A call for more specific and numerate climate communication

There's too much low-hanging fruit going unpicked, and it's relatively easy to pick

Despite millions of people focusing on it, there is still a crazy amount of simple low-hanging fruit in climate change communication going unpicked. Off the top of my head, I’m pretty surprised that these don’t exist:

• A popular book summary of everything important in the IPCC report, written for a mass audience. Best I can find are the summaries published by the IPCC itself, which don’t seem to be reaching many people.

• A clear customizable visualization of how any one activity compares to your total daily and annual emissions, to help you figure out what to cut.

  • The visualizations that do exist are pretty clunky.

  • A lot of people I know worry about the emissions of flying in planes, but almost none can tell me how those emissions compare to their daily lives (a flight from NYC to San Francisco emits in expectation about as much as 2 weeks of your regular lifestyle, or about 1/10th of a car’s annual emissions).

  • More importantly, few people seem to know how advocating for systematic change to the energy grid can pay off in ways that have hundreds of thousands of times as much impact on the climate as any lifestyle change you could make. I’ve been vegan for 10 years, but that basically rounds to zero compared to my friends working on smart grid tech. More people should know about how big this gulf is.

  • It is kind of an overwhelming thought that in the fourth decade of serious climate communication, the average well-educated person is still basically spinning a roulette wheel in their head to make random lifestyle cuts for the climate with no real sense of how the options compare to each other. Eat less meat or fly less? Cut chatbots or recycle? So few people actually know anything about how these compare.

• A map of new smart grid and green energy infrastructure in your area you could go and advocate for.

• An updated version of Sustainable Energy – without the hot air. My favorite climate book, partly because when you read it you become confused about why so little climate communication is able to achieve anything like the same level of simple clarity.

• An 80,000 Hours-like comprehensive website trying to rigorously compare the actual impacts of different climate careers specifically (I know the Effective Environmentalism network aims to do something like this).

• A big public estimate of how much emissions have been prevented, in total, by the climate movement, by government action, by new technology vs. policy vs. lifestyle changes etc. I asked Claude and it estimates based on some papers that the climate movement specifically has prevented maybe 8 Gt of CO2, a little over a year and a half of the US’s emissions. I think this is way too low because it’s not including government policy, which Claude estimates to have prevented 34 Gt, and surely the movement is having lots of indirect impact there. Is any of this correct at all? Zero clue, I’d like a better source on this, but I can’t find one!

Most of these don’t seem that hard to make and maintain. I might try to make the second one if no one beats me to it. In general, a lot of people thinking at high levels about this stuff seem to be asleep at the wheel when it comes to how much they can change the conversation by just putting out clear, accessible, but also comprehensive and highly numerate info about climate change.

In a more sane world, I wouldn’t have been able to build the big audience I have by saying over and over again “The emissions of a computer program aren’t really in the same ballpark as driving a car,” but too many people who know about this stuff weren’t saying anything. I got lucky and had the time and energy to type it down, and was also motivated a lot by the effective altruist observation that almost no one is bothering to publicly compare very simple numbers involved in big global problems, and that those numbers do matter quite a bit and should be more action-guiding than they often are. The basic EA intuition is that a lot of people who talk about big high-status issues are coasting on saying the correct social passwords in order to be seen as good people, that we easily deceive ourselves with these passwords into thinking our own beliefs are way more thought out than they actually are, but also that the issues themselves are often very real, getting them right matters, and taking the numbers seriously is a way of breaking through the status games we play with ourselves and others.

You should strongly defer to actual expert consensus unless you have an extremely good reason not to, but you need to figure out what the actual expert consensus is and not trust that social passwords align with it. I was lucky in college to learn a lot about climate change and what the actual expert consensus was, so I could take the problem seriously while also ignoring the people confidently telling me that the US would fall into a civil war over water by the early 2020s. That was just a password, and the actual expert consensus was available to me if I was willing to seek it out instead of coasting on this new fake way of signaling that I was a serious clear-eyed person. So much of my success in blogging in the last year came from the simple decision to not go along with the social password “You should definitely be mindful with your chatbot use.”

I’m not bothered at all if people don’t like EA, but I do think this simple story of the world it tells is basically true and a way of springboarding yourself way above the fray in big debates about global problems like this. Don’t call it EA if you don’t want to, don’t feel like you need to give EA itself any status, but if you’re thinking about diving into climate communication, keep this basic story in mind. You can break out of the mental stupor of coasting on high-status passwords with a blank Google doc, a calculator, and a goal to seriously communicate how simple quantities compare to each other (with humility and strong deference to expert consensus where it exists). As I’ve learned over and over, there’s a huge appetite for this way of thinking, and you should assume that so many people are coasting along without bothering to look for the gaps in the discourse that these gaps are actually very easy to find and fill as soon as you start seriously looking for them. If you step out of trying to say the right social passwords about climate (or another big issue you care about) and just start free writing about what everyday public resources could exist for it but don’t, I think you’ll be surprised at how easy it is. Even just a simple rule like “Make the resource you wish your past self had” on its own goes a long way.

As an aside, Our World in Data is a light in the dark on good climate stats, and if you go back through my posts you’ll notice how reliant I am on a lot of the climate data they’ve compiled. Draw inspiration there! The Effective Environmentalism network also think about this stuff a lot. Project Drawdown’s another good example. So is this Founders Pledge report on climate philanthropy. There are lots of others, but not enough.