Put differently, buying eggs only hurt hens via some indirect market effects, and I’m now offsetting my harm at that level before it turns into any actual harm to a hen.
I probably misunderstand but isn’t this also true about other offsetting schemes like convincing people to go vegetarian? They also lower demand.
At a minimum they also impose harms on the people who you convinced not to eat meat (since you are assuming that eating meat was a benefit to you that you wanted to pay for). And of course they make further vegetarian outreach harder . And in most cases they also won’t be such a precise an offset, e.g. it will apply to different animal products or at different times or with unclear probability.
That said, I agree that I can offset “me eating an egg” by paying Alice enough that she’s willing to skip eating an egg, and in some sense that’s an even purer offset than the one in this post.
At a minimum they also impose harms on the people who you convinced not to eat meat (since you are assuming that eating meat was a benefit to you that you wanted to pay for). And of course they make further vegetarian outreach harder .
The primary argument for convincing someone to not eat meat is that the long term costs outweigh the short term benefits, so I’m not sure that you can categorically state that convincing someone to stop eating meat is causing them harm. Sure, they don’t get to eat a steak, but the odds of their grandchildren not dying from catastrophic climate collapse go up.
If we expected increased outreach and prosletyization from vegetarians to uniformly make further outreach harder, would we expect to see the rapid and exponential growth of vegetarianism (as it seems to be)?
If we expected increased outreach and prosletyization from vegetarians to uniformly make further outreach harder, would we expect to see the rapid and exponential growth of vegetarianism (as it seems to be)?
Is this true? e.g. Gallup shows the fraction of US vegetarians at 6% in 2000 and 5% 2020 (link), so if there is exponential growth it seems like either their numbers are wrong or the growth is very slow.
The primary argument for convincing someone to not eat meat is that the long term costs outweigh the short term benefits, so I’m not sure that you can categorically state that convincing someone to stop eating meat is causing them harm. Sure, they don’t get to eat a steak, but the odds of their grandchildren not dying from catastrophic climate collapse go up.
It seems implausible to me that the individual benefits from reducing climate change are comparable to the costs or benefits of diet change over the short term. Even if everyone changing their diet decreased extinction risk by 1% (I think that’s implausible, but you could try to tell a story about non-extinction environmental impacts being crazy large), being vegetarian would reduce your grandchildren’s probability of death by well under < 1/billion which is completely negligible.
Also, I would guess that on this forum the primary argument for convincing people not to engage with factory farming is the suffering it causes to farm animals.
That said, I think you could argue that if someone decides not to eat meat on reflection and that their previous diet was in error, then in some sense you are doing them a favor by helping them reach that conclusion.
Is this true? e.g. Gallup shows the fraction of US vegetarians at 6% in 2000 and 5% 2020 (link), so if there is exponential growth it seems like either their numbers are wrong or the growth is very slow.
It seems implausible to me that the individual benefits from reducing climate change are comparable to the costs or benefits of diet change over the short term. Even if everyone changing their diet decreased extinction risk by 1% (I think that’s implausible, but you could try to tell a story about non-extinction environmental impacts being crazy large), being vegetarian would reduce your grandchildren’s probability of death by well under < 1/billion which is completely negligible.
Culture is a thing, and the decisisons that you express shape the social valuations of the people around you. A single person going against a carnivorous tide will indeed change nothing, but a single person choosing to engage in a wider, growing movement can have substantial knock-on effects. I think you may be underestimating the impact of modern animal agriculture here, I would say that the difference between a timelines that drastically reduces its meat intake would be measureably better environmentally—primarily because it would drastically reduce the land requirements of feeding the world, which would in turn mean we could rewild large parts of it for a lot cheaper. No drastic change means that the freefall collapse of the biosphere continues unabated, whereas change could plausibly improve the situation like I describe.
I probably misunderstand but isn’t this also true about other offsetting schemes like convincing people to go vegetarian? They also lower demand.
At a minimum they also impose harms on the people who you convinced not to eat meat (since you are assuming that eating meat was a benefit to you that you wanted to pay for). And of course they make further vegetarian outreach harder . And in most cases they also won’t be such a precise an offset, e.g. it will apply to different animal products or at different times or with unclear probability.
That said, I agree that I can offset “me eating an egg” by paying Alice enough that she’s willing to skip eating an egg, and in some sense that’s an even purer offset than the one in this post.
The primary argument for convincing someone to not eat meat is that the long term costs outweigh the short term benefits, so I’m not sure that you can categorically state that convincing someone to stop eating meat is causing them harm. Sure, they don’t get to eat a steak, but the odds of their grandchildren not dying from catastrophic climate collapse go up.
If we expected increased outreach and prosletyization from vegetarians to uniformly make further outreach harder, would we expect to see the rapid and exponential growth of vegetarianism (as it seems to be)?
Is this true? e.g. Gallup shows the fraction of US vegetarians at 6% in 2000 and 5% 2020 (link), so if there is exponential growth it seems like either their numbers are wrong or the growth is very slow.
It seems implausible to me that the individual benefits from reducing climate change are comparable to the costs or benefits of diet change over the short term. Even if everyone changing their diet decreased extinction risk by 1% (I think that’s implausible, but you could try to tell a story about non-extinction environmental impacts being crazy large), being vegetarian would reduce your grandchildren’s probability of death by well under < 1/billion which is completely negligible.
Also, I would guess that on this forum the primary argument for convincing people not to engage with factory farming is the suffering it causes to farm animals.
That said, I think you could argue that if someone decides not to eat meat on reflection and that their previous diet was in error, then in some sense you are doing them a favor by helping them reach that conclusion.
Well the nature of exponential growth includes a long tail, but yes, it does appear that over the past few decades there has been substantial growth in many areas, with the UK reporting 150,000 vegans in 2006 compared to 600,000 vegans in 2018. Additionally, the vegan food industry “$14.2 billion in 2018 and is expected to reach $31.4 billion by 2026, registering a CAGR of 10.5% from 2019 to 2026.” That’s a really high growth rate—I doubt that there is no other sector of the food industry expanding as rapdily as that, though I can’t say for sure.
Culture is a thing, and the decisisons that you express shape the social valuations of the people around you. A single person going against a carnivorous tide will indeed change nothing, but a single person choosing to engage in a wider, growing movement can have substantial knock-on effects. I think you may be underestimating the impact of modern animal agriculture here, I would say that the difference between a timelines that drastically reduces its meat intake would be measureably better environmentally—primarily because it would drastically reduce the land requirements of feeding the world, which would in turn mean we could rewild large parts of it for a lot cheaper. No drastic change means that the freefall collapse of the biosphere continues unabated, whereas change could plausibly improve the situation like I describe.