By the way, if anyone has any thoughts on this that they'd like to share but doesn't want to post publicly about something so controversial, don't hesitate to contact me privately here or on Bluesky or X.
Depends who you are, I suppose. Greta Thunberg seems to have bent climate policy (particularly in Europe) enough to likely save a fair number of human lives (no, I am not Greta Thunberg). I live in the US, which has midterm elections next month, and any one Senate race — several of which are currently considered toss-ups — could have a dramatic impact on climate policy under the next presidency, since Senate terms are six years. Last year's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which was a disaster for the climate, passed the Senate by a single vote, so it could have been stopped had Democrats won just one more Senate seat in 2020, 2022, or 2024.
I could have been clearer that I was considering wealth disparities both among countries and within countries. I think the point still stands, though.
Yeah, I wasn't really thinking about this on an individual level, and I'm definitely not trying to encourage people to maximize their carbon emissions (especially since I still don't know whether that would actually be net positive or net negative). It does raise the question of whether climate activism does more harm than good, though.
Yeah, that last part is why I wanted to draw a distinction between suffering and extreme suffering. We all suffer some, we all know we will suffer more if we keep living, and almost everyone chooses on a perpetual basis to continue living anyway. That's the level of suffering experienced in the wild (or at least close to it). I could imagine myself going through any form of suffering regularly experienced in the wild without being too horrified. The kind of suffering experienced on factory farms, on the other hand, is incomprehensible to me. I would probably take a 100% chance of being blinked out of existence than a 1% chance of becoming a factory-farmed pig or chicken.
Your second point I think illustrates that y would likely differ quite a lot among different scenarios of climate breakdown (that stop short of ending civilization). A level of warming that ravages the poorest parts of the world but barely alters life for the global rich would probably bear a small y. A level of warming that radically reshapes global agriculture would likely be a different story. In that sense, I suppose the worst-case scenario could actually be one with a substantial amount of climate action that still isn't enough to bring the problem under control.
By the way, if anyone has any thoughts on this that they'd like to share but doesn't want to post publicly about something so controversial, don't hesitate to contact me privately here or on Bluesky or X.
Depends who you are, I suppose. Greta Thunberg seems to have bent climate policy (particularly in Europe) enough to likely save a fair number of human lives (no, I am not Greta Thunberg). I live in the US, which has midterm elections next month, and any one Senate race — several of which are currently considered toss-ups — could have a dramatic impact on climate policy under the next presidency, since Senate terms are six years. Last year's One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which was a disaster for the climate, passed the Senate by a single vote, so it could have been stopped had Democrats won just one more Senate seat in 2020, 2022, or 2024.
I could have been clearer that I was considering wealth disparities both among countries and within countries. I think the point still stands, though.
Yeah, I wasn't really thinking about this on an individual level, and I'm definitely not trying to encourage people to maximize their carbon emissions (especially since I still don't know whether that would actually be net positive or net negative). It does raise the question of whether climate activism does more harm than good, though.
Yeah, that last part is why I wanted to draw a distinction between suffering and extreme suffering. We all suffer some, we all know we will suffer more if we keep living, and almost everyone chooses on a perpetual basis to continue living anyway. That's the level of suffering experienced in the wild (or at least close to it). I could imagine myself going through any form of suffering regularly experienced in the wild without being too horrified. The kind of suffering experienced on factory farms, on the other hand, is incomprehensible to me. I would probably take a 100% chance of being blinked out of existence than a 1% chance of becoming a factory-farmed pig or chicken.
Your second point I think illustrates that y would likely differ quite a lot among different scenarios of climate breakdown (that stop short of ending civilization). A level of warming that ravages the poorest parts of the world but barely alters life for the global rich would probably bear a small y. A level of warming that radically reshapes global agriculture would likely be a different story. In that sense, I suppose the worst-case scenario could actually be one with a substantial amount of climate action that still isn't enough to bring the problem under control.