To be honest it wasn't my intention to argue that fish eggs have moral weight - I included them to give a sense of the scale of impact - but I can see how that came across, so apologies.
Fish eggs may more clearly have moral worth under non-utilitarian value systems, such as believing that all life that will eventually be sentient has intrinsic moral worth, or that impacts to nature should be minimised for intrinsic reasons (to be clear I don't hold these views personally, but maybe having some level of moral uncertainty leads to a non-zero moral weight).
On evidence for fish eggs having moral worth under a utilitarian-ish values system, 1) I don't know, it's not my area, but 2) it seems pretty unlikely given fish larvae themselves seem to generally have pretty weak evidence for sentience immediately after hatching.
Coal and nuclear electricity generation kill a significant number of fish through water intake systems. This matters for evaluating the impact of any new electricity load.
Most thermal power plants (coal, nuclear, and to a lesser extent gas) draw large volumes of water from rivers and lakes for cooling. This causes two underappreciated harms to fish:
Impingement — fish get trapped against water intake filters and die. Entrainment — eggs, larvae, and small fish are pulled through pumps and heat exchangers, killing them. A single coal plant in Ohio (Bay Shore coal plant) killed roughly 46 million fish and 2.2 billion fish eggs and larvae in 2005–06.
Some thermal plants use evaporative cooling while others return the water to the source warmer than it was drawn. This thermal pollution stresses aquatic life in two compounding ways: elevated temperatures reduce dissolved oxygen levels while simultaneously increasing organisms' metabolic oxygen demand. Even small temperature increases can cause declines in bottom-dwelling species, and organisms in already-warm environments are especially vulnerable.
Impingement and entrainment don’t affect fish population levels because many of them would have died young anyway, other things like pollution have a much greater effect, and “only” ~10% of the wild population died due to the coal plant in the above case of the Ohio Bay Shore coal plant and Maumee River.
It's also unclear what the net effect on wild-animal suffering is when comparing death in a water intake to death by natural causes. And as electricity generation shifts from thermal plants toward renewables, these specific harms should diminish.
From an EA perspective, this seems worth flagging for anyone working on wild animal welfare or assessing the environmental footprint of new electricity load like compute scaling. The fish mortality numbers are large in absolute terms even if they seem unlikely to cause population-loss, and this externality rarely features in discussions about electricity demand growth.
I could estimate the number of fish, fish eggs, and larvae killed due to thermal plants globally based on the Bay Shore coal plant, but without more information on how representative it is it would feel like false specificity. I feel ~50% sure it's over 500 billion fish, fish eggs, and larvae globally per year.
Thanks for the detailed response! I've included a few reflections on the work in the conclusion section. Fair point on the internal costs - I was thinking about this as a cost but not as an impact multiplier from funding. With some more work it could be used as justification for the existence of ECA and why consumers pay their salary. ~$200k seems right for staff time plus overhead.
Yeah, "over half" was quite surprising to me too. I wonder how much of this is because organisations may only lodge a rule change request if they have a decent sense that it is likely to be successful before doing so. If individuals and smaller/outside organisations took my advice and started lodging more rule change requests that ratio would surely change.
Thank you for nudging me to expand on the specfics of what I did. I think I'll write something more detailed at some point, but for now I'll just brain dump some dot points on what we did in those 6 months - hopefully that's helpful for now.
ECA strategic planning to identify the energy consumer issues that are most important, tractable, and within ECA's wheelhouse (see 3-year plan as the output)
Deep literature review (many rounds of this at each stage - I tried to just become an expert in the topic - I used AI pretty heavily as a learning companion)
Internal brainstorming with seniors to identify the problem and design a solution
Stakeholder mapping to identify who we need to involve, consult, mobilise, etc. (e.g., using IAP2 frameworks, plotting stakeholders on interest vs power axes)
Building a spreadsheet based on stakeholder mapping with details of key organisations including contacts
Identifying the value propositions of our rule change request - i.e. 4 main/unique values that different stakeholders would receive if the rule change were successful
Grouping stakeholders into one of 4 value propositions
Several rounds of seeking and incorporating feedback with key decision makers and stakeholders (sending dot point summaries, drafts, presenting to, meeting with, etc.)
Multiple rounds of internal drafting and review
Final checks (placed a high bar on being accurate and not having typos, etc.)
Lodged rule change
Offered briefings to interested parties
Media releases leading to some articles in industry press
Developed fact sheet to help stakeholders understand issue and lower the bar to making a submission
Social media posts to create awareness and (primarily) to encourage submissions
Running 4 workshops/briefings (one for each value proposition) to mobilise stakeholders to make a submission and collect feedback
Responding to government consultation papers (some more literature review, feedback, brainstorming for solutions to specific issues raised)
Commissioning external expert analysis as needed
I was the project leader for all of this (except the strategic planning which happened before I joined) but didn't necessarily do all of it myself.
Thanks for sharing and great work, I'm inspired! I'm starting a new role at a large company in a few weeks after working at smaller organisations/academia for a while, and I'm excited to explore what's possible once I settle in.
I did a limited version of this 10 years ago at my first full time job at a large Australian company. A few colleagues came to a giving game I co-organised with a local EA chapter. I spoke to the company's philanthropic giving lead - I didn't make any headway, and found out that the company's corporate giving was based predominately on supporting communities they operated in (I was a bit naive).
I'm really excited about this! I'll be watching it closely, because starting something similar here in Australia could be interesting.
My experience working in policy has been that it can either be surprisingly tractable or surprisingly intractable. Achieving change in energy policy in Australia has been surprisingly easy, and achieving change in farmed animal policy in Australia has been surprisingly hard.
I'm not sure yet which of the two would be most analogous to wild animal welfare. Farmed animal policy has strong entrenched interests, but perhaps wild animal welfare doesn't because many don't care about the issue as much one way or the other. It could be easy to get some quick wins.
A lot of people are talking about data centres in space in the last few weeks. Andrew McCalipbuilt a model to see what it would take for space compute to get cheaper than terrestrial compute.
This quote stood out:
we should be actively goading more billionaires into spending on irrational, high-variance projects that might actually advance civilization. I feel genuine secondhand embarrassment watching people torch their fortunes on yachts and status cosplay. No one cares about your Loro Piana. If you've built an empire, the best possible use of it is to burn its capital like a torch and light up a corner of the future. Fund the ugly middle. Pay for the iteration loops. Build the cathedrals. This is how we advance civilization.
I like the sentiment, but I'm not necessarily sure space data centres are a net positive for humanity.
That said - what are some candidates for billionaire pet projects that reduce suffering? A billionaire getting fixated on making cellular agriculture dirt cheap seems promising to me.
Thanks for writing about this! I've thought about this as well, but there are a couple of reasons I haven't done this yet. Primarily, I've been thinking more lately about making sure my time is appropriately valued. I'm still fairly early-mid career, and as much as it shouldn't matter, taking a salary reduction now probably means reduced earnings potential in the future. This obviously matters less if you don't plan on working for a non-highly impactful non-profit in the near future or if you're later in your career, but I think this is worth thinking about even if you're financially secure.
I think the sort of people who frequent this forum tend to be a bit too keen to work for not much because they think the work is so important, kind of like an 'impact discount', and I think historically effective non-profits have been a bit too keen to offer impact discount salaries. This seems to be less of an issue in the last 3 years in my experience, maybe because EA-aligned orgs are getting better funded.
I think taking impact discounts probably harm our impact in the longer term. It's not just about the money per se, but about the perception of value. Unfortunately, people tend to see your hourly rate as a reflection of how much value you provide. Young people should probably care about this a bit more, but granted it's a tough job market and it's probably a much lower priority than just getting a job.
It also, of course, depends on whether you think your current employer is the most effective place to be sending your counterfactual dollars. It's plausible that one might work at a highly impactful non-profit, but they think that another non-profit they could donate to is twice as effective (or whatever the ratio is based on their marginal tax rate, but it's probably not more than double).
Luke, you've been so strong at the helm of GWWC for so long that I'm often guilty of thinking about you and GWWC as synonymous (that's a compliment, I swear!). Well done on the amazing work you've done, and enjoy a well deserved break. I can't wait to see what you do next.
To be honest it wasn't my intention to argue that fish eggs have moral weight - I included them to give a sense of the scale of impact - but I can see how that came across, so apologies.
Fish eggs may more clearly have moral worth under non-utilitarian value systems, such as believing that all life that will eventually be sentient has intrinsic moral worth, or that impacts to nature should be minimised for intrinsic reasons (to be clear I don't hold these views personally, but maybe having some level of moral uncertainty leads to a non-zero moral weight).
On evidence for fish eggs having moral worth under a utilitarian-ish values system, 1) I don't know, it's not my area, but 2) it seems pretty unlikely given fish larvae themselves seem to generally have pretty weak evidence for sentience immediately after hatching.
Coal and nuclear electricity generation kill a significant number of fish through water intake systems. This matters for evaluating the impact of any new electricity load.
Most thermal power plants (coal, nuclear, and to a lesser extent gas) draw large volumes of water from rivers and lakes for cooling. This causes two underappreciated harms to fish:
Impingement — fish get trapped against water intake filters and die. Entrainment — eggs, larvae, and small fish are pulled through pumps and heat exchangers, killing them. A single coal plant in Ohio (Bay Shore coal plant) killed roughly 46 million fish and 2.2 billion fish eggs and larvae in 2005–06.
Some thermal plants use evaporative cooling while others return the water to the source warmer than it was drawn. This thermal pollution stresses aquatic life in two compounding ways: elevated temperatures reduce dissolved oxygen levels while simultaneously increasing organisms' metabolic oxygen demand. Even small temperature increases can cause declines in bottom-dwelling species, and organisms in already-warm environments are especially vulnerable.
Impingement and entrainment don’t affect fish population levels because many of them would have died young anyway, other things like pollution have a much greater effect, and “only” ~10% of the wild population died due to the coal plant in the above case of the Ohio Bay Shore coal plant and Maumee River.
It's also unclear what the net effect on wild-animal suffering is when comparing death in a water intake to death by natural causes. And as electricity generation shifts from thermal plants toward renewables, these specific harms should diminish.
From an EA perspective, this seems worth flagging for anyone working on wild animal welfare or assessing the environmental footprint of new electricity load like compute scaling. The fish mortality numbers are large in absolute terms even if they seem unlikely to cause population-loss, and this externality rarely features in discussions about electricity demand growth.
I could estimate the number of fish, fish eggs, and larvae killed due to thermal plants globally based on the Bay Shore coal plant, but without more information on how representative it is it would feel like false specificity. I feel ~50% sure it's over 500 billion fish, fish eggs, and larvae globally per year.
This writing was part of a broader piece I wrote on space-based data centres.
Thanks for the detailed response! I've included a few reflections on the work in the conclusion section. Fair point on the internal costs - I was thinking about this as a cost but not as an impact multiplier from funding. With some more work it could be used as justification for the existence of ECA and why consumers pay their salary. ~$200k seems right for staff time plus overhead.
Yeah, "over half" was quite surprising to me too. I wonder how much of this is because organisations may only lodge a rule change request if they have a decent sense that it is likely to be successful before doing so. If individuals and smaller/outside organisations took my advice and started lodging more rule change requests that ratio would surely change.
Thank you for nudging me to expand on the specfics of what I did. I think I'll write something more detailed at some point, but for now I'll just brain dump some dot points on what we did in those 6 months - hopefully that's helpful for now.
I was the project leader for all of this (except the strategic planning which happened before I joined) but didn't necessarily do all of it myself.
Thanks for sharing and great work, I'm inspired! I'm starting a new role at a large company in a few weeks after working at smaller organisations/academia for a while, and I'm excited to explore what's possible once I settle in.
I did a limited version of this 10 years ago at my first full time job at a large Australian company. A few colleagues came to a giving game I co-organised with a local EA chapter. I spoke to the company's philanthropic giving lead - I didn't make any headway, and found out that the company's corporate giving was based predominately on supporting communities they operated in (I was a bit naive).
I'm really excited about this! I'll be watching it closely, because starting something similar here in Australia could be interesting.
My experience working in policy has been that it can either be surprisingly tractable or surprisingly intractable. Achieving change in energy policy in Australia has been surprisingly easy, and achieving change in farmed animal policy in Australia has been surprisingly hard.
I'm not sure yet which of the two would be most analogous to wild animal welfare. Farmed animal policy has strong entrenched interests, but perhaps wild animal welfare doesn't because many don't care about the issue as much one way or the other. It could be easy to get some quick wins.
$10,000 to Good Ancestors Project - all my post tax income above $59,000 for last financial year.
Between a new job and having finally paid off all my student debt, I'm excited about the next year.
A lot of people are talking about data centres in space in the last few weeks. Andrew McCalip built a model to see what it would take for space compute to get cheaper than terrestrial compute.
This quote stood out:
I like the sentiment, but I'm not necessarily sure space data centres are a net positive for humanity.
That said - what are some candidates for billionaire pet projects that reduce suffering? A billionaire getting fixated on making cellular agriculture dirt cheap seems promising to me.
Assuming this captures x-risk considerations, the scale of the future is significantly bigger than present day.
Thanks for writing about this! I've thought about this as well, but there are a couple of reasons I haven't done this yet. Primarily, I've been thinking more lately about making sure my time is appropriately valued. I'm still fairly early-mid career, and as much as it shouldn't matter, taking a salary reduction now probably means reduced earnings potential in the future. This obviously matters less if you don't plan on working for a non-highly impactful non-profit in the near future or if you're later in your career, but I think this is worth thinking about even if you're financially secure.
I think the sort of people who frequent this forum tend to be a bit too keen to work for not much because they think the work is so important, kind of like an 'impact discount', and I think historically effective non-profits have been a bit too keen to offer impact discount salaries. This seems to be less of an issue in the last 3 years in my experience, maybe because EA-aligned orgs are getting better funded.
I think taking impact discounts probably harm our impact in the longer term. It's not just about the money per se, but about the perception of value. Unfortunately, people tend to see your hourly rate as a reflection of how much value you provide. Young people should probably care about this a bit more, but granted it's a tough job market and it's probably a much lower priority than just getting a job.
It also, of course, depends on whether you think your current employer is the most effective place to be sending your counterfactual dollars. It's plausible that one might work at a highly impactful non-profit, but they think that another non-profit they could donate to is twice as effective (or whatever the ratio is based on their marginal tax rate, but it's probably not more than double).
Luke, you've been so strong at the helm of GWWC for so long that I'm often guilty of thinking about you and GWWC as synonymous (that's a compliment, I swear!). Well done on the amazing work you've done, and enjoy a well deserved break. I can't wait to see what you do next.