I am someone who is quite pro-EA in the sense of "charity donations can go a lot farther if you apply them thoughtfully, I love it when fewer children die from malaria", which in my mind is/should be the core Thing of EA, and I deeply deeply resent the AGI people sucking all the oxygen out of the room and torching piles and piles of goodwill the way they do. So please don't read the following as a defense of the AI doomers and longtermists, I find them very tedious and frustrating:

1. The reason EA types don't tend to touch on climate change is because of its core Thing which is trying to find and address problems that are "important, neglected, and tractable". Stopping/reversing climate change is both Important* and Tractable, but it's really not Neglected-- there are tons of really really smart people working on it, it's far from low hanging fruit, and that means the floor for meaningfully contributing to those efforts is pretty high, diminishing returns and all; Altruism in this area will be less Effective. This is definitely a bullet to bite but I think it basically makes sense.

2. I think EA was at one point trying to do stuff about nuclear threats? Maybe it still is, idk, my understanding was that it ended up really not being very tractable, like, how do you know you're reducing the overall threat of nuclear war and proliferation? What does that look like? The most tractable part of that that I can think of (getting existing nuclear weapons dismantled) is not very directly solvable with money, which is the primary tool EA uses (since the original point is making a donated dollar do as much good as possible)

3. Now you might ask, well, how does AI extinction risk rank in important/neglected/tractable, I mean for one how tractable could "AI alignment" possibly be? To which the AI people will say "shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh"

* (The AI people will say it's not that important because climate change isn't going to drive humans extinct, let alone wipe out all life on earth/the galaxy the way they say AI will, it's just going to make lots of people die and make life worse for everyone who survives.)

Anyway even if EA never does anything tangibly good ever again (unlikely imo, the We Want Less Kids To Die From Malaria faction is still going strong), I think they at least get credit for GiveDirectly, which lets you give direct cash transfers to people living in extreme poverty around the world with no strings attached, so they get to decide where it's best spent, rather than someone half a world away dictating that to them. I highly recommend anyone and everyone donate money to GiveDirectly if they have some spare cash lying around.

In conclusion, sorry if you already knew all this or it's an illegible wall of text, it turns out I was in an infodumping mood, what can ya do.