Re: your poll, I’d say neither. Veganism and offsetting are both ‘rearranging furniture on the Titanic’. The button I’d press wouldn’t be to make everyone vegan in an instant, but to get cultivated meat on supermarket shelves at a competitive price point, in an instant.
Nothing else (bar x-risks for humans) is going to end factory farming. As you say, meat consumption is skyrocketing, yet in animal advocacy we act like there isn’t a viable alternative that is, or rather could be, on the table.
So strong is my view on this that I’d go as far as to say that the way funding is allocated in animal advocacy is extremely ineffective. It should basically all be going towards scale-up grants or policy advocacy or whatever cultivated meat businesses need.
But yeah the findings of the Pulse survey you mentioned don’t surprise me. In the end I think this campaign was a load of hot air, probably not particularly helpful nor damaging either way.
Alternative proteins don’t seem like an overwhelmingly good bet. How much will the marginal $ to R&D bring forward the development of cost-competitive cultivated chicken? What’s the trade off between the broiler lives prevented, and the broiler lives improved if we spent that marginal $ on broiler welfare advocacy instead? If cost-competitive cultivated chicken is developed, will that really displace all chicken meat (and how quickly)? (I mostly mean these questions rhetorically, and just mean that it’s hard to answer to answer them confidently)
But also: even the best intervention might not be the best to fund at the margin. Not every marginal resource is fungible. And going all-in on one theory of change might take us to odd places for movement dynamics.
Good questions. R&D isn’t the only lever. Given the relatively small amount of money that would be coming from EA, I’d direct the funding towards policy advocacy, comms/educating the market, and lobbying for governments to invest more in scale up funding.
I’m not in favour of intervention plurality for its own sake. Even if cultivated meat would only displace 50%, 25%, 10% of demand for broiler chickens, that would already be hugely beneficial compared to what we spend on currently.
And you wouldn’t have to be vegan to support it, which would open the movement up to others in the way FarmKind have tried to do. Just imagine: vegans, non vegans, environmentalists, investors, and businesses all united under one common, commercially viable goal of giving consumers another choice that has almost no trade offs compared to what they eat currently. Most other interventions and meta debates seem trivial by comparison if you think that cultivated meat is inevitable… which I do.
I think the main problem from a movement dynamics point of view is that it would undermine much of what people spend their energy on now.
Because a large proportion of vegans revert to eating animals at some point in their lives. Moreover, it isn’t going to happen in any timeframe, unfortunately.
I think pressing a button to make everyone (ethically) vegan would be a much more robust way to end factory farming (and all forms of animal exploitation) than pressing a button to get cultivated meat on supermarket shelves at a competitive price point.
If everyone is ethically vegan: the social/cultural pressure to remain vegan is much stronger –> ex-veganism is heavily stigmatised –> far fewer ex-vegans –> not enough demand for factory farming to survive or return
Even before that, presumably factory farming would be undermined from every angle: lawmakers would ban it, employees would quit/strike, consumers would boycott
As far as I know, cultivated meat faces a number of cultural barriers
Clearly it’s much much harder to make everyone vegan than to get affordable cultivated meat on supermarket shelves! That’s one reason why I think cultivated meat is currently a more powerful tool at our disposal than vegan outreach for helping animals.
But I want the vegan outreachers to continue doing their work. One reason is I think that veganism is, deontologically, a moral obligation; another is that I think veganism is a costly signal that binds the animal movement together, which can serve to keep advocates motivated.
Re: your poll, I’d say neither. Veganism and offsetting are both ‘rearranging furniture on the Titanic’. The button I’d press wouldn’t be to make everyone vegan in an instant, but to get cultivated meat on supermarket shelves at a competitive price point, in an instant.
Nothing else (bar x-risks for humans) is going to end factory farming. As you say, meat consumption is skyrocketing, yet in animal advocacy we act like there isn’t a viable alternative that is, or rather could be, on the table.
So strong is my view on this that I’d go as far as to say that the way funding is allocated in animal advocacy is extremely ineffective. It should basically all be going towards scale-up grants or policy advocacy or whatever cultivated meat businesses need.
But yeah the findings of the Pulse survey you mentioned don’t surprise me. In the end I think this campaign was a load of hot air, probably not particularly helpful nor damaging either way.
I don’t think we should spend an overwhelming majority of our resources on any one theory of change. We should spread our bets.
I think that should depend on what the bets are.
Alternative proteins don’t seem like an overwhelmingly good bet. How much will the marginal $ to R&D bring forward the development of cost-competitive cultivated chicken? What’s the trade off between the broiler lives prevented, and the broiler lives improved if we spent that marginal $ on broiler welfare advocacy instead? If cost-competitive cultivated chicken is developed, will that really displace all chicken meat (and how quickly)? (I mostly mean these questions rhetorically, and just mean that it’s hard to answer to answer them confidently)
But also: even the best intervention might not be the best to fund at the margin. Not every marginal resource is fungible. And going all-in on one theory of change might take us to odd places for movement dynamics.
Good questions. R&D isn’t the only lever. Given the relatively small amount of money that would be coming from EA, I’d direct the funding towards policy advocacy, comms/educating the market, and lobbying for governments to invest more in scale up funding.
I’m not in favour of intervention plurality for its own sake. Even if cultivated meat would only displace 50%, 25%, 10% of demand for broiler chickens, that would already be hugely beneficial compared to what we spend on currently.
And you wouldn’t have to be vegan to support it, which would open the movement up to others in the way FarmKind have tried to do. Just imagine: vegans, non vegans, environmentalists, investors, and businesses all united under one common, commercially viable goal of giving consumers another choice that has almost no trade offs compared to what they eat currently. Most other interventions and meta debates seem trivial by comparison if you think that cultivated meat is inevitable… which I do.
I think the main problem from a movement dynamics point of view is that it would undermine much of what people spend their energy on now.
If we made everyone vegan in an instant, how would that not end factory farming?
Because a large proportion of vegans revert to eating animals at some point in their lives. Moreover, it isn’t going to happen in any timeframe, unfortunately.
I think pressing a button to make everyone (ethically) vegan would be a much more robust way to end factory farming (and all forms of animal exploitation) than pressing a button to get cultivated meat on supermarket shelves at a competitive price point.
If everyone is ethically vegan: the social/cultural pressure to remain vegan is much stronger –> ex-veganism is heavily stigmatised –> far fewer ex-vegans –> not enough demand for factory farming to survive or return
Even before that, presumably factory farming would be undermined from every angle: lawmakers would ban it, employees would quit/strike, consumers would boycott
As far as I know, cultivated meat faces a number of cultural barriers
Clearly it’s much much harder to make everyone vegan than to get affordable cultivated meat on supermarket shelves! That’s one reason why I think cultivated meat is currently a more powerful tool at our disposal than vegan outreach for helping animals.
But I want the vegan outreachers to continue doing their work. One reason is I think that veganism is, deontologically, a moral obligation; another is that I think veganism is a costly signal that binds the animal movement together, which can serve to keep advocates motivated.
Ok, you’ve convinced me on the theoretical button-pushing. In reality those aren’t the options we’re presented with.