1 – We can’t grasp big numbers

I'm not very good at feeling the size of large numbers. Once you start tossing around numbers larger than 1,000 (or maybe even 100), the numbers just seem "big".

Consider the Amazon rainforest. If you told me that we've lost an area the size of one hundred football fields to deforestation, I would feel like that's a lot of forest. If, instead, you told me we've lost an area the size of France... I would still just feel like that's a lot of forest.

The feelings are almost identical. In context, my brain grudgingly admits that France is larger than one hundred football fields, and puts forth a token effort to feel like the loss is bigger. But out of context, if I weren't anchored at football fields when I heard “France”, both of these numbers just feel vaguely large.

I feel a little respect for the bigness of numbers if you pick really, really large numbers. If you say, "One followed by 100 zeroes," then this feels a lot bigger than a billion. But it certainly doesn't feel (in my gut) like it's 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 times bigger than a billion. Not in the way that four apples internally feels like twice as many as two apples. My brain can't even begin to wrap itself around this sort of magnitude differential.

This phenomenon is related to scope insensitivity, and it's important to me because I live in a world where sometimes the things I care about are really, really numerous.

For example, billions of tonnes of CO₂ are emitted into our atmosphere each year, raising global temperatures and destabilizing our climate. Each year, more than 10 million hectares of forests are cut or burnt down. Billions of humans and other animals suffer the effects of habitat loss and climate change. And though most of this happens out of my sight, I still care about it.

The destabilization of Earth's climate system with all its consequences for ecosystems and human communities is tragic no matter what the cause, and the tragedy is not reduced simply because I was far away, because the people who are affected haven’t been born yet, or because I did not know of it, or because I did not know how to help, or because I was not personally responsible.

Knowing this, I care about the climate stability of this entire planet. The problem is, my brain is simply incapable of taking the amount of caring I feel for a single climate impact and scaling it up by a billion times. I lack the internal capacity to feel that much. My care-o-meter simply doesn't go up that far.

And this is a problem.

2 – Can we care enough about big problems?

It's a common trope that courage isn't about being fearless; it's about being afraid but doing the right thing anyway. In the same sense, caring about the climate isn't about having a gut feeling that corresponds to the scale of the climate crisis (that’s impossible); it's about doing the right thing anyway. Even without the feeling.

My internal care-o-meter was calibrated to deal with about 150 people, and it simply can't express the amount of caring that I have for billions affected by climate change, for countless species losing their habitats, for future generations inheriting a destabilized planet. It’s especially not calibrated to care about the (quite indirect) impacts of vast amounts of invisible greenhouse gases. I simply can’t care a billion times more about 1 Gigatonne of CO₂ emissions than about 1 tonne of CO₂. Both of these numbers mean very little to me because my care-o-meter is simply not equipped to deal with large and vague quantities of gas.

Humanity is playing for unimaginably high stakes. At the very least, billions of people will be affected by climate change in this century. At the worst, we could trigger irreversible tipping points that fundamentally alter Earth's habitability. All the intricate civilizations that the future could hold, the ecosystems and biodiversity that took millions of years to evolve, depends upon what we do here and now.

When you're faced with stakes like these, your internal caring heuristics, calibrated on numbers like 10 or 20, and maxing out around 150, completely fail to grasp the gravity of the situation.

Planting a few trees in your community feels great, and it would probably feel just about as good as passing landmark climate legislation to prevent deforestation. It surely wouldn’t be many billion times more of a high to end global deforestation, decarbonize industry, and switch to sustainable transportation globally, because your flesh-based hardware can’t express a feeling a billion times bigger than the feeling of helping your own town with some new trees. But even though the satisfaction from planting a few trees would be shockingly similar to the satisfaction of passing new climate legislation, always remember that behind those similar feelings there is a whole world of difference.

Our internal care-feelings are woefully inadequate for deciding how to act in a world with planetary-scale climate problems.

3 – What drives us to take action?

There's a mental shift that happened to me when I first started internalizing scope insensitivity. It is a little difficult to articulate, so I'm going to start with a few stories.

Consider Alice, a software engineer at Amazon in Seattle. Once a month or so, college students show up on street corners with clipboards, looking ever more disillusioned as they struggle to convince people to donate to a community-driven solar power. Usually, Alice avoids eye contact and goes about her day, but this month they finally manage to corner her. They explain their work on renewable energy transition, and she actually has to admit that it sounds like a pretty good cause. She ends up handing them $20 through a combination of guilt, social pressure, and genuine concern, and then rushes back to work. (Next month, when they show up again, she avoids eye contact.)

Now consider Bob, who has been challenged by a friend on social media to calculate his carbon footprint and change his lifestyle. He feels too busy to do the full audit and doesn’t want to ditch his car, give up meat, or cancel the upcoming flight for his holiday. Instead, he just buys €100 of carbon offsets.

Now consider Christine, who is in the college environmental club Green Campus. Green Campus is engaged in a competition with another campus organization to see who can eliminate the most waste in a week. Christine has a competitive spirit and gets engaged in the initiative, spending most of her evenings canvassing her college campus over the course of the week (especially at times when Green Campus is especially behind).

All three of these people are taking climate action, and that's great. But notice that there's something similar in these three stories: These actions are largely motivated by a social context. Alice feels obligation and social pressure. Bob feels social pressure and maybe a bit of camaraderie. Christine feels camaraderie and competitiveness. These are all fine motivations, but notice that these motivations are related to the social setting, and only tangentially to the scale of the climate crisis.

If you took Alice or Bob or Christine aside and asked them why they aren't dedicating all of their time and money to addressing climate change that they apparently believe is important, they'd look at you funny and they'd probably think you were being rude (with good reason!). If you pressed, they might tell you that money is a little tight right now, or that they would do more if they were a better person.

But the question would still feel kind of wrong. Giving all of your money away is just not what you do with money. We can all say out loud that people who give all of their possessions away to fight climate change are really great, but behind closed doors we all know that those people are crazy. (Good crazy, perhaps, but crazy all the same.)

This is a mindset that I inhabited for a while. But there's an alternative mindset that can hit you like a freight train when you start internalizing scope insensitivity.

4 – Becoming sensitive to scope

Consider Denisse, a college student. Shortly after the Deepwater Horizon BP oil spill, she encounters one of those people with the clipboards on the street corners, soliciting donations to the Nature’s Voice Initiative. They're trying to save as many oiled birds as possible. Normally, Denisse would simply dismiss the charity as Not The Most Important Thing, or Not Worth Her Time Right Now, or Somebody Else's Problem, but this time Denisse has been thinking about how her brain is bad at numbers and decides to do a quick sanity check.

He pictures herself walking along the beach after the oil spill and encountering a group of people cleaning birds as fast as they can. They simply don't have the resources to clean all of the available birds. A pathetic young bird flops toward her feet, slick with oil, eyes barely able to open. She kneels down to pick it up and help it onto the table. One of the bird-cleaners informs her that they won't have time to get to that bird themselves, but he could pull on some gloves and could probably save the bird with three minutes of washing.

Denisse decides that she would spend three minutes of her time to save the bird, and that she would also be happy to pay at least $3 to have someone else spend a few minutes cleaning the bird. She introspects and finds that this is not just because she imagined a bird right in front of her: She feels that it is worth at least three minutes of her time (or $3) to save an oiled bird in some vague, platonic sense.

And, because she's been thinking about scope insensitivity, she expects her brain to misreport how much she actually cares about large numbers of birds; the internal feeling of caring can't be expected to line up with the actual importance of the situation. So instead of just asking her gut how much she cares about de-oiling lots of birds, she shuts up and multiplies.

Thousands and thousands of birds were oiled by the BP spill alone. After shutting up and multiplying, Denisse realizes (with growing horror) that the amount she actually cares about oiled birds is lower-bounded by two months of hard work and/or fifty thousand dollars. And that's not even counting wildlife threatened by other oil spills.

And if she cares that much about de-oiling birds, then how much does she actually care about preventing the oil spills in the first place? About transitioning away from fossil fuels? About the billions of tonnes of CO2 we emit each year? About climate tipping points that could fundamentally alter Earth's habitability? About the future of our climate? She actually cares about these things to the tune of much more money than she has, and much more time than she has.

For the first time, Denisse sees a glimpse of how much she actually cares, and how dire the state of our planet's climate is.

This has the strange effect that Denisse’s reasoning goes full-circle, and she realizes that she actually can't care about oiled birds to the tune of 3 minutes or $3. Not because the birds aren't worth the time and money (in fact, she thinks that the economy produces things priced at $3 which are worth less than a bird's survival), but because she can't spend his time or money on saving the birds. The opportunity cost suddenly seems far too high: There is too much else to do! We're pumping billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere! Climate tipping points are approaching! The very stability of Earth's climate system is at stake!

Denisse doesn't wind up giving $50,000 to the Nature’s Voice Initiative, and she also doesn't donate to every environmental cause. But if you ask Denisse why she's not donating all her money, she won't look at you funny or think you're rude. She's left the place where you don't care far behind, and has realized that her mind was lying to her the whole time about the gravity of the real problems.

Now she realizes that she can't possibly do enough. After adjusting for her scope insensitivity (and the fact that her brain lies about the size of large numbers), even "smaller" environmental problems suddenly seem worthy of dedicating a life to. Campus recycling, community solar, and oily birds are suddenly all crises that she would move mountains to solve, except she's finally understood that there are just too many environmental mountains, and campus recycling isn’t the most critical bottleneck, and there might be problems that are even bigger that need to be prioritised.

In her original mindstate, the reason Denisse didn’t drop everything to help raise money for birds affected by this oil spill was because it just didn’t seem important enough. Or feasible to address, or within her control. In her mindset, she knows how much she cares, but still doesn’t drop everything to work on this issue, simply because there are even larger, more urgent systemic problems to address first. 

Denisse understands that she will never be able to tackle oil pollution at the beach, nor will she be able to halt deforestation, nor can she single-handedly lead the energy transition. But all of these problems are at least somewhat in her control. Her donations can make a difference, and she could move mountains in her career. The least she can do, is to do the math and try to figure out where she can make the biggest difference.

Alice, Bob and Christine usually aren't spending time solving the climate crisis because they forget to see its scale. If you remind them, put them in a context where they remember how much they care (hopefully without guilt or pressure), then they'll likely make a token effort or take some modest action.

By contrast, Denisse and others who have undergone the mental shift aren't working full-time on climate because there are just too many urgent environmental problems. (Denisse hopefully goes on to discover effective environmentalism and starts contributing to the most promising solutions.)

5 – Don’t trust your feelings

I'm not trying to preach here about how to be a good person. You don't need to share my viewpoint to be a good person (obviously).

Rather, I'm trying to point at a shift in perspective. Many of us go through life understanding that we should care about climate change and environmental destruction, but failing to. I think that this attitude is tied, at least in part, to the fact that most of us implicitly trust our internal care-o-meters.

The "care feeling" isn't usually strong enough to compel us to frantically reduce every tonne of emissions. So while we acknowledge that it would be virtuous to do more for the climate, we think that we can't, because we weren't gifted with that virtuous extra-caring that prominent climate activists must have.

But this is an error: the people who are doing the most to tackle climate change and environmental destruction aren't per se the people who have a larger care-o-meter; they're the people who have learned not to trust their care-o-meters.

Our care-o-meters are broken. They don't work on large numbers. Nobody has one capable of faithfully representing the scope of the climate crisis. But the fact that you can't feel the caring doesn't mean that you can't do the caring.

You don't get to feel the appropriate amount of "care" in your body. Sorry, the climate crisis is just too large, and your body is not built to respond appropriately to problems of this magnitude and evaluate which actions truly make a large difference on a global scale. But if you choose to do so, you can still act like the climate crisis is as big as it is. You can stop trusting internal feelings to guide your actions and switch over to manual control. 

Rather than trusting our care-o-meters to guide where we can make the biggest difference, our manual control allows us to step back and think through our options: which sectors are responsible for the most emissions? Where does most air pollution come from? Which skills do I have that are relevant to making a change? Which promising solutions aren’t being worked on yet? What type of actions will keep me motivated to keep up my efforts? Our intuition might fail to guide our decision-making, but none of these questions are very difficult to answer.

6 – What should you do, then?

This, of course, leads us to the question of "What do you do, then?"

Well, that depends. It depends on what you’re good at, whether you’re rich enough to donate money, and your research on what’s the biggest thing you can do. I'll plug organizations like:

• The Effective Environmentalism Initiative (which I lead), a community of people maximizing their positive climate impact.

• Giving Green (where I work), an evaluator finding the most promising climate nonprofits.

• Probably Good (which I like), a nonprofit that helps people find high-impact work.

The reason I’m building an effective environmentalism movement is because I want there to be a movement of people working to address climate change and big environmental problems who admit that their care-o-meter is broken. Rather than supporting or working on issues that feel good, effective environmentalism is (a) figuring out how you can make the biggest contribution to tackling climate change and environmental destruction using data, evidence, and careful analysis, and (b) do it, by changing your job, supporting charities, or whatever else you think is most promising.

Making the biggest difference for our planet doesn’t require you to feel the full weight of climate change, nor do you need to feel the gravity or the potential of the issue you could address. I think that’s a good thing; if we would feel the full weight of such global challenges the whole time, we would be overwhelmed, demotivated, and depressed. We don’t need to feel the caring to do the caring: simply acknowledge that you care a lot, and then figure out how you can make the biggest difference.

Credits

This essay is an adaptation from an earlier essay (On Caring) by Nate Soares (So8res), edited to tailor to an audience interested in climate change and the environment. Adaptation by Soemano Zeijlmans. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.