Eating meat with lower carbon footprint often means killing more animals
ourworldindata.org
ourworldindata.org
As soon as you get into gradations of value based on things like size or perceived intelligence, things get muddy pretty quickly. For instance, we don’t value the life of a small child less than the life of a grown adult, even though the child is smaller and less “intelligent” than the adult. Similarly, we don’t value adult humans based on their intelligence.
Perhaps the metric should be capacity for suffering and our goal should be to minimize suffering. Does a human have greater capacity for suffering than a mosquito? I think there are many good reasons to think yes. Does a cow have greater capacity for suffering than a chicken? I don’t know that that is nearly as clear.
On the contrary, children are valued higher than adults, generally speaking.
We _absolutely_ value adult humans based on their intelligence, this is generally reflected in things like… salary.
What are you on about?
> Does a cow have greater capacity for suffering than a chicken?
You have quite obviously never spent time around either chickens or cows if you think this is some sort of salient point. It’s not.
Cows are the opposite in just about every way.
If you have much experience with cows and chickens, I think the difference in capacity for suffering is pretty clear.
>we don’t value the life of a small child less than the life of a grown adult, even though the child is smaller and less “intelligent” than the adult. Similarly, we don’t value adult humans based on their intelligence.
I think when forced into a decision, humans and societies will make distinctions along these lines. e.g. saving the mother or child during birth or famine, Prioritizing scientists or even sacrificing soldiers during wartime.
I’m not saying there is no difference - they are different species so we wouldn’t expect them to have an identical experience of pain and deprivation - but rather that the difference is not easily quantifiable. We are not able to access the interior lives of these animals. And in practice, I suspect many people would be as reluctant to rip the wing off a live chicken as the ear from a cow, while showing few misgivings about squashing an ant. That is to say, in practice most people are likely to behave as if the moral stances toward cows and chickens are roughly equivalent.
In terms of being forced into decisions to value one human life over another, that doesn’t change the fact that morally and ethically we value human lives equally. We don’t extrapolate from emergencies to posit that one mom = three children. In any case, what bearing does this have on the problem at hand? If one cow’s life is morally equivalent to a non-singular number of chickens, how many chickens are we choosing, and why?
Do we? I can think of many counter examples, and I'm sure you can as well. How is this a fact?
Doesn't it? There are stated valuations and then revealed valuations on life. When asking what people really think and feel, I think it is relevant to look at how they act when their behavior is contingent. Anyone can make arbitrary claims when they are not tested. Anyways, I agree that this all a tangent from the main point.
>That is to say, in practice most people are likely to behave as if the moral stances toward cows and chickens are roughly equivalent.
This is where I think we disagree. I think most people would have a pretty difference emotional and psychological experience killing a cow or chicken. This ties back to the concept of claimed belief vs revealed beliefs.
(word in bold added by me)
This is the crux of the whole debate imo. We simply don't know. For all you know, the chicken's experience is far worse, even if the external manifestation of their sufferring is less relatable.
And to take it a step further, potentially the same goes for plants.
It's an interesting example, because we actually kind of do. If I'm not mistaken, in case of difficult pregnancies, saving the mother is favored compared to saving the child/fetus.
When it comes to valuing life in general, things are going to get muddy no matter how you look at it. Valuing females over males? Already happening. Children over adults? Sometimes. Healthy over disabled? Occasionally.
And that's just between different "categories" of people.
[1] https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/food-agriculture-environm...
1: https://www.iea.org/reports/global-methane-tracker-2022/meth...
What do you mean? CO2 emissions from each are molecularly identical. both go into the air and recycled/reabsorbed through the exact same processes. The difference is the source of the carbon, not the recycling.
Furthermore, about half of the GHG from animals like cows is methane, with is not part of the standard carbon cycle.
livestock returns back CO2 captured by plants + transportation cost. So, transportation cost part is not CO2 neutral if they use fossils(very likely) and needs to be estimated.
> Gone whole hog: Here's what happens to the rest of your Easter ham: Pig parts are used in everything from gelatin to fabric softener.
* https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thefridgelight/gone-whole-hog-here-...
> Cow Parts: Mad cow disease could wreak havoc in the US because nearly everything we taste has cow in it
Some of the replies seem to imply that life is some abstract combination of chemicals. Just do a double blind test, and be "unable to believe it's butter". Once neuralink is up to spec, plug in, be happy, and "free of suffering".
I believe there is much to be done to reduce suffering, and it's a worthy goal, primarily for humans, and also for animals. One animal killing another for food is not on that list of you ask me. The problem is that we do treat animals very poorly, at tremendous scale, but that is not the only way. In my opinion there is nothing ethically or morally wrong to kill an animal for consumption. We're still (barely) free enough to disagree ;)
If the taste, appearance, etc. of a lab-grown ribeye - perhaps they grow an entire headless, brainless cow and ensure it manages to get exercise - is identical, would your preference still be the one that required a thinking creature to die?
Is it the death that matters, or the taste?
But it's not the death that matters. The death is just what happens, and I have no issues with that.
I certainly prefer a rib-eye to tofu, but that's not the question.
If it is 100% chemically identical to meat from a cow, I'll try it. If it's full of other chemicals not present in a piece of dead cow I won't.
Nature vs nurture?
I think most people want to eat good tasting, ideally nutritious food.
Native Americans: https://www.ivu.org/history/native_americans.html
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/do-insects-have-co...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/weve-been-looking...
https://www.animal-ethics.org/invertebrate-sentience-a-revie...
Virtue signaling by eating something gross? Dunno.
Granted, there may be other factors in play, such as how easy they are the farm as you mention.
Electric car? Less pollution, more lithium mining (for now)
Avoid plastic? Glass jars are heavy (and added emissions to transport), and more likely to need replacing.
Avoid clothing with microplastics (like polyester)? Cotton is one of the most water-intensive crops, and production of bamboo cloth requires heavy chemicals usually, polluting the local environment
etc ...
That's just the basic human condition.
Taxes and prices are the tools we are supposed to be using to deal with tradeoffs. Blanket bans or regulations generate lots of externalities. Where water is scarce it needs to be expensive. We need to tax carbon, not just subsidize batteries.
Yeah, subsidies are incredibly clumsy/distorting compared to just taxing the problem directly.
I hold out hope that we'll someday see a uniform carbon tax, but as my wife likes to say, American politicians like carrots a lot more than they like sticks.
Depending on what temperatures you'd expect where you live, fur could be a great option for the environment. Well made fur cloaks can last generations (source: I'm still using my grandpa's fur coat).
Compared to, say, a gore-tex jacket, it's great for the environment. But the life of a fur animal isn't always great.
Personally I prioritize keeping seas free of plastics over the quality of some goats' or minks' life, but I get that for some, that choice will be different.
I just wish everyone understood that that is the choice.A lot of people see fur and see red.
Same goes with "vegan leather" which my car's seats are made of. It's nice and all, and easy to clean which is great, but I do feel torn about the extra (and easily avoidable) plastic.
Depending on the efficiency of the economy, if something is expensive, it required more energy or time or resources to produce. Producing (and buying) organic small batch things yields lower _net_ efficiency than mass-produced stuff.
Now, increasing efficiency may mean that _net_ impact is minimized, but tradeoffs are pretty wild. For example, we trade off pollution for cheaper energy production, etc...
Of course this is only fully realized in a spherical economy in a vaccum, but still, some of this is applicable to the real world.
People who only care about the ecological aspect don't care about killing more animals
Also, how do you even quantify that ?
Is killing 30 cage raised chicken better or worse than killing a single grass fed free range cow ?
Are all lives worth the same ? If so bug based food would be extremely problematic
TL;DR: Pandas and koalas are the most ethical source of meat.
Instead people should focus on the real super polluters: https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyv5mm/5-of-earths-power-pla...
Calculating "carbon footprint" is just calculating astrology, a narrative to scam their customers. Canada's wildfires last years polluted more than all antropic emission combined https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jun/27/canada... similarly Darvaza gas crater pollute much more than all flatulence and methane leaks from animals and humans together.
The point is that to feed enough human we need enough land for enough livestock and actually the current food production systems can't adapt to the climate change, huge number of humans AND BUSINESS so they try other ways to remain in business instead of evolving.
This is not science, it's a kind of religion, to convince people formed with a kind of scientific mindset but not really inhabited to reason individually, but to accept as truth what they read. Starting from the "data collected" form certain institutions who have NO PROOF of their collection, meaning their data are not really reproducible. Just a modern variant of the old colored glass to trade gold with certain populations.
[1] (Note: change "Count" to "Country" to get worldwide data) https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-greenhouse-gas-emissions#...
That's inaccurate, and not what the article says. The article quotes research saying the 2023 wildfires added 3 billion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere, which is "nearly four times the carbon emissions as airplanes do in a year" or "about the same amount of carbon dioxide that 647m cars put in the air in a year."
For comparison, global fossil-fuel and industry sources emitted roughly *37 billion tons* of CO2 in 2023. This excludes land-use emissions: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
There's also the fact that fossil fuel emissions are net-new release of gaseous CO2 that's been sequestered away from the atmosphere for millions of years. Tree cover loss is bad, but forest-fire CO2 was fixed within much shorter timescales, and the article mentions the burnt forest area regrows and starts to sequester carbon again within decades.