Is the nonprofit lawyer really making a lower impact per hour worked compared to the earning-to-give corporate lawyer? This could be a good case study of system change efforts vs direct donation.
Let’s say the lawyer is donating $200,000/year less than they would have if they stayed at a for-profit firm (donating $200,000 requires an extremely high percentile conviction in the efficacy of effective donation and something like top 1-5% earnings for a lawyer, but I’ll use this to be conservative), but now is working on enforcing environmental legislation.
$4500 to save a life with AMF in Guinea according to Givewell: $200,000/$4500 = 45 lives saved per year from malaria. So in a twenty-year career at the nonprofit, say, the lawyer would have to accomplish good equivalent to saving 900 lives.
The easiest way to convert impact to lives is probably estimating the lives lost for a given amount of carbon emitted. Thankfully, this has been done. They found that 4434 metric tons of carbon saved is a life saved. So the lawyer needs to save 3,990,600 tons of carbon to hit equivalence.
Looking through the “recent wins” page of Earthjustice, the largest environmental justice employer, is a case that is estimated to have saved 970,000,000-1,800,000,000 tons of carbon by 2050. Earthjustice can’t take full credit for this—they were just part of a team suing, along with many city and state governments. Let’s say their expertise was responsible for 1% of the win. Taking the midpoint of the carbon estimate, 1,385,000,000 was saved, of which Earthjustice was responsible for 13,850,000.
This means that if every lawyer at Earthjustice (there are 200+, so we’ll estimate 299 to be super safe and account for other workers who are supporting them) had a win that big just once over their twenty-year career, they would each be outperforming $200,000/yr donated by a factor of 4.
If this singular recent win was the whole impact of Earthjustice for 2022, how would that stack up, divided among 299 lawyers/personnel?
Well, that’s 46,321 tons of carbon, per lawyer, per year. Over 20 years that’s 926,421 tons. So, rather poor. That’s about a fourth of the impact of the $200,000/year. Equivalently, Earthjustice needs to put out 4 wins of that magnitude a year to justify its existence through proactive action alone (though a decent percentage of their actual impact is in deterrence, I’d imagine). Here’s the recent victories page if you want to judge for yourself how large the impact of various wins are. (EDIT: I found at least one other 2022 win with comparable carbon impact, see comments below).
Overall, I’d say it’s quite plausible—even probable, after further consideration (see the comments below)--that the environmental lawyer would have equivalent or greater impact. To be fair, OP was written when the cost estimate of saving a life with GiveWell was much lower.
Of course, only a portion of Earthjustice’s work is measured in reducing carbon. You’d want to use the number of Earthjustice attorney FTEs that can be fairly classified as devoted to carbon reduction (which I don’t know), rather than total attorney headcount.
True, their role in defending the endangered species act, conserved land, and water/air quality regulations is also extremely valuable, just harder to quantify in terms of lives saved. If those types of victories account for, say, 3⁄4 of Earthjustice’s impact, then the numbers start to suggest that each of the lawyers make a much bigger impact (3x+ perhaps) than $200,000 in donations per year, as I was able to find another large strictly-carbon win for 2022 (electrifying mail trucks).
Adding in the value of deterrence and the diffuse cultural impact of the group, it could conceivably be an order of magnitude better.
Bonus evaluation of another 2022 win: 66,160 electric mail trucks replacing 8mpg gasoline trucks over the next few years, directly as a result of suing over a plan that would have purchased 106,000 entirely gasoline trucks over that time. They also got them to guarantee all electric from 2026 onwards.
If a mail truck does a 30-mile route, and idling and driving back account for 3⁄4 of total fuel usage, then 120miles/8mph = 15 gallons of gas would have been burned. Every gallon is 8.887kg of carbon. So over a year, assuming the vehicle is driven 320 days, that’s 42,658kg or 42.7 metric tons. Let’s say the electricity still pollutes 2⁄3 of the amount as gasoline, because a lot of it is fossil fuels. That’s 14.2 metric tons saved, per vehicle, per year. Let’s say the vehicles are in use for 15 years each. 66,160 vehicles * 15 years * 14.2 tons/vehicle/year = 14,092,080 metric tons saved. And that’s not even to mention the guarantee of only electric after 2026, or the fact that the electricity will probably start to come from cleaner sources.
So actually, this case is even bigger than the other I examined. It’s exceeded the impact by 2041, nine years earlier, plus it has even more impact, potentially twice the impact, after the guarantee is added in. So there were at least two major wins for Earthjustice in 2022, and if all the rest of its victories and deterrence added up to four major wins, then working as an Earthjustice lawyer was at least as good as donating $200,000 to GiveWell.
And this isn’t even to consider the fact that some of the bigshot corporate law cases might have moral negatives, e.g. a citizen or government body righteously sues a company, and you’re helping the company get away with it.
Is the nonprofit lawyer really making a lower impact per hour worked compared to the earning-to-give corporate lawyer? This could be a good case study of system change efforts vs direct donation.
Let’s say the lawyer is donating $200,000/year less than they would have if they stayed at a for-profit firm (donating $200,000 requires an extremely high percentile conviction in the efficacy of effective donation and something like top 1-5% earnings for a lawyer, but I’ll use this to be conservative), but now is working on enforcing environmental legislation.
$4500 to save a life with AMF in Guinea according to Givewell: $200,000/$4500 = 45 lives saved per year from malaria. So in a twenty-year career at the nonprofit, say, the lawyer would have to accomplish good equivalent to saving 900 lives.
The easiest way to convert impact to lives is probably estimating the lives lost for a given amount of carbon emitted. Thankfully, this has been done. They found that 4434 metric tons of carbon saved is a life saved. So the lawyer needs to save 3,990,600 tons of carbon to hit equivalence.
Looking through the “recent wins” page of Earthjustice, the largest environmental justice employer, is a case that is estimated to have saved 970,000,000-1,800,000,000 tons of carbon by 2050. Earthjustice can’t take full credit for this—they were just part of a team suing, along with many city and state governments. Let’s say their expertise was responsible for 1% of the win. Taking the midpoint of the carbon estimate, 1,385,000,000 was saved, of which Earthjustice was responsible for 13,850,000.
This means that if every lawyer at Earthjustice (there are 200+, so we’ll estimate 299 to be super safe and account for other workers who are supporting them) had a win that big just once over their twenty-year career, they would each be outperforming $200,000/yr donated by a factor of 4.
If this singular recent win was the whole impact of Earthjustice for 2022, how would that stack up, divided among 299 lawyers/personnel?
Well, that’s 46,321 tons of carbon, per lawyer, per year. Over 20 years that’s 926,421 tons. So, rather poor. That’s about a fourth of the impact of the $200,000/year. Equivalently, Earthjustice needs to put out 4 wins of that magnitude a year to justify its existence through proactive action alone (though a decent percentage of their actual impact is in deterrence, I’d imagine). Here’s the recent victories page if you want to judge for yourself how large the impact of various wins are. (EDIT: I found at least one other 2022 win with comparable carbon impact, see comments below).
Overall, I’d say it’s quite plausible—even probable, after further consideration (see the comments below)--that the environmental lawyer would have equivalent or greater impact. To be fair, OP was written when the cost estimate of saving a life with GiveWell was much lower.
Of course, only a portion of Earthjustice’s work is measured in reducing carbon. You’d want to use the number of Earthjustice attorney FTEs that can be fairly classified as devoted to carbon reduction (which I don’t know), rather than total attorney headcount.
True, their role in defending the endangered species act, conserved land, and water/air quality regulations is also extremely valuable, just harder to quantify in terms of lives saved. If those types of victories account for, say, 3⁄4 of Earthjustice’s impact, then the numbers start to suggest that each of the lawyers make a much bigger impact (3x+ perhaps) than $200,000 in donations per year, as I was able to find another large strictly-carbon win for 2022 (electrifying mail trucks).
Adding in the value of deterrence and the diffuse cultural impact of the group, it could conceivably be an order of magnitude better.
Bonus evaluation of another 2022 win: 66,160 electric mail trucks replacing 8mpg gasoline trucks over the next few years, directly as a result of suing over a plan that would have purchased 106,000 entirely gasoline trucks over that time. They also got them to guarantee all electric from 2026 onwards.
If a mail truck does a 30-mile route, and idling and driving back account for 3⁄4 of total fuel usage, then 120miles/8mph = 15 gallons of gas would have been burned. Every gallon is 8.887kg of carbon. So over a year, assuming the vehicle is driven 320 days, that’s 42,658kg or 42.7 metric tons. Let’s say the electricity still pollutes 2⁄3 of the amount as gasoline, because a lot of it is fossil fuels. That’s 14.2 metric tons saved, per vehicle, per year. Let’s say the vehicles are in use for 15 years each. 66,160 vehicles * 15 years * 14.2 tons/vehicle/year = 14,092,080 metric tons saved. And that’s not even to mention the guarantee of only electric after 2026, or the fact that the electricity will probably start to come from cleaner sources.
So actually, this case is even bigger than the other I examined. It’s exceeded the impact by 2041, nine years earlier, plus it has even more impact, potentially twice the impact, after the guarantee is added in. So there were at least two major wins for Earthjustice in 2022, and if all the rest of its victories and deterrence added up to four major wins, then working as an Earthjustice lawyer was at least as good as donating $200,000 to GiveWell.
And this isn’t even to consider the fact that some of the bigshot corporate law cases might have moral negatives, e.g. a citizen or government body righteously sues a company, and you’re helping the company get away with it.