A piece such as this should engage with the direct cost/benefit calculations that have been done by economists and EAs (e.g. Giving What We Can), which make it seem hard to argue that climate change is competitive with global health as a cause area.
I’ll definitely take a look at the cost effectiveness calculations and see if I can work references to these into my draft. In particular, I’m interested to find out what assumptions they are based on.
The other blog post you shared looks to me to have a key flaw—it models emissions as having a sharp spike where they go from growing quickly to declining quickly. This seems very unlikely to me—and the smoother curve as growth slows and turns into decline implies a greater area under the curve and hence a much greater final impact of delay.
A piece such as this should engage with the direct cost/benefit calculations that have been done by economists and EAs (e.g. Giving What We Can), which make it seem hard to argue that climate change is competitive with global health as a cause area.
How much it would take to stay under a mostly arbitrary probability of a mostly arbitrary level of temperature change is a less relevant statistic than how much future temperatures would change in response to reduced emissions.
Okay, I’ve just posted an analysis of the four relevant impact/cost-effectiveness estimates that I’m aware of. You can see my conclusions here—https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ynRG6JBvARS2cHu63/review-of-climate-cost-effectiveness-analyses
I’ll definitely take a look at the cost effectiveness calculations and see if I can work references to these into my draft. In particular, I’m interested to find out what assumptions they are based on.
The other blog post you shared looks to me to have a key flaw—it models emissions as having a sharp spike where they go from growing quickly to declining quickly. This seems very unlikely to me—and the smoother curve as growth slows and turns into decline implies a greater area under the curve and hence a much greater final impact of delay.