EA - The Founders Pledge Climate Fund at 2 years by jackva

Link to original articleWelcome 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: The Founders Pledge Climate Fund at 2 years, published by jackva on December 2, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.By Johannes Ackva, Violet Buxton-Walsh, and Luisa SandkühlerThese posts were originally written for the Founders Pledge Blog so the style is a bit different (e.g. less technical, less hedging language) than for typical EA Forum posts. We add some light edits in [brackets] specifically for the Forum version and include a Forum-specific summary. The original version of this post can be found here.Contextualization and summaryIn the two years since its inception the Founders Pledge Climate Change Fund has distributed over $10M USD to high-impact climate interventions. In this post we reiterate the reasons for having the Climate Fund, why we believe it is higher impact than giving to recommended charities (also see Giving What We Can’s recent post), its initial impact, and our current view of key uncertainties to investigate for future grantmaking. Two companion posts present initial ideas on those uncertainties, namely making sense of the reshaped US climate response (Forum version here), as well as the Ukraine invasion (Forum version here) and its implications for climate and energy.IntroductionThis fall we're celebrating the two year anniversary of the Founders Pledge Climate Change Fund. To date, the fund has allocated more than $10M USD to high-impact climate interventions. Our team is committed to finding the best available giving opportunities in the climate space and filling the most urgent funding needs. This is why, once we’ve made all of our planned grants for 2022, there will be no money remaining in the Fund. Moving forward, we hope to raise much more capital and, as in the past, spend it rapidly on the most effective climate solutions.This post will give a high-level overview of how this money has been hard at work (i) accelerating innovation in neglected technologies, (ii) avoiding carbon lock-in in emerging economies, (iii) promoting policy leadership and paradigm shaping, and (iv) catalytically growing organizations during the past two years.We start by laying out our basic “meta” theory of change and why we created the Climate Fund in the first place, before discussing some of the recent successes as well as future plans.Part I: The WhyHow to have an impact on climateIn a well-funded space such as climate, with philanthropic giving on the order of USD 10 billion per year and societal spending around 100x that at about USD 1 trillion per year, it is not easy to have a meaningful impact as an individual donor.Indeed, a natural question for any individual might be – “how can my contribution matter?” – when several of the world’s richest people, such as Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, are major climate philanthropists.The visual below illustrates this challenge, comparing the Climate Fund at business as usual in 2023 to climate philanthropy at large (about 1000x larger) and societal response (100x larger still):Given the size of existing funding as well as predictable biases in climate philanthropy and our societal climate response, we believe it is overwhelmingly likely that impact-maximizing action for individual donors coming into climate lies in correcting the existing biases of the larger pool of overall climate philanthropy, to fill blindspots and leverage existing attention on climate more effectively. You can read, listen, or watch more about this in the linked materials.Why a fund?Of course, until now we have not yet answered the question “why should this happen through a Fund?”.There are several reasons to expect higher impact from a fund than from individual giving:The fund model allows us to make larger, coordinated grants that enable significant change for grantees, such as hiring new staff and starting new programs;...