It’s great to have this debate explicitly, so thanks for producing this!
That said, I think your estimates err significantly on the optimistic side. A couple of specific points:
If swinging the election improves the chance of climate action by 50%
This is quite extreme—your subsequent calculation shows that’s an absolute rather than relative 50%. This would be thinking that a single election could move the global likelihood of climate action (assuming full action with success, and zero otherwise) from 25% to 75%, according to who wins. It looks more than an order of magnitude too optimistic to me at this step.
… the EPA’s estimated net global benefits of climate regulations ($67 billion), this march would, on expectation, yield an expected $201 million in benefits—enough to save 60,000 lives.
Careful. An important fact is that money goes differently far in different contexts, and the figure that you are using for “enough to save 60,000 lives” represents an extremely good use of money. The benefits under discussion will not be distributed so as to all go on such cases. In fact many of them are health benefits which have been converted into a dollar value (I couldn’t find the conversion rate on a skim read, but I can guarantee that it will be a lot more expensive than $3,500 per life—probably between 1 and 3 orders of magnitude more, depending on the country they benchmark from).
Thanks for pointing this out. I agree it is good to have this debate explicitly.
Regarding point one, it doesn’t seem all that extreme to me, but maybe I’m wrong. Republican administrations have rolled back regulations on climate and Democratic administrations have expanded them, and it doesn’t seem like there’s all that much variation in this.
The second one is a good point, though it’s tough to figure out the right approach to do this quantification, since it is the global cost of carbon, so it’s not only American lives involved in the quantification (http://reep.oxfordjournals.org/content/7/1/23.full.pdf). In addition, at the risk of getting into another thorny debate, it leaves out the costs for wild animals, which I would guess would be at least an order of magnitude worse than those for humans. I’m going to make another post to address this. On balance, this seems to me to move participation in this march from ‘toss up’ to ineffective, but I don’t think that generalizes to causes that are potentially easier to impact or smaller marches.
Good spot. A single election result should produce <1% change of global climate change action, right? Changing 10% of USA senators to democrat could arguably cause like 1% change in that probability....
The CBA was for the US EPA actions announced by President Obama (although future Presidents will be able to undo them, so it’s questionable to count it as ‘done’ by a single President).
If it were intense long-term global climate action to keep below 2 degrees Celsius of warming, the estimated benefits would be measured in trillions, not billions.
It’s great to have this debate explicitly, so thanks for producing this!
That said, I think your estimates err significantly on the optimistic side. A couple of specific points:
This is quite extreme—your subsequent calculation shows that’s an absolute rather than relative 50%. This would be thinking that a single election could move the global likelihood of climate action (assuming full action with success, and zero otherwise) from 25% to 75%, according to who wins. It looks more than an order of magnitude too optimistic to me at this step.
Careful. An important fact is that money goes differently far in different contexts, and the figure that you are using for “enough to save 60,000 lives” represents an extremely good use of money. The benefits under discussion will not be distributed so as to all go on such cases. In fact many of them are health benefits which have been converted into a dollar value (I couldn’t find the conversion rate on a skim read, but I can guarantee that it will be a lot more expensive than $3,500 per life—probably between 1 and 3 orders of magnitude more, depending on the country they benchmark from).
Thanks for pointing this out. I agree it is good to have this debate explicitly.
Regarding point one, it doesn’t seem all that extreme to me, but maybe I’m wrong. Republican administrations have rolled back regulations on climate and Democratic administrations have expanded them, and it doesn’t seem like there’s all that much variation in this.
The second one is a good point, though it’s tough to figure out the right approach to do this quantification, since it is the global cost of carbon, so it’s not only American lives involved in the quantification (http://reep.oxfordjournals.org/content/7/1/23.full.pdf). In addition, at the risk of getting into another thorny debate, it leaves out the costs for wild animals, which I would guess would be at least an order of magnitude worse than those for humans. I’m going to make another post to address this. On balance, this seems to me to move participation in this march from ‘toss up’ to ineffective, but I don’t think that generalizes to causes that are potentially easier to impact or smaller marches.
Good spot. A single election result should produce <1% change of global climate change action, right? Changing 10% of USA senators to democrat could arguably cause like 1% change in that probability....
The CBA was for the US EPA actions announced by President Obama (although future Presidents will be able to undo them, so it’s questionable to count it as ‘done’ by a single President).
If it were intense long-term global climate action to keep below 2 degrees Celsius of warming, the estimated benefits would be measured in trillions, not billions.