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This is the third in a sequence of posts taken from my recent report: Why Did Environmentalism Become Partisan?
Summary
Rising partisanship did not make environmentalism more popular or politically effective. Instead, it saw flat or falling overall public opinion, fewer major legislative achievements, and fluctuating executive actions.
Public Opinion...
I think right now EAs might be making a significant mistake by paying insufficient attention to the political realm. As EAs we tend to figure out what’s most impactful for us to work on and focus hard. That’s great! But there are various actions that are ‘non-delegatable’ - the extent to which an individual can do the action is limited (like voting, going to a protest, making hard money contributions to particular campaigns). It might be useful if we were all more in the habit of doing variou...
This post presents the executive summary from Giving What We Can’s impact evaluation for 2025. At the end of this post we share links to more information, including the full report and...
Recent opportunities to take action
A paper that Kian Mintz-Woo is working on is relevant: "Incentives for the Long-Term(ist)"
From the abstract: "To address long-term externalities, I propose internalizing long-term externalized costs: according to our best estimates of the long-term costs of an activity or product, this cost should be added."
You would have to ask him directly where he's currently at with his draft.
I'll do this. I think this discussion is getting a lot of track when it comes to climate change. Precisely because low-prob catastrophic scenarios are neglected by climate change IAMs - because they lead to a collapse of the cost-benefit analysis, according to Weitzman (2009) - Stiglitz, Taylor & Stern have been advocating for target-consistent pricing. I wonder if something analogous would be feasible for x-risks.
For instance, there have been many advocates for a robot tax on automation to internalize possible damages to job markets; I never quite bought this idea (I'm not sure we should distinguish types of unemployment when it comes to social insurance), but I find it more attractive if it could be used to fund differential progress.