I think offsetting your emissions and offsetting your meat consumption are treated differently by EAs because they really are different.
I liked the two examples presented by William MacAskill in ‘Doing good better’:
Offsetting your contribution to climate change by donating to CoolEarth, so that all the CO2 you produce gets offset before it gets to harm anyone—the ‘undoing harm’ kind
Donating to an org that advocates for not cheating on your spouse to offset your cheating on your spouse—the ‘apology’ kind
In the second case the damage is already done; by offsetting, you just prevent further harm. Eating meat while donating to animal welfare organizations is more like the second example. You harm some animals and then pay for some other animals to be saved. You can’t undo the harm done to the animals harmed.
I think MacAskill’s claim in (1) is based on a scientifically inaccurate picture of how Earth’s climate and weather systems work. In my view, the harm caused by CO2 emissions clearly isn’t the kind which can be undone by carbon offsetting practices.
The atmosphere is a chaotic system, meaning even small changes to it can lead to butterfly-like effects. These changes snowball into significant differences in weather patterns, affecting the timing and location of extreme weather events like cyclones, heat waves, and monsoons decades later. So, when we emit CO2 in one place and offset it elsewhere, we are almost certainly causing some people to lose their homes, be injured, fall ill or die when they otherwise wouldn’t have, while making it so that a different set of people avoid those tragedies when they otherwise wouldn’t have. And that is why neither carbon nor factory farm offsets undo any kind of harm. Both involve harming others and then conferring an equivalent benefit to an entirely different group of people. Thus, they can’t differ in terms of acceptability, I think.
The empirical support for my claims can be found in doi: 10.1088/​0951-7715/​27/​9/​R123
I think offsetting your emissions and offsetting your meat consumption are treated differently by EAs because they really are different.
I liked the two examples presented by William MacAskill in ‘Doing good better’:
Offsetting your contribution to climate change by donating to CoolEarth, so that all the CO2 you produce gets offset before it gets to harm anyone—the ‘undoing harm’ kind
Donating to an org that advocates for not cheating on your spouse to offset your cheating on your spouse—the ‘apology’ kind
In the second case the damage is already done; by offsetting, you just prevent further harm. Eating meat while donating to animal welfare organizations is more like the second example. You harm some animals and then pay for some other animals to be saved. You can’t undo the harm done to the animals harmed.
I think MacAskill’s claim in (1) is based on a scientifically inaccurate picture of how Earth’s climate and weather systems work. In my view, the harm caused by CO2 emissions clearly isn’t the kind which can be undone by carbon offsetting practices.
The atmosphere is a chaotic system, meaning even small changes to it can lead to butterfly-like effects. These changes snowball into significant differences in weather patterns, affecting the timing and location of extreme weather events like cyclones, heat waves, and monsoons decades later. So, when we emit CO2 in one place and offset it elsewhere, we are almost certainly causing some people to lose their homes, be injured, fall ill or die when they otherwise wouldn’t have, while making it so that a different set of people avoid those tragedies when they otherwise wouldn’t have. And that is why neither carbon nor factory farm offsets undo any kind of harm. Both involve harming others and then conferring an equivalent benefit to an entirely different group of people. Thus, they can’t differ in terms of acceptability, I think.
The empirical support for my claims can be found in doi: 10.1088/​0951-7715/​27/​9/​R123