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Comment by akelly | Hacker News Reader

You might make more impact finding the highest paying finance job and then donating most of your income to climate causes.

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You were downvoted but this is a legit point - people like the ones in this article on “effective altruism” made this decision: https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2020/09/23/effective...

If you can find an org that can convert dollars to lives saved (by climate advocacy eg climate central or direct action eg terraformation) and commit to donating a certain percentage of your paycheck to them it may make your job feel more meaningful. Doesn’t work for me but works for sum.

Effective altruism suffers from a number of issues, the biggest being the inability of current frameworks to quantify the effects of externalities via systems modeling. In short: if your job contributes to the climate issue (and finance certainly does), you probably won't counteract that effect by donating even the entirety of your disposable income.

It might if you're really good at making money and really bad at climate stuff, but your donation enabled people who are actually impactful to work on it. At an extreme, a finance person's salary could pay for a dozen good teachers who could go on to inspire hundreds to work more directly in climate, vs that finance person trying to become an educator themselves (if education isn't their skill or desire).

But yes, we don't have a good system for quantifying those differences in individual effectiveness per career path across society.

The point is you are also impacting the climate in your day job, whether you intend to or not. You are essentially taxing yourself by causing some harm that needs to be later rectified. There is a reason that "reduce, reuse, recycle" is stated in that order.

I understand that, but the carbon impacts of many jobs are small -- whether positive or negative. If you take a job that has a small negative carbon footprint, use some of the money and focus it on things that have a larger positive carbon sequestration, that's still a (small) net win.

And there are force multipliers. Education is one of them. Science/R&D is another.

Think of it another way. You can pay 3x more fancy vegan food that might be like 150% better for the climate, or use that money to plant trees directly and save more carbon overall.

Efficiency and magnitude matters. It's all CO2E in the end, but not every dollar spent gets you the same amount.

The carbon impacts of most jobs are huge, certainly in finance. The need for perpetual economic growth is by far the largest contributor to climate change.

Per capita, I mean.

Even if each person threw only one plastic bag in the Virgin River per year, Zion would suck very soon.

Participating in finance is itself a force multiplier for others to do the same, and with such an energy-hungry practice as finance, that is going to cause worse outcomes. We can't just buy our way out of the problem, because on the whole, the economic activity you generate enables others to help cause worse outcomes (even per-capita, it's a lot of people).

This suggestion only makes sense if you don't consider your job as part of the contributions to climate change. You will find that the things you help to finance in your job will cause more carbon emissions than you can counteract with your salary.

YAAAS If we can accelerate income equality we can reduce consumption. We need the 99% (better yet the 99.9%) to be as poor as possible. Income is related to consumption, and consumption is related to emissions and pollution.

> Income is related to consumption, and consumption is related to emissions and pollution.

This doesn't make any sense. The suggestion is to make more money and donate ~all of it instead of consuming it. You can't look at a plan to make more income and infer that the higher income means more consumption _when the entire point of the plan explicitly avoids consuming the excess income_.

Making a lot of money doesn't "accelerate income inequality" necessarily; there isn't a fixed amount of money in the world and it's not possible to hoard it.

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