Chronic Versus Acute Harm: Weighting Erosion Against Extraction.

Abstract

Acute extraction events — blasting, crushing, cutting — affect roughly 50 billion tonnes of rock per year. Chronic erosion affects, in some meaningful sense, the entire exposed lithosphere on a continuous basis. The total integrated tonnage of chronic erosion is, over any reasonable time horizon, vastly larger than the acute total. Yet the per-event welfare significance of erosion is plausibly far lower than that of comminution. This paper asks how the two should be weighted against each other in cause-prioritisation work.

Key claims

• Under most plausible weightings, acute events dominate per-dollar cost-effectiveness for the simple reason that they are concentrated and tractable to address. Erosion is diffuse and largely unaddressable through philanthropic intervention.
• This is not the same as claiming that erosion-induced distress is small. It may be very large in aggregate. It is, however, low in cost-effective tractability.
• RWP programmes accordingly focus on acute harm. We do not assert this is the welfare-optimal allocation. We assert it is the cost-effective one under our current best estimates.

Open questions

Whether welfare significance is best modelled as a function of rate-of-change (acute events score higher) or of total displacement (chronic events catch up over geological time) remains unresolved. A satisfactory account will need to specify both the temporal kernel and the underlying credence about lithic phenomenology. We are not yet in a position to specify either with confidence.

Pre-print available on request via contact. Peer review pending.