While I do think the overall point of the article is an interesting one, it seems to me an odd assumption that the life of a single cow is somehow equal to the life of a single chicken or a single fish. At what point does it stop being equal? Is the life of a human equal to the life of a mosquito?
Why wouldn’t the life of a cow be equivalent to the life of a chicken though? I’m not asking rhetorically.
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.
>Does a cow have greater capacity for suffering than a chicken? I don’t know that that is nearly as clear.
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.
> If you have much experience with cows and chickens, I think the difference in capacity for suffering is pretty clear.
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?
>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.
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.
> If you have much experience with cows and chickens, I think the perceived difference in capacity for suffering is pretty clear.
(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.
I suppose that to a person who a) is already eating beef burgers and b) is considering swapping the meat in their burger to chicken for environmental reasons, the value of the life of a cow and the life of a chicken are both functionally nil. Perhaps not "without value", but too difficult to quantify against each other to be meaningful when decision making.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I agree that targeting tiny amounts doesn't work - but I don't think your source supports the idea that raising livestock is a tiny amount. It quotes the amount for "Agriculture, Forestry, and Other Land Use" at 22% and describes it as "Greenhouse gas emissions from this sector come mostly from agriculture (cultivation of crops and livestock) and deforestation".
Yes but… not all “greenhouse gas emissions” are the same. Emissions from cattle get recycled through natural processes, which is not the same as fossil carbon that hasn’t been part of the ecosystem for billions of years. I’m way more worried about fossil carbon.
>Emissions from cattle get recycled through natural processes, which is not the same as fossil carbon
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.
That makes a certain amount of sense, even if humans weren't keeping tens of millions of grazers as livestock, the plants they're eating would to some extent still exist, fix carbon, die, and release it. I think the main problem is animal methane emissions[1], which cause more damage than just C02[1]
> Livestock accounts for somewhere between 10-20% of global greenhouse gas emissions
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.
Given that most people want to eat meat, as an axiom, looks like you will have to choose one or the other. In this case, if one is concerned for sentient animal welfare, then insects could be a great solution (although they'd be more of a protein source, not actually meat), or better yet, lab-grown meat, since that's ideally identical to animal-cultivated meat.
Probably nature, due to the preponderance of evidence for it, and that likely evolved into a cultural phenomenon too. There is a reason all societies eat meat in one form or another.
I’ve been wondering how snails fit into this. I know they have some higher calcium needs, but their carbon footprint per gram of protein is a fraction of chicken. Granted, I know most of their flavor comes from the butter and garlic they are cooked with, but speaking as someone who likes escargot, why is the focus always on crickets? What is the missing piece?
In terms of protein and CO2 eq, the snails seem comparable if not better than crickets, if I’m reading the data correctly, with .7 kg CO2 eq per kg for the snails (edible meat) vs 1.3 for crickets, and 16g protein vs the crickets 14-20g.
Granted, there may be other factors in play, such as how easy they are the farm as you mention.
Then we should eat snails, at least they have that meaty texture compared to crickets. Perhaps other forms of bugs could work though, the ones in The Lion King sure looked tasty.
If it makes you feel better, you can label my preference however you see fit dear internet stranger. I merely pointed out that not everyone who eats meat does it strictly to ingest a specific combination of proteins.
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 ;)
You've entirely skipped answering the actual question, though.
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?
For the environmentally minded, it's almost always a tradeoff.
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
As gets pointed out semi-regularly, it was "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, in that order." I suppose it makes sense to consider "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Use less impactful materials and processes, probably in that order"?
To add to the complexity - for certain things region and location matters. There are lots of good places with plenty of water to grow cotton. There are lots of bad places to put solar panels.
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.
> 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.
Places like Texas tend to equal out the taxes. For example, I have to pay an additional $200 fee on my registration to account for the fact that my EV doesn't contribute to gasoline taxes. I assume they'd do the same to any carbon taxes.
Are there any industrial processes where plastic containers get re-used? I know drink containers get returned where I live. But I doubt they get re-used.
Finland replaced those with the lighter ones that get crunched now... Then again it might have been sensible from microplastics perspective... Many of the recycled ones were pretty scuffed...
I think the best tradeoff is being more mindful of waste and overconsumption. we're buying cheaper, lower quality, goods more often, which increases waste and uses more resources in the long term.
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.
Our World in Data Argues the other way (https://ourworldindata.org/electric-car-sales) in the first paragraph. With more scientific sources (I’m not saying science is perfect, but the Guardian and Washington Post also not.)
Pollution wise, I think the argument is pretty straightforward. The battery is about 200 liters. So about 200 liters plus some manufacturing costs. After this, there is a chance that the energy comes from renewable or nuclear sources. Conversely, at most 10% of the many hundreds to thousands of liters that go in a petrol car are renewable. And most people even avoid bio petrol because it’s bad for the engine. The biggest part of the oil is not renewable nor shipped to the destination via renewable transport methods. Anyone arguing that EVs are somehow more polluting in all kinds of ways, like tire pollution all of a sudden, are probably being bamboozled by the oil & gas industry.
> Anyone arguing that EVs are somehow more polluting in all kinds of ways, like tire pollution all of a sudden, are probably being bamboozled by the oil & gas industry.
This is reasonable, but the fact is, EVs are only slightly less polluting and should not be considered as a reliable replacement for the petrol cars and solution to all our problems.
Also tire pollution is a solvable problem without mass collective action, whereas climate change is going to require not just any solution but every solution in order to have a meaningful impact. It's the kind of problem where there's no silver bullet, just a lot of hard work ahead of us.
I know this is a naive view, but in an efficient economy of scale where we are cutting costs to produce a good, the lower the costs, the higher the efficiency to produce that good.
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.
Agreed but all the CWD in US deer is making venison a risky proposition. What a world we’ve made, nothing is safe anymore. The fish are full of heavy metals, the animals full of prion diseases and the woods full of Lyme’s disease causing ticks.
On the other hand, they eat tons of krill. Bringing back mammoths, however, gives us decent portions from an herbivore, one that I imagine was delicious!
Sorry for oversimplifying, I was poking fun at the "consumption of whales who die in the anti aging processing" vs the "consumption of whales who die for the protein food source processing". Now that I explained it, I suppose it is no longer witty or funny.
They're still sentient though so to fully maximize the function value, you'd need braindead animals, or better yet, muscle cells formed into common cuts of meat.
I think I read somewhere that blind chickens get less stressed in battery environments, so there's an ethical minefield we could jump into (metaphor intended).
Sorry but this article is pure PR. Nature is a cycle, animals do not "consume" food or "produce" meat. They live. A cow eating grass feeds the grass with its excrement and stimulate it's growth. The "issue" is for business who have to harvest food for their livestock to produce enough to sell enough at a price sufficient to earn their life.
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.
> Canada's wildfires last years polluted more than all antropic emission combined
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.
The Canadian wildfires last year produced less than 1/10th the CO2 emissions of the anthropic ones last year, using the numbers from the link that you misrepresented as saying they exceeded anthropic ones (which the link simply does not support in the slightest) and anthropic numbers from here [1].
Carbon emissions calculations aren’t astrology, there has actually been a lot of detailed data collected. For example:
https://www.fao.org/4/i3460e/i3460e.pdf
They are. Because they have some measure and collected data, and some other measures totally invented. How can you state I "save CO₂ emissions" producing energy from my p.v.? How can you state up front that only CO₂ emissions count in pollution and climate change?
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.
