For most people, climate change is pretty much the only world-scale issue they’ve heard of. That makes it very important (in relative terms); climate change has a world-scale impact, and no other issues they’re familiar with do, so it’s very important.
LessWrong has a history of dealing with other world-scale issues, and EA (an overlapping neighboring community) likes to make a habit of pointing out all the cause areas and weighing them against each other. When climate change is weighed against AI risk, animal welfare, biosafety, developing-world poverty, and various meta-level options… well, AGW didn’t get any less important in absolute terms, but you can see why people’s enthusiasm and concern might lie elsewhere.
As a secondary issue, this is a community that prides itself on having high epistemic standards, so when the advocates of a cause area have conspicuously low epistemic standards, it winds up being a significant turn-off. When you have a skeptical eye, you start to automatically notice when people make overblown claims, and recommend interventions that obviously won’t help or will do more harm than good. Most of what I see about AGW on social media and on newspaper front pages falls into these categories, and while this fact isn’t going to show up on any cause-prioritization spreadsheets, on a gut level it’s a major turnoff.
For an example of what I’m talking about, look into the publicity surrounding hydrogen cars. They’re not a viable technology, and this is obvious to sufficiently smart people, but because they claim to be relevant to AGW, they get a lot of press anyways. The result is a con-artist magnet and a strong ick-feeling which radiates one conceptual level out to AGW-interventions in general.
For an example of what I’m talking about, look into the publicity surrounding hydrogen cars. They’re not a viable technology, and this is obvious to sufficiently smart people, but because they claim to be relevant to AGW
Elon made his bet on battery driven cars. It’s not clear to me that it’s the right call. Hydrogen can be stored for longer timeframes which means that in a world where most of our energy comes from solar cells you can create it from surplus energy in the summer and use it up in the winter while batteries can only charge with energy that’s available at the particular time you want to charge your car.
Whether or not hydrogen driven cars become viable, there are strong arguments (Nikola Motors aside) that hydrogen trucks are likely to become viable, moreso than battery trucks, because of the energy demands and long distances driven. Autonomous vehicles could change the situation again, in either direction, depending on recharge vs refuel time and electricity vs hydrogen costs, and the price of that time and fuel relative to the value of vehicle uptime, especially for shared and fleet vehicles.
For most people, climate change is pretty much the only world-scale issue they’ve heard of. That makes it very important (in relative terms)
Suppose climate change were like air pollution: greenhouse gas emissions in New York made it hotter in New York but not in Shanghai, and greenhouse gas emissions in Shanghai made it hotter in Shanghai but not in New York. I don’t see how that would make it less important.
Local control seems very relevant to me, given our lack of powerful global governing institutions and other coordination mechanisms. In the localized-climate-change world, Shanghai may decide they’re willing to tolerate more climate change than NY is, in which case NY can just pay more to prevent it and then reap the benefits themselves.
Our world doesn’t have that option, which has been one of the biggest stumbling blocks to real at-scale action on climate change for as long as I’ve been alive. Instead we have to deal with all the political history of every current and past-but-remembered political conflict anyone can possibly dig up to negotiate concessions from one another.
Furthermore, if you seek to contribute to a global cause via technical means then it often makes sense to specialize. If you know you can have a greater marginal impact in biosafety than AGW then you should allocate (almost) all of your altruistic attention to biosafety and (almost) none of it to AGW.
For most people, climate change is pretty much the only world-scale issue they’ve heard of. That makes it very important (in relative terms); climate change has a world-scale impact, and no other issues they’re familiar with do, so it’s very important.
LessWrong has a history of dealing with other world-scale issues, and EA (an overlapping neighboring community) likes to make a habit of pointing out all the cause areas and weighing them against each other. When climate change is weighed against AI risk, animal welfare, biosafety, developing-world poverty, and various meta-level options… well, AGW didn’t get any less important in absolute terms, but you can see why people’s enthusiasm and concern might lie elsewhere.
As a secondary issue, this is a community that prides itself on having high epistemic standards, so when the advocates of a cause area have conspicuously low epistemic standards, it winds up being a significant turn-off. When you have a skeptical eye, you start to automatically notice when people make overblown claims, and recommend interventions that obviously won’t help or will do more harm than good. Most of what I see about AGW on social media and on newspaper front pages falls into these categories, and while this fact isn’t going to show up on any cause-prioritization spreadsheets, on a gut level it’s a major turnoff.
For an example of what I’m talking about, look into the publicity surrounding hydrogen cars. They’re not a viable technology, and this is obvious to sufficiently smart people, but because they claim to be relevant to AGW, they get a lot of press anyways. The result is a con-artist magnet and a strong ick-feeling which radiates one conceptual level out to AGW-interventions in general.
For some thoughts on how climate change stacks up against other world-scale issues, see this.
Elon made his bet on battery driven cars. It’s not clear to me that it’s the right call. Hydrogen can be stored for longer timeframes which means that in a world where most of our energy comes from solar cells you can create it from surplus energy in the summer and use it up in the winter while batteries can only charge with energy that’s available at the particular time you want to charge your car.
Whether or not hydrogen driven cars become viable, there are strong arguments (Nikola Motors aside) that hydrogen trucks are likely to become viable, moreso than battery trucks, because of the energy demands and long distances driven. Autonomous vehicles could change the situation again, in either direction, depending on recharge vs refuel time and electricity vs hydrogen costs, and the price of that time and fuel relative to the value of vehicle uptime, especially for shared and fleet vehicles.
Suppose climate change were like air pollution: greenhouse gas emissions in New York made it hotter in New York but not in Shanghai, and greenhouse gas emissions in Shanghai made it hotter in Shanghai but not in New York. I don’t see how that would make it less important.
Local control seems very relevant to me, given our lack of powerful global governing institutions and other coordination mechanisms. In the localized-climate-change world, Shanghai may decide they’re willing to tolerate more climate change than NY is, in which case NY can just pay more to prevent it and then reap the benefits themselves.
Our world doesn’t have that option, which has been one of the biggest stumbling blocks to real at-scale action on climate change for as long as I’ve been alive. Instead we have to deal with all the political history of every current and past-but-remembered political conflict anyone can possibly dig up to negotiate concessions from one another.
Furthermore, if you seek to contribute to a global cause via technical means then it often makes sense to specialize. If you know you can have a greater marginal impact in biosafety than AGW then you should allocate (almost) all of your altruistic attention to biosafety and (almost) none of it to AGW.