In this article I argue that moral offsetting is not inherently immoral and that, as long as it's implemented well, it can have a positive impact. I also explain that certain kinds of offsets wouldn't work but that others might, and I speculate that offsetting meat consumption would probably be feasible and have a positive impact. What do you think?
PS: If you hit a paywall, you can read the article for free here, but if you like it please consider tipping me.
ACE has 4 top charities
Wild Animal Initiative -> not involved with livestock , irrelevant to discussion
Faunalytics -> involved in research and making research more accesible, impact valuable but very hard to measure in the way that makes “ offsetting” work as a concept .
Good Food Institute -> plant-based-alternative industry lobbying group, probably useless, considering There is no association between rising plant-based-meat sales and lowered meat sales.
The Humane League->mainly focused on “ improving” livestock welfare ( not decreasing the number of animals farmed) , has been a major force in the “ cage-free” push even-though Industrial-cage-free Egg farms tend to have higher mortality rates ( meaning more farmed animals per Kcal) than conventional farms. almost certainly net negative and should be tossed to the side.
You complain about hypotheticals far removed from reality, and then offer up one. There is no EA recognized organization that you could possibly use to offset the number of animals raised for your animal-product consumption. Donating to an ACE top charity means one of these four, one bad, one useless, one irrelevant, and one to difficult to quantify the impact of. People who claim to be offsetting There meat consumption ( is any one actually doing this???) are not.
I agree that donating to an ACE top charity doesn't mean offsetting. I didn't mean to suggest that, I'm sorry if it sounded like that. What I mean is that it should be in principle possible to offset meat consumption. I didn't get into the practicalities of how this would actually work for the sake of brevity, but I can do it here:
Imagine a food delivery app that works like this:
- When people buy vegan/vegetarian food, in the checkout process they have an option to donate to a meat offset fund. This option can be checked by default with a suggested don
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