Andrew Revkin

A strict cost-benefit analysis will always tell you a dollar invested in resilience before a community gets hit by whatever is worth 10.

You'll always have to spend 10 after.

And so it's fine to do the cost-benefit stuff, but it's just the baseline analysis.

Then you have to look at the social science, or history, which shows you how few times we do it.

It's like we just don't do it.

Therefore, you can bang that drum.

Your work is valuable, but it's really constrained.

Because show me in the world...

where that does happen, and then how you turn that success, which is basically something not happening, into the story.

There's some really cool elements that you guys just brought up.

You mentioned that word moral before.

I latched onto it because it relates to these timescales that really are immeasurable.

If you know it's going to take decades to confirm the benefit of some investment now, that implies you're doing the investment with some moral imperative, not because you can do a spreadsheet and come up with a number.

And that process, letting go of the need for kind of a mechanistic cost-benefit approach, thinking about kids' education in poor countries, or several things we talk about, seems to be really important, and it's very hard for all of us to do.

Philanthropists suck at it.

I worked at National Geographic Society for a year building some new programs when they got a big infusion of money.

They have a whole department that's called M&E.

It's Measurement and Evaluation.

which is if you don't prove it, it goes away.

I mentioned Spotify earlier, Spotify killing a climate podcast, because that podcast didn't measure out for their impact, what they wanna do.