FarmKind includes an offset calculator on its website, the results of which are roughly 1-3 orders of magnitude higher than some of the offset calculations I’ve seen on-Forum (e.g., here and here).
I’m personally skeptical about offset arguments for various reasons. But—although I haven’t dug under the hood too much—FarmKind’s calculation (of $23/month for an average omnivore) seems to at least mitigate many of my objections as a practical matter.
Why the differences from other approaches? Some of this may be due to using a bucket of interventions to calculate offset, which may mitigate some negative effects that can flow from focusing heavily on certain types of interventions which score best on perceived cost-effectiveness. However, some of the difference also appears to come from a design choice that has the effect of pushing up the figure (i.e., the idea that if you consume a certain type of animal or its output, then your offsetting activity should reduce an equivalent amount of suffering in that species, rather than any morally equivalent amount of farmed-animal suffering).
In the end, I suspect my own computation would be even higher than FarmKind’s for various reasons (e.g., I suspect they still give too much “credit” to the donor in the context of offsetting).[1] But it strikes me as at least in the right direction, and mitigates some practical concerns with publicizing and internalizing very low offset numbers.[2] I’ve put a specification of those reasons and concerns in footnotes to keep this a quick take and keep it somewhat more focused on FarmKind’s work than my personal musings about offsets.
Many theories of change in farmed-animal welfare end up placing additional costs on third parties. When we are deciding where to spend our charitable dollar, that’s fine! But in an offset situation, I don’t think it is proper to spend $1 to influence action that will cost other consumers $10, and then claim all the impact myself for offset purposes. I would have just pushed most of the costs of offsetting my actions onto other people. Treating financial costs to other consumers as collateral damage doesn’t strike me as consistent with impartiality where I am also participating in the system as a consumer. (I will make an exception for financial costs imposed on Big Ag that it cannot effectively pass on to consumers.)
There’s also a tendency to give all (or at least too much) of the moral credit to the donor, as if donating money were the only input to successful action. It seems that some of the credit should go to people who work at animal-welfare organizations, even non-EA ones. Frankly, corporate campaigns wouldn’t work too well if the public didn’t care at all and wouldn’t punish corporations that refused to make welfare commitments. As with third-party financial costs, I think there is a difference in how we should think about these things when deciding whether to donate and when thinking about how much offset credit we can take.
Some orgs have limited room for more funding compared to the number of omnivorous consumers out there. I’d be uneasy with publishing an offset estimate that would be woefully inadequate if more than a tiny number of people chose to offset. There’s likely to always be a limit on the number of individuals who can effectively offset, but adding orgs with room for more funding (e.g., those in the cultured meat space) should significantly increase that number.
In addition to philosophical concerns about offsetting in general, I sense two practical concerns flowing more specifically from low figures:
The idea that an omnivore’s involvement in the factory-farming system can be offset for (e.g.) a nickel a day risks trivializing the magnitude of the harm. Something that can be fixed for that amount doesn’t feel like a big problem.
It is unvirtuous to derive net benefit from the factory-farming system. If you’re saving $25/month on your food spend due to factory farming’s existence, and then kicking back $1 to offset, you are still retaining 96% of the financial benefit of the system. I don’t think the net benefit has to be calculated as the difference between what non-negative-welfare products would cost today and what one’s actual spend is. I would be somewhat more lenient and characterize it as the difference between what one spends today and what one would need to spend for the same consumption in a world where non-negative-welfare products were the norm.
For a different kind of FarmKind post:
FarmKind includes an offset calculator on its website, the results of which are roughly 1-3 orders of magnitude higher than some of the offset calculations I’ve seen on-Forum (e.g., here and here).
I’m personally skeptical about offset arguments for various reasons. But—although I haven’t dug under the hood too much—FarmKind’s calculation (of $23/month for an average omnivore) seems to at least mitigate many of my objections as a practical matter.
Why the differences from other approaches? Some of this may be due to using a bucket of interventions to calculate offset, which may mitigate some negative effects that can flow from focusing heavily on certain types of interventions which score best on perceived cost-effectiveness. However, some of the difference also appears to come from a design choice that has the effect of pushing up the figure (i.e., the idea that if you consume a certain type of animal or its output, then your offsetting activity should reduce an equivalent amount of suffering in that species, rather than any morally equivalent amount of farmed-animal suffering).
In the end, I suspect my own computation would be even higher than FarmKind’s for various reasons (e.g., I suspect they still give too much “credit” to the donor in the context of offsetting).[1] But it strikes me as at least in the right direction, and mitigates some practical concerns with publicizing and internalizing very low offset numbers.[2] I’ve put a specification of those reasons and concerns in footnotes to keep this a quick take and keep it somewhat more focused on FarmKind’s work than my personal musings about offsets.
In more detail:
Many theories of change in farmed-animal welfare end up placing additional costs on third parties. When we are deciding where to spend our charitable dollar, that’s fine! But in an offset situation, I don’t think it is proper to spend $1 to influence action that will cost other consumers $10, and then claim all the impact myself for offset purposes. I would have just pushed most of the costs of offsetting my actions onto other people. Treating financial costs to other consumers as collateral damage doesn’t strike me as consistent with impartiality where I am also participating in the system as a consumer. (I will make an exception for financial costs imposed on Big Ag that it cannot effectively pass on to consumers.)
There’s also a tendency to give all (or at least too much) of the moral credit to the donor, as if donating money were the only input to successful action. It seems that some of the credit should go to people who work at animal-welfare organizations, even non-EA ones. Frankly, corporate campaigns wouldn’t work too well if the public didn’t care at all and wouldn’t punish corporations that refused to make welfare commitments. As with third-party financial costs, I think there is a difference in how we should think about these things when deciding whether to donate and when thinking about how much offset credit we can take.
Some orgs have limited room for more funding compared to the number of omnivorous consumers out there. I’d be uneasy with publishing an offset estimate that would be woefully inadequate if more than a tiny number of people chose to offset. There’s likely to always be a limit on the number of individuals who can effectively offset, but adding orgs with room for more funding (e.g., those in the cultured meat space) should significantly increase that number.
In addition to philosophical concerns about offsetting in general, I sense two practical concerns flowing more specifically from low figures:
The idea that an omnivore’s involvement in the factory-farming system can be offset for (e.g.) a nickel a day risks trivializing the magnitude of the harm. Something that can be fixed for that amount doesn’t feel like a big problem.
It is unvirtuous to derive net benefit from the factory-farming system. If you’re saving $25/month on your food spend due to factory farming’s existence, and then kicking back $1 to offset, you are still retaining 96% of the financial benefit of the system. I don’t think the net benefit has to be calculated as the difference between what non-negative-welfare products would cost today and what one’s actual spend is. I would be somewhat more lenient and characterize it as the difference between what one spends today and what one would need to spend for the same consumption in a world where non-negative-welfare products were the norm.