CE Research Training Program graduate and research contractor at ARMoR under the Global Impact Placements program, working on cost-benefit analyses to help combat AMR. Currently exploring roles involving research distillation and quantitative analysis to improve decision-making e.g. applied prioritization research, previously supported by a FTX Future Fund regrant and later Open Philanthropy’s affected grantees program. Previously spent 6 years doing data analytics, business intelligence and knowledge + project management in various industries (airlines, e-commerce) and departments (commercial, marketing), after majoring in physics at UCLA. Also collaborating on a local charity evaluation initiative with the moonshot aim of reorienting Malaysia’s giving landscape towards effectiveness.
I first learned about effective altruism circa 2014 via A Modest Proposal, a polemic on using dead children as units of currency to force readers to grapple with the opportunity costs of subpar resource allocation under triage. I have never stopped thinking about it since, although my relationship to it has changed quite a bit; I related to Tyler’s personal story (which unsurprisingly also references A Modest Proposal as a life-changing polemic):
I thought my own story might be more relatable for friends with a history of devotion – unusual people who’ve found themselves dedicating their lives to a particular moral vision, whether it was (or is) Buddhism, Christianity, social justice, or climate activism. When these visions gobble up all other meaning in the life of their devotees, well, that sucks. I go through my own history of devotion to effective altruism. It’s the story of [wanting to help] turning into [needing to help] turning into [living to help] turning into [wanting to die] turning into [wanting to help again, because helping is part of a rich life].
The 1,000-ton rule is Richard Parncutt’s suggestion for reframing the political message of the severity of global warming in particularly vivid human rights terms; it says that someone in the next century or two is prematurely killed every time humanity burns 1,000 tons of carbon.
I came across this paper while (in the spirit of Nuno’s suggestion) trying to figure out the ‘moral cost of climate change’ so to speak, driven by my annoyance that e.g. climate charity BOTECs reported $ per ton of CO2-eq averted in contrast to (say) the $ per death averted bottomline of GHW charities, since I don’t intrinsically care to avert CO2-equivalent emissions the way I do about averting deaths. (To be clear, I understand why the BOTECs do so and would do the same for work; this is for my own moral clarity.)
Parncutt’s derivation is simple: burning a trillion tons of carbon will cause ~2 °C of anthropogenic global warming, which will in turn cause 1 − 10 million premature deaths a year “for a period of several centuries”, something like this:
Based on the 1,000-ton rule, Pearce & Parncutt suggest the ‘millilife’ as “an accessible unit of measure for carbon footprints that is easy to understand and may be used to set energy policy to help accelerate carbon emissions reductions”. A millilife is a measure of intrinsic value defined to be 1/1000th of a human life; the 1,000-ton rule says that burning a ton of fossil carbon destroys a millilife. This lets Pearce & Parncutt make statements like these, at an individual level (all emphasis mine):
and
and for “large-scale energy decisions”:
Pearce & Parncutt then use the 1,000-ton rule and millilife to make various suggestions. Here’s one:
One more energy policy suggestion (there’s many more in the paper):
I have no (defensible) opinion on these suggestions; curious to know what anyone thinks.