Frankly, posting on this forum intimidates me the way reading any critical essay by Chomsky does. I do want to be intellectually responsible, but I don’t much like the idea of being on either end, frankly, of an intellectual firing squad.
In some ways, this comment is in the spirit of Draft Amnesty Week.
This is great for online supermarket shopping.
This is a down-the-road consideration, but let’s say this approach becomes wildly popular, pushing people who would have shopped in person online in order to get their easy vegan options. Do the environmental benefits of a new vegan outweigh the environmental costs of a new online supermarket shopper, order process, and deliveries?
It would just be difficult to have the rigor for multiple restrictions out the gate. All you need is a couple of gluten poisonings to upend the whole project. Strategically, starting with one restriction can help them stress test the model and build out from there with great evidence for additional investors.
To cut straight, you need to line up the ends. You can’t put causes’ impact side-by-side and cut straight across. They don’t line up.
For example, can you one-to-one animal and human welfare? No matter now you answer that, you’re answering from a philosophical standpoint that you’d need to defend before comparing.
As I currently live in an urban area in the Netherlands, I made the comment with the consumer walking or biking in mind. While ordering my groceries would be more convenient for me, I specifically do not because of the higher environmental costs. My using the app, and so being limited to online ordering, would be a worse environmental outcome than my continuing to walk and review products myself manually. But I am, to your point, likely not in the majority.
There are two main reasons I ask: first, because I don’t know that the environmental costs of the products themselves would be higher (seems likely, but I don’t know) or that transportation to the home, rather than the store, is factored into estimates as a point of course. The second reason I ask is because I think any valuable solution should consider the system implications of wild success.
I do think it is a good solution, and probable that, even at universal scale, is more sustainable.