Volts podcast: Johannes Ackva on effective climate altruism
In this episode, Johannes Ackva of Founders Pledge discusses his thinking on the most effective forms of climate philanthropy.
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David Roberts
Say you’re a private individual (or a company, or a foundation) who cares about climate change and has some money to spend on it. What’s the best way to spend that money? How can you ensure the largest possible impact?
Similar questions about maximizing philanthropic impact have led to an entire field of study and practice known as “effective altruism,” which seeks to apply logical and empirical rigor to do-gooderism. But it is only very recently that effective altruists have turned their attention to climate change.
One of the leading EA voices on climate is Johannes Ackva. He’s a researcher at Founders Pledge, an organization through which business owners and entrepreneurs donate a portion of their earnings to charity. For years, Ackva has been thinking through the puzzle of how best to channel climate philanthropy, given the structure of the problem and the politics around it.
If you’re interested in what groups Founders Pledge has chosen for its donations, you can find a list on the website, but I was more interested in the thinking that led Ackva to those recommendations. Given the enormous spatial and temporal scales involved in climate change, the many social and political complexities, the extensive and irreducible uncertainties, how can a well-meaning donor have any confidence in their choices?
I found our conversation quite enlightening — a new lens through which to view this familiar problem — it and I think you will too.
Johannes Ackva, welcome to Volts. Thanks for coming.
Johannes Ackva:
Yeah, thank you, David. Thanks for having me. It's an honor and pleasure to be here.
David Roberts:
Let's start a few steps back since I'm not entirely sure that the Volts audience will be familiar with the effective altruism movement, even though it gained quite a bit of press attention recently. So to start with, just tell us briefly, what is effective altruism and what is it trying to do?
Johannes Ackva:
So effective altruism is really a social and intellectual movement that tries to answer the question, “how can we do the most good possible?” And, not only answer that question in a theoretical way, but in a very practical way, actually trying to do as much good as possible.
There are two components to it. The first one that I would stress is, of course: altruism, which is about trying to be really serious about helping other people and other beings. So, effective altruists usually take a global take, including all humans, also all future humans, also all animals. So, having a really expansive form of altruism. And many effective altruists donate a large part of their income to the global poor or change their careers. So this is the altruism piece of it.
And then there's this effectiveness piece, which is like thinking really hard and long, and trying to use as much evidence as possible to think about “how can we have the most impact?”, the most positive impact. And one thing about impact here that I think is crucial, because I think it will come up throughout our conversation, is that a lot of what I'm saying on climate is motivated by this notion of counterfactual impact. Given what everyone else is doing, what is the thing that is additional, should be done next? So, not only trying to have impact, but trying to have impact that otherwise would not happen in the world. And I think that's really key to how we think about climate.
David
