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This is: [updated] Global development interventions are generally more effective than climate change interventions, published by HaukeHillebrandt on the effective altruism forum.
Previously titled “Climate change interventions are generally more effective than global development interventions”. Because of an error the conclusions have significantly changed. [old version]. I have extended the analysis and now provide a more detailed spreadsheet model below. In the comments below, Benjamin_Todd uses a different guesstimate model and found the climate change came out ~80x better than global health (even though the point estimate found that global health is better).
Word count: ~1800
Reading time: ~9 mins
Keywords: Climate change, climate policy, global development, global health, cause prioritization, prioritization research, comparing diverse benefits
Epistemic status: Uncertain and speculative. I don’t excessively hedge my claims throughout for clarity’s sake (#‘better wrong than vague’, #“say wrong things”, #"correct me if I'm wrong", #"All models are wrong, but some are useful").
Acknowledgments: Thanks to John Halstead, Danny Bressler, Sahil Shah, and members on the Effective Altruism forum, especially AGB, for helpful comments. Any errors are mine.
Comparative cost-effectiveness of climate change and global development
Summary
Does climate change deserve more attention within the effective altruism community?[1]
What is more effective: climate change interventions to avert emissions per tonne or single recipient global development interventions such as cash transfers?
Are targeted interventions to more fundamentally transform the lives of the poorest more effective than supplying broad global public goods such as a stable climate with comparatively small benefits to everyone on the planet?
To answer these questions, the following question is crucial:
“What value should we use for the social cost of carbon to adequately reflect the greater marginal utility of consumption for low-income people?”[2]
Here, I tried to answer this question. Surprisingly, I find that global development interventions are generally more effective than climate change interventions.
My spreadsheet model below shows that climate change interventions are only more effective than global development interventions, if and only if:
Money is worth only 100 times as much to the global poor than people in high-income countries (i.e. if utility to consumption is logarithmic) and not more
AND climate change interventions are very effective (less than $1 per tonne of carbon averted) AND/OR
under quite pessimistic assumptions about climate change (if the social cost of carbon is higher than $1000 per tonne of carbon).
Key claims
I base the above conclusion on the following three empirical claims:
1. New research on the income-adjusted country-level social cost of carbon allows us to compare global development interventions to climate change interventions.
The new research is the first to use climate model projections, empirical climate-driven economic damage estimations, and also socio-economic projections which take into account greater marginal utility of consumption for every country individually.[3]
In other words, this takes into account “your dollar does (>)100x or more good if you give to the poorest rather than people in high-income countries”). More on income weighting in Appendix 2.
Other more canonical Integrated Assessment Models (IAM) such as DICE have only have one value for the whole world, and, while the RICE IAM has 12 regions,[4] this still understates the heterogeneous geography of climate damage.
The new research first estimated the social cost of carbon for every country in the world. Then, the authors summed up all the country-level costs of carbon to arrive at the global cost of carbon: US$...
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