Comments
Hey there & thanks for asking a great question. I don’t have any particularly fresh insights, but I wanted to join in & note that I went through the same thing a couple years ago, and concluded that I should donate a little bit each year offset my emissions.
I generally agree with the calculations leading to the $35 figure above; it does genuinely seem like the Clean Air Task Force (CATF) and Coalition for Rainforest Nations (CfRN) are extremely effective per dollar. In some sense, no matter who you offset with, you’re always offsetting in expectation—if you’re worried about risk, you should offset at the lower credible bound for effectiveness. But to address your points above, these organisations can only absorb so much funding. The German government couldn’t donate billions of euros a year in a cost-effective way—but you can donate a hundred. So I think it’s not unreasonable for governments to have higher estimates of the long-term per-capita burden of carbon emissions, at the same time as it being possible for your donation to be orders of magnitude cheaper. (In an EA context, compare saving a life via GiveWell against a government saving thousands of lives by building a hospital).
All of this generally assumes offsetting is possible. CO2 emissions are easier, you can plant vegetation which will directly absorb some amount of carbon over its lifecycle. In the CfRN’s case, they save vegetation which preserves its future absorption ability. Other greenhouse cases such as nitrogen have a trickier theory of change; it mostly seems like it’s best to prevent future emissions and wait for the existing gases to decay. And that’s where the CATF come in.
I think I have a bit more of a deontological streak than other EAs, so for me it feels important than I’m not doing any harm myself. I can’t easily make an argument that would suggest a pure utilitarian should donate that ~$35 to carbon offsetting over saving lives. But for me it was cheap enough (the price of a nice dinner, say) that any hand-wringing over it would be a waste of time.
My impression is that most CO2 offsets are bogus, basically the climate change version of “just 25 cents will help save a child’s life”. If you subject them to a GiveWell style analysis, I would guess most of these offset programs fall apart, or at least deliver way less than the promised counterfactual impact.
Also logically I think it would make sense to lump offsets in with other charitable giving and subject them to the same scrutiny, and when you do that it just doesn’t make sense to buy offsets. Even within the climate cause area, I really doubt that buying offsets would be cost effective, and I also doubt that climate is the most cost effective cause area right now.
Hi Ian, thanks for your thoughts. I think we are on the same page. My proposal is to NOT buy the normal offsets but just calculate the amount of money you would have to spend for the cost inefficient offsets (or using even the 237€ per ton above) and use this money for cost effective donations for GiveWell / effectiv-spenden recommended charities.