Great to hear that you and the team have been exploring this! I'd be keen to learn more about how far you got in your thinking/analysis, but realize it's on the backburner for the time being. Let me know if I can be of any help when/if you resurface the topic.
Thanks for this contribution. I hadn't come across the Rethink Priorities analysis, so this was a great nudge. Responding to both your post and the RP research, I think it's important that the EA community recognize that certain climate change mitigation interventions double as global health and development interventions. And I’m not just referring to countering the social cost of carbon.
Climate change mitigation interventions, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, can be designed to not just address carbon emissions but also enable better healthcare and education delivery.
To give an example, there are an estimated 6.5 million diesel generators across Sub-Saharan Africa. These generators are polluting, prone to breakdowns and fuel for them is expensive. Yet households, businesses, health clinics or schools often have no other power option because they aren’t connected to the electricity grid, or if they are, the grid is prone to outages. So, diesel generator it is! Until there’s a fuel shortage. Or the price of diesel spikes. Or the generator, which was probably bought second-hand, fails. Then surgeries get cancelled and vaccines spoil from no refrigeration.
This is why a technology like a solar mini-grid, which can deliver electricity at a levelized cost up to 60 per cent lower than diesel, should be viewed as more than just a climate change mitigation solution. It provides a critical input to healthcare and education delivery, including some of the interventions that the EA community funds (think vaccination rollout).
Obviously, there’s a lot more to unpack in terms of what it takes to replace something like 6.5 million diesel generators with clean energy alternatives, including the cost of doing so. I just think that it’s important to recognize that the human impacts of clean energy deployment go beyond alleviating the social cost of carbon.
Has the EA community already looked at this nexus issue? Would love to connect with anyone thinking about or researching the full impact of clean energy, particularly its role as an enabler of interventions in GHD.
Hi Emily, I would love to connect on this topic since I've been working on clean energy development (mainly solar) in a Sub-Saharan Africa context for the past seven years. Obviously the bottlenecks and barriers to clean energy are quite different in places like Malawi or Sierra Leone than in the US, but the opportunities are significant for improving human well-being, a core focus for EA. I am particularly interested in the role energy (clean or not) plays in enabling other global health and development interventions, for example vaccine rollout.
Thanks for this very accessible breakdown of the key differences between EA and utilitarianism. I'm somewhat of an EA newbie and have been quietly grappling with how to distinguish the two. I see EA as requiring a high-utility mindset, but certainly not utilitarianism at all costs (i.e. compromising other values).
One quick flag: did you rather mean "reducing gender inequality" in the third to last para?
Great to hear that you and the team have been exploring this! I'd be keen to learn more about how far you got in your thinking/analysis, but realize it's on the backburner for the time being. Let me know if I can be of any help when/if you resurface the topic.
Thanks for this contribution. I hadn't come across the Rethink Priorities analysis, so this was a great nudge. Responding to both your post and the RP research, I think it's important that the EA community recognize that certain climate change mitigation interventions double as global health and development interventions. And I’m not just referring to countering the social cost of carbon.
Climate change mitigation interventions, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, can be designed to not just address carbon emissions but also enable better healthcare and education delivery.
To give an example, there are an estimated 6.5 million diesel generators across Sub-Saharan Africa. These generators are polluting, prone to breakdowns and fuel for them is expensive. Yet households, businesses, health clinics or schools often have no other power option because they aren’t connected to the electricity grid, or if they are, the grid is prone to outages. So, diesel generator it is! Until there’s a fuel shortage. Or the price of diesel spikes. Or the generator, which was probably bought second-hand, fails. Then surgeries get cancelled and vaccines spoil from no refrigeration.
This is why a technology like a solar mini-grid, which can deliver electricity at a levelized cost up to 60 per cent lower than diesel, should be viewed as more than just a climate change mitigation solution. It provides a critical input to healthcare and education delivery, including some of the interventions that the EA community funds (think vaccination rollout).
Obviously, there’s a lot more to unpack in terms of what it takes to replace something like 6.5 million diesel generators with clean energy alternatives, including the cost of doing so. I just think that it’s important to recognize that the human impacts of clean energy deployment go beyond alleviating the social cost of carbon.
Has the EA community already looked at this nexus issue? Would love to connect with anyone thinking about or researching the full impact of clean energy, particularly its role as an enabler of interventions in GHD.
Hi Emily, I would love to connect on this topic since I've been working on clean energy development (mainly solar) in a Sub-Saharan Africa context for the past seven years. Obviously the bottlenecks and barriers to clean energy are quite different in places like Malawi or Sierra Leone than in the US, but the opportunities are significant for improving human well-being, a core focus for EA. I am particularly interested in the role energy (clean or not) plays in enabling other global health and development interventions, for example vaccine rollout.
Thanks for this very accessible breakdown of the key differences between EA and utilitarianism. I'm somewhat of an EA newbie and have been quietly grappling with how to distinguish the two. I see EA as requiring a high-utility mindset, but certainly not utilitarianism at all costs (i.e. compromising other values).
One quick flag: did you rather mean "reducing gender inequality" in the third to last para?