Great post! I do think indirect effects are underrated.
Reducing the consumption of animals has lots of benefits, but I do think there are some negative ones too:
Having less farmed animals implies decreasing the production of animal feed, and therefore reducing crop area, which tends to:
Increase the population of wild animals (unclear whether good or bad), which I do not know whether it is good or bad. I think the welfare of terrestrial wild animals is driven by that of terrestrial arthropods, but I am very uncertain about whether they have good or bad lives. I recommend checking this preprint from Heather Browning and Walter Weit for an overview of the welfare status of wild animals.
Decrease the resilience against food shocks (bad). As I wrote here:
The smaller the population of (farmed) animals, the less animal feed could be directed to humans to mitigate the food shocks caused by the lower temperature, light and humidity during abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios (ASRS), which can be a nuclear winter, volcanic winter, or impact winter.
Because producing calories from animals is much less efficient than from plants, decreasing the number of animals results in a smaller area of crops.
So the agricultural system would be less oversized (i.e. it would have a smaller safety margin), and scaling up food production to counter the lower yields during an ASRS would be harder.
Eating less animals improves human health, which is good per se, but also increases productivity /β economic growth, which has questionable longterm effects:
In the last few hundred years, economic growth has been associated with better living conditions (good), but also with higher existential risk (bad).
I think the focus should be on differential progress, but I do know whether better health, and greater economic growth contribute positively or negatively to that.
I have a draft for a question-post describing the multiple effects of decreasing the consumption of animals. Comments are welcome!
Hi Sebastian,
Great post! I do think indirect effects are underrated.
Reducing the consumption of animals has lots of benefits, but I do think there are some negative ones too:
Having less farmed animals implies decreasing the production of animal feed, and therefore reducing crop area, which tends to:
Increase the population of wild animals (unclear whether good or bad), which I do not know whether it is good or bad. I think the welfare of terrestrial wild animals is driven by that of terrestrial arthropods, but I am very uncertain about whether they have good or bad lives. I recommend checking this preprint from Heather Browning and Walter Weit for an overview of the welfare status of wild animals.
Decrease the resilience against food shocks (bad). As I wrote here:
The smaller the population of (farmed) animals, the less animal feed could be directed to humans to mitigate the food shocks caused by the lower temperature, light and humidity during abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios (ASRS), which can be a nuclear winter, volcanic winter, or impact winter.
Because producing calories from animals is much less efficient than from plants, decreasing the number of animals results in a smaller area of crops.
So the agricultural system would be less oversized (i.e. it would have a smaller safety margin), and scaling up food production to counter the lower yields during an ASRS would be harder.
Less farmed animals reduces GHG emissions, but:
It is quite unclear whether climate change is good or bad for wild animals.
More global warming might be good to mitigate the food shocks caused by abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios.
Eating less animals improves human health, which is good per se, but also increases productivity /β economic growth, which has questionable longterm effects:
In the last few hundred years, economic growth has been associated with better living conditions (good), but also with higher existential risk (bad).
I think the focus should be on differential progress, but I do know whether better health, and greater economic growth contribute positively or negatively to that.
I have a draft for a question-post describing the multiple effects of decreasing the consumption of animals. Comments are welcome!