Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!): A recent study (Bressler, 2021) estimated that for every 4000 ton CO2 emitted today, there will be one extra premature human death before 2100. The post author converts this into human deaths per kilogram of meat produced (based on CO2 emissions for that species), and pairs this with the number of animals of that species that need to be slaughtered to produce 1kg of meat.
After weighting by neurons per animal, their key findings are below:
This suggests switching from beef to chicken or insect meat reduces climate change but increases animal suffering significantly, so might be bad overall. They suggest prioritizing a reduction of chicken meat consumption, and that policy makers stop subsidizing research on insect meat, tax meat based on climate and suffering externalities, and start subsidizing plant / cell based meat.
(If you’d like to see more summaries of top EA and LW forum posts, check out the Weekly Summaries series.)
Post summary (feel free to suggest edits!):
A recent study (Bressler, 2021) estimated that for every 4000 ton CO2 emitted today, there will be one extra premature human death before 2100. The post author converts this into human deaths per kilogram of meat produced (based on CO2 emissions for that species), and pairs this with the number of animals of that species that need to be slaughtered to produce 1kg of meat.
After weighting by neurons per animal, their key findings are below:
This suggests switching from beef to chicken or insect meat reduces climate change but increases animal suffering significantly, so might be bad overall. They suggest prioritizing a reduction of chicken meat consumption, and that policy makers stop subsidizing research on insect meat, tax meat based on climate and suffering externalities, and start subsidizing plant / cell based meat.
(If you’d like to see more summaries of top EA and LW forum posts, check out the Weekly Summaries series.)