I’ve been thinking about getting involved in climate activism, particularly during the US election season, but one nagging concern has been preventing me from doing so: that climate change mitigation could actually result in increased suffering.
I’m looking at this from a single angle: factory farming. My personal moral philosophy places a much greater degree of emphasis on intense suffering than on widespread suffering — in other words, five individuals’ each experiencing a (hypothetically quantifiable) utility of negative one thousand is far worse than one thousand individuals’ each experiencing a utility of negative five. From this perspective, wild-animal suffering is essentially negligible in comparison to domestic-animal suffering — human impact on wild animals consists mostly of relatively quick deaths, whereas factory-farmed animals spend their entire lives in horrifically inhumane conditions.
Factory farming is entirely a product of human civilization — and relatively recent human civilization at that (my understanding is that it only really came about after World War II). Climate change is one of the greatest threats to human civilization. While experts seem to generally consider full societal collapse to be an unlikely result of climate change, climate change could lead to a lower level of civilization overall. As more and more parts of the world become increasingly unlivable, the capacity of those regions to support a level of civilization in which factory farming exists could decrease. A place that is repeatedly hit by storms or devastated by droughts seems less likely to contain factory farms.
These are the concerns that I have. What I don’t have is the scientific expertise to evaluate how reasonable my concerns are. Would a world with, say, 2.5 degrees of warming have less factory farming than a world with 2.0 degrees of warming? It seems similarly plausible that the opposite is true. Perhaps by blunting human prosperity, climate change will limit our evolution away from factory farms, leaving us at the top of a sort of animal-cruelty Kuznets curve. Animal welfare is often derided as a concern of the privileged, and there’s some evidence that the prevalence of factory farming will decrease if societies become richer. Meat consumption is on the decline in several Western countries. Alternatives to meat are a booming market. The proportion of hens raised cage-free has risen sharply in the last decade in the US and Europe. If more prosperity frees people to care more about animals, climate change could leave both humans and farm animals worse off.
So, ultimately, my question is this: Would a marginal degree of climate change mitigation compared to the status quo have a positive or negative worldwide effect on factory farming and, by extension, intense suffering? This is obviously a very complicated question, and I don’t expect any one person to necessarily have a perfect answer, but I’d be interested in your thoughts!
Is climate change good?
I’ve been thinking about getting involved in climate activism, particularly during the US election season, but one nagging concern has been preventing me from doing so: that climate change mitigation could actually result in increased suffering.
I’m looking at this from a single angle: factory farming. My personal moral philosophy places a much greater degree of emphasis on intense suffering than on widespread suffering — in other words, five individuals’ each experiencing a (hypothetically quantifiable) utility of negative one thousand is far worse than one thousand individuals’ each experiencing a utility of negative five. From this perspective, wild-animal suffering is essentially negligible in comparison to domestic-animal suffering — human impact on wild animals consists mostly of relatively quick deaths, whereas factory-farmed animals spend their entire lives in horrifically inhumane conditions.
Factory farming is entirely a product of human civilization — and relatively recent human civilization at that (my understanding is that it only really came about after World War II). Climate change is one of the greatest threats to human civilization. While experts seem to generally consider full societal collapse to be an unlikely result of climate change, climate change could lead to a lower level of civilization overall. As more and more parts of the world become increasingly unlivable, the capacity of those regions to support a level of civilization in which factory farming exists could decrease. A place that is repeatedly hit by storms or devastated by droughts seems less likely to contain factory farms.
These are the concerns that I have. What I don’t have is the scientific expertise to evaluate how reasonable my concerns are. Would a world with, say, 2.5 degrees of warming have less factory farming than a world with 2.0 degrees of warming? It seems similarly plausible that the opposite is true. Perhaps by blunting human prosperity, climate change will limit our evolution away from factory farms, leaving us at the top of a sort of animal-cruelty Kuznets curve. Animal welfare is often derided as a concern of the privileged, and there’s some evidence that the prevalence of factory farming will decrease if societies become richer. Meat consumption is on the decline in several Western countries. Alternatives to meat are a booming market. The proportion of hens raised cage-free has risen sharply in the last decade in the US and Europe. If more prosperity frees people to care more about animals, climate change could leave both humans and farm animals worse off.
So, ultimately, my question is this: Would a marginal degree of climate change mitigation compared to the status quo have a positive or negative worldwide effect on factory farming and, by extension, intense suffering? This is obviously a very complicated question, and I don’t expect any one person to necessarily have a perfect answer, but I’d be interested in your thoughts!