I'm interviewing Santosh Harish (Open Phil's 'South Asian Air Quality' Program Officer). What should I ask him?

[disclaimer that I'm not Shruti so can only offer my interpretation of the argument she makes]

I think this paragraph from her piece does a good job of distilling the challenge of air pollution -

"It takes decades, maybe centuries to develop high state capacity that can tackle commons problems, mitigate pollution and create a world-class clean public transportation system. And this requires increases in economic growth and government revenue as well as well aligned political incentives. The problem is there is no simple solution that can be easily implemented. Unlike malaria, the impact of air pollution cannot be avoided by handing out air purifiers. They they don’t even make a dent in lowering the hazardous AQI in Delhi. The problem can only be solved though better governance mechanisms and innovation. Innovation can take the form of better construction technology that doesn’t contribute as much to particulate matter pollution. Or by developing cleaner fuel for vehicles. Or through better carbon capture and particulate matter capture technology. But none of this is legible or predictable."

I think the last sentence is the crux, solutions to air pollution are neither legible or predictable. I'd claim that legibility and predictability are pretty central to EA based giving, at least GiveWell flavour EA, because they bear on how measures of tractability and impact are calculated.

On predictability, I'd be interested to know why you'd associate EA with high-risk hits based giving. From reading GiveWell cost-effectiveness reports (on say Iron Fortification for instance), I recall there being discounts based on how uncertain members evaluating the grant thought the evidence was. I thought this was fairly standard practice across such grants.

On legibility, I think Shruti is making the point that it would be really difficult to know the precise interventions needed to make sure Delhi's air pollution problem never got as bad as it did and it still isn't totally clear what the best ones are. What we do seem to know is that improving state capacity (strongly linked to economic growth), and driving technological innovation (funding carbon capture startups for instance) are likely the best approaches to tackling air pollution in India. And neither of those two options seem particularly EA-aligned.