this slide that I sometimes show that shows that both solar energy, since 1990, both solar panels and batteries have dropped in cost by 98%. And if you look at predictions of costs before then, it every year, it drastically outstrips its predictions. So those are two just like major successes in the climate world that I think are really unmatched by any other policy or agreement or behavior change. So when I think about one of the things we can do next, it's thinking about how to, what is the next solar panel or batteries and what can government or philanthropy do to make sure that these technologies are success and push them forward? If you're like me, you'd really like to learn quick practical tips for improving your life or understanding the world. But it's hard to know where to look and it's easy to be overwhelmed by the flood of blogs, media sites and academic papers. Well, there's good news. Once a week, we send out a newsletter called One Helpful Idea, where we distill down a single idea that we think you'll find to be valuable. We know you're busy. So each idea is formatted to be read in just 30 seconds. And at the bottom of the newsletter, we also include links to that week's new podcast episodes, which is a great way to keep up with the podcast. And we include, in each email, a newly released essay by Spencer. So if you only listen to our podcast, you're missing out on a lot of our content. To sign up for the One Helpful Idea newsletter and start receiving bite-sized ideas once a week, visit clearerthinkingpodcast.com/newsletter. - Is there a divide among environmentalists between ones that say, oh yeah, technology is a good thing, we should embrace it, it's going to be the way out, versus ones that are sort of anti-technology, or view it as foolish to put stock in technology. Like technology got us into this problem while we're trying to focus on technology to get us out of it. - I wouldn't say people who are, there are people who are anti-technology, but there are people who think that the problem is so incredibly urgent that we shouldn't be wasting our time developing and working with technology that doesn't exist yet, and we just need to deploy the stuff we have now. And there's an argument that we have all the technology we need, we have all the solutions, it's just a matter of finance and willpower to deploy them. And sometimes they will accuse the more technology-focused people of just it being like a delay tactic away to avoid making hard decisions, because some magical technology is going to come from the future and solve everything. So they're just saying, look, if we just put the brakes and everything and we switched everything to solar and wind and batteries, et cetera, we could just solve this right now. - Yeah, but honestly, I think that the facts just don't line up with that. Like maybe in some sectors, you could do it. Like we could do it with electricity in theory, even though it would be incredibly expensive and required just massive overbuilding in order to get 100% clean electricity with just solar and wind. You can do it with transportation. We have battery-operated cars. But if you start moving to some of the harder sectors, like the technology just doesn't exist. Like we can't just say like, okay, everyone start using clean concrete. Like there's barely any clean concrete out there. We're just figuring out how to do it. Concrete, steel, meat, aviation, shipping. Like all of these things are at various levels of technology readiness, but there's no way to just throw money at the problem. You can't tell everyone like, okay, start taking clean aviation flights tomorrow. I guess you could tell everyone to stop flying or stop eating meat, but as we said before, that doesn't seem very realistic. - Yeah, there's just no question, how would you actually get this to happen? Like you would need a tremendous political will and the government would have to spend an incredible amount of money. It's just like, so then you go back to the question would the government ever have that political will? - Yeah, I mean, you would have a revolt from the populist. If you said like, okay, we now have to have zero carbon footprint in our agriculture systems and no more using steel and concrete and no more flying and no more shipping because like, sorry, we don't have technology for these things yet. Oh, and also like, we're converting multiple states worth of land to solar electricity because now we can only use solar electricity. Like, hey, I just don't think it's at all reasonable to say that we can get to net zero with current technology and be like even in places you could, it requires just massive, massive sacrifices that I think no democratic society would be willing to accept. And honestly, I don't think they should. I think that the trade-off is too stark. - Well, this is the question about, obviously you're really concerned about climate. That's what you work on, right? That's what you devote yourself to. But some people think it's literally the end of the world and it's happening really soon. So, yeah, how do you differ from some other climate activists? Like, what do they think and what do you think in terms of the pressiness and the seriousness of the problem? - I would agree with most people working on climate that this is a serious problem, right? It's going to cause major disruption in human societies, major loss of lives, major decrease of economic output compared to a world without climate change. So, I think it's a big problem. I also am optimistic about humanity's ability to develop solutions to the problem and also adapt to a warming world. So, I don't know where exactly these things are on the spectrum. I'm not in the camp of this is going to be an existential crisis for humanity and all of human population is going to die out. But, and I also don't think that, I also think that we have a little bit of time, right? Like, I don't think that we are going to have massive, massive disruptions in human society in the next 10 or 20 years. I don't think if we go above these magical thresholds that the UN has put together like 1.5 degrees or two degrees, everything is going to fall apart. But, I do think the warmer it gets, the worse it's going to get, it's going to be non-linear and we want to stop and we want to stop. We want to prevent the worst possible outcomes, which means we really want to make sure that we don't get to four or five degrees or seven degrees warming. So, you know, I think we have a little bit of time to develop the new technologies we need in some of these hard to evate sectors, get the policies right, get the costs down such that the cost to humanity is not incredibly oppressive and such that our population will actually embrace the energy transition rather than fight it. - Going back to the question of technology more broadly, how would we best promote it? Suppose, you know, you got to advise the government on how to use technology to solve the climate crisis. Would you be having giant prizes? Would you do a totally different approach? - Yeah, I think that that the US government, well, well, first of all, it's, I might just talk about the US for a little while because that's where I'm most familiar and also the US has historically been a real driver of innovation both in universities, in government support and in the private sector. So, the US is a really good place. - I guess Germany is driven a lot of the solar tech, but other than that, like the US has been dominant, is that right? - Yeah, I mean, I think the pretty sure the solar panel was invented in the US. And then Germany had some of the first early adoption and then China had the real major scale up. So, it was sort of a global thing. You know, prizes, I think prizes are a good idea and they have their place. I think that there's a couple of things. When we as a philanthropy, a lot of the work we do is trying to influence the government to support certain programs that we think are important. And there's different ways that that support, the support for technology development can happen and it depends on where, what level of technological readiness things are at. So, one of the things you can do is very basic R&D. The government can support basic research and development mostly in universities, sometimes in private companies, through programs like ARPAE, which is the energy version of DARPA, which was the military research program. The US government makes direct grants to universities to say, invent new types of batteries, invent new ways of making steel, et cetera. So, straight up research, I think, is a big component of it that's very important. And then you have commercialization where there are different things that are needed. So, some are the Department of Energy Loans Programs Office has played a really big role in making loans to early stage companies with new technologies to try to help them bring them to market. There's also tax credits for new technologies, various types of subsidies. So, I think government can play a really big role in taking early technologies and trying to help them get to market. And then as technologies really start to mature, governments can create long-term incentives for uptake by either through direct procurement. Like, the government buys a lot of steel in concrete. You could imagine the government saying, we're going to be a major buyer of zero carbon steel and totally seeding a market there. And then also putting regulations in place, as the market starts to mature, you can start to require that companies use a certain percentage of zero carbon steel in their construction, et cetera. And then hopefully, eventually, the new technology can compete with the incumbent technology on merits. But like I said before, it's not necessarily true. Like, you might always need a subsidy regulation to keep green steeler, green concrete demanded in the market. - You also mentioned this idea of looking for the next solar panel, right? The next edge where technology could really do a lot. Do you have an idea of what that might be? Or what are some things in the horizon for that? - So, one of the things that we are really excited about is geothermal energy. Your listeners are probably relatively aware of geothermal energy. It's like yellowstone park, you have these hot water, boiling hot water pools just under the surface. You can kind of tap directly into them and then water steam comes up and it runs at turbine and like, that's all great. Basically free energy right below the ground. Those resources in the world have been heavily exploited. There's not that many places where you can just like, put a little pipe into the ground and get energy out. But there's been major advancements of technology driven by the fracking revolution, where fracking has allowed people to dig deeper to extract various elements out of the ground by pumping water or their chemicals down and doing things like horizontal drilling. And a lot of these same technologies can now be used to dig deeper and deeper and deeper to find more heat, more energy, more steam that can be used for geothermal production. So, one of the things that we're working on in Giving Green is trying to figure out how to push that market towards more commercial readiness. There's already been one commercial project by a company called Fervo, already operating in Utah and they're scaling up. But potentially, if you can get this technology moving down the cost curve and keep digging deeper and deeper, you could have just really massive electricity resources available in a large percentage of the world. And a type of electricity that's always available doesn't have a huge land footprint and is completely green. What some people might wonder about is, if you look at the cost curves for solar and you mentioned this earlier, there's been this incredible exponential following of the cost per kilowatt. Why is that not just going to save it on its own? Like if that keeps going exponential, is it the fundamental limitations of the technology because it requires battery storage or is it more fundamental aspects? - Yeah, there's a couple of things. So, one is that is the intermittency of solar power. And so, like you said, that can be at least somewhat. The current state of technology is that, so just solar panels, you know, they provide power just during the day. You can add batteries and that can move the power to the evening and generally what they're doing is like moving power from the peak of solar development to the peak of electricity demand, which is five to nine PM. It doesn't solve greater yearly or monthly fluctuations in solar power, right? You need, if you want solar power in New York in December, I mean, you have a little bit of solar power, but you would need either to have these like long duration storage batteries that are moving it from the summer or you're gonna need to pipe power from, say, Arizona to get there, or you just need like so many solar powers and solar panels in New York to get the little bit of solar energy that's coming in. So the answer is that all of these things are possible. Most of the technologies exist. This, a cheaper version of long duration energy storage is one of the things that's on the technology frontier to help this. The issue is that when you look at the, when you cost some of the things out, the other major problem is that it requires so much land, right? If you start to really model what it would take to power the US on just renewable energy being solar and wind, it ends up being extremely costly because you just have to massively over build in order to gain every last bit of sunshine and then save it for times when there's not sunshine or move it around. And then B, it requires just a huge amount of land. And that land is technically available. I think there's a report from Princeton, and if I remember the calculation correctly, it's like the total amount of solar build out we would need is equal to the amount of land in the states of Ohio and Kentucky. So it's a lot of land, but it's not a possible. We do have decent amounts of open land with solar resources in the American West, but practically we see more and more resistance from communities to massive infrastructure projects in their area. Like people just don't really want to live next to huge solar fields. And there's only so many places you can tuck and hide it. So basically you have problems of large cost energy storage and community resistance that are really, I think those three things together are going to mean that solar and wind are going to top out at some level. I'm not sure what that level is. Maybe 60% of energy supply, maybe 80%, but it's not going to make it to 100. And where do you see nuclear fitting into this equation? So we see clean from power, new sources of clean from power, and clean from firm means just power that can be deployed at any time and is always on. So that's as opposed to solar and wind that are intermittent. So we see sources of clean, new sources of clean from power as an extremely important part of this mix. For the reasons I mentioned before, solar and wind have this intermittency issue and this land issue, whereas clean firm sources can always be on and most of them have limited land requirements. So we're excited about geothermal, like I mentioned before. We're also excited about nuclear, which has a lot of these positive aspects. And is a technology that already exists and is working? So nuclear has a lot of aspects that make it super attractive to a scale up of a green energy system. The issue with nuclear power is, especially in the US over the past few decades, it's gotten extremely expensive. And this has to do both with increasing safety regulations since the three mile island disaster, layers and layers of safety regulations to prevent another nuclear incident. And also the fact that in general in the US, we've just gotten bad at building big projects, our costs for building subways and building roads and rail lines is much higher than Asia or Europe. And it's also true for nuclear power plants, which are these huge projects that cost, I think the latest one in Georgia cost like $15 billion. So there's a problem, right? From a technology perspective, it is an excellent technology. From an economics perspective, it is super problematic. So the question is, can we develop nuclear technology and nuclear regulations, such that it becomes less expensive and a more viable energy source? And so there's all kinds of new designs for nuclear power plants that are owned by various companies and are in various stages of getting regulatory approval or building their first test plants. And usually the designs are built around the idea that they can be done cheaper because they need, they're safer so they need fewer safety regulations or they're small and modular so you can build them, build more components and factories and benefit from economies of scale. We at Giving Green are cautiously optimistic about this revolution and we've made grants in this area for nuclear and I think it's a piece of the puzzle. But I do think that there is an open question about whether the nuclear industry can get the cost down or whether it's gonna be overrun by other technologies. - When writing this article about potentially promising strategies in climate, the third strategy originally didn't have, as I said, but my friend who works in climate convinced me to add it, which is around the idea that there's a relatively small number of companies that have a relatively large effect on the climate, you know, sometimes people would say, it's like, oh, under 200 companies that have this really large effect on the climate. And the idea there would be that those companies might be able to be pressured either by their shareholders or potentially by governments to changing their behavior and that could have a big impact on climate. What do you think of that kind of approach? - I read this Spencer and I felt pretty skeptical. So there's two things, it's, the pressure by government, I have more, I'm more optimistic about it. I think government has a lot of power and, you know, I mentioned before when I was talking about heavy industry government could just say, okay, all you guys need to be buying clean steel now and then, you know, it can basically happen. So I believe in the power of government, but I do think the crux of this argument was a little bit different. It was more about customers or shareholders putting pressure on companies to change the way that they do business in a way that decreases emissions. And this, I'm not so optimistic on. So you see some really excellent examples of this happening with tech companies that I think are quite good, you know, you see Google going out there and trying to be a buyer first of a kind sources of nuclear energy, geothermal energy. You see Microsoft has some really interesting financial deals with new producers of green concrete and green steel. Like they're out there trying to be a first mover on some of these technologies in a way that I think is really useful while also trying to do a lot of work to decrease their own footprints. But I think that using the examples of the tech companies as representative of the rest of the polluting industries, I think is totally wrong. Technology companies have huge profits. They have an extremely liberal employee base that wants to see the companies make changes. And the ratio of their profits to their carbon footprints are really high. So they can go and spend a little bit of their profits to reduce their carbon footprint and do some good stuff. And I think that's all great. But if you try to expand it to the largest emitters, so I don't have the top 200 emitters in front of me, but I sure as heck back, it's the big oil companies and the big industry companies, chemicals, steel, concrete, because that's where emissions are in our system. And those companies have an extremely different ratio of emissions to profits. So for instance, BP made a net zero commitment a few years ago that they've very quietly walked back where they said, BP will be net zero by, I don't remember what year it was. Something totally unrealistic. But if you took a look at what it would cost to, like taking some, so I did this calculation, some reasonable estimate of abatement costs and you look at their total emissions versus their profits, you know, abatement costs were like three times profits. So you really think that BP is going to completely erase its profits to reduce its emissions or to eliminate its emissions like no way. First of all, you're never getting a majority of shareholders that wants to do this. You're not going to have executives who want to do this. It's just like in the places where the really huge emissions are, there's not the incentives nor any type of market reality that's going to force them to do this. Are there low-hanging fruit actions these giant companies could take if they were so inclined that wouldn't, because obviously they're not going to completely sacrifice their profits, but are there things they could do that would have very little effect on profits but would have a big environmental effect? So we have a giving green, have a paper on this, a white paper on what we think companies can do to make a difference in the climate. And I really think a lot of companies are doing the wrong thing. They're looking very clearly at their own emissions and then they're trying to take steps to reduce it, which is fine, but usually they're taking steps, they're taking the easy steps. Like Amazon bought a fleet of electric vehicles instead of buying gas-powered vehicles. Actually, I think that was pretty good, but it is buying into a mature-ish technology and not really changing the game. So these things are fine, but I think the low-hanging fruit is less interesting than the hard stuff. Where I think it's really interesting corporate action is companies trying to make catalytic investments in the hard stuff. It's similar when I was talking about with individuals before, where you have individuals, I said, I think individuals should try to be early buyers of new potentially catalytic technologies because somebody's got to make that sacrifice. And so when you see companies doing that, I think it's really interesting. I mentioned Microsoft, I mentioned Google. There's an Australian mining firm called Fortescue that's trying to drastically reduce its emissions by inventing the technologies and needs to reduce emissions in the mining space and in the iron-smelting space, which is an incredible source of emissions. And so just really making tough first-of-a-kind investments within their supply chain that probably are not in the short run profitable, but might be in the long run, especially if you can establish yourself as a technology leader. So when I advise companies, I tell them, forget offsetting, forget paper napkins in your cafeteria. Think about what are the things within the economy that you as a company are really good at or have some sort of comparative advantage at? And how can you work to provide a unique market signal or develop a new product that is really needed for the transition? - Right, so rather than just mitigating some of the stuff they're doing, actually creating new solutions. - Yeah, I think that's more compelling. It kind of gets to the story. I forget what, I think like Morningstar D-listed Tesla from its ESG ratings because of, I'm not sure some corporate policy and Elon Musk went ballistic. He said like, where are the largest electric car company in the world? How can you say we're not helping the environment? And I think at a point, I think that the products that companies create are more important than like a 10% emissions drop in their supply chain. - Okay, so we've talked about my article, but I'm wondering, what am I missing, right? What are the big things that might actually really help? They're not any of the things that we've discussed so far. - Well, I think I would just build on the technology, pillar a little bit. So there's a lot of new technologies that need to get created. And then we need incentives and support in order to, for these technologies to actually come to market and have large adoption. So we tend to think of, we have like a slightly larger umbrella that we call systems change, which means technology, markets and policy. So I think that one of the major things that individuals can do to try and effect, to try and make a big difference in climate is to try and change what the government is doing. So from us, from a philanthropic perspective, that means funding organizations, doing education of government, doing research on what policies could be, doing various types of advocacy. Basically, I think a really important lever that most individuals have to making a big difference in climate is to try to change policy. And so that can mean, for individuals that can mean voting, that can mean political action. From where I sit as a climate philanthropist, that mostly means funding organizations that are trying to change policy either through research, through advocacy, through policy analysis and development, et cetera. A lot of the times, these policies have to do with technology, like I mentioned before, but that's not necessarily the only thing. It can be various regulations. It can be international coordination, like you mentioned before. But I do think that governments, at least from the US perspective, the federal government, but also different levels, state governments, local governments, are just a huge lever because the regulations and policies they make can change the behaviors of actors up and down the system. So I just think thinking about government as an important actor in the space is super, super important. And then the other thing that I think about is markets. And again, usually thinking about, how do we make sure there's a viable market for clean energy and products make with clean energy? Like solar panels, green steel, meat free burgers, et cetera. And so that market can come through various government actions, but there's other kind of interesting market shaping approaches, like coordination between various actors, like some of the more interesting ideas I've seen out there that haven't exactly been executed, but for instance, for green steel, what if you got a bunch of buyers of green steel together, like let's say big car companies, and then you get a bunch of producers of steel who aren't producing green steel now, because there's no buyers, but maybe would if they had a commitment to buy, you can get these various groups together and align supply and demand to seed market development. And that's generally, this idea comes from the idea of advanced market commitments that you see in the vaccine industry. And people have been, there've been rising ideas to try and apply it to climate. I've seen things going on with air conditioners, with steel, with alternative proteins. And so I think this is a really interesting potential mechanism. Science is built on replication. Our confidence that a particular hypothesis is true increases the more times we can conduct experiments and get results that are consistent with the original research. Unfortunately, psychology and other social science fields have been undergoing a replication crisis for the past several years, meaning that researchers have tried but failed to replicate experimental results from the past few decades. And this is deeply troubling because it calls into question many of the things we thought we knew about how humans work. To help solve this replication crisis in psychology, the team at Clearer Thinking has launched a project called Transparent Replications that seeks to celebrate high quality research while also shifting incentives toward more replicable, reliable methods. They accomplished this by conducting rapid replications of recently published psychology and human behavior studies in prominent academic journals, with the aims of celebrating the use of open science best practices, improving reliability, and promoting clarity. Once the Transparent Replications team has completed a replication, they make their results freely available on their website for anyone to read. To read those results and other essays by the team, visit replications.clearthinking.org. Before we wrap up, I wanted to ask about how you think about focusing on climate versus other potential ways of helping the world. When you're thinking with what's the most effective intervention to pursue, why do you choose climate? Well, I would say at least at a personal level, I didn't choose climate because I went through a list of all of the things that could be done. I chose something that I thought that I had some comparative advantage in that I knew something about. So I think that's what drives a lot of individuals. And speaking, if I were saying trying to talk to a donor or someone with a bit more of a blank slate, I don't think I would come out here and make the argument that climate is absolutely the most important thing that people have to do. I think you see the effect of altruist community has does a lot of work on cause selection. And there's a lot of compelling causes out there. I think I would say a few things, though. And one is that climate is very clearly like a very clear and present danger to humanity that is here and definitely happening. And so I think for people who are interested in working on a problem that is very clear and present, compared to say like an AI robot takeover that's like a hopefully not gonna happen, but like working on a low probability outcome. The climate is like working on a problem that we know is a problem. And we feel like we have tangible solutions to and can actually make progress with. So I think that's both attractive to me as an individual and to lots of people. To move to a little bit more of like a nerdy cost effectiveness approach to it. I also think that it is, I wouldn't say it's better than other things people work out can work at, but I think it is extremely competitive. Like I would say like within the same order of magnitude of cost effectiveness of other cause areas that people find very compelling. I don't know all of the comparisons, but for instance, I came to climate from working at international development and working with Gifwell a lot. You know, as a, and my role in ID and site, Gifwell was one of our clients. And so I like to do a little bit of a back of the envelope math kind of comparing working on climate and the type of things we do at Giving Green versus comparing lives at Gifwell. So Gifwell's cost effectiveness models, just quite a range, but generally you think that the cost of a life saved by donating to a Gifwell charity is roughly $5,000. The value of statistical life is a measure used to, you know, try to put some monetary value on a life saved and Gifwell has done to work with this. And actually in my job at ID and site, we did a bunch of surveys in Africa to try and estimate, you know, how people make the trade-off between money and life. Something like in the order of $50,000 is probably a pretty good estimate of the VSL in these contexts. - So that's when someone could basically make decisions that could increase the probability I'm dying by 1% or something like that, that you kind of back out. Well, that is an implicit price that they're putting on their own life. That was actually the preference exercise that we did and we got an estimate around there, but there's a few different ways that people have estimated that come like in that basic ballpark. But yeah, that's right. So basically when I think if you're giving to Gifwell, you're getting roughly $50,000 of value for $5,000 cost, like a 10 to 1 return, which I think is great. Love Gifwell. So then I try to apply that to climate. And so I think our cost effectiveness models are way less certain than Gifwell. We'll just put that out there. Well, we've done a bunch of modeling of certain types of policy advocacy or technology development of the type we do. And we usually think that a good benchmark that we strive to achieve with our grant making is roughly $1 for every ton removed of carbon. Then what is the value of that to society? Well, this is an idea called the social cost of carbon that is hugely controversial and very difficult to make. What is the long term cost to society of avoiding one ton of emissions right now? And people have studies that are looking at long term health effects, long term economic effects, et cetera. It's very controversial. There have been papers recently that say it's 1,000. The Trump administration wants to set it to zero. The Biden administration's EPA used a number of 200, which I think is a relatively reasonable estimate given where the literature is now. And so what that means is if you contribute to climate and you believe our cost effectiveness numbers, which you should have a host of dose of skepticism, but I think that they're relatively solid, well, then you're getting a 200 time return on your investment. So basically, I think that's really strong related to other really good causes out there. Like I said, I'm not going to make the argument that climate is better than one of these others, especially given massive uncertainty, but I would make the argument that it's probably comparable. The effect of altruism community is obviously very concerned with how do you do the most good? And very few people end up working on climate. Do you think that's a mistake? Do you think it's a blind spot? Well, I understand why people do it. Because the effect of altruism community tends to view climate as something that is-- that's just a lot of people are working on. And they just do the niche of the effect of altruism community as let's work on stuff that other people aren't working on. Right, get a framework of what you call it funding needed, but someone call it neglectedness. It seems to do very badly. It pays value because it's like, well, so much energy and conversation and effort going into it. I think there's some truth to that, but it also misses some points. It's such an incredibly wide and multifaceted field that I do think there are certain pieces of it that are extremely neglected and important. And that's that stuff we're trying to find. So I do think that there is a lot of room for effective altruists to get involved with climate and make a difference. It's interesting. You said that effective altruists are not so interested in climate. And that seems to be true based on the type of things that the major effective altruist organizations are working on. But if you actually look at surveys of people in the effect of altruist community, it's one of the top cause areas that people care about and think is important. Maybe not the top, but it's like top five. I might not have the latest survey in my mind. But I do think a lot of effective altruists care about it. I think that application of the ideas of cost effectiveness and high marginal effectiveness are concepts that are super important to apply to a field like climate change, where there is a huge variety of potential solutions. There's a lot of money going into it, going to things that seem not that important. And I think there's a lot of value to working on this issue with an E.A. type lens. So that's what inspired me to work on climate. And I think that there are a lot of people who do feel the same way. Why is it that they're neglected sub areas that are important? You might think with all the money going around, all the concern. A huge number of people are really concerned about climate. Why are there these pockets of neglectedness? I think that a lot of the money-- you have the kind of traditional environmentalist movement that's very focused on conservation. And conservation is really important for climate. But you tend to see that there were certain values in these types of organizations. And these are both-- these are the nonprofits themselves. These are funders. These are also people within government. That those organizations had a certain set of values built up over decades. And when you take those values and apply them to the climate issue, you only get a certain subset of actions, which are essentially consume less conserved more. I think that those-- that that subset of actions is not super well placed to meet the moment of the complexity of the climate challenge. I think that you see this type of mindset are similar to what I was saying before, where people not wanting to invest in new technologies, because I think, oh, the solution's simple. People just shouldn't be flying and will use solar power. I think that's-- as we've talked before, that's just an oversimplification. And especially for people who want to take a bit of a longer-term view and say, let's make longer-term investments in policy and technology that will make this transition easier, you just have fewer organizations, especially funding organizations, interested in that. People are not patient. And they're not willing to take risks. And so I think patient-- I think there's a space for more patient, risk-loving capital in the system. A while back, I did a August episode where I brought on one person who's really involved in the climate world has done a ton of work in it, and another person who's a little bit skeptical, but not skeptical in the way that you might think, not skeptical of the whole cause, not skeptical of the broad conclusions. What their skepticism arose from is a lack of models that said, OK, if we let climate go as it's going, that we're going to have hundreds of millions of people die or massive global unrest. Basically, their surprise was that as they looked at their reports and they looked at number of deaths estimated and things like that, the numbers were always much smaller than they expected. If climate is such a big deal, why are the numbers of deaths expected and stuff like this? Not that high. And then if you also look at even effects on GDP, you're like, well, if you assume that GDP is going to keep growing as it's been growing, yeah, it sucks to lose some of that GDP, but GDP's still growing anyway. So you still expect the future to be much wealthier than it is today, even with climate factor in. So anyway, that was the debate under discussion. And what the climate person said, basically, is that the biggest concerns about climate are not things that we can really quantify today. They're not things we can carefully model. We know it's going to cause devastating effects on the world, but these are going to be effects in migration, in massive wars, and we don't have good models for these things. So yes, if you just look at the things we can quantify, it doesn't look nearly as scary as it really is. But I just wanted to get your take on that, because that was sort of when we left that conversation. And it felt like a bit of an unsatisfying kind of conclusion. And it's like, yeah, it's going to be horrible, but we can't really model how horrible it's going to be. - Yeah, I mean, I wish I had all the answers to this. I think my first argument is even based on what the models say, I think it's pretty bad. You know, I did hear part of that episode and hearing the guy that you said was on there, like, surprised at how not bad it was. But I don't really agree, you know, I think like, 30 to 50% lower GDP than we would have had, and millions of deaths built up over many years. Like, that seems bad to me, and a problem worth working on. - Well, those are obviously really bad things, but then if you put them in context, you say, okay, yeah, 30% less GDP, but also GDP is much higher than it is today anyway, right? So we're 30% less than a much higher level than we're used to. And millions of deaths, yes, that's absolutely horrendous, but like cars can come millions of people, right? Today, so it's like, so it's just, contextually, it doesn't feel as big as you would have expected, you know? - Yeah, well, it depends on what you expected. So I think I would first argue that the baseline numbers are bad. And then I would say, can you complain these bad baseline numbers with all of these uncertain risks that are really bad? So I think the tail risks are tremendously bad, you should have been. - Like, this is potentially what your other guest is talking about. The ones that I think about as being really scary are these certain tipping points. Like, people are quite worried not to get too technical. People are worried about the AMC collapse, which is this is like the currents in the Atlantic Ocean that keep Europe basically temperate. And that if this collapses, then Europe will like suddenly go into a centuries-long freeze. And, okay, it's like a bunch of models show that potentially happening, but we're not really sure. There's a number of other like major collapse type things on this. There's also worry about, I think one of the problems with looking at averages is it erases all kinds of spatial differences, right? So let's say yes, total GDP, I saw an estimate recently, I'm not putting my, you know, my self behind it, but something like 30% decrease in GDP compared to the world without climate change by 2050. Okay, that's bad, but that's gonna be, that's gonna, even if you say like, okay, that's not bad, that's hiding major, major spatial differences, right? That's combining increases in GDP in Canada and Russia with major plummets in GDP nearly a quarter and subsequent Africa. So I think it's partially like, it's gonna be okay for plenty of people. I do think as like relatively wealthy people in the US that have the ability to adapt to climate, I don't think it's gonna be catastrophic, but I do think you will see certain parts of the earth that become untenable for agriculture that have just crazy, crazy heat and you're gonna have to have massive migration movements. And then yeah, you start getting some of these terrorists, like will it cause major, like will it cause major wars? Will there be a disease outbreak? Will you have like new types of disease develop? Yeah, I don't know, like I don't think, I heard part of that episode that you were talking about and I do think it's a little bit foolish to make, it's foolish to kind of like assume that all of these things will happen when we don't, till say like freak out about civil war happening because of climate when that causal pathway is so incredibly undefined. And you know, maybe just the rising GDP in the meantime is going to make it so everyone better off, even in these areas where agriculture is being depleted that it won't matter. But I do think that there are all these different Taylorist scenarios that are scary enough that it makes, at least from my perspective, makes me think like okay, the baseline projection is bad and the Taylorists are really, really scary and those two things combined really demand action. The other thing is that the total amount, like money and effort needed to solve this issue, it's not that crazy, you know, like again, this is really, really hard to estimate but you see some estimates that say something like, this is going to knock off, either knock off 3% of GDP per year or cost 1% of GDP to fix. You know, it's like, it is very much a problem that is solvable without an extreme amount of sacrifice. - It's so funny guys, I don't know if I've ever heard someone say that about climate change that it's like, you know, oh, it's actually like a cost effective thing to do because you know. - No, this is not some sort of weird thing coming out of my head. This is pretty mainstream, which is just that like, the costs to solve climate change seem much lower than the damages it will cost, it will create. - Yeah, I mean, it makes a lot of sense, but I don't know. I don't hear a lot of people making that argument. So I found that interesting. Yeah, you know, there's a world where models are so uncertain and there's not the world we live in, but there's a world where models are so uncertain that you kind of just dismiss them and you're like, well, I'm not going to worry about that because the model sucks so bad. And then there's a world where the models are like, perfectly certain and you're like, okay, we know exactly what's going to happen. And I feel like climate is in this weird middle ground where uncertainty actually makes things much scarier and riskier because we don't know. There could be these recursive loops in the climate. There could be these cycles and everything goes like completely to shit, you know. Like, you know, and we know things are non-linear. We're like, you know, if it's not in the 50, if it's not in the median estimate, it turns out it's like the worst 5% tile, we might be just completely fucked, right? So yeah, that uncertainty actually makes you significantly more concerned about climate. - Yeah, yeah, I totally agree with you. - Before we finish, what would you wanna leave the listener with? For example, are there specific things that you think they should donate to? Are there specific actions you think they should think about taking? - Yeah, I mean, I guess I can just take one second to talk about what we do at Giving Green, which is, you know, we do research to try to help donors figure out how they can most, how they can intervene in climate in the most cost-effective ways. So we have research on what types of organizations we think people should be giving to, what we think the really high leverage points are. We have a re-granting fund, people can just give to our fund, and then with no additional costs we'll re-grant it to organizations according to our research. You know, I think I've already sort of talked about the types of things we think are important, but I can just kind of quickly list some of the conclusions that our research has come to in terms of very specific areas that we think are super, are really high impact right now. So one is in the US, we think that, especially given the current administration, it's a time of retrenchment of climate, but we see a couple of places of potential bipartisan progress, one of them around clean firm power, especially around technology innovation. So this is the nuclear and geothermal stuff I talked before, and then also about reducing deployment barriers to renewable energy, so permitting, citing transmission, just trying to stop the regulations that are preventing more and more clean power from getting on the grid. I've talked a lot about steel and concrete. I just think heavy industry is such a big problem that is mostly unaddressed, and we think that a lot of the action of this is happening outside the US, and we have some organizations doing really good work, trying to bring these new technologies to bear. I think the food systems, especially livestock, are just this incredibly big issue that's causing tons and tons of emissions, and basically no government action on it. So we're excited about alternative proteins, we're excited about trying to reduce the amount of methane within a cow's stomach, and we have a bunch of organizations we think are doing really good work on this. Shipping and aviation are both really unsolved problems that we think they both work on the policy and technology side need to be done. We're making some grants in these areas. We're working on reducing barriers to deployment of renewable energy in low-income countries, specifically India and Indonesia, which are projected to be really, really large and growing emitters. So trying to look at unleashing barriers to solar energy, wind energy, heavy industry in these countries. And then finally, we do some grant making in what's known as climate interventions. So if things get really bad, what can we do? So solar radiation management, specifically around governance. How could we make a decision to actually do one of these things like putting a bunch of sulfur in the air to reflect the sunlight? How could that be decided as a society? And then carbon removal, trying to get carbon out of the air through various technologies. So those are the pillars where we make recommendations and grants and we have deep reports on why we think these things are important and where we think people should be given their money and specific recommendations. So I think there's something in there for most people and also all of our research and deliberation is super transparent, hopefully, on our website. And people can just kind of walk through our logic and see whether you agree or disagree and you can write us emails and tell us what you think. We're happy to chat. Great. So if you want to check out what the recommendations are now, go to givengreen.earth. And Dan, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. All right, thanks so much, Ben. Sorry, I really appreciate it. [MUSIC PLAYING] Thanks for joining us. We always love to hear from our audience. So if you have any questions or comments, send us an email at
[email protected]. This episode was edited by tone support and transcribed by We Amplify. We would really appreciate it if you could rate and review us wherever you're listening to this, as it helps others find out about the show. And did you know you can now watch videos of the podcast? Just go to youtube.com/atclearthinkingpodcast. Stay tuned in by subscribing to our email newsletter, One Healthful Idea. Each week, we'll send you one valuable idea that you can read about in just 30 seconds, along with that week's new podcast episode, an essay by Spencer, an announcements about upcoming events. To sign up for our newsletter, access transcripts, or learn more about our guests, visit podcast.clearthinking.org. A listener asks, what podcasts have you been listening to? So recently I've been enjoying the study show, which is really fun. I also like the podcast Psych, which is a recent one. Another one that I like to search engine. One more honorable mention is two psychologists for beers, which gets into serve the weeds on academic psychology, but if you're interested in that, it can be really good. (upbeat music)
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