I don’t think the math checks out here. I do a quick cost benefit analysis here, and meat vs. climate interventions don’t seem like comparable orders of magnitude to me. Not eating meat appears to be a much more cost effective sacrifice.
(Math: Responding to Robi’s comparison between not eating 1kg chicken (meat for 3 days) vs not using AC for 3 days. I’m not sure where the 10^(-14) °C number came from, but let’s assume it draws ~1,000 watts, or about ~100,000 watt-hours/3days. US power generation apparently produces about 0.85 pounds of CO2 emissions per kWh, so that’s 85 pounds of carbon. At about 2 trillion tons of carbon per degree Celcius, that is indeed about 10^(-14) °C of warming.)
Given a value of 10^8 deaths per degree of warming (notes), this comparison implicitly values human to chicken lives at about 1,000,000 : 1. (10^-6 = 10^8 * 10^-14) (1 chicken produces ~1kg meat)
Reasonable EAs disagree, but I guess I value chickens at more like a 10,000:1 ratio to humans, especially given how much suffering factory farming entails. Given that not eating meat for 3 days and not having AC for 3 days feel like comparably small hardships, the impact of not eating meat seems to be about 100 times higher for the same cost.
This sort of cost-benefit analysis makes me feel like personal sacrifices for the climate are not very high value compared to veganism.
Are there personal climate sacrifices that are more worthwhile than this, or is this line of reasoning incorrect somehow?
I’m not sure this is a fair comparison if what you want is an apples-to-apples comparative cost-effectiveness analysis. Not eating chicken is the lowest-hanging fruit in terms of personal sacrifice for animal welfare. Switching from eating beef to beans for 3 days would give you orders of magnitude less bang for sacrifice in animal welfare terms. Conversely, going without AC is hardly the most cost-effective personal sacrifice for climate change mitigation. For that, I’d pick something like biking to work instead of driving (the magnitude of the sacrifice is going to vary a lot from person to person; I really like biking, so it’s not much of a sacrifice to me) or taking a train instead of flying, when the latter would be more convenient.
It also seems strange to only count the mortality costs of climate change. This seems especially striking given that my understanding is that it isn’t really the mortality that’s the core issue in farm animal welfare since the relevant counterfactual in the going-vegan scenario is fewer farm animals being born, to begin with.
Finally, I just want to emphasize that I’m really trying to bracket the question of cause importance. I really don’t feel like I have a handle on how much negative welfare a chicken on a factory farm experiences. Climate damages are somewhat easier to value, but there is still a pretty wide dispersal in estimates of the social cost of carbon. However, I think you can take my core point on board regardless of your view on the relative importance of the two causes. That is, the role of the contributions that individuals can make to solving each problem are roughly analogous. Now, maybe you think that farm animal welfare is just so much more important as a cause area than climate change mitigation that it justifies the discrepancy in EA behavior, but then it’s at least worth being explicit about that. Given that low neglectedness is the main factor typically cited by EAs for emphasizing climate change and that there are not significant diminishing marginal returns (on the extensive margin) to individual sacrifice, that itself would require an update in what I understand to be the EA consensus.
I don’t think the math checks out here. I do a quick cost benefit analysis here, and meat vs. climate interventions don’t seem like comparable orders of magnitude to me. Not eating meat appears to be a much more cost effective sacrifice.
(Math: Responding to Robi’s comparison between not eating 1kg chicken (meat for 3 days) vs not using AC for 3 days. I’m not sure where the 10^(-14) °C number came from, but let’s assume it draws ~1,000 watts, or about ~100,000 watt-hours/3days. US power generation apparently produces about 0.85 pounds of CO2 emissions per kWh, so that’s 85 pounds of carbon. At about 2 trillion tons of carbon per degree Celcius, that is indeed about 10^(-14) °C of warming.)
Given a value of 10^8 deaths per degree of warming (notes), this comparison implicitly values human to chicken lives at about 1,000,000 : 1. (10^-6 = 10^8 * 10^-14) (1 chicken produces ~1kg meat)
Reasonable EAs disagree, but I guess I value chickens at more like a 10,000:1 ratio to humans, especially given how much suffering factory farming entails. Given that not eating meat for 3 days and not having AC for 3 days feel like comparably small hardships, the impact of not eating meat seems to be about 100 times higher for the same cost.
This sort of cost-benefit analysis makes me feel like personal sacrifices for the climate are not very high value compared to veganism.
Are there personal climate sacrifices that are more worthwhile than this, or is this line of reasoning incorrect somehow?
I’m not sure this is a fair comparison if what you want is an apples-to-apples comparative cost-effectiveness analysis. Not eating chicken is the lowest-hanging fruit in terms of personal sacrifice for animal welfare. Switching from eating beef to beans for 3 days would give you orders of magnitude less bang for sacrifice in animal welfare terms. Conversely, going without AC is hardly the most cost-effective personal sacrifice for climate change mitigation. For that, I’d pick something like biking to work instead of driving (the magnitude of the sacrifice is going to vary a lot from person to person; I really like biking, so it’s not much of a sacrifice to me) or taking a train instead of flying, when the latter would be more convenient.
It also seems strange to only count the mortality costs of climate change. This seems especially striking given that my understanding is that it isn’t really the mortality that’s the core issue in farm animal welfare since the relevant counterfactual in the going-vegan scenario is fewer farm animals being born, to begin with.
Finally, I just want to emphasize that I’m really trying to bracket the question of cause importance. I really don’t feel like I have a handle on how much negative welfare a chicken on a factory farm experiences. Climate damages are somewhat easier to value, but there is still a pretty wide dispersal in estimates of the social cost of carbon. However, I think you can take my core point on board regardless of your view on the relative importance of the two causes. That is, the role of the contributions that individuals can make to solving each problem are roughly analogous. Now, maybe you think that farm animal welfare is just so much more important as a cause area than climate change mitigation that it justifies the discrepancy in EA behavior, but then it’s at least worth being explicit about that. Given that low neglectedness is the main factor typically cited by EAs for emphasizing climate change and that there are not significant diminishing marginal returns (on the extensive margin) to individual sacrifice, that itself would require an update in what I understand to be the EA consensus.