“[Climate change interventions are] just so robustly good, especially when it comes to what Founders Pledge typically champions funding the most: clean tech. Renewables, super hot rock geothermal, and other sorts of clean energy technologies are really good in a lot of worlds, over the very long term — and we have very good evidence to think that. A lot of the other stuff we’re doing is much more speculative. So I’ve started to view [working on climate change] as the GiveDirectly of longtermist interventions. It’s a fairly safe option.”
The climate change scenarios that EAs are most worried about are tail-risks of extreme warming, in comparison to GiveDirectly’s effects which seem slightly positive in most worlds. And while the best climate change interventions might be robustly not-bad, that’s not true for the entire space. Given the relatively modest damage in the median forecasts (e.g. 10% counterfactual GDP, greatly outweighed by economic growth) many proposals, like banning all air travel, or anti-natalism, would do far more harm than good. Will suggests that climate change policies are robustly good for the very long term growth rate (not just level), but I don’t understand why—virtually all very long-term growth will not take place on this planet.
Here’s Will MacAskill at EAG 2020:
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“[Climate change interventions are] just so robustly good, especially when it comes to what Founders Pledge typically champions funding the most: clean tech. Renewables, super hot rock geothermal, and other sorts of clean energy technologies are really good in a lot of worlds, over the very long term — and we have very good evidence to think that. A lot of the other stuff we’re doing is much more speculative. So I’ve started to view [working on climate change] as the GiveDirectly of longtermist interventions. It’s a fairly safe option.”
But then this might be a bit outdated now (see Good news on climate change ).
The climate change scenarios that EAs are most worried about are tail-risks of extreme warming, in comparison to GiveDirectly’s effects which seem slightly positive in most worlds. And while the best climate change interventions might be robustly not-bad, that’s not true for the entire space. Given the relatively modest damage in the median forecasts (e.g. 10% counterfactual GDP, greatly outweighed by economic growth) many proposals, like banning all air travel, or anti-natalism, would do far more harm than good. Will suggests that climate change policies are robustly good for the very long term growth rate (not just level), but I don’t understand why—virtually all very long-term growth will not take place on this planet.