SPENCER: Dan, welcome.

DAN: Thanks so much, Spencer, happy to be here.

SPENCER: So we live in a world today where some people deny that the climate is changing due to humans altogether, but even many people who believe in climate change think there's nothing we can do about it. It's a hopeless situation. Is that really true? Is it hopeless?

DAN: It is absolutely not hopeless. If it is hopeless, I'm sure I'm 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 are others 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.

SPENCER: 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. We 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?

DAN: So there's not exactly a "works-or-doesn't-work" answer. If we were to manage to drastically increase the amount of forest cover on the earth and leave it there, 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 high-profile tree planting projects that just haven't worked, and the reason for that is that, first of all, it's not just planting trees. You have to keep them alive for a long time. 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 that 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 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 very easy and very popular solution. 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 the marginal effort, marginal dollar towards solutions. This is not the most high-impact place you could put.

SPENCER: So when one of these trees is planted and grows up, the idea is that it captures a fixed amount of carbon in the body of the tree, but then if the tree dies, that goes back into the atmosphere.

DAN: Pretty much, right. It's not fixed. There's this curve where, as it grows, it absorbs more and more carbon, and then when it becomes mature, it absorbs carbon a bit more slowly. But yes, you could think of the tree embodying carbon that is taken from the atmosphere and just holding it. If the tree dies, if it burns, it immediately releases all the carbon. If it dies and is left to rot, it slowly releases the carbon, but once it's not living, that carbon normally finds its way back into the atmosphere eventually.

SPENCER: And what about carbon credits as a strategy? Can you tell us what that is, and how effective do you believe that is?

DAN: 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 emissions, or they are not cutting down trees that they would have otherwise, and then they are awarded a credit by some credit granting agency. They can sell those credits on the open market to companies, but sometimes individuals who want to undo their own emissions by saying, "I've emitted a certain amount, so I'll buy these credits that will undo my personal emissions." I think there are two fundamental problems with this.

SPENCER: Just to clarify. So essentially, it 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?

DAN: That's right. So I think there are two high-level issues with this. The first is that if our goal is to get to zero emissions, this isn't going to work, because ultimately everyone has to stop emitting. 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.

SPENCER: But they could still be effective on the margin, right?

DAN: Except for the second problem, which is that most of these credits are trash. To put it very bluntly, there are 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 going to cut down this forest unless someone pays me," and then you wait for someone to pay you to not cut it down, but you are maybe not going to cut it down anyway. I think the problem is that so many credits in the market are essentially people trying to get paid for stuff they were going to do anyway. It's extremely hard as a consumer in the market to figure out what is what. We actually, at Giving Green in an earlier incarnation, did a lot of research in this market to try and figure out if this is, if this is going to be a commodity, you need real certainty that you have a causal reduction in emissions when you buy this thing. I think that certainty is extremely hard to find in this market. Various studies have been done that say that 80% of carbon credits are bad, or 90% of carbon credits are bad. It's not like a little problem in 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.

SPENCER: Is there a strange incentive where those that are willing to exaggerate the most can make the most money, and so you kind of get a race to the bottom.

DAN: Yeah, I would say that there is just a really major incentive to try to get credits for stuff you're already doing, and then when you're doing it, to 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 are already doing, to not worry about what's called a reversal, if you promise not to cut down the trees, but then you go ahead and cut them down a few years later, and there's no one in this entire process incentivized to get it right. The credit granting providers, the projects, are their customers, 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

SPENCER: 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.

DAN: Right. And the sad part is, when third parties have tried to do that research, they find almost nothing good. It destroys the market. So, none of the intermediaries want to be that super high-quality intermediary, because it really destroys supply.

SPENCER: I know that plastic straw removal is not targeted at global warming, but when I see that it gets so much attention, I 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 see it as sort of performative, rather pointless actions that actually have almost no impact but make people feel good. I'm wondering how 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 make people feel like they're doing something virtuous, even though it doesn't really have much impact?

DAN: No, I'm with you, Spencer. I think these things in most cases are pretty frustrating. I think that the question of whether individual actions matter is a complicated one. I think there are 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 is so bad. I saw this TikTok video the other day of someone comparing Texas In-N-Out to California In-N-Out. Supposed to be funny, like, "Does it taste the same?" The thing that came up was, in California, they had the paper straws, and the guy was so pissed off. He was like, "This is terrible. My Coke tastes bad. The straws disintegrated. This is the worst." So it's something that, A, it doesn't really have a big upside, and B, it has a big downside in the public sphere because it frustrates people. 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 bathwater."

SPENCER: But how could you feel good about yourself if the paper straws actually worked? It's because you have to suffer using the paper straws, and then you can feel you have done something virtuous.

DAN: Yeah, I think so. I think this is part of the 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 that it is incredibly lacking ambition. If you think that what you're going to 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, 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.

SPENCER: I wonder about that. So there are some cause areas, like causing harm to factory-farmed animals, where I think it's reasonable to say that if someone becomes a vegan, 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 exactly a certain number because it's probabilistic. We know that when consumers change, they 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 when n consumers do it, it's going to reduce it by k units. 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 altogether, does it really make any difference at all? Or is it just 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 prevent the suffering of 12 animals or whatever.

DAN: I think that the analogy doesn't really work with climate. Okay, let's say that I go off the grid and drop my emissions to completely zero. The 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 0.000000001 degrees or whatever. I think it's actually imperceptible in terms of life for humans and animals on the planet.

SPENCER: I imagine that's way less than one second. It's going to take an extra microsecond or whatever to get to the level. Had you not done that, right?

DAN: One thing that I do have a little bit more optimism about individual action is sending market signals. 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. It's always a struggle for new technologies when they're early in their development cycle and are a little bit more expensive. 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 buy a heat pump, an Impossible Burger, or an electric car. In the early days, these companies didn't have a lot of customers. It's not like, your 0.000001% of their customer base; you can chop a bunch of zeros off of there, and it can actually be meaningful to make this purchase, tell your friends about it, and maybe crowd a few other people in.

SPENCER: It sends a signal to the market when they go fundraising. The number of customers is going to be a big factor, so you can kind of magnify your impact a little bit. They can market, "Oh, look, we have all these people purchasing." What about individual action as a strategy? I see these environmental groups all the time trying to push individual action as a solution to climate change. From my perspective, I feel like, I'm not going to say that's literally impossible, but I feel like we've refuted that as a form of strategy that's been pushed for 20 years and doesn't seem to have gone anywhere.

DAN: Yeah, I agree. Ultimately, humans respond to incentives, and I think that people, especially in the US where I'm most familiar, are not going to take massive, systematic, altruistic actions and self-sacrifice for the climate. I think it's a losing battle. It can also backfire because if people think that the only way to solve the climate crisis is to make huge sacrifices, like giving up hamburgers, then you've got a huge PR problem on your hands. I do think you've seen a little bit of a difference in Europe, where the pressure for individual action has caused meaningful changes in energy usage and energy efficiency, but it's also caused political schisms in Europe, where you get right-wing political movements that are kind of aligned with anti-climate, like the yellow vest in France. It's not a slam dunk there, either. Overall, I'm pretty skeptical of these approaches, and I just don't think they're going to scale.

SPENCER: 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. Run it by you. So originally I had two strategies in there, but my friend who works in climate convinced me that a third. The first strategy I talked about is government collaboration. So if the major world governments of the largest countries, so we talked about China, the US, India, as well as probably Europe, all collaborate and just make sort of common sense regulations like taxing carbon, setting deadlines for industries that pollute the most to become more green, et cetera, that this could have an incredible difference. But it's essentially just a political battle about having the right leaders in place who care and work 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?

DAN: 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 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, one that I think we should keep working on, but I would say it's been a relative failure so far. We've gotten a bunch of toothless promises. I also think, if anything, the political economy of the world seems to be moving in the wrong direction. Among the great powers, there seems 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 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, but 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. You can see in the US, "We're in the Paris Agreement, then we're out of the Paris Agreement, then we're in the Paris Agreement, then we're out of the Paris Agreement." I think the more this happens, the more it 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.

SPENCER: 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 is a fundamentally flawed idea, or do you think that the right leader of the US, or the right leaders of Europe, etc., could make it happen?

DAN: I think it's only possible if you get broader-based support from the electorate. I'm more optimistic in Europe, where, in many European countries, you have very solid majorities that say climate change is an important issue. We think our leaders should be doing something about it, etc. If you look in the US, it's extremely polarized by party. But even within Democrats, it's not a super high priority for most voters.

SPENCER: I saw some statistics recently that basically said there are no climate change deniers in America. The idea was not that nobody cares about it, but if you ask people what their number one priority is, almost nobody lists it as their number one priority in America.

DAN: 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 no agreement, as long as it's not a huge priority for the population, there's huge disagreement among parties. It's hard to see the US being a credible climate leader, even if we get one super pro-climate president. Everyone's going to understand that the pendulum could just swing the other way in four years.

SPENCER: In this article, the second big strategy that I felt was potentially promising for climate is just technological innovation. Obviously, there are lots of companies working on technology related to climate, but the idea here would be massive government prizes or massive incentive programs, maybe with really clear milestones. For example, if you hit this milestone in battery technology, we give you a billion dollars or $10 billion. If you solve this particular challenge that we don't have to solve, or you get carbon capture down to this cost or whatever. The idea would be just saying, "Look, we know that people are unlikely to take a lot of actions to improve the climate when it's not in their self-interest to do so, but with technology, we can make it easier for them to take good actions. We can make it more in their own interest to be green, because it's easy to be green, it's cheap to be green, etc. Maybe it's even easier to be green than it is to not be." So, what do you think of that as a broad kind of approach?

DAN: Yeah, that's much more aligned with my views. I think that if there is a way out of this issue, if we have a pathway to really stop or slow 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. That's basically people who think, "Oh, we're going to be fine. 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 we need will be developed, or that ultimately the technology that's developed will be cheaper than the emitting status quo. Even if we have good technology, there's no golden law of nature that says clean technology must eventually be cheaper than emitting technology. But I do think this is the one place where we've seen success. 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 since 1990, both solar panels and batteries have dropped in cost by 98%. If you look at predictions of costs before then, it drastically outstrips its predictions every year. Those are two major successes in the climate world that I think are really unmatched by any other policy, agreement, or behavior change. When I think about what we can do next, it's thinking about what is the next solar panel or battery, and what can government or philanthropy do to make sure that these technologies are a success and push them forward.

SPENCER: Is there a divide among environmentalists between those who say, "Oh yeah, technology is a good thing, we should embrace it, this might be the way out," versus those who are sort of anti-technology or view it as foolish to put stock in technology, arguing that, "Technology got us into this problem, why are we trying to focus on technology to get us out of it?"

DAN: I wouldn't say 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. 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. Sometimes they will accuse the more technology-focused people of it being a delaying tactic, a way to avoid making hard decisions, because some magical technology is going to come from the future and solve it.

SPENCER: So they're just saying, "Look, if we just put the brakes on everything, we switch everything to solar and wind and batteries, etc., we could just solve this right now."

DAN: Yeah, but honestly, I think that the facts just don't line up with that. Maybe in some sectors, you could do it. We could do it with electricity in theory, even though it would be incredibly expensive and require 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 we start moving to some of the harder sectors, the technology just doesn't exist. We can't just say, "Okay, everyone start using clean concrete. There's barely any clean concrete out there. We're just figuring out how to do it." Concrete, steel, meat, aviation, shipping, 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, "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.

SPENCER: Yeah, there's also a question of how would you actually get this to happen? You would need tremendous political will, and the government would have to spend an incredible amount of money. So then you go back to the question, would the government ever have that political will?

DAN: Yeah, you would have a revolt from the populace if you said, "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, Sorry, we don't have technology for these things. Yes. Oh, and also, we're converting multiple states' worth of land to solar electricity because now we can only use solar electricity." I just don't think it's at all reasonable to say that we can get to net zero with current technology. And even in places you could, it requires massive sacrifices that I think no democratic society would be willing to accept. And honestly, I don't think they should. I think the trade-off is too stark.

SPENCER: This raises the question about, obviously, you're really concerned about climate; that's what you work on. 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 how do you differ from some other climate activists? What do they think? What do you think in terms of the pressingness and the seriousness of the problem?

DAN: I would agree with most people working on climate that this is a serious problem. It's going to cause major disruption to human societies, major loss of lives, and a major decrease in 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 adapt to a warming world. I don't know where exactly these things are on the spectrum. I'm not in the camp that this is going to be an existential crisis for humanity and that all of the human population is going to die out. I also think that we have a little bit of time; I don't think that we are going to have massive disruptions in human society in the next 10 or 20 years. I don't think if we go above these kinds of 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 nonlinear, and we want to prevent the worst possible outcomes, which means we really want to make sure that we don't get to four, five, or seven degrees of warming. I think we have a little bit of time to develop the new technologies we need in some of these hard-to-abate sectors, get the policies right, and 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.

SPENCER: Going back to the question of technology more broadly, how would we best promote it? Suppose you have 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?

DAN: Well, first of all, I might just talk about the US for a little while, because that's where I'm most familiar. 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...

SPENCER: I guess Germany has driven a lot of the solar tech. But other than that, the US has been dominant. Is that right?

DAN: Yeah. I think that I'm 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. I think prizes are a good idea, and they have their place. I think that there are a couple of things. 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. There are different ways that support for technology development can happen, and it depends on what level of technological readiness things are at. 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 ARPA-E, which is the energy version of DARPA, which was the military research program. The US government makes direct grants to universities to invent new types of batteries, invent new ways of making steel, etc. So straight-up research is a big component of it. It's very important. Then you have commercialization, where there are different things that are needed. The Department of Energy's loan programs have played a really big role in making loans to early-stage companies with new technologies to try to help them develop and bring them to market. There are also tax credits for new technologies and various types of subsidies. I think the government can play a really big role in taking early technologies and trying to help them get to market. As technologies really start to mature, governments can create long-term incentives for uptake, either through direct procurement, like the government buys a lot of steel and concrete. You could imagine the government saying, "We are going to be a major buyer of zero-carbon steel, 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, etc. Hopefully, eventually, the new technology can compete with the incumbent technology on merits. But it's not necessarily true; you might always need a subsidy or regulation to keep green steel or green concrete demanded in the market.

SPENCER: You also mentioned this idea of looking for the next solar panel. That next edge where technology could really do a lot. Do you have an idea of what that might be? What are some things on the horizon for that?

DAN: One of the things that we are really excited about is geothermal energy. Everyone is probably relatively aware of geothermal energy. In Yellowstone National Park, you have these boiling hot water pools just under the surface. You can tap directly into them, and then steam comes up and runs a turbine. That's basically free energy right below the ground. Those resources in the world have been heavily exploited. There aren't that many places where you can just put a little pipe into the ground and get energy out. But there have been major advancements in 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 chemicals down, doing things like horizontal drilling. A lot of these same technologies can now be used to dig deeper to find more heat, more energy, and more steam that can be used for geothermal production. One of the things that we're working on at Giving Green is trying to figure out how to push that market towards more commercial readiness. There's already one commercial project by a company called Fervo operating in Utah, and they're scaling up. If you can get this technology moving down the cost curve and keep digging deeper, you could have 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.

SPENCER: 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 fall in the cost per kilowatt. Why is that not just going to save us in the US on its own? If that keeps going exponential, is it the fundamental limitations of the technology because it requires battery storage, or is it more fundamental aspects?

DAN: Yeah, there are a couple of things. One is the intermittency of solar power. As you said, the current state of technology is that solar panels provide power only during the day. You can add batteries, which can move the power to the evening. Generally, what they're doing is moving power from the peak of solar generation to the peak of electricity demand, which is 5 to 9 PM. It doesn't solve greater yearly or monthly fluctuations in solar power. If you want solar power in New York in December, you have a little bit of solar power, but you would need either long-duration storage batteries that store energy from the summer or you need to transmit power from, say, Arizona, to get there. Or you just need many solar panels in New York to capture the little bit of solar energy that's coming in. The answer is that all of these things are possible. Most of the technologies exist. A cheaper version of long-duration energy storage is one of the things on the technology frontier to help this. The issue is that when you cost some of these things out, the other major problem is that it requires so much land. If you start to 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 have to massively overbuild to capture every last bit of sunshine and then save it for times when there's no sunshine or move it around. Additionally, it requires a huge amount of land. That land is technically available. I think there's a report from Princeton that estimates the total solar build-out needed would require land equivalent to the size of Ohio and Kentucky combined. So it's a lot of land, but it's not impossible. 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. People just don't want to live next to huge solar fields, and there are only so many places you can tuck and hide it. So basically, you have problems of high-cost energy storage and community resistance. I think those three things together will mean that solar and wind will top out at some level. I'm not sure what that level is, maybe 60% of the energy supply, maybe 80%, but it's not going to reach 100%.

SPENCER: And where do you see nuclear fitting into this equation?

DAN: We see clean firm power, new sources of clean firm power. Clean firm means power that can be deployed at any time and is always on. That's as opposed to solar and wind, which are intermittent. We see new sources of clean firm 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. We're excited about geothermal, as I mentioned before, and we're also excited about nuclear, which has a lot of these positive aspects and is a technology that already exists and is working. Nuclear has many aspects that make it super attractive for scaling up a green energy system. The issue with nuclear power, especially in the US, is that over the past few decades, it has become extremely expensive. This has to do with increasing safety regulations since the Three Mile Island disaster, which added layers of safety regulations to prevent another nuclear incident. In general, in the US, we've just gotten bad at building big projects. Our costs for building subways, roads, and rail lines are much higher than in Asia or Europe. This is also true for nuclear power plants, which are huge projects that cost. I think the latest one in Georgia cost around $15 billion. So there's a problem. From a technology perspective, it is an excellent technology. From an economics perspective, it is super problematic. The question is, can we develop nuclear technology and regulations such that it becomes less expensive and a more viable energy source? There are all kinds of new designs for nuclear power plants owned by various companies and in various stages of getting regulatory approval or building their first test plants. Usually, the designs are built around the idea that they can be done cheaper because they are safer, so they need fewer safety regulations, or they are small and modular, allowing for more components to be built in factories and benefiting from economies of scale. We, at Giving Green, are cautiously optimistic about this revolution, and we've made grants in this area for nuclear. I think it's a piece of the puzzle, but I do think there is an open question about whether the nuclear industry can reduce costs or whether it will be overtaken by other technologies.

SPENCER: When writing this article about potentially promising strategies in climate, the third strategy I 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. Sometimes people would say it's under 200 companies that have this really large effect on the climate. The idea is that those companies might be pressured either by their shareholders or potentially by governments to change their behavior, and that could have a big impact on climate. What do you think of that kind of approach?

DAN: I read this, Spencer, and I felt pretty skeptical. There are two things. It's pressure from the government. I'm more optimistic about that. I think the government has a lot of power. As I mentioned before, when I was talking about heavy industry, the government could just say, "Okay, all you guys need to be buying clean steel now, and then it can basically happen." I believe in the power of government, but I think the crux of this argument is a little bit different. It's more about customers or shareholders putting pressure on companies to change the way they do business in a way that decreases emissions. I'm not so optimistic about that. You see some excellent examples of this happening with tech companies that I think are quite good. You see Google going out there and trying to be a buyer of 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; 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 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 is really high, so they can spend a bit of their profits to reduce their carbon footprint and do some good stuff. I think that's all great, but if you try to expand it to the largest emitters, I don't have the top 200 emitters in front of me, but I sure as heck bet it's the big oil companies and the big industry companies, chemicals, steel, concrete, because that's where emissions are in our system. Those companies have an extremely different ratio of emissions to profits. 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. If you took a look at what it would cost to, like, taking some reasonable estimate of abatement costs, and you look at their total emissions versus their profits, abatement costs were about three times profits. So you really think that BP is going to completely erase its profits to reduce its emissions or eliminate its missions? No way. First of all, you're never getting a majority of shareholders that want to do this. You're not going to have executives who want to do this. In the places where the really huge emissions are, there are not the incentives, nor any type of market reality that's going to force them to do this.

SPENCER: Are there low-hanging fruit actions these giant companies could take if they were so inclined that they 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?

DAN: At Giving Green, we have a paper on what we think companies can do to make a difference in the climate. 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 the easy steps, like Amazon bought a fleet of electric vehicles instead of buying gas-powered vehicles. I think that was pretty good, but it is kind of buying into a mature-ish technology and not really changing the game. These things are fine, but I think the low-hanging fruit is less interesting than the hard stuff. Where I think corporate action is really interesting is companies trying to make catalytic investments in the hard stuff. It's similar to what I was talking about with individuals before, where I said I think individuals should try to be early buyers of new, potentially catalytic technologies because somebody's got to make that sacrifice. 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 it needs to reduce emissions in the mining space and in the iron smelting space, which is just an incredible source of emissions. They're 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. 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?

SPENCER: So, rather than just mitigating some of the stuff they're doing, actually creating new solutions?

DAN: Yeah, I think that's more compelling. It kind of gets to this story. I think Morningstar delisted Tesla from its ESG ratings because of some corporate policy. Elon Musk went ballistic. He said, "We're the largest electric car company in the world. How can you say we're not helping the environment?" I think he had a point. I think that the products that the companies create are more important than a 10% emissions drop in their supply chain.

SPENCER: So we've talked about my article, but I'm wondering, what am I missing? What are the big things that might actually really help that are not any of the things we've discussed so far?

DAN: Well, I think I would just build on the technology pillar a little bit. There are a lot of new technologies that need to be created, and we need incentives and support for these technologies to actually come to market and have large adoption. We tend to think of a slightly larger umbrella that we call systems change, which means technology, markets, and policy. I think one of the major things that individuals can do to try to make a big difference in climate is to try to change what the government is doing. From a philanthropic perspective, that means funding organizations that are educating the government, doing research on what policies could be, and doing various types of advocacy. I think a really important lever that most individuals have to make a big difference in climate is to try to change policy. For individuals, that can mean voting or political action. From where I sit as a climate philanthropist, that mostly means funding organizations that are trying to change policy, either through research, advocacy, or policy analysis and development. A lot of the time, these policies have to do with technology, as I mentioned before, but that's not necessarily the only thing. It can involve various regulations or international coordination, as you mentioned before. 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 or policies they make can change the behaviors of actors up and down the system. I think thinking about the government as an important actor in this space is super important. The other thing I think about is markets. I'm usually thinking about how we can ensure there's a viable market for clean energy and products made with clean energy, like solar panels, green steel, meat-free burgers, etc. That market can come through various government actions, but there are also interesting market-shaping approaches, like coordination between various actors. For instance, for green steel, what if you got a bunch of buyers of green steel together, like big car companies, and then you got 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. This idea comes from advanced market commitments that you see in the vaccine industry. There have been rising ideas to try to apply it to climate. I've seen things going on with air conditioners, steel, and alternative proteins, and I think this is a really interesting potential mechanism.

SPENCER: 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 about the most effective intervention to pursue, why do you choose climate?

DAN: Well, I would say that 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 I had some comparative advantage in and that I knew something about. I think that's what drives a lot of individuals. If I were 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. You see the effect of the altruist community does a lot of work on cause selection, and there are a lot of compelling causes out there. I think I would say a few things, though. One is that climate is very clearly a clear and present danger to humanity that is here and definitely happening. For people who are interested in working on a problem that is very clear and present, compared to, say, an AI robot takeover that hopefully is not going to happen but working on a low probability outcome, working on climate is addressing a problem that we know is a problem, and we feel like we have tangible solutions to and can actually make progress with. I think that's both attractive to me as an individual and to lots of people. To move to a little bit more of a nerdy cost-effectiveness approach, it is not better than other things people can work on, but I think it is extremely competitive, 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 in international development and working with GiveWell a lot. In my role at IDInsight, GiveWell was one of our clients, and I like to do a little bit of back-of-the-envelope math, comparing working on climate and the type of things we do at Giving Green versus comparing lives at GiveWell. GiveWell's cost-effectiveness models show quite a range, but generally, you think that the cost of a life saved by donating to a GiveWell charity is roughly $5,000. The value of statistical life is a measure used to try to put some monetary value on a life saved, and GiveWell has done some work with this. In my job at IDInsight, we did a bunch of surveys in Africa to try to estimate 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.

SPENCER: When someone could basically make decisions that could increase the probability of dying by 1%, that is an implicit price they are putting on their own life.

DAN: That was actually the preference exercise that we did, and we got an estimate around there. There are a few different ways that people have estimated that that come in that basic ballpark, but yeah, that's right. Basically, when you think of giving to GiveWell, you're getting roughly $50,000 of value for $5,000 costs, like a 10 to 1 return, which I think is great. I love GiveWell. Then I try to apply that to climate. Our cost-effectiveness models are way less certain than GiveWell's; we'll just put that out there. 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 we strive to achieve with our grant making is roughly $1 for every ton of carbon removed. What is the value of that to society? This is an idea called the social cost of carbon, which is hugely controversial and very difficult to determine. What is the long-term cost to society of avoiding one ton of emissions right now? People have studies looking at long-term health effects, long-term economic effects, etc. It's very controversial. There have been papers recently that say it's $1,000; the Trump administration wanted to set it to zero, but the Biden administration's EPA used a number of $200, which I think is a relatively reasonable estimate, given where the literature is now. What that means is if you contribute to climate and you believe our cost-effectiveness numbers, which you should approach with a dose of skepticism, I think they are relatively solid. Then you're getting a 200 times return on your investment. I think that's really strong compared to other really good causes out there. I'm not going to make the argument that climate is better than one of these others, especially given massive uncertainty, but I would argue that it's probably comparable.

SPENCER: The effective altruism community is obviously very concerned with how to do the most good. Very few people end up working on climate. Do you think that's a mistake? Do you think it's a blind spot?

DAN: I understand why people do it, because the effective altruism community tends to view climate as something that a lot of people are working on, and they view the niche of the effective altruism community as, let's work on stuff that other people aren't working on.

SPENCER: In a framework of, you call it funding needed, but some would call it neglectedness. It seems to do very badly at face value, because so much energy and conversation and effort is going into it.

DAN: 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. That's the stuff we're trying to find. I do think there's 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 effective altruist community, it's one of the top cause areas that people care about. I think it's important, maybe not the top, but it's in the 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 the 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 things that seem not that important, and I think there's a lot of value to working on this issue with an EA type lens. That's what inspired me to work on climate, and I think there are a lot of people who feel the same way.

SPENCER: Why is it that there are neglected subareas that are important? You might think, with all the money going around and all the concern, a huge number of people are really concerned about climate. Why are there these pockets of neglectedness?

DAN: You have the traditional environmentalist movement that's very focused on conservation, which is really important for the climate. But you tend to see that there are certain values in these types of organizations — the nonprofits themselves, the funders, and the people within the government — and these groups 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, conserve more." I think that subset of actions is not well placed to meet the complexity of the climate challenge. You see this type of mindset similar to what I was saying before, where people do not want to invest in new technologies because they think the solution is simple. People just shouldn't be flying and will use solar power. But that's an oversimplification, especially for people who want to take a longer-term view and say, "Let's make longer-term investments in policy and technology that will make this transition easier." You have fewer organizations, especially funding organizations, interested in that. People are not patient and they are not willing to take risks. I think there's a space for more patient, risk-loving capital in the system.

SPENCER: A while back, I did a podcast episode where I brought on one person who is really involved in the climate world, has done a ton of work in it, and another person who is 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. Their skepticism arose from a lack of models that said, "Okay, if we let climate go as it's going, we are going to have hundreds of millions of people die or massive global unrest." Basically, their surprise was that as they looked at the reports and the estimated number of deaths, the numbers were always much smaller than they expected. If climate is such a big deal, why are the expected numbers of deaths not that high? If you also look at the effects on GDP, you might think, "If you assume that GDP is going to keep growing as it has been, it sucks to lose some of that GDP, but GDP is still growing anyway." You still expect the future to be much wealthier than it is today, even with climate factored in. That was kind of the debate under discussion. What the climate person said is that the biggest concerns about climate are not things we can really quantify today. They are 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 and massive wars, and we don't have good models for these things. If you just look at the things we can quantify, it doesn't look nearly as scary as it really is. I want your take on that because when we left that conversation, it felt like a bit of an unsatisfying conclusion. It's going to be horrible, but we can't really model how horrible it's going to be.

DAN: I wish I had all the answers to this. My first argument is that even based on what the models say, I think it's pretty bad. I did hear part of that episode, and hearing the guy you mentioned was surprised at how not bad it was, but I don't really agree. I think 30 to 50% lower GDP than we would have had and millions of deaths built up over many years seems bad to me and a problem worth working on.

SPENCER: Those are obviously really bad things, but 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 cars kill millions of people today. So contextually, it doesn't feel as big as you would have expected.

DAN: It depends on what you expected. I think I would first argue that the baseline numbers are bad, and then I would say you combine these bad baseline numbers with all of these uncertain risks that are really bad.

SPENCER: The tail risks are tremendously bad.

DAN: This is potentially what your other guest was talking about. The ones that I think about as being really scary are these certain tipping points. People are quite worried, not to get too technical, about the AMOC collapse, which is the currents in the Atlantic Ocean that keep Europe basically temperate. If this collapses, then Europe will suddenly go into a centuries-long freeze. A bunch of models show that potentially happening, but we're not really sure. There are a number of other major collapse scenarios. There's also worry about, one of the problems with looking at averages is it erases all kinds of spatial differences. Let's say, "Yes, total GDP. I saw an estimate recently. I'm not putting my name behind it, but something like a 30% decrease in GDP compared to the world without climate change by 2050." Okay, even if you say that's not bad, that's hiding major spatial differences. That's combining increases in GDP in Canada and Russia with major plummets in GDP near the equator, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. It's going to be okay for plenty of people. I do think, as relatively wealthy people in the US who have the ability to adapt to climate, I don't think it's going to be catastrophic. But I do think you will see certain parts of the earth become untenable for agriculture due to extreme heat, and you're going to have to have massive migration movements. Then, you start getting some of these tail risks. Will it cause major wars? Will there be disease outbreaks? Will new types of diseases develop? I don't know. I don't think I heard part of that episode you were talking about. I do think it's a little foolish to freak out about civil war happening because of climate when that causal pathway is so incredibly undefined. Maybe the rising GDP in the meantime will make everyone better off, even in these areas where agriculture is being depleted, that it won't matter. But I do think there are all these different tail risk scenarios that are scary enough that, from my perspective, the baseline projection is bad, and the tail risks are really scary. Those two things combined really demand action. The other thing is that the total amount of money and effort needed to solve this issue isn't that crazy. Again, this is really hard to estimate, but you see some estimates that say, "This is going to knock off either 3% of GDP per year or cost 1% of GDP to fix." It is very much a problem that is solvable without an extreme amount of sacrifice.

SPENCER: It's funny, I don't know if I've ever heard someone say, "That about climate change, that it's actually a cost-effective thing to do."

DAN: This is not some sort of weird thing coming out of my head. This is pretty mainstream, which is just that the costs to solve climate change seem much lower than the damages it will create.

SPENCER: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense, but I don't hear a lot of people making that argument. I find that interesting. There's a world where models are so uncertain that you just dismiss them, and you're like, "I'm not gonna worry about that because the model is so bad." Then there's a world where the models are perfectly certain, and you're like, "Okay, we know exactly what's gonna happen." I feel like the climate is in this weird middle ground where the 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 cycles where everything goes completely to shit. We know things are nonlinear. If it's not in the median estimate, it turns out it's in the worst five percentile, and we might be completely fucked. That uncertainty actually makes me significantly more concerned about climate.

DAN: Yeah, I totally agree with you.

SPENCER: Before we finish, what would you want to 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 consider taking?

DAN: I can just take one second to talk about what we do at Giving Green. We do research to help donors figure out how they can intervene in climate in the most cost-effective ways. We have research on what types of organizations we think people should be giving to and what we think the really high leverage points are. We have a regranting fund; people can give to our fund, and with no additional costs, we will regrant it to organizations according to our research. I think I've already talked about the types of things we think are important, but I can quickly list some conclusions from our research in terms of very specific areas that we think are really high impact right now. One is in the US. 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 is around clean firm power, especially around technology innovation. This is the nuclear and geothermal stuff I talked about before, and also about reducing deployment barriers to renewable energy, such as permitting, siting, and transmission. We need to stop the regulations that are preventing more clean power from getting on the grid. I've talked a lot about steel and concrete. Heavy industry is a big problem that is mostly unaddressed, and we think a lot of the action is happening outside the US. We have some organizations doing really good work trying to bring these new technologies to bear. The food systems, especially livestock, are an incredibly big issue causing tons of emissions and basically no government action on it. We're excited about alternative proteins and trying to reduce the amount of methane in a cow's stomach. We have a bunch of organizations we think are doing really good work on this. Shipping and aviation are both really unsolved problems that need work on both the policy and technology sides. We're making some grants in these areas. We are working on reducing barriers to the deployment of renewable energy in low-income countries, specifically India and Indonesia, which are projected to be really large and growing emitters. We're trying to look at unleashing barriers to solar energy, wind energy, and heavy industry in these countries. Finally, we do some grant making in what's known as climate interventions. If things get really bad, what can we do? 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 sunlight? How could that be decided as a society? Then carbon removal, trying to get carbon out of the air through various technologies. 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 giving their money, along with specific recommendations. I think there's something in there for most people. All of our research and deliberation is super transparent on our website, so hopefully, people can walk through our logic and see whether they agree or disagree. You can write us emails and tell us what you think; we're happy to chat.

SPENCER: Great. So if you want to check out what their recommendations are, now go to givinggreen.earth. And Dan, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

DAN: All right, thanks so much, Spencer. I really appreciate it.