I’m only aware of (loosely) EA affiliated attempts to assess the cost effectiveness of climate change versus global health. I knew about the “2016 GWWC estimate” before I started work on this writeup, and I had seen the “2019 Hillebrandt Cost-Effectiveness” estimate posted on this forum very recently. I found “2018 Halstead Extinction Risk” and “2019 Bressler Mortality Estimate” by searching on this forum.
Let me know if you’re aware of any other relevant estimates.
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 notified info@80000hours.org about this public post. I thought it would be better to solicit public feedback rather than attempting to work privately with 80K Hours.
The ideal responses to mainline and extreme risks appear to be different.
I’m curious to know what you think the difference is. Both problems require greenhouse gas emissions to be halted.
Adjusting this by giving more expensive things higher neglectedness scores in effect takes the ‘cost’ out of the ‘cost-effectiveness analysis’.
The neglectedness guidelines focus on the level of existing funding. I argue that this is an insufficient view—that if you have two problems who require $100 or $200 of total funding to solve completely, if they both have $50 of funding today, they are not equally neglected. The denominator matters—the $200 problem is much further from being solved.
Using a completely different framework would be fine, but making this adjustment alone causes one to depart from any notion of good done per effort put in.
Perhaps I’m proposing a slightly different framework—but it’s definitely not one divorced from the notion of caring about the good done per effort put in. I just don’t believe that climate change is really at saturation point for the level of effort.
Qualified ’need’s
Fair point about use of language. I’ll try and address this in a future edit.
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.
I have included this estimate in an overall review of climate cost-effectiveness analyses.