ethical offsets for eating meat are difficult because it’s hard to quantify the expected impact of e.g donating to an animal rights charity, and compare it to the impact of eating meat. (if you pay for a lobbyist to talk to a congressman for 30 minutes about larger cages for chicken farming, how much does this improve chicken lives, and how many chicken lives saved is that equivalent to?)
here’s a much simpler solution: almost everyone agrees that a human is more morally valuable than a cow, even if the human is far away in a distant land. (the cow is also far away!) it costs ~$5000 to save a human life—while arriving at this number obviously still requires assumptions, they’re much less rickety.
cows are pretty big, so you can get about 500lb of beef from each cow. beef is about $6/lb, so it’s not completely crazy to spend $10/lb on ethical offsetting. this is less bad than it sounds, because the raw cost of the beef is probably only a fraction of your total expenditures on food.
(unfortunately, chicken enjoyers get kind of screwed because chickens are much smaller, and can’t use the trick of amortizing the $5000 over a lot of meat. so they need to either make up an exchange rate between human and chicken lives, or use a conservative bound of 1:1. thankfully, I like beef more than chicken anyways.)
ethical offsets for eating meat are difficult because it’s hard to quantify the expected impact of e.g donating to an animal rights charity, and compare it to the impact of eating meat. (if you pay for a lobbyist to talk to a congressman for 30 minutes about larger cages for chicken farming, how much does this improve chicken lives, and how many chicken lives saved is that equivalent to?)
here’s a much simpler solution: almost everyone agrees that a human is more morally valuable than a cow, even if the human is far away in a distant land. (the cow is also far away!) it costs ~$5000 to save a human life—while arriving at this number obviously still requires assumptions, they’re much less rickety.
cows are pretty big, so you can get about 500lb of beef from each cow. beef is about $6/lb, so it’s not completely crazy to spend $10/lb on ethical offsetting. this is less bad than it sounds, because the raw cost of the beef is probably only a fraction of your total expenditures on food.
(unfortunately, chicken enjoyers get kind of screwed because chickens are much smaller, and can’t use the trick of amortizing the $5000 over a lot of meat. so they need to either make up an exchange rate between human and chicken lives, or use a conservative bound of 1:1. thankfully, I like beef more than chicken anyways.)