While this particular number is highly sensitive to the baseline parameters of the model, the broader conclusion that animal welfare costs completely swamp the climate costs of eating meat turns out to be almost unavoidable once you grant that factory-farmed animal lives are net-negative.
This sort of question depends enormously on the parameters, and I’m not convinced that it gets you all the way to “completely swamp”? The paper seems to be https://nbviewer.org/github/kevinkuruc/Papers_for_Download/blob/main/SCWDraft.pdf and while it’s not easy to read I think it is valuing suffering equally whether experienced by humans or animals? If you instead think animals matter much less than humans (ex), which is a common view, that would bring the cost down well below $100k.
Yes, that’s true, but you’d need to count animal interests for (something like) less than 0.001 (which seems a pretty extreme discount of genuine suffering!) before they were in the ballpark of the climate costs.
You can get your factor-of-1,000 from a combination of:
Valuing instrumental effects more than short term suffering (perhaps because of taking a longtermist lens in which case this could get you more than a factor-of-1,000 by itself; but one doesn’t need to adopt longtermism to think some more moderate factor-of-adjustment is correct here);
Upweighting the climate costs to count economic impacts on the poorest more than economic impacts on richer people (probably correct and important, but I’m not sure if this is like a factor-of-2 adjustment or a factor-of-20 adjustment);
Upweighting climate costs to account for tail risks in addition to central projections of economic cost (if 90% of your worry about climate change is about tail risks this should be a factor-of-10 adjustment; different people will have different takes on that);
The direct moral importance of suffering of different beings (reasonable views vary a lot, but Jeff’s linked post seems like a careful thinker trying to have a reasonable take and arriving at figures in the vicinity of factor-of-1,000 just from this factor)
I don’t think it’s that hard for combinations of these factors to push you over to “climate effects matter more”.
This sort of question depends enormously on the parameters, and I’m not convinced that it gets you all the way to “completely swamp”? The paper seems to be https://nbviewer.org/github/kevinkuruc/Papers_for_Download/blob/main/SCWDraft.pdf and while it’s not easy to read I think it is valuing suffering equally whether experienced by humans or animals? If you instead think animals matter much less than humans (ex), which is a common view, that would bring the cost down well below $100k.
Yes, that’s true, but you’d need to count animal interests for (something like) less than 0.001 (which seems a pretty extreme discount of genuine suffering!) before they were in the ballpark of the climate costs.
You can get your factor-of-1,000 from a combination of:
Valuing instrumental effects more than short term suffering (perhaps because of taking a longtermist lens in which case this could get you more than a factor-of-1,000 by itself; but one doesn’t need to adopt longtermism to think some more moderate factor-of-adjustment is correct here);
Upweighting the climate costs to count economic impacts on the poorest more than economic impacts on richer people (probably correct and important, but I’m not sure if this is like a factor-of-2 adjustment or a factor-of-20 adjustment);
Upweighting climate costs to account for tail risks in addition to central projections of economic cost (if 90% of your worry about climate change is about tail risks this should be a factor-of-10 adjustment; different people will have different takes on that);
The direct moral importance of suffering of different beings (reasonable views vary a lot, but Jeff’s linked post seems like a careful thinker trying to have a reasonable take and arriving at figures in the vicinity of factor-of-1,000 just from this factor)
I don’t think it’s that hard for combinations of these factors to push you over to “climate effects matter more”.