Comments
More from the author
Curated and popular this week
63
AI Use Note: Main body text entirely human written. Claude (Opus 4.8) helped develop models of animal life histories in the appendix.
Cross-posted from Good Structures.
Executive Summary
* Animal advocates sometimes make claims like “there are X of this animal...
“How long have you been v*g*n?”
This is one of the most common icebreakers at animal protection events. It’s a baseline assumption, and it mostly holds true: if you’re out advocating for animals not to be tortured or abused, realistically these days you are v**n, or close. And it makes for good conversation. It seems fairly safe to assume when you meet strangers.
But this assumption is hurting the movement in a way which we don’t always notice: someone new comes into the sp...
Summary
Back in November 2023 I posted here to launch Spiro and raise our first $198k. Two and a half years later this is an update and a fundraiser for the next step.
The short version: we've now reached over-5,900 people with TB preventive medicine, including over 3,000 children under five years old. Our early results have held up well an...
Recent opportunities to take action
I increasingly realize just how emotionally inaccessible the concept of ethical offsetting is to most people. With regard to climate, the figure I remember from William MacAskill is that he estimates one dollar donated to Clean Air Taskforce to save 1 ton of CO2. If you take this seriously, then you basically don't need to bother with any efforts to have less waste in your personal life. (With the possible exception being your image, but only if you're a public figure.)
I think most climate people are very suspicious of charities like this, rather than or in addition to not believing in ethical offsetting. See this Wendover Productions video on problematic, non-counterfactual, and outright fraudulent climate offsets. I myself am not confident that CATF offsets are good and would need to do a bunch of investigation, and most people are not willing to do this starting from, say, an 80% prior that CATF offsets are bad.
This article just made HN. It's a report saying that 39 of 50 top offsetting programs are likely junk, 8 "look problematic", and 3 lack sufficient information, with none being found good.
re: CATF, you can look at FP's cost-effectiveness analysis of CATF's work (past, future), along with their non-cost effectiveness-based reasoning (see Why do we trust this organisation?) and their general methodology for evaluating relative impact in high-uncertainty contexts like climate (where they argue that "bottom-up cost-effectiveness analyses as well as bottom-up plausibility checks... are fundamentally insufficient for claims of high impact"), and judge for yourself. I personally think that the notion of "CATF offsets" doesn't make much sense once I drilled down to that level; if I donate to them it won't be for ethical offsetting reasons.
re: the vast majority of offsetting-oriented climate charities, I'm skeptical myself.