Good Morning
What we’re reading this week:
Drafting Talent to Decarbonize the Global Economy (MCJ)
Humpback Whale Bubble Net Hunting (W)
Investors conclude that Tesla is a carmaker, not a tech firm (E)
The Greendicator
Top Deals of the Week
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Svante, a 15-year-old Canadian startup that develops filters to capture industrial carbon emissions for storage or reuse, raised a $318 million Series E round led by previous investor Chevron (R)
Nexus Circular, a recycling process startup for plastics, raised a $150M round led by Cox Enterprises (PRN)
Sun King, a 15-year-old London startup that provides off-grid solar energy products for customers in Africa and Asia, raised a $70 million Series D extension round led by LeapFrog Investments. TechCrunch has more here.
Aerones, a startup building robots to scrub and inspect wind turbines, raised $38.9M in funding from dozens of undisclosed investors (TC)
Element Energy, a three-year-old Menlo Park, Ca. startup that has developed a platform to manage large-scale battery systems, raised a $28 million Series B round. The round was led by Cohort Ventures (EE)
Liberation Labs, a one-year-old New York startup that aims to produce alternative proteins at scale, raised a $20 million seed round co-led by Agronomics and Siddhi Capital (LL)
Energy Dome, a startup building a CO2 battery, received an $18.55M investment from the European Innovation Council (BW)
Eion, a startup based in Princeton, N.J., that helps farms capture carbon with green rock dust, raised a $12 million Series A round co-led by AgFunder and Ridgeline (TC)
Concretene, a British startup that combines graphene with concrete to form what it claims to be a “stronger, more sustainable, and more cost-effective alternative” to concrete, raised a $9.57 million seed round from LocalGlobe and Nationwide Engineering Research and Development (T)
Everimpact, a seven-year-old Paris startup that helps companies track their carbon emissions in real-time, raised a $1.8 million seed round. Motion Ventures was the deal lead (TFN)
Green Theory
[Give to ]Earn to Give
Is philanthropy just an excuse for earlier exploitation? Robber baron and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth justified his history of ruthless business practices by explaining how he would dole out his wealth to others in charity. This thinking provided a release valve for the pressure one’s conscience might exert on stopping their own relentless pursuit of individual profits. If you thought you had crossed the threshold from grit to greed on your ascent through the class hierarchy, now you could just spare some change for the less fortunate, instead of questioning your livelihood.
Questioning one’s livelihood isn’t a privilege afforded to all. But even for the erudite and powerful, Upton Sinclair’s timeless adage holds: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” If opportunity is the reward of education, why do people of high status and influence keep showing up for work at socially destructive corporations every day? For one, they may say someone else is likely to take their place if they walk away from their societally harmful job, so it wouldn’t do any good to leave. Others cling centrally to the Gospel of Wealth, and claim excess income they can maybe donate far outweighs any social harms they definitely inflict through their work. Finally, some say that their skills aren’t suited to devoting their working life to socially positive tasks. Each of these arguments props up a false dichotomy separating careers that do good (for the world) from careers that do well (for oneself), and then condemns the careers that “do good” for being less good in the long run.
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What is Earn to Give?
To properly unpack the flaws in these defenses, and how they apply to Earning to Give, today, let’s look into the movement’s recent roots: from academics’ brain drain, to Sam Bankman-Fried. In the 1970s, philosopher Peter Singer began to implore the affluent to donate significant income to charity, and the rumblings of Effective Altruism—concept of maximizing the good one does with each dollar—began to coalesce. Sounds good on the surface. Another philosopher Peter (Unger) argued in the ‘90s that it was “praiseworthy and perhaps even morally required” for intelligent academics to pursue higher salaries in business, and donate the net-new earnings to charity. This idea may seem a little more extreme, but it was just the groundwork for what was to come.
Since these Peters started with the presumption that donating to charity is the optimal path to enacting one’s own vision of Effective Altruism in the world, and that the efficiency of the donation could be “optimized,” the next question was how to get the most money to donate. Alongside Singer, his new Oxford buddy, William MacAskill, helped answer this question in Earn to Give: a methodology that suggests ditching less lucrative fields in the hope of larger paychecks, and therefore bigger donation sums. This most limited view presents a simple, but dangerously shallow approach to organizing one’s life.
For uninspiring, highly paid employees looking for a guilt fix, and those not reading MacAskill’s growing caveats, the theory of Earn to Give simply shifts focus away from debating the moral acquisition wealth, and toward the rough metricization of charity. The movement was building steam, attracting many who had figured out how to Earn to [To Be Decided]. The movement helped make “Give” fill some of that void. Appealing to followers’ same economic, utilitarian thinking that could have buoyed their success in white collar work, the Effective Altruism movement centralized philanthropic discussion, especially for a wealthy, analytical audience. Then MacAskill acolyte Sam Bankman-Fried took Earn to Give for a spin.
Defraud to Give: Young Crypto Ex-Billionaire’s Effective Appearance of Altruism
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Brandishing a virtuous shield of Effective Altruism and Earn to Give, Bankman-Fried masked his fraudulent rise to celebrity and fortune. As the wealthiest twenty-something in the world, he amassed over $26 billion in personal wealth through his cryptocurrency exchange and trading firm. Former US President Bill Clinton praised Bankman-Fried on stage with Former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, in the spring of 2022, lending authoritative, yet vague voices to Bankman-Fried’s expansive mission to earn. On the giving side, he was the second-largest individual donor to the Biden 2020 campaign, after Michael Bloomberg, and frequently pedaled promises for public welfare and protecting society, on his way to becoming one of the privileged hundred wealthiest people alive, for a short while. He went from seeming the zany, well-intentioned wunderkind, brushing elbows with world leaders, to penniless con artist, all in a handful of days, come November 2022. MacAskill resigned from Bankman-Fried’s “FTX Future Fund” the same month.
Greed finally caught up, and exposed Bankman-Fried’s altruistic signals as undemocratic, at best. Discussing this scheme may elicit an attitude of: “Buyer beware. People shouldn’t mess around with cryptocurrency, anyway,” after the multi-billion-dollar collapse of his unsecured exchange, FTX. While it’s unwise to undertake too much risk, this consumer focus distracts from Bankman-Fried’s behavior: if it’s exclusively the responsibility of the victim to detect fraud, some businesses/scammers will take advantage of that market opportunity. Someone such as Bankman-Fried may argue, then, it’s better he takes advantage of those people, and donate their money to the Biden campaign, or wherever he personally sees fit. Bankman-Fried took a Silicon Valley playbook of covering up big flaws with big “visions,” engaging Earn to Give to pull off this sleight, even post-meltdown, more Effectively.
Income isn’t the only Outcome
Not giving up by saying scams are inevitable, we could imagine, and fight for, a world where we give power to regulators, where world leaders (former or otherwise) exhibit better discernment in evaluating the businesses they praise, or where the proceeds from taxing unbannable social ills can be administered democratically, instead of by scammers. Just like suggesting the existence of gullible people somehow justifies becoming a scammer, one could cling to the idea that leaving their socially negative job will be ineffectual, since a new worker may take your seat and salary as soon as you exit stage left. On the contrary, refusing to do socially harmful work for profit sends a message to those around you: maybe there’s room for doing good and doing well, at the same time.
Co-founder of Effective Altruism, Peter Singer admits there’s at least one other flaw in Earn to Give’s focus on maximizing income. In a 2019 interview, he conceded that, had he been an Effective Altruist pursuing Earn to Give when younger, he would not have pursued philosophy, and touched the world in the same way, spreading new moral theories of human and animal welfare.
If everyone tries to become a high frequency trader (as many Earn-to-give-ists are), who will revolutionize the food industry, overhaul our energy infrastructure, rethink transportation, or study the delicate web of life we’re demolishing each day? Who will be the next generation of philosophers and teachers?
Singer and MacAskill would be quick to point out that Effective Altruism’s 80,000 Hours page has expanded its view to suggest careers outside of financial maximization. Still, that change says nothing of the enduring strength of misguided Gospel of Wealth thinking. Our search for righteous, productive labors can’t be flattened into a single monetary metric for redistributive charity, and the source of earnings could ultimately matter as much as the destination. The surface message of Earn to Give helps still healthy stirrings that could wake people needlessly dedicated to exploitation, on a sleepwalk through Carnegie’s American dream.
Lining up to pay Socially Positive New Hires
Let’s say you’re convinced that the career you pick could play a big role in shaping your climate shadow, your impact on the world, and your experience of life. Still, while finding a more socially responsible job sounds great, you think your skills are better suited to something that, in itself, can’t possibly serve society at large. You believe you must work a socially damaging or ambiguous job, and “offset” your impact through donation, instead.
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Maybe you don’t even care for charity or Earn to Give—you just want an above-average income to support your loved ones, or your dream of opening a bird sanctuary. You don’t have to be an Effective Altruist to desire a high salary. Fortunately, although numerous, pressing, complex problems face humanity, those very qualities make the real opportunities to help solve them vast, and skills demanded diverse. Don’t believe it? Every week you’re seeing climate tech startups’ new funding in this very newsletter, and there’s a whole world of other socially positive businesses, nonprofits, government organizations, research labs, and more hiring … even outside tackling climate change directly.
Earn to Give me a Break
Effective Altruism appeals to the economically minded, would-be philosopher, with its allure of quantifying good itself, to build an imaginary optimization function. Earn to Give takes this thinking to a new level: hooking up a fire hose of cash to the Effective Altruism movement, with no way to control the socially damaging pursuit of funds.
Today, if you don’t want to take the “Earn” out of “Earn to Give”, you can try to Give to Earn to Give, through working at a socially positive organization. In itself, making thoughtful donations is anything but a sin against society. And yet, using charity to justify other damaging business practices sets up a shaky bargain that could pay off morally, while undoubtedly causing harm in the meantime.
How does one assess an organization’s social impact? What if all the good people leave the “bad” sectors? Why don’t these existential risk-focused, vegan/vegetarian philosophers demand their highly educated, skilled followers pursue climate action? That and more on next week’s Green Bite. For now, you’ve Earned to Give yourself a break!
The Closer
“...Holiday break is often the time I try and dig through my photo archives and try to make sense of my work. I often find that the older I get the more the photography becomes about who I was with & whom I shared that moment with than anything else…” - Chris Burkard