In a late-2020 interview with CNBC, Skype cofounder Jaan Tallinn made a perplexing statement. “Climate change,” he said, “is not going to be an existential risk unless there’s a runaway scenario.” A “runaway scenario” would occur if crossing one or more critical thresholds in the climate system causes Earth’s thermostat to rise uncontrollably. The hotter it has become, the hotter it will become, via self-amplifying processes. This is probably what happened a few billion years ago on our planetary neighbor Venus, a hellish cauldron whose average surface temperature is high enough to melt lead and zinc.
Fortunately, the best science today suggests that a runaway scenario is unlikely, although not impossible. Yet even without a runaway scenario, the best science also frighteningly affirms that climate change will have devastating consequences. It will precipitate lethal heatwaves, megadroughts, catastrophic wildfires (like those seen recently in the Western U.S.), desertification, sea-level rise, mass migrations, widespread political instability, food-supply disruptions/famines, extreme weather events (more dangerous hurricanes and flash floods), infectious disease outbreaks, biodiversity loss, mass extinctions, ecological collapse, socioeconomic upheaval, terrorism and wars, etc. To quote an ominous 2020 paper co-signed by more than 11,000 scientists from around the world, “planet Earth is facing a climate emergency” that, unless immediate and drastic action is taken, will bring about “untold suffering.”
So why does Tallinn think that climate change isn’t an existential risk? Intuitively, if anything should count as an existential risk it’s climate change, right?
Cynical readers might suspect that, given Tallinn’s immense fortune of an estimated $900 million, this might be just another case of a super-wealthy tech guy dismissing or minimizing threats that probably won’t directly harm him personally. Despite being disproportionately responsible for the climate catastrophe, the super-rich will be the least affected by it. Peter Thiel—the libertarian who voted for a climate-denier in 2016—has his “apocalypse retreat” in New Zealand, Richard Branson owns his own hurricane-proof island, Jeff Bezos bought some 400,000 acres in Texas, and Elon Musk wants to move to Mars. Astoundingly, Reid Hoffman, the multi-billionaire who cofounded LinkedIn, reports that “more than 50 percent of Silicon Valley’s billionaires have bought some level of ‘apocalypse insurance,’ such as an underground bunker.”
That’s one possibility, for sure. But I think there’s a deeper reason for Tallinn’s comments. It concerns an increasingly influential moral worldview called longtermism. This has roots in the work of philosopher Nick Bostrom, who coined the term “existential risk” in 2002 and, three years later, founded the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) based at the University of Oxford, which has received large sums of money from both Tallinn and Musk. Over the past decade, “longtermism” has become one of the main ideas promoted by the “Effective Altruism” (EA) movement, which generated controversy in the past for encouraging young people to work for Wall Street and petrochemical companies in order to donate part of their income to charity, an idea called “earn to give.” According to the longtermist Benjamin Todd, formerly at Oxford University, “longtermism might well turn out to be one of the most important discoveries of effective altruism so far.”
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