> How the dismal science can help us end the dismal treatment of farm animals
By Martin Gould
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Note: This post was crossposted from the Open Philanthropy Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
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This year we’ll be sharing a few notes from my colleagues on their areas of expertise. The first is from Martin. I’ll be back next month. - Lewis
In 2024, Denmark announced plans to introduce the world’s first carbon tax on cow, sheep, and pig farming. Climate advocates celebrated, but animal advocates should be much more cautious. When Denmark’s Aarhus municipality tested a similar tax in 2022, beef purchases dropped by 40% while demand for chicken and pork increased.
Beef is the most emissions-intensive meat, so carbon taxes hit it hardest — and Denmark’s policies don’t even cover chicken or fish. When the price of beef rises, consumers mostly shift to other meats like chicken. And replacing beef with chicken means more animals suffer in worse conditions — about 190 chickens are needed to match the meat from one cow, and chickens are raised in much worse conditions.
It may be possible to design carbon taxes which avoid this outcome; a recent paper argues that a broad carbon tax would reduce all meat production (although it omits impacts on egg or dairy production). But with cows ten times more emissions-intensive than chicken per kilogram of meat, other governments may follow Denmark’s lead — focusing taxes on the highest emitters while ignoring the welfare implications.
Beef is easily the most emissions-intensive meat, but also requires the fewest animals for a given amount. The graph shows climate emissions per tonne of meat on the right-hand side, and the number of animals needed to produce a kilogram of meat on the left. The fish “lives lost” number varies significantly by
Thank you for this post Lee, I really do appreciate it.
This is definitely a disappointing result and not what I wanted out of this consultation. However for me this does not reduce the potential of this path to impact; of influencing policy outcomes by coordinating submissions to consultations.
The first reason for this belief is the successes in Australia. The second reason is the ICAI consultation I worked on last October, where I coordinated around ~60 submissions, and successfully influenced the consultation’s results. For each of the four questions ICAI asked, they listed the top recommendations given. The top answer that they list for each question directly corresponds to our top recommendation that we gave to attendees to push forward (e.g. use of best buys, cash-benchmarking). A number of our secondary arguments are also prominently included.
However, even with this success they state that ‘we estimate that around 40 responses showed a degree of coordination, but we are confident that this has not changed the substance of the results.’ Meaning either they noticed our coordination but it didn’t affect our influence, or our coordination wasn’t noticed.
I think that this IDC consultation was also different in that we only pushed forward a single argument and provided a single version of that argument. Whereas the usual method is providing multiple arguments to push forward and different variations of them. The benefit of a single argument is the significantly less work required, however as one likely could have guessed, it also results in significantly less success.
For me this only enhances the need to have someone working on this full-time, which we are actually hiring for at the Global Policy Research Group. The contractor position will involve coordinating submissions from the UK/European effective altruism and adjacent communities to significant governmental consultations (on the core EA cause areas) to create policy change.
If you or someone you know would be interested, here is the Application Form.
If anyone has any positive or critical thoughts on this work or this role I am very open to hearing them!