Soemano Zeijlmans
Bio
Participation3
I'm co-re-launching Effective Environmentalism. Interested in EA approaches to climate change, environment, animal welfare, and global health and development. Experienced with quantitative and qualitative research, including mathematical modelling and Delphi studies.
MSc Environmental Economics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
MA Environment, Development and Peace, UN University for Peace
BSc Governance, Economics, and Development, LUC The Hague
How others can help me
I'm looking for funding for the Effective Environmentalism field-building initiative.
Comments6
Try to see if your company's expertise match with any of the recommended fields of work by Giving Green and High Impact Engineers! Especially this latter link is probably interesting for you and your colleagues.
I think that @Ulrik Horn's suggestion about how to adapt to worst-case climate scenarios is a good one, especially if you focus on places that are likely severely hit but don't have adequate plans for adaptation yet.
Some first ideas, going by the expertise of the company:
- Chemical regulation (e.g., REACH) and LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) - Helping firms comply is probably not the most cost-effective, since compliance is mandatory, so they'll just find another consultancy firm. Counterfactual is probably low here.
- Circular economy. I'd say this really depends on which sector you're trying to make circular. Something related to the circular use of rare earth materials for the energy transition seems promising, but this is still a broad theme.
- Soil remediation. - Don't know enough to comment.
- Environmental permits and environmental impact assessments (effects on water, air quality, biodiversity, etc.). Similar to my first comment - if this is for compliance, firms will hire a consultant anyway, so the counterfactual here is lower. If you do EIAs or permitting for important new environmental infrastructure (e.g. hot rock geothermal), this may be different.
- District heating networks. This is interesting, if you can contribute to quickly deploying geothermal energy around the world! Talk with the folks at Project Innerspace to know more.
- Electricity grids. There's a big potential here to electrify heavy industries that now rely on fossil fuels. The price of renewables has been dropping quite rapidly, but there's quite a challenge in using renewables for hard-to-decarbonise processes like cement. Talk to or visit the websites of e.g. Future Cleantech Architects, Clean Air Task Force, and Industrious Labs to know more! I reckon energy storage and load shifting could be interesting ones to look at too! And maybe easier to get government funding for.
- Sustainability and biodiversity consultancy - A little to broad to comment on.
- Mobility solutions (design of roads, bridges, etc.) - no comment
- Sewerage and water infrastructure - EU countries have a lot of their sewerage and water infrastructure in order already, so within the EU I don't think this is the most cost-effective work on the margin. Some really innovative solutions could be interesting, perhaps. E.g. desalinisation?
- Building and factory design. This seems promising. Lots of industrial processes are hard to get rid of (e.g. we'll need cement, and worldwide demand is set to increase!) but there hasn't been a lot of work on clean production in this area. Looking at cleaner production of cement, steel, or other industries seems promising, and factory design is probably a big part of that. Try to reach out to Industrious Labs!
In general, I find most channels posting 'positive climate news' honestly a bit annoying because they tend to focus on things that really don't matter all that much in the big picture, or present their solution as a silver bullet while in fact there is none. (But maybe I'm a bit too critical here.)
If you're interested, we've compiled a big list of climate-related resources on the Effective Environmentalism website - some of which are quite hopeful! For example, the books Not the End of the World and Regenesis. There are also a bunch of podcasts and videos on climate solutions that have a bit of a "yes we can" vibe.
https://www.effectiveenvironmentalism.org/resources
Outside EA circles, I really love the YouTube channel Just Have a Think for some climate hope. And (not a video, but a static image), the falling costs of solar is one of the most hopeful graphics in the climate cause area!
I like the idea of measuring or anticipating the effects of a tax in units of deaths avoided/caused and quality of life gained/lost instead of in monetary terms. The monetary measurement of the impacts of a tax (the common approach among economists) can be quite a bad proxy for actual things we care about: saving and improving lives. There's actually a growing field of economics aiming to replace the GDP measure with quality of life measurements.
I understand your causal mechanism to be as follows: (1) taxation reduces people's income, (2) having less income makes working risky jobs financially more attractive, (3) this causes more people to die. While this sounds plausible, I see quite a few problems with the approach that you're suggesting, which I'll cover below. (I won't go in-depth into the calculation you used since you already mentioned that it's not accurate and I assume the point of your post is to advocate for starting a subdiscipline of economics, rather than providing a method for calculation.)
Use of VSL estimates
VSL estimates come from looking at the wage differences between similar jobs with different occupational fatality rates, for example lumberjacks and gardeners. In the USA, for every $13 million or so in increased wages among we-assume-otherwise-identical jobs, one person dies on the job.
VSL estimates are intended be used to understand how people value small reductions in risk, not to predict the outcome of increased wages on deaths. Greater risk leads to higher pay, but higher pay doesn't lead to this increase in deaths per se. For example, demand for risky jobs like firefighters isn't very elastic (the number of firefighters society needs is more or less fixed), and even if that wasn't the case, less qualified or experienced people may enter the field. I wouldn't use the VSL for this purpose since the methods used to calculate it don't establish this causal link.
Not a lot of people die in workplace accidents
I don't think people taking riskier jobs, as the VSL approach would assume, is the primary negative impact of taxation. Rather, I think reducing people's spendable income makes them less likely to buy healthy food, less likely to live in air-conditioned or heated houses, and less likely to be able to afford medical bills. Only a very small number of people actually die in accidents - let alone workplace accidents. So if we want to know the mortality effect of a tax, it would be more interesting to research questions such as: what is the effect of this tax on cardiovascular health (e.g. unable to buy healthy food) or lung health (e.g. air pollution).
Taxation is used to reduce mortality
If it is not obvious to you that these numbers are all more than zero, consider the basic facts that poverty kills people, and taxes take money from people.
Interestingly, having low income, low wealth, low education, and low social status are very strong determinants of early mortality. This is exactly what taxation is trying to tackle. If we take the data for my country (The Netherlands), for example, we see that more than half of all public spending goes to healthcare and social security, and another 12% goes to education. In short, taxation is mostly used to make healthcare affordable or to alleviate social determinants of mortality.
So no, I don't think we can assume that taxation kills people.
People in poverty are mostly exempt from taxes
poverty kills people, and taxes take money from people
Looking at distributive effects is probably really important here. I can imagine that taxing people to the point that they enter poverty (as you suggested) makes things a lot worse for them. Most countries have some type of tax-free threshold under which you don't have to pay income taxes. Low incomes are only taxed relatively little. Some taxes, like VAT on food, fall disproportionately on the poor since they spend a larger share of their income on food.
So, theoretically it's possible that taxation causes poverty, and poverty causes deaths. But if we look at the top causes of global poverty, we see that poverty is mostly caused by things we can tackle by spending tax money: on safety nets and food programmes to stop hunger, on healthcare systems to improve access, on sanitation and clean water to improve hygiene and save time, on education to give kids a prosperous future, on infrastructure so that people can get to work, on creating jobs...
Summary
In summary, I'm in favour of researching the effects of taxation and public spending on mortality, but I expect the sign on most taxes to be negative (i.e. reducing mortality), at least when the tax incidence is not on people in poverty and public funds are spent on sensible projects. I think the method based on the VSL is probably not appropriate, but your proposal to have a government consider the effects of mortality makes sense since we can probably make a good guesstimate of the effects of a tax or government programme on social determinants of mortality.
While many industrialized economies have a lower carbon intensity than a few decades ago, what matters for climate change is not carbon intensity, but total cumulative emissions. Carbon intensity is an often used metric, but it is flawed for achieving climate change goals.
This is what degrowth advocates point out: a relative decoupling between GDP and greenhouse gas emissions can still lead to an increase in total emissions if GDP grows faster than carbon intensity shrinks. Even though there has been a 34% decrease in carbon intensity (CO2e/$) between 1965 and 2015, total emissions increased by 300%. To decrease carbon emissions, we would either need to (a) have absolute and strong decoupling between emissions and GDP and/or (b) reduce society's dependence on GDP to flourish, at least temporarily. The former solution is often called 'ecomodernism', while the latter is 'degrowth' or 'post-growth'. (Background info on decoupling here.)
Obviously, degrowth approaches, too, can have their drawbacks (e.g. lower tax revenues, typically lower tractability). But I would keep away from calling degrowth a "non-starter" and use the scout mindset to explore ideas within it. Personally, I wouldn't support EA going all-in on the degrowth train, but there are probably worthwhile ideas and solutions coming from the degrowth economy that would otherwise be unlikely to get funding, as governments and companies have no incentive to advocate for degrowth. That's worthwhile to explore!
Remember that OP did not argue that EA climate change funding should all go to degrowth approaches, but merely for "further exploration and research as to it's [sic] viability as a funding opportunity". That seems like a fair idea to me.
I don't have a lot to add that hasn't been covered in the answers below. One thing I would add is: regardless of who owns the company, do you think that home batteries is the biggest impact you can make on climate change with your skillsets, or are there perhaps other fields that are working on climate solutions that score higher on importance, tractability and neglectedness.
You could take a look at the Open Sustainable Technology list for inspiration on how programming can be impactful. Project Drawdown has a great list of impactful climate change interventions. If you have expertise on AI and machine learning, you can also check out Climate Change AI.
Glad to hear!
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