Thanks!

I think if we optimize for short-term impact we would want a list that focuses on short-lived pollutants (e.g. methane) or short-term adaptation measures.

I think the weakness of the article for EA prioritization is that it optimizes for something -- domestic certain reductions within countries -- that is not related to any globally relevant target metric.

E.g. irrespective of whether one optimizes for the short-term or long-term in neither scenario will the focus on national target achievement be relevant directly (it might matter somewhat indirectly via signaling). Obviously, it is a good article for national policy makers that want to achieve national targets.

Thanks!

I agree that policies can be combined but that doesn't really change the fundamental problem that evaluating policies for their certain local short-term impact will move us away from more impactful policies.

This is good raw data, but I don't think one can learn very much from this for what actions to prioritize for a couple of reasons:

(1) The focus is on national targets, while the most transformative policies in the past have had massive global impacts long-term with minimal local effects in the short-term (cf. early solar and wind policies, many of which were not even motivated as climate policies). Indeed, there is often a negative correlation between short-term domestic and long-term global impacts (I explore this a bit here).

(2) What matters for taking action is decarbonization returns on additional effort (activism, philanthropy, policy momentum), which could be quite different from absolute emissions reductions if implemented (similar to what Habryka is commenting on).

(3) In particular, this biases against relatively modest looking interventions that can be transformative (often have been in the past) such as innovation-support for nascent and early-stage technologies, where carbon pricing does ~nothing, but R&D expenditure, creating market demand, public co-financing of demonstration projects etc. make a large difference.

(4) Somewhat less importantly, the authors have a well-known focus on advancing carbon pricing, so this is something to keep in mind.

It turned out to be a very easily solvable problem (heavily concentrated industry, very few production plants, technological substitution being very easy).

I think the Montreal Protocol is often misunderstood to be a great success story / positively indicative reference class for much harder problems like climate, AI, etc., biosecurity, when it really is an example of an exceptionally easy problem to solve.

Apologies for my delay here.

There is indeed no contradiction -- solar got cheap through massive public support, first mostly R&D and later deployment subsidies / market creation policies in the hundreds of billions.

So the lesson from solar is definitely that public innovation support massively matters, it is more that different forms of support are most critical at different times (that is something the Kavlak paper emphasizes, how at early TRL R&D dominates and then later induced demand becames the major source of cost reduction) and that the R&D money cited is a small contributor to the cost reductions observed then.

If APs were like solar, I think we should expect things to take a lot longer and require a lot more support and maybe the current plateau would be like the 1980s for solar. (But I think there are good reasons to be more optimistic).

Apologies for the delay, Remmelt.

What I meant to say in my original comment is that when someone who has a bad reputation for being truth seeking / has a reputation for being a conspiracy theorist says something on an area outside their expertise we should not give a lot of credence to it. 

The burden of this not being a credible scenario should -- in my view -- not lie with commenters and, at the time I was commenting, most comments seemed incremental instead of pointing to a strong skepticism on Weinstein's take to start as if it were a plausible situation that a guy on a podcast without specific relevant expertise has uncovered a mechanism that 50 years of anti-nuclear activism have not produced (or, more nuanced, something that is so implausible that even typical anti-nuclear advocates wouldn't lead with it because they know it won’t stand).

To the specific question -- we do have a long section on nuclear in our 2018 report and I've obviously also spent a lot of time on it though I haven't written it up, but it took me several years to turn from German anti-nuclear environmentalist to the positions I hold now.

Here is an article on why a Chernobyl-style event is not possible with modern reactors. And the diesel generators would not be refueled for a year, given in the scenario there would be a failure of the entire power grid you would just use them to have enough electricity to shut things down safely.

I'll address the rest later (hopefully this weekend), but just to clarify that I did not mean to call you or your summary conspiratorial, Remmelt!

I only meant the substantive claim and coming from Bret Weinstein, but I'll address this with more time and the rest of your comment later.

Great stuff!

I am not sure how crucial this is, but I do think this piece gets some of the renewable energy analogies importantly wrong. In particular:

1. The primary drivers of making solar cheap where policies passed in the early 2000s, in particular massive deployment subsidies, not primarily R&D. So, the 30B R&D number for 2004-2012 are unlikely to be a major driver of the dramatic cost reductions in solar, at the same time countries like Germany spent 100s of B on subsidizing solar deployment (see e.g. Kavlak et al 2018, also Nemet's book)

2. By 2010, while solar was still marginal, the cost reduction dynamic was largely triggered through those policies and the virtuous cycle of investment, economies of scale, and China becoming interested in becoming a renewables manufacturing powerhouse. It is not driven by 2004-2012 R&D and it is not really driven by things that started after 2010, more a self-reinforcing dynamic playing out. 

Hopefully and plausibly, APs are an easier technology to get cheap than solar panels!

(3. Nitpick: Solar is 4% of electricity, not energy, electricity is only  ~1/3 of energy.)
 

Thanks, fascinating stuff!