(00:01):
Well, I'm in over my head. No one told me trying to keep my footprint small was harder than I thought it could be. I'm in over my head. What do I really need? Trying to save the planet over someone, please save me trying to save the planet over someone. Please save me.

(00:25):
Welcome in over my head. I'm Michael Bartz. My guest today is John G. Halston. John is a research fellow at forethought foundation focusing on climate change. Prior to that, he was head of applied research at founder's pledge, a philanthropic advisory service for tech entrepreneurs and a research fellow at the global priorities project. He is a Ph.D. in political philosophy from Oxford and has published on a range of topics, including philosophy, economics and climate change. Welcome to in over my head, John.

(00:55):
Hi, thanks for having me.

(00:57):
So in talking about the just transition, we covered poverty and inequality, and this got me thinking about money and how we use it to affect the climate crisis. This led me to the idea of effective altruism for those who may not have heard of this before. What is effective altruism?

(01:10):
So effective altruism is broadly the use of reason and evidence to do the most good. The core idea is to combine the head and the heart. So say you wanna go into the world and do some good with your money or your career or your time in some other way, how do you do as much good as possible? So I suppose it's best known for encouraging people to donate 10% of their income to the most cost-effective charities. So those that save the most lives, bake the most carbon and so on, but effective altruism can also be applied to decisions about how to use your time, what to do with your career, what to do with your lifestyle decisions and that kind of thing.

(01:48):
Okay. And, and so what sort of impact would that have on let's say climate change with giving 10% of your income?

(01:54):
Well, I suppose obviously it depends on how much money you earn the median income for a full-time worker in the UK is about 40,000 pounds. So if you're giving 10%, you can then donate around 4,000 pounds. Every year in climate change is very hard to calculate how much effect this would have, but research by fan pledge, where I used to work, which does evaluations of various climate policy charities suggests that you can expect to abate about a hundred tons of carbon for each a hundred dollars that you donate to an effective climate charity. And that's kind of probably a, a bit of a lower bound. So then if you're donating 4,000 pounds, you can expect to avert around 4,000 tons of carbon. Let's put that in context, if you are in the UK, your annual emissions will be something like five tons of carbon per year. Whereas if you're in the US, it's closer to 15, although, in both places, it's, it's declining due to environmental policies and progressing in low carbon technology. So if the average person donates, they can 4,000 tons, but through their kind of living their day-to-day life, they can expect to admit around five tons. So it is this very large effect, I suppose, relative to the impact people have just living their day-to-day life.

(03:09):
Yeah. And, and my understanding and, and doing a little bit of reading was that it's not about just donating once and then that's it it's donating throughout your lifetime, is that correct?

(03:17):
Yeah. It's supposed to be this lifetime commitment where a lot of people have taken the giving, what we can pledge, where you pledge to give 10% of your income for the rest of your life. And I suppose it comes out of this recognition that if you're on the median income in the UK, you are fabulously well off compared to the rest of the world, especially compared to the rest of history. So with great power comes great responsibility, as they say. So you have, you can make a small sacrifice and make the world a lot better. Most people don't really notice if they earn like 10% less if you're in a rich country. So that's the rationale. And then I suppose, like if you're a millionaire or even a billionaire, then you can have even more impact by donating even more money.

(03:54):
Yeah. So that makes me think of the idea of the earning to give. So is there an argument for making as much money as you can, so you can donate more to charity?

(04:01):
So I suppose effective altruism became particularly well known in some places for recommending people take this earnings gift path, which instead of taking a job, doing direct work at a charity, you'd go into some high job like finance or something like that. And then you'd donate the money that you earned in that job. The rationale for that was that say, you're going for a job, a charity, that's doing something for like working on climate change or working on global health. If you don't take the job, then what happens is the kind of next best person gets the job. Who's maybe, you know, slightly worse than you are assuming that you were actually offered the job. So that kind of diminishes the impact. You have a bit relative to the counterfactual. Whereas if you take this job in finance, it's very unlikely that someone in finance would've donated most people in finance don't donate like 10% of their income or donate hundreds of thousands of pounds to charity every year, which you could do if you were in a, like a very high paying job in finance.

(04:56):
So the argument is, instead of taking this direct job, you can work in finance or some other high-paying job, and then you can donate to the charity and they can employ an extra four or five people or something. I think that's probably a bit of a caricature of what a lot of the effective altruism-focused community actually thinks about earning to give because now it seems most people are advised to do direct work. Like I work doing direct work, mainly focused on climate change and there's work. We'd like to be done, but there are not enough people to do it. And we have the money to finance it. So we kind of want people to go out into the world and get cracking. That being said, for some people, it probably is a good path to go into earning, to give. So Sam bank and fried is I think, still the richest person in the world under 30. And he hears this explicitly earning to give focused person. And he went to so FTX, which is this crypto exchange in order to give away like 99% of everything he earns. And he, you know, drives this very modest car and is a vegan and, and what have you. And he basically just did that just so that he could donate to effective causes.

(05:57):
That's interesting. But I feel like for most people they're probably not going to become a gazillionaire and then donate everything. I think a lot of people who want to earn a lot of money are doing it for other reasons. You talked a bit about getting involved in other work rather than just making a lot of money. So what would that look like for some people?

(06:15):
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, most people aren't going to go and earn billions of dollars. Um, but yeah, for most people who don't have this very high earning potential, I suppose includes me. I think there's lots of options out there, not just in climate, but in lots of areas. Like you can go into politics and try and encourage environmentally-friendly policies. There are various climate charities, nonprofits think tanks that doing lots of good work. I think people can have a lot of impact if they wanna switch careers. Yeah. So I'd encourage people to be ambitious when they're thinking about how can I have the biggest impact on the climate and not just think about their lifestyle choices and not just think about how much they could enable, but also think about what they're doing with their career, how they're using their time because you can make a very large impact if you choose your career wisely.

(06:59):
Yeah. No, that makes sense to me. Like you don't just have to be a biologist or something. You could be an accountant or other skills that environmental charities need, right?

(07:07):
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, you are doing this podcast and that's like another good example of you think you can like have some impact by using your time wisely.

(07:15):
Yeah. That's the hope at least.

(07:17):
Yeah.

(07:17):
Yeah. And I guess that's a good point, right? Cuz like you mentioned, maybe you're not making a lot of money and, and I've been quite public myself actually living my tiny lifestyle. Also not making a lot of money intentionally rather than chasing that dollar, doing more meaningful projects. So yeah. Let's chat a bit about that. So effective altruism is encouraging people to do that sort of thing.

(07:36):
Yeah. I think a lot of people in the effective altruism community are focused on living a modest lifestyle to a large extent, the roots of the movement come from Peter singer and this argument, you know, like imagine you could get into a pond to save a drowning child, but you ruin your expensive suit in the process. Most people think the suit doesn't matter. You should just get in the pond and save the child. So I think that line of thinking has probably had a lot of influence within effective altruism. So the basic thought being, if you can give up something that doesn't really improve your life very much to do something that improves someone else's life a lot, then you should do that. According to lots of plausible moral theories, it's not just this hardcore use of the Tarn thing, but it seems like any moral theory should say that you should do that.

(08:20):
So to that end, lots of effects of interest to vegans and lots of them live relatively modest lifestyles. It can be a bit of a trade off living a modest lifestyle and also using your time really well. Sometimes it can be worth it to sort of spend money to save yourself time so you can do more work and then do more good, you know, rather than getting like a cheap flight where you have a layover in France for four hours or something. And it's just kind of like kills your day. You can do something a bit quicker and be more productive in your job. And that can have more impact down the line if that makes sense. But yeah, it's kind of all rooted in this idea that just, we have lots of power and lots of influence. And that means we have lots of opportunities to do lots of good, which I suppose is just a very exciting thing that isn't really salient to lots of people in their day-to-day life.

(09:06):
Like you can just have this huge climate impact by donating, but people don't really know that there's this issue of whether donating kind of offsets any harm you might do for your lifestyle choices. So say, you know, I fly to the US and then if I donate to some effective climate charity, does that kind of offset the harm? Like I'm pretty skeptical about the idea that it does most offsetting schemes. Aren't very good and they just won't do what they say they do. If you get a flight in the UK, it will often say, do you wanna offset the emissions from your flight? And the issue with that is just that there's not very much oversight into these offsetting schemes. You know, they're gonna go out and plant trees somewhere or they're gonna fund a renewable energy project in a developing country. But no one's really checking to ensure that that actually happens or to ensure that it wouldn't have happened.

(09:59):
Anyway, an example is in California, there's an emissions trading scheme and businesses can buy forestry offsets. You can buy a project, which is saying like we'll prevent deforestation by this much, or we'll plant this many trees. And it's just really hard to monitor forestry. And the most credible study suggests that it doesn't really work. Basically, these offsets in, in the California system don't work. So it doesn't work very well in California, which is one of the richest restrictions in the world. Then imagine you're like trying to do it in Brazil or in Indonesia or in the Congo, which is where a lot of these offsetting schemes will try and do their work. And then it's just like even harder there and monitoring is even harder. So that's one thing I think you need to donate carefully. Another thing is I, I think it just limits people's ambitions a bit, which I suppose we've touched on before, but the thought is, you know, I am, I am at around five tons per year or something like that.

(10:49):
If I'm a typical, right, that means I could only donate about five pounds per year if that's my sole focus, whereas I could have a much greater impact by donating even more, even if it's not 10%, I could donate a few hundred pounds a year and then that's better than just focusing on offsetting the harm that I've done. I've spoken to entrepreneurs and they're like, oh yeah, I'm not sure how to kind of offset my missions. And I sort of think, you know, it's good that they're thinking about it, but at the same time, I'm a bit like, you know, you're sat on millions of dollars and you could do a lot more by donating carefully. So I wouldn't just stop at offsetting the harm of my flight. So that kind of thing. Yeah. And then I think there's all these like difficult ethical questions about whether it really does offset the harm that you cause.

(11:30):
So offsetting is often pared as being akin to like infidelity offsetting. So if I cheat on my wife and then I pay someone not to cheat on theirs, the total amount of cheating is the same, but still, it seems wrong cause I've cheated on my wife. And that's how a lot of people view offsetting. It's really complicated to think about these harms associated with your emissions and how donating affects that because the harms are spread out across the entire world and also spread out for like hundreds of thousands of years. Cause that's how long CO2 emissions last in the atmosphere. So I would see it as more of a yes. And rather than instead doing both is good, you know, going vegan and also donating is good. And you shouldn't see them as like in competition if that makes sense.

(12:11):
Yeah. It seems like you can do multiple things for sure. Now you talked about donating carefully, obviously, like you mentioned some of those offsetting programs that aren't effective. How can people be more informed when they're making these donations?

(12:25):
Yeah. One straightforward step is just to look at the effect of altruism funds, which is a platform where there are lots of carefully evaluated charities working on different problem areas. So not just climate change, working on pandemic preparedness and global poverty and animal welfare. And they have fund managers who are like experts in doing these evaluations. So it's like a natural place to start. If you're just figuring out that you wanna do some good with your money and that's a good place to look, charity evaluation is hard. I've done evaluation of climate charities and it is just really hard, especially cuz they're working on policy change. It's really hard to tell whether this charity is saying like, oh, well, if we hadn't done this, then this policy would never have been passed. It's very hard to judge cuz it's like, well maybe it would've happened anyway, someone else would've just tried to do it or there would've been an alternative policy that would've been even better.

(13:16):
Did they even have any impact on getting this policy passed? It's very hard to tell, but I think there are broad rules of thumb that you can use. One is just the most famous charities are likely to be already very well funded. So they're probably less in need of money than other charities. From my own experience, the most effective charities tended to be off the radar of the major funders charities can keep raising money, even if they don't really need it that much anymore. So it's a bit different to business in that respect. Even if the charity's not spending it very well, they can just keep getting money. If that makes sense.

(13:50):
Well, that makes a lot of sense cause yeah, I think some people might have some skepticism with yeah. Maybe some of those bigger charities, if they get too big, then there's a lot more operating cost or, or it's not actually going to the thing that its funding. So I like that idea of perhaps funding, smaller organizations, newer ones when reading about effective altruism, it talks about neglected problems is, is what they're you're focusing on if I'm correct in that.

(14:13):
Yeah, that's right. And so within climate change, some things are much more neglected than other things, at least over the last few years, most environmental advocacy and funding within climate change has gone towards advocating for renewables and advocating for forestry-related things. And most of it is focused on emissions in the west. That's had lots of good effects, renewables of declining costs enormously over the last few decades, like more than 99%, same for batteries, which is why electric cars are becoming so competitive now. But it's kind of like everyone is already doing that. So we need to think what's the next thing where we can catalyze this big change in technology or in a policy approach that other funders aren't already focusing on. And there's lots of money in climate change now. So finding stuff that's off the radar of major funders is pretty hard actually.

(15:02):
And that means that finding the most impactful opportunities is also hard. We wanna focus on problem areas that are especially neglected. So pandemic preparedness, I suppose we've been focusing on that for a long time, even pre-COVID. We were saying like, this seems like a big deal. Maybe we should put some more effort into that effective Altru funders were some of the main funders working on pandemic preparedness. That's definitely like a key insight of effective altruism. Not thinking like what's good on average, but what should we do given how everyone else is spending their money?

(15:26):
That makes sense. And so I guess, is there some crossover where if you're funding a poverty project, that's also hopefully helping with climate change.

(15:34):
I think in general, it's probably better to focus on one at a time. Definitely one can benefit the other. But then like on the other hand, there's also trade-offs. If you're thinking about animal welfare, chickens generally have worse lives than cows. So if you're thinking about how to improve animal welfare, you probably wanna eat less chicken, and eat more beef, but that's worse for the climate. So yeah, there are trade-offs. I would say another nice thing about effective altruism is that it allows you to choose between different problem areas and not just say like, oh, well you, you know, you have this portion for climate, this portion, global poverty, but also how should we think about deciding between working on malaria versus working on mental health versus working on pandemic proudness or even AI-related stuff. So that's some of the kind of nice features that I quite like about it.

(16:17):
So how do you make that decision of the things that you fund? Is it more about your personal values or is it more of a rationality thing of this makes the most change for the most people?

(16:28):
From my point of view, mainly the latter defining feature of effective an outcome. Is it not being partial to a particular cause or a particular problem? So I know someone with like some rare kind of cancer or something like that from an impartial point of view if I'm just going out there trying to do good and improve as many lives as possible, what should I do? So it's not like this thing. If what's personal to me in that sense, suppose you are deciding what to do and you want to be impartial. How do you go about doing that? And there's obviously all these difficult issues in philosophy. To what extent you should give up projects that are close to you and the name of doing good from an impartial point of view, it's sort of a surprising thing about do Gooding, that there hasn't been much systematic thoughts about that.

(17:06):
And instead people have been like arriving with answers about how the world should look libertarians, want the state to play less of a role socialists, want the state to play more of a role in the economy. Whereas EA I suppose is just asking this, just this question, okay, supposing we have these aims, what do we do in the world to advance them the most? But yeah, in general, it's just really hard because there's just lots of uncertainty about the costs of climate change in terms of economic costs and health costs. And you have to make all these ethical regimens about how you weigh the lives of, uh, future people. So it, it is just very hard to compare some rules of thumb that people have used as its scale solvability and collectiveness. So neglected, we already mentioned, which is just how many resources is this already receiving?

(17:51):
Another one is the scale of the problem. So how good would it be to solve it basically, how good would it be to prevent all pandemics or how good would it be to completely solve global poverty or prevent all animal suffering? These are really hard questions, really hard to quantify, but you can kind of get order of magnitude estimates, you know, with animals, the sort of billions of chickens living brilliant pleasant lives. You have to make this call about how you compare that to the, the welfare of people living in extreme poverty. And obviously, there's lots of really gnarly philosophical questions about that, but it's sort of a judgment call that you just have to make. If you're trying to do good from an impartial point of view, how do you trade off these things? And I think most people accept, there are some trade-offs.

(18:33):
If you offer the choice of improving one person's life, a small amount versus preventing factory farming, most people would say, okay, yeah, let's prevent factory farming for that trade-off. And then one factor with the scale of a problem is future generations. If you drive your car, the CO2 that leaves the exhaust pipe goes into the atmosphere and kind of affects, uh, CO2 concentrations for hundreds of thousands of years. So you're gonna affect future generations that suggests that because there could be so many people in the future influencing how that future goes, could be really important. That might mean fencing climate change, or it might mean something is going extinct from like maybe nuclear Walker makers go extinct or engineered viruses. Could makers go extinct or, or sort of advanced artificial intelligence could take control of the future. Or there could be some sort of global totalitarianism that emerges, but these are all things that could sort of affect how the entire future goes.

(19:28):
And then that could make a big difference to the scale of a problem. The last one is solvability, which is just what are the barriers to solving the problem? How easy is it to make progress with climate change? I think there are concrete ways to make progress compared to other global risks, which are mainly sort of future-oriented for climate change. We kind of know whether we're winning or not. If we reduce CO2 emissions, then we're doing well. Whereas with improving pandemic preparedness, it's really hard to tell whether you are even succeeding at all. So those are the three rules of thermal heuristics that effective Arus often use when deciding how to choose causes it's solvability scale. And collectedness, it's like a useful starting point.

(20:10):
Yeah. So obviously it's a very complicated issue. This show is about empowering people to take action on the climate crisis. So what's one thing someone can do today if they want to get involved in effective altruism.

(20:20):
The most obvious thing I think is just donating to the founder's pledge climate fund. It's just something that's accessible to everyone. I think it supports charities that make a lot of difference and that have been very carefully vetted relative to lots of other charities beyond that. I think those are the stuff like voting for effective environmental policies and parties working to support that. If you're really into it, you could start thinking about how to use your career looking at job openings for the charities that founders pledge climate fund recommends going on the 80,000 hours website and seeing what careers are out there. So there's a careers, guidance service for people trying to do the most good. So those are things you can go out there and do.

(21:02):
Perfect. Well, that's very helpful. This has been very enlightening, John, thanks so much for coming on the show.

(21:07):
Yeah, thanks for having me.

(21:09):
Well, that was my talk with John. The one thing that stood out for me was the neglect side of effective altruism, looking at things that aren't currently being funded and giving your money to that because maybe those big projects already have enough money. So for me, that was really insightful. Don't forget to check out the website, www.inovermyheadpodcast.com. There's other shows I've been on talking about money and living with less and pictures of the tiny house itself. So that's pretty cool. Well, that's all for me. I'm Michael Barts. Here's the feeling a little less in over our head when it comes to saving the planet. We'll see you again soon. You know, my head was produced and hosted by Michael Bartz original theme song by Gabriel Thaine. If you would like to get in touch with us, email info@inovermyheadpodcast.com. Special thanks to Telus STORYHIVE for making this show possible.

(22:00):
I'm trying to save the planet. Oh, will someone please save me?