Thanks for your feedback.
Framing climate change as the default problem, and working on other cause areas as defecting from the co-ordination needed to solve it, impedes the essential work of cause-impartial prioritisation that is fundamental to doing good in a world like ours.
I think it’s worth emphasizing that the title of this post is “Climate Change Is Neglected By EA”, rather than “Climate Change Is Ignored By EA”, or “Climate Change Is the Single Most Important Cause Above All Others”. I am strongly in favor of cause-impartial prioritisation.
In “Updated Climate Change Problem Profile” I argued that Climate Change should receive an overall score of 24 rather than 20. That’s a fairly modest increase.
This post itself argues that EA is losing potential members by not focusing on climate change. But this claim is in direct tension with claims that climate change is neglected. If there are droves of potential EAs who only want to talk about climate change, then there are droves of new people eager to contribute to the climate change movement. The same can hardly be said for AI safety, wild animal welfare, or (until this year, perhaps) pandemic prevention.
I don’t agree with this “direct tension”. I’m arguing that (A) Climate Change really is more important than EA often makes it out to be, and that (B) EA would benefit from engaging with people about climate change from an EA perspective. Perhaps as part of this engagement you can encourage them to also consider other causes. However, starting out from an EA position which downplays climate change is both factually wrong and alienating to potential EA community members.
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.