Human and Animal Muscles Liberated by Abundant Energy
Abundant energy, coupled with the technology to harness it, is one of the fundamental drivers of reduced suffering in the world. Consider slavery—a horrific practice that, tragically, was the norm in nearly every past society. Its abolition did not result from a sudden moral awakening. While abolitionist movements and moral reframing were indispensable, the advent of fossil fuels and mechanization reduced reliance on coerced labor in key sectors of industrializing societies. These regions then abolished slavery and often imposed abolition on others. As machinery displaced human labor in grueling tasks, society’s long-standing moral repulsion toward slavery could finally translate into sustained political action.
Even beyond slavery, it is difficult to overstate how the harnessing of fossil fuel energy during the Industrial Revolution reshaped the landscape of suffering. Much of today’s discourse tends to focus on the harsh conditions faced by early mining and factory workers, but these conditions—grim as they were—actually represented individual choices for improvements over rural misery.
For millions of working animals, the impact was similarly profound. Before the advent of energy-intensive technologies, animals were indispensable for transportation, water lifting, grain milling, and countless other labor-intensive tasks. Their lives were often marked by constant suffering and hard labor. Mechanization—cars, trucks, motorized pumps, and mills— changed this reality.
In essence, the Industrial Revolution meant that most of the tasks previously done by the muscles and bones of animals and humans could be done exponentially more efficiently by engines. The Industrial Revolution revealed powerful energies around us that we didn’t even know existed, contributing to a society characterized by unparalleled physical comfort and abundance. Today, many of us need to go to gyms just to get a bit of physical movement, and we must restrain ourselves from overeating. Such are the problems of affluence— “rich people’s problems”—that our recent ancestors could only dream of having.
A necessary correction: industrialization also led to industrialized animal suffering.
Energy abundance and mechanization reduced some forms of drudgery and eventually displaced many uses of working animals, but they also enabled the rise of industrial animal agriculture—especially the post–World War II expansion of confinement systems particularly in poultry and pig production. The moral lesson is not that energy abundance is automatically benevolent; it is that energy is a powerful amplifier. Our aim is to ensure the next wave of energy abundance amplifies the replacement of factory farming rather than its entrenchment.
Now It Is the Turn of Energetic Abundance to Liberate the Brain
Billions of animals are currently raised in conditions that will certainly be viewed as shameful by future generations. But again, it will not be a sudden moral awakening that abolishes this, but practical and far better alternatives rendering it obsolete. The challenge, however, is immense: promoting a revolution in the development and availability for the masses of healthy, delicious, convenient, and affordable alternatives to animal products. These alternatives will likely be energy-intensive to first develop and then to produce.
Industrial animal agriculture is highly energy-intensive, with most of its energy demands met through external sources such as fossil fuels. Although a portion of the feed energy originates from solar radiation via photosynthesis in crops, this represents only a small part of the total energy required across the entire production chain. But animal product substitutes, like cultured meat, will probably not be more energy efficient, either—especially in the short term—as they are likely to require continuous and abundant energy inputs at every stage, particularly for sourcing raw materials and maintaining the tightly controlled conditions in bioreactors that are crucial for cell growth.
Even on the development side, achieving the breakthroughs required to create a wide range of substitutes that are much more attractive will demand significant scientific and technical advancements—many of which will be powered by energy-hungry AI. And yes, intelligence (natural or artificial) requires a considerable amount of energy.
Let’s take biology as a guide: the human brain, despite comprising only about 2% of our body weight, consumes roughly 20% of the body’s energy. Likewise, a society fully integrated with information and intelligence will naturally devote a larger share of its energy to cognitive processing functions.
This brings us to a significant dilemma: advancing these solutions to reduce animal suffering requires substantial energy, yet there remains a noticeable tension, as many within the animal welfare community have traditionally been cautious or reluctant about embracing the expansion of energy production and AI use.
Energy Abundance, Animal Welfare, and the Climate Disagreement
The Effective Altruism community aims to reduce suffering by staying grounded in evidence and by being explicit about tradeoffs. That principle matters here, because abundant, reliable energy is not a luxury add-on: it is a prerequisite for replacing industrial animal agriculture with alternatives that are healthier, cheaper, and more attractive to consumers. Wind and solar are valuable in many contexts and have expanded rapidly, but a modern economy—and especially the industrial systems needed to scale new food technologies—requires reliability, dense energy, and enormous build-out of infrastructure. Nuclear power could play a much larger role but faces political and regulatory obstacles that often slow deployment. In much of today’s world, fossil fuels therefore remain a major source of scalable energy.
This brings us to a tension: energy policy is now deeply entangled with claims about climate risk. We are skeptical of the increasingly common tendency to treat the most alarmist framings as settled beyond debate, especially when those framings are used to justify energy scarcity in a world where scarcity has moral victims, such as chronic poverty in many parts of the world, and billions of animals trapped in current production systems.
Importantly, we do not need to resolve every disputed point in climate science in order to make progress on animal welfare. What we do need is an EA-style approach to the real question in front of us: which energy policies, in the world as it actually exists, most rapidly expand access to reliable electricity at scale, without ignoring obvious harms such as air pollution and other local environmental damage?
My claim is simple and decision-relevant: slowing the expansion of energy supply slows the development and mass production of animal-product substitutes, and that delay is paid for in animal suffering. For that reason, the animal welfare movement should be willing to engage openly with energy realism, to question fashionable constraints that are treated as moral axioms, and to support a broad portfolio of scalable energy solutions rather than treating energy abundance as morally suspect.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Cynthia Schuck-Paim, Elsa Negro Calduch, and Pablo Rosado for their comments and critical feedback.
Strongly downvoted because of several fundamental errors. The post confuses energy with energy services, and ignores the role that efficiency plays in reducing the demand for energy. It also misunderstands that meat alternatives including cell culture varieties are far more energy efficient today on a primary energy basis than the animal-based meats they replace. There are several other unsupported or incorrect claims on animal advocate intentions and key factors influencing animal agriculture an meat alternative scaling.
Matthew — I appreciate the engagement, but I don’t think your critique engages with the core argument.
On “energy vs energy services”: of course what ultimately matters are services like industrial heat, refrigeration, sterilization, and computation. The post does not deny that. The point is that scaling a replacement for industrial animal agriculture requires large quantities of reliable energy services. Efficiency reduces intensity per unit, but it does not eliminate capacity constraints when the objective is a global industrial transition. If you believe efficiency alone removes energy as a binding factor, it would help to specify which services and what magnitude of gains you expect — and on what timeline.
On primary energy efficiency: that varies by pathway. Many plant-based alternatives appear already competitive or favorable on energy efficiency compared to conventional animal products. Other approaches — especially cultivated meat and some fermentation systems — are widely described in published assessments as energy-uncertain and potentially energy-intensive depending on process assumptions, scale, and energy source. In several analyses, energy demand and energy mix emerge as key drivers of environmental performance and cost. If you have a source showing that cell-cultured meat is already more primary-energy efficient than conventional meat under commercially realistic conditions, I’d welcome it.
More importantly, per-kg primary energy is only one variable in scaling. Cost, reliability, capital intensity, throughput, and integration into existing industrial systems all shape whether alternatives can replace tens of billions of animals per year. Even if energy intensity is favorable on paper, energy price, grid reliability, or institutional bottlenecks can still affect siting decisions and scaling speed. If you think energy availability is not meaningfully binding in practice, pointing to industrial evidence would make that case stronger.
You also mention unsupported claims about advocate intentions and scaling drivers. I’m open to correction — but that requires specificity. Which claims are incorrect? What do you see as the dominant constraints on replacing factory farming at scale?
The practical claim here is not that all substitutes are more energy-intensive than animal products. It is that for at least some of the most ambitious and scalable replacement pathways—particularly cultivated meat and certain fermentation systems—energy availability, energy price, and reliability are likely to be decisive constraints as we move from pilot facilities to global production.
If energy becomes expensive, unreliable, or institutionally constrained, the path from promising prototype to mass adoption slows. And delays are paid for in animal suffering.