LESSWRONG
LW

All of meh's Comments + Replies

Essay-Question Poll: Dietary Choices
meh00

I think we're pretty much in agreement. Any remaining differences are either trivial, semantic, or (at the risk of angering the Aumann Gods) "things reasonable people can disagree about".

Reply
Essay-Question Poll: Dietary Choices
meh00

I'm sorry, but this argument seems rather confused to me.

Assuming some upper limit on the cost you're willing to pay to reduce carbon emissions, your best strategy is to choose the option that provides the greatest reduction for the least personal cost.

No, it's to choose the best n options, up to the point at which you reach your cost limit. Depending on the limit, and the options you face, n could be 0, or 20, or 100; but there's no particular reason to think it should be 1.

Of course, assuming a fixed upper bound on willingness to sacrifice runs coun... (read more)

Reply
0mattnewport
I guess I wasn't sufficiently clear there. My point is that you need to do a cost-benefit analysis, pick your best choice and then do a new cost-benefit analysis rather than just follow through with your 2nd and 3rd best choice from your original analysis. You can't assume that your 2nd best choice becomes your new best choice after taking your best choice. If you're hungry and you decide your first choice is to buy a mars bar and your second choice a snickers and you buy and eat the mars bar you can't assume that your next action should be to buy and eat the snickers - the situation has changed and you need to re-evaluate. Not a fixed upper bound, just a limit. Anyone who cares about reducing their carbon footprint will reach a point where they are not currently willing to make any further sacrifices for a further carbon emissions reduction because to do so would conflict with their other goals. What I'm saying is that each choice you make changes the calculation a little when considering future choices. Not exactly no. The thing is that one might be willing to pay more than one currently does to continue eating meat. If the cost of meat doubled for example I would not reduce my consumption by 50%, I'd cut back elsewhere. I choose to spend a certain amount of money on meat because it represents better value than my next best opportunity. The reason I currently spend money on meat is that I value the meat more than the money (or other alternate uses of the money). You have to take that into account when considering the opportunity cost of becoming vegetarian. No, the benefits can be denominated in (general) human welfare. The costs are denominated in your own personal welfare. Money can serve as a convenient proxy for that to aid in calculation but I'm not sure you can give any direct measure, the best you can do may be a preference ordering.
Essay-Question Poll: Dietary Choices
meh10

it needs to reduce emissions more effectively than other equally costly options.

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but this still seems inaccurate to me. If there is a more effective yet equally costly option O, but the total benefit of O+Vegetarian is still greater than the total cost of O+Vegetarian, then Vegetarian is still worth it (as is O). Your framing seems to deny this.

My original question was an attempt to ascertain whether the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions was truly your primary reason for choosing vegetarianism

Yes. It was, and is. I g... (read more)

Reply
-1mattnewport
You've got to consider opportunity cost and marginal utility. If you valued reducing carbon emissions above all else then your best course of action would probably be suicide. Assuming some upper limit on the cost you're willing to pay to reduce carbon emissions, your best strategy is to choose the option that provides the greatest reduction for the least personal cost. If given your preferences and available options, buying some carbon offsets is your most cost effective option and becoming vegetarian is your second most cost effective option, it does not follow that you should do both. While the benefits can be seen as fixed for the purposes of your decision (since whatever you do will have such little impact that you can sum them without worrying about diminishing marginal utility) the costs cannot, if they are significant relative to your total resources. This is more easily seen when you're talking about choices that can directly be represented with money but is still true when the costs are not purely financial. Assuming the costs can simply be summed you would have to conclude that you should spend all your money on carbon offsets if you thought it was wise to spend any of your money on them (since if the benefit of O is greater than the cost of O then the benefit of 100xO should be greater than the cost of 100xO).
Essay-Question Poll: Dietary Choices
meh10

It's not clear to me that vegetarianism would be the best choice

Given that vegetarianism doesn't exclude other strategies for emissions reduction, I'm unclear why you think it's relevant whether or not it's the single best strategy. Surely all that's required is that it have a net positive effect?

Reply
0mattnewport
Net positive taking into account all of the personal costs, yes. It's not enough that it merely reduces emissions, it needs to reduce emissions more effectively than other equally costly options. I get the sense that we're largely in agreement there though. My original question was an attempt to ascertain whether the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions was truly your primary reason for choosing vegetarianism (with the choice made by weighing up the costs and benefits of various ways of reducing emissions) or whether it was a convenient 'added benefit' given a choice that was made partly or wholly for other reasons. The (seemingly) more common animal welfare justification for vegetarianism seems more directly linked to the particular decision to not eat meat than does a carbon emissions argument.
Essay-Question Poll: Dietary Choices
meh10

it seems like it would be a bit too convenient if a comprehensive cost benefit analysis came out with the answer 'become a vegetarian'

Convenient for people who are vegetarians on other grounds, perhaps; not so much for me.

In any event, I don't think anyone was suggesting that vegetarianism is the single best way to reduce your carbon footprint. (The specific suggestion being made was presumably that becoming vegetarian was likely to be more effective than buying an equivalent tonnage of offsets. I think this was true when I became vegetarian, but perha... (read more)

Reply
1mattnewport
I'm not particularly advocating buying local as a better option, it was just an example of the kinds of factors that one might need to consider. I tend to think that if there is a significant negative externality to carbon emissions that is not currently reflected in prices, the optimal solution would be to impose some kind of carbon tax to reflect that hidden cost. This would avoid the need for individuals to try and make complex cost benefit calculations for themselves on optimal carbon reducing choices. I don't think it's very likely that it is politically feasible to implement such a tax though so if I considered the issue important I might attempt to make lifestyle choices that reduced my own personal impact. Under those circumstances I'd want to make choices efficiently. It's not clear to me that vegetarianism would be the best choice but since I don't consider reducing my own carbon footprint a priority I haven't done a lot of research on the issue.
Essay-Question Poll: Dietary Choices
meh20

If your main reason for eating a vegetarian diet is to reduce your carbon footprint, how effective is your dietary choice? My impression is "not particularly".

Is that impression based on anything in particular? The evidence that it will reduce one's individual carbon footprint seems fairly solid (see e.g. here) . The extent to which that translates, via reduced demand, into actual emission reductions is perhaps more arguable, but that doesn't seem to be what you're getting at. Conversely, there are rather more serious, and well-recognised conc... (read more)

Reply
0mattnewport
Not really, I just suspect that if one's primary concern is reducing one's carbon footprint, it seems like it would be a bit too convenient if a comprehensive cost benefit analysis came out with the answer 'become a vegetarian'. That seems like an overly simple answer to a very complex question. All else being equal, eating less meat is probably going to reduce carbon emissions but were you to take into account the full picture (perhaps preferring locally sourced produce over imported, preferring food that you can walk to the store to buy over food that you have to drive to a specialty store to purchase, taking overall nutritional content into account, etc.) and consider other lifestyle changes in addition to dietary then I just find it unlikely that 'stop eating meat' is the uncomplicated best course of action. I am prepared to believe that the answer to the question 'Will eating less meat tend to lower my carbon footprint?' is yes. I am very skeptical that the answer to the question 'All things considered, what is the best way for me to lower my carbon footprint?' is a simple 'Become a vegetarian'. It's a data point for others to consider, sure. Given the male/female ratio here (discussed at length elsewhere) it's my default assumption unless a username seems obviously male or female. In the absence of a good gender neutral pronoun I tend to use he, though in this case I did assume you were male.
Essay-Question Poll: Dietary Choices
meh10

Assuming I felt like it, it would depend significantly on the efficiency (particularly energy efficiency) of the production process.

Reply
Essay-Question Poll: Dietary Choices
meh10

I think that's an accurate characterization of my concerns. I didn't take the offset route for three main reasons.

  1. I do have other concerns besides GHG emissions, which offsets wouldn't address.
  2. In general I prefer to reduce where I can, and save offsets for things I struggle more to do without (necessary plane trips being the main one). Which is another way of saying that I'm not willing to pay the increased (offset inclusive) price. I guess I was also banking on adapting to meat-avoidance fairly well; perhaps if I'd ended up finding it more difficult, I
... (read more)
Reply
1Mike Bishop
Seconded. We're also helping to create a larger market for vegetarian food or vat meat and reducing stigma against vegetarians.
Essay-Question Poll: Dietary Choices
meh10
  1. I avoid all meat, as well as milk. I'm working to reduce other dairy products, but cheese is proving stubborn.
  2. Environmental and efficiency concerns are my main motivation, particularly GHG emissions. I have no particular concern for animal welfare.
  3. I have three general exceptions. The first is that I'll try types of food that I've never eaten before if offered the opportunity. (I would totally try fried locusts.) The second is that I'll eat things that I or a close friend or family member has caught/killed (non-farmed). The third is that I'll eat meat to
... (read more)
Reply
2mattnewport
Would it be accurate to say that your primary concern is that there are negative externalities involved in meat production that are not reflected in the price of meat products? If the largest negative externality that concerns you is GHG emissions do you feel that your reasons for not eating meat would be eliminated if the negative externalities were priced in through some kind of energy tax or cap and trade system? Did you ever consider eating meat and purchasing carbon offsets to make up for the unpaid negative externality? It sounds like you don't miss meat much any more but you say that you used to enjoy it so presumably there would have been some additional price you would have been willing to pay in the form of a carbon offset or perhaps a charitable donation of some kind?