Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Does climate change deserve more attention within EA?, published by Louis_Dixon on the Effective Altruism Forum.
Write a Review
I have been an 80,000 Hours Podcast listener and active in EA for about eighteen months, and I have shifted from a focus on climate change, to animal welfare, and now to x-risk and s-risk, which seem to be highly promising from an EA perspective. Along the way, I wonder if some parts of EA might have underplayed climate change, and if more engagement and content on the topic could be valuable.
While I was thinking about sustainability and ethics, I was frustrated by how limited the coverage of the topic was in the 80,000 Hours Podcast episodes, so I emailed the team. Rob Wiblin responded and suggested that I write up an EA forum post.
Thanks to Alexrjl, John Bachelor, and David Nash for their suggestions and edits.
Edited 29/10/2019 to remove a misquotation of 80,000 Hours, and a few other cases where I want to rectify some over-simplifications.
Summary
While it is true that EA and 80,000 Hours is effective in drawing attention to highly neglected areas, my view is it has unjustly neglected coverage of climate change. There are several reasons why I believe climate change deserves more attention within EA. Firstly, some key opinion-shapers in EA appear to have recently updated towards higher weightings on the severity of climate change. Secondly, though climate change is probably not an existential risk itself, it could be treated as an existential risk factor or multiplier. Thirdly, there are limitations to a crude application of the ITN framework and a short-termist approach to altruism. Fourthly, climate change mitigation and resilience may be more tractable than previously argued. Finally, by failing to show a sufficient appreciation of the severity of climate change, EA may risk losing credibility and alienating potential effective altruists.
Changing perceptions of climate change among key individuals in EA
1. Assessment of climate change in Doing Good Better, 2015
The view taken in this book, foundational to EA, mostly equates climate change to a year of lost growth, and assigns a 'small but significant risk' that temperature rises are above 4C.
Will Macaskill: Economists tended to assess climate change as not all that bad. Most estimate that climate change will cost only around 2% of global GDP. The thought that climate change would do the equivalent of putting us back one year economically isn’t all that scary- 2013 didn’t seem that much worse than 2014. So the social cost of one tonne of American’s greenhouse gas emissions is about $670 every year. Again, that’s not a significant cost, but it’s also not the end of the world.
However, this standard economic analysis fails to faithfully use expected value reasoning. The standard analysis looks only at the effects from the most likely scenario: a 2-4C rise in temperature. there is a small but significant risk of a temperature increase that’s much greater than 2-4C.
The IPCC gives more than 5% probability to temperature rises greater than 6C and even acknowledges a small risk of catastrophic climate change of 10C or more. To be clear, I’m not saying that this is at all likely, in fact it’s very unlikely. But it is possible, and if it were to happen, the consequences would be disastrous, potentially resulting in a civilisational collapse. It’s difficult to give a meaningful answer of how bad that would be, but if we think it’s potentially catastrophic, then we need to revise our evaluation of the importance of mitigating climate change. In that case, the true expected social cost of carbon could be much higher than $32 per metric ton, justifying much more extensive efforts to reduce emissions than the estimates the economists first suggested.
The main text, and the later table of cause ...
view more