A curious tendency in the world of philanthropy, philosophy, and economics is that human welfare, animal welfare, and environmental concerns all operate in their own silos and rarely compare results with each other. What I’ve been trying to do in this book is to put it all together, because what we need is advice on what to do when we’ve taken everything into account that we can.
Unfortunately, environmental damage covers a lot of stuff, including river pollution, extinction of species, destruction of the rainforest, and climate change. Lacking data on environmentalism as a whole, I’m going to focus on climate change, because it looms large in our minds, it’s really important, and people have done studies on it. But keep in mind throughout this discussion that thinking of environmental damage only in terms of climate change is always an underestimation, as there are lots of other kinds of relevant damage.
When you want to compare things, you need to have some unit of measure that is common. The World Health Organization estimated that an additional 140,000 deaths were caused by climate change in the year 2004. This is due mostly to changes to the threat of climate-sensitive diseases, such as dengue and malaria, but also through crop failure.1 In this book I’ve been using years of human life lost (DALYs). We’ve seen that you can roughly translate animal suffering into years of human life lost. Can we do that for climate change?
Estimating of how many people will die due to climate change is extraordinarily complex, and the papers that even attempt to do so only started coming out in 2018.5 These estimates look at how many people will die over the next one hundred years for every ton of greenhouse gas put into the atmosphere. Specifically, they estimate in terms of life-years lost per ton. According to these estimates, taking actions that result in putting a ton of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere results in somewhere between -0.00019 and 0.0013 human life-years lost. Put in terms of minutes, that’s between 97.8 minutes gained and 668 minutes of life lost. You might be surprised to see that this range includes adding life to the world. This is because climate change causes a variety of effects, and some of them are good, like fewer people dying of cold-related deaths, and better farming in currently colder climates. But it is far more likely to cause loss of human life.6
Even though we can calculate the number of human life-years lost due to our consumption’s release of greenhouse gases, it doesn’t feel nearly as visceral as poisoning somebody’s food, or strangling them to death. But deaths are just as real, and their moral implications are just as bad. If you’re unconvinced, here’s a compelling thought experiment by philosophers Jonathan Glover and M. J. Scott-Taggart: Suppose there’s a land where there are a bunch of people who are near starvation. Each one of them has a bowl of beans. A bunch of robbers come down and each robber steals one bowl of beans, each causing one particular person to die. Then the thieves have a discussion about the ethics of what they’re doing. Some of them, it turns out, are bothered by the fact that the food that they’re taking from others is resulting in death. So one of the robbers suggests that rather than each robber going down and taking one bowl of beans from one person, and thereby killing that person, each robber steals one bean from each bowl. At the end of the raid, all the bowls will be equally empty, and the same number of people die, but no one will be responsible for anyone’s death in particular, because they will have only taken one bean from each bowl, which is, really, an amount so small that you wouldn’t even notice it. Each robber sleeps soundly, knowing that they were not responsible for anybody’s death.7
The robber’s reasoning is almost comical in its ridiculousness, but there is a direct analog to many of the harms that we can cause in the world today, including climate change. The fact that one is causing a tiny little bit of harm to lots of people, rather than a lot of harm to one person does not make the action any better, as the beans story makes clear. By now you know why it feels different, though. Human morality evolved in a world where hurting everybody a little bit, particularly people all over the world, was impossible. We have to use our principles and reasoning to see that it’s bad, and not rely on our instincts.8 This is why people don’t feel bad about an employee of Disney stealing a stapler from work or pirating The Mandalorian. They’re only taking one bean from each Disney shareholder’s bowl. It just doesn’t feel wrong.
Recall that earlier I used Monte Carlo simulations to estimate how much animals can suffer and how much it matters. I concluded that it was far worse to eat chicken than beef, primarily because chickens are treated so much worse, and because there’s so little meat on them. But it turns out that raising cattle is much worse for the environment than raising chickens. So eating beef is better for animal welfare, and eating chicken is better for climate change. So which is the better meat to eat?
Now that we have estimates for the damage done to human lives for every ton of greenhouse gases emitted, and we know how many tons of greenhouse gases are emitted to raise different kinds of animals, we can put it all in a common currency and see which is better and which is worse. We can put chicken and cow suffering in terms of its equivalent in human suffering. After 10,000 simulations, using ranges of numbers provided by experts, it turns out that chicken is still much worse to eat.
Our simulations suggest that eating a serving size of beef does a very small amount of good, because the lives of domestic cattle aren’t so bad, to the tune of adding the equivalent of 0 to 0.3 days of human life over the next one hundred years.
Eating chicken, on the other hand, shortens the equivalent of human life by between -0.053 and 0.68 days of life. Put bluntly, eating one factory-farmed chicken patty (which is about one serving) does the damage to the world in the equivalent of shortening someone’s life by about half a day.9
So far I’ve only talked about caring for the environment in terms of how environmental destruction will affect the lives of sentient beings. Indeed, I think that effects on sentient beings are, ultimately, the only things that do matter. However, it’s hard to predict the far-future effects of environmental destruction, even if we limit ourselves to effects on sentient creatures.
Should we care about wilderness? Let’s suppose we could tear down an ecosystem and replace it with another one that has less species diversity but has the same amount of good feelings. No problem? We shouldn’t be too sure. Older ecosystems cannot simply be replaced, any more than the Notre-Dame cathedral can simply be rebuilt. There are potential benefits that might be gained from study or some other kind of exploitation of these resources in the future that we might not be able to imagine now, from medicines harvested from particular plants, to biological understandings from particular species that might be hard to get by studying other species. Biological diversity is a huge, untapped reservoir of future scientific discoveries that are likely to positively affect sentient beings in the future, even if we have no clear idea of what those benefits will be. As such, we should be wary of destroying old ecosystems based on simple calculations of life-years lost, for example.
For similar reasons we should care about extinction. Killing a male and female rabbit is better than killing the last male and female of a similarly sentient species. Even though they might suffer the same amount, extinction truly is forever.10 Rendering a species extinct means we cannot study it, and future sentient beings won’t be able to enjoy the benefits of what we might have learned from such study. We should preserve species and ecosystems not only because of the suffering of the now-and-future creatures in it, but for the same reasons the loss of the library of Alexandria was such a tragedy—lost knowledge that could have made the world a better place.
Local and Organic Food Antimatters
Some people think that eating organic food is better for the environment because the creation of it uses fewer pesticides, preserves soil better, and keeps water cleaner. Talking about “organic food” in general sweeps under the rug an enormous variety of foods and how they are grown. But we can talk about organic versus conventional food in general, even if there are exceptions to our conclusions.
Unfortunately the net effect of organic food seems to be mostly negative. It’s not any more nutritious, and doesn’t even taste any different, in most cases.11 The pesticides on conventional food are in such small amounts that most scientists agree they are far below what is considered a risk to health.12
Precisely because of the lack of pesticides used in organic farming, a lot more food goes to waste. This means that more land has to be used to raise the same amount of food.13 In fact, we would not be able to feed the world’s growing population without conventional (nonorganic) agriculture.14 Because more land and water is required, that means more habitat destruction. This means turning more wild land (which tends to be a carbon sink) into farm land (which emits carbon into the atmosphere). Organic food is, on average, worse for climate change than conventional food.15 As policy analyst Mark Budolfson puts it, buying organic is voting with your purchasing choices—it’s just voting for habitat destruction and starvation.
Local food, too, is another well-intentioned idea that is generally worse for the environment. The reason is that wherever you live, there are going to be lots of foods that would be more efficiently grown elsewhere. These foods get produced with less energy, and then shipped to you in bulk. Although they travel farther, there is so much food that the impact is lessened. In contrast, local food is often grown less efficiently, by small farmers, and then small quantities are driven in on a truck. Locally grown food has a higher carbon footprint.16
Eating organic and, in most cases, local, antimatters. As organic food is more expensive, you’d do much more good buying regular food and donating the price difference to an effective charity.
We’ve seen that when it comes to helping people, some people are just cheaper to help than others, and sometimes these people are far away. We get the same kind of thing with certain environmental causes.
One of the core values of the environmental movement is the preservation of species. That is, species going extinct is frowned upon. It’s no secret that tropical areas have much, much more diversity than colder ones. Ecuador, for example, has more species of trees in each hectare of tropical rainforest than all of Canada and the United States combined.17 Think about that—if you walked the length of a football field in a rain forest, you would pass within throwing distance of more species of tree than in all of Canada and the United States.
So from a species-protection point of view, owning and protecting a single hectare of Ecuadorean land would be better for the environment than protecting all of the U.S. and Canada. Of course, there are other environmental concerns than preventing species extinction. My point is that there are great inequities in terms of how much good certain actions take. As usual, some things matter much more than others.
The choices you make in your life affect the environment in many ways, mostly adversely. Much of the problem is due to the energy consumed by your purchases. If we just focus on greenhouse gases for a moment, leaving your television on all day causes some amount of CO2e to be released into the atmosphere. How much? It turns out it greatly depends on how your electricity is generated. The most efficient, environmentally friendly way to get energy is from nuclear power, and the worst ways are burning wood or coal.18
Some places get most of their energy from dams, which do environmental damage to ecosystems when they are created, but after that have negligible bad effects. What this means is that in terms of electricity, if you live in a place where your energy is relatively cleanly generated, you should probably focus less on turning off the lights and more on other, more effective changes.
If you want to help the environment, there are ways you can change your behavior to do less damage. Unfortunately, doing the things you need to do to stay alive in the modern world usually requires harming the environment. But by doing things like taking fewer flights, you can do less harm. For an entertaining book describing the climate change impact of everything from drinking a glass of tap water to destroying a power plant, I recommend the book How Bad Are Bananas? by Mike Berners-Lee.
But if you want to maximize your help for the environment, it involves giving money to charities. Right now one of the top-rated charities is the Clean Air Task Force (CATF). The charity evaluator SoGive estimates that this is a particularly effective charity for fighting climate change, and that somebody can avert the emission of one ton of greenhouse gases for between three cents and $5.50. The range is huge because this is an area of incredible uncertainty.
We also know how much a ton of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere will harm humanity in terms of human life lost over the next one hundred years: between 97.8 minutes gained and 668 minutes of life lost. Roughly, this suggests that for about $2.77 you can expect to save about 285 minutes of human life by helping the CATF fight climate change.
At the time of this writing, there are no environmental charities among the top rated charities of GiveWell.org, for example.19 Like many other attempts to mitigate future risk, particularly catastrophic risks, such as detecting planet-destroying meteors, a malignant artificial intelligence takeover, or catastrophic climate change, there’s too much uncertainty and too many unknown variables to confidently put numbers on how many lives you save by investing money now in an attempt to prevent these disasters.