I am writing up two charity ideas I’ve wanted to investigate, but haven’t been able to, in the hopes someone will investigate them further. If you end up investigating either, I'd be most interested to see what conclusions you come to!
Vulture preservation as a global health intervention
Since the mid 1990's the vulture population in India has been rapidly declining. The reason is due to a few chemicals which are fed to livestock, which is highly poisonous to vultures.
...
Epistemic status: Wrote this pretty fast, probably ~70% confident some version of the thesis claim is true, would welcome being proven demonstrably wrong.
Context: I’m a grantmaker focused on alt-protein and am fairly well-connected/moderately in the loop of what animal welfare grantmakers are doing.
This post was significantly inspired by “...
I like the idea of carbon offsets for flights etc, but I think most carbon offset schemes are probably garbage. A year ago I made a personal pledge that whenever I was prompted to pay extra to carbon offset something, I would decline, but then immediately donate the same amount or more to effective environmental funds (in my case, Effective Altruism Australia Environment.) It's easy to remember and easy to do. Perhaps this simple pledge will be similarly sticky for other people :)
My personal (skeptical) benchmark for price per unit of non-garbage carbon offsets comes from Scott Alexander's mention of Climeworks:
Climeworks actually charges more now, at least for their individual subscription pricing: $1,500/ton, no volume discount across subscription tiers.
I like the idea of immediately donating the same amount or more to effective environmental funds, thanks for sharing.