Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Let's Fund: Impact of our $1M crowdfunded grant to the Center for Clean Energy Innovation, published by Hauke Hillebrandt on April 4, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.

Let's Fund researches pressing problems, like climate change, and then crowdfunds for nonprofits working on effective policy solutions. One such policy is clean energy innovation (e.g. via more grant funding for scientists to invent better solar panels).

Making clean energy cheaper has many benefits because it reduces:

Emissions

Energy poverty

Air pollution (which kills millions a year)

Revenue for autocratic petrostates[1]

Extreme climate risks (since if countries agreements to reduce emissions like Paris were to break down, cheaper clean energy hedges against this[2])

Since 2019, we've crowdfunded $1M for the Center for Clean Energy Innovation (CCEI) at ITIF, a non-profit think tank in DC. One example of our grantees work is researching the effects of higher and smarter clean energy R&D spending and communicating the results to policy-makers. Our research showed that this is the most effective climate policy[3] and was featured on Vox (which Bill Gates retweeted![4]).

As a result, ~2000 donors crowdfunded a $1M+ for CCEI to do more think tank work (e.g. do research, talk to policy-makers, etc.).

Here I show how with our grant, CCEI might have e.g. shifted >$100M from less effective clean energy deployment (e.g. subsidies) to more neglected and effective clean energy R&D. The donations might avert a ton CO for less than $0.10.

That a leading think tank can cause such shifts becomes plausible, if we look at the pivotal ('hingey') timeline of a political climate so favorable that climate budgets went up by an unprecedented scale:

2020: Big Government Dems win the presidency, house and a razor-thin margin senate majority. Then a CCEI researcher gets a job advising Biden's climate envoy, John Kerry, who had endorsed and blurbed CCEI's Energizing America report and which has been called 'a very influential report', and advice for Biden on how to reform the energy innovation system.[5]

2021: COVID leads to a massive stimulus that includes ~$42B for clean energy RD&D, doubling the yearly budget- an ~$10B increase: [6]

This US leadership led 16 countries to pledge ~$100B for the Clean Energy Technologies Demonstration Challenge recently.

These increases were politically tractable thanks to tens of thousands of climate activists raising awareness worldwide. But CCEI is part of a much smaller coalition of only hundreds of key movers and shakers (others are: CATF, Carbon180, etc.[7]) that improved the quality of these spending increases by channeling them towards energy RD&D, which is ~10x more effective at ~$10/tC than deployment at ~$100/tC averted (more).

Also, our $1M grant was ~2% of donations to US climate governance and a respectable 0.2% to all US think tanks.[8],[9],[10] Based on this, if we assume CCEI caused ~.1-10%[11] of the $10B-100B clean energy RD&D increases - then, our Monte Carlo model (see UseCarlo.com) suggests that CCEI averts ~.5Gt at ~$.002/tC:[12]

Distribution

p0

p10

p50

p90

UseCarlo.com output

Notes / Source

Energy R&D budget increase

Metalog

$0K

$10B

$42B

$100B

~50Gt

P10: US increases / y. P50: total stimulus. P90: global agreement

CCEI's effect of shifting deploy$ to RD&D$

Metalog

0%

0.1%

2%

10%

~5%

Guesstimate: CCEI is part of the coalition of key movers and shakers that shifted budget increases to energy RD&D

RD&D effectiveness

Metalog

$0

$3

$13

$41

~$20/tC

Review on the cost-effectiveness of energy R&D

Deployment effectiveness

Metalog

$0

$0.1K

$0.5K

$1K

~$500/tC

Levelized Cost of Carbon Abatement

tC averted via R&D shift

Output

~0.5Gt

tC averted by R&D- Counterfactual tC averted by deployment

Let's Fund grant

~$1M

CCEI effectiveness

~$0.002/tC

Donor effectiveness

~$0.02/tC

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