Join, or Die: A Comment

I had a comment raised (by Owen Cotton-Barratt) in response to my post on protests that was important enough I felt I should post it:
... 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).
My estimate of the impact of the global effect of the Climate March on humans should be significantly lower using the government's impact estimate, though it's difficult to say how much because the estimate is global, so it involves both American lives and African lives, and there's a good argument that a loss from an African economy is likely to be much more damaging to that country's economy than a comparable to the U.S. This is perhaps the crux of the issue with climate change. But I think this should revise the estimated human impact downward by about two orders of magnitudes.

 This led me to realize that I neglected the lion's share of the impact of climate change - the impact on wild animals. The impact in this case is again highly uncertain but seems most likely to increase the impact of climate change by several orders of magnitude (see here for an analysis).

 So I'm led to conclude that there is even more uncertainty than that which I pointed out in my original post, and I'm inclined to move participation in that particular march from "toss-up" to "ineffective," but I don't think this bleeds over much to other causes and to smaller- and medium-sized marches more in need of support. Moreover, I'm inclined to repeat the cliché that more research is needed in this area.

Comments

  1. Jon HawkJune 30, 2015 at 6:03 AM

    Hey Zach,

    We met at a couple of DxE events. Would you be interested in trying to get a pressure campaign going in CT against a particular animal exploitation business like the SHAC movement did? If so, which do you think would be most strategic/economically vulnerable? http://www.finalnail.com/connecticut.html Would love to hear from you: JonHoch3 (at) gmail (dot) com

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Zach Freitas-GroffJune 30, 2015 at 5:32 PM

      Hi Jon,

      For various reasons, I do not do pressure campaigns, nor does DxE. Our goal is more systemic.

      Best,
      Zach

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How Much Do Wild Animals Suffer? A Foundational Result on the Question is Wrong.

Image
NOTE: I would like to clarify that the post below and the published paper show that a result from 1995 does not hold, but they do NOT make the case for the 1995 model being correct. There are many reasons the models in both papers are likely to be deeply flawed: path dependency, dynamic ecosystems, philosophical problems with the definition of suffering and enjoyment, and so on. The primary point here is to treat the 1995 result and other work on wild animal suffering with caution. In 1995, Yew-Kwang Ng wrote a groundbreaking paper, "Towards welfare biology: Evolutionary economics of animal consciousness and suffering"  that explored the novel question of the wellbeing of wild animals as distinct from the conservation of species. As perceptive as it was innovative, the paper proposed a number of axioms about evolution and consciousness to study which animals are sentient, what their experiences are, and what might be done about it. Among the many results in the paper wa
Read more

We're Here, We're Queer, Get Used to It: A Lesson the Animal Rights Movement Could Learn

Image
This fall, I've been listening in on a course I always intended to take as an undergraduate, U.S. Gay and Lesbian History by George Chauncey, and I've had to pinch myself for the last week or two as I read my way through Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities  by John D'Emilio to remind myself that I'm not reading about the animal rights movement. The debate is so similar to, and the rhetoric so evocative of, the modern animal rights movement that it's impossible for someone in this movement to miss. So I've decided I should share some of the most interesting parallels in the book with a wider audience. The book covers the early (pre-Stonewall) movement for gay and lesbian rights, particularly centering around the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, two 1950s groups. The movement was known as the homophile movement in those decades. I don't think many of these examples are that biased by D'Emilio's own perspective, as the previous book
Read more

What I Learned from a Year Spent Studying How to Get Policymakers to Use Evidence

Image
Source: http://cognitive-edge.com/blog/on-evidence/ The past year I was a senior research analyst at Northwestern University's Global Poverty Research Lab on a study of evidence-based policy. Specifically, our goal was to work on a question often on researchers' minds: how can I get my ideas acted upon? To do this, I dug through a number of bodies of evidence on how science influences policy. One area I looked at is what is called "implementation science" in medicine, which looks at how to get doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators to adopt evidence-based practice. Another was a series of papers by social scientist Carol Weiss and her students on how policymakers in government agencies claim to use evidence. There is also a small literature on how to implement evidence-based policy in public schools, and a little work on policymaker numeracy. I've included a bibliography below that should be helpful for anyone interested in this topic. Most of my yea
Read more