EA - The deathprint of replacing beef by chicken and insect meat by Stijn

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The deathprint of replacing beef by chicken and insect meat, published by Stijn on November 30, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Animal-based meat production is a large contributor to climate change. Especially beef has a high a carbon footprint, measured in terms of kilogram CO2-equivalents per kilogram of meat. Switching from beef to chicken meat or insect meat lowers greenhouse gas emissions and hence decreases future climate change damages. But chicken meat has a much higher moral footprint (Saja, 2013) or welfare footprint (welfarefootprint.org) than beef. Chickens experience more intense suffering and more hours of suffering for one kilogram of meat, compared to beef cows.This article shows that the increase in moral footprint when switching from beef to chicken meat or insect meat is likely to be worse than the decrease in carbon footprint. To compare these footprint changes, all the footprints are expressed in terms of the deathprint: the number of humans dying prematurely from climate change and the number of animals killed (slaughtered) in animal farming, for the production of one unit of meat.The deathprint of climate changeA recent study (Bressler, 2021) estimated the net number of humans dying prematurely from temperature changes (especially heat waves) due to climate change, before the year 2100. An extra emission of 4000 ton CO2, emitted today, results in one extra human death due to climate change, in the business as usual scenario where everyone else does not take measures to reduce their emissions. Hence, 0,00000025 humans will be killed this century by emitting one extra kilogram of CO2.I use this number of deaths for the calculations below, although this number is both an underestimation and overestimation of the total human deaths due to climate change. It is an underestimation, because it does not include deaths from e.g. famines, wars, infectious diseases, floods and other risks that are increased by climate change. On the other hand, this number is an overestimation in the sense that climate change adaptation measures and CO2 emission reduction measures are likely to be taken. If poor countries develop and become richer, people in those countries can take more adaptive measures such as installing air conditioning, which lowers the mortality rate from extreme temperatures. And if global CO2 emissions are reduced, the impact of an extra unit of CO2 emissions (i.e. the marginal mortality rate) reduces as well (due to the non-linear relationship between amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and climate damages).[i]The deathprint of meatThe table below shows the amount of meat produced by one animal, and the carbon footprints of meat products. These footprints measure the greenhouse gas emissions, in terms of CO2-equivalents, including all life cycle emissions as well as land use change emissions from e.g. deforestation, for the production of one kilogram of meat. The values of beef, pork and chicken are taken from Pieper e.a. (2020), which applies to Germany. The carbon footprint of insect meat is assumed to be lower than the footprint of chicken meat but slightly higher than the footprint of plant-based protein. The chosen value is a preliminary estimate of cricket meat, taken from Blonk e.a. (2008). It requires roughly 10.000 crickets for the production of one kilogram of cricket protein powder.kg meat per animal consumedanimals killed per kg meatkg CO2 per kg meatbeefporkchicken meatinsect meat3000,003371000,010101,50,667160,000110.0002With these values, we can calculate the human and animal deathprints of meat, i.e. how many humans will die from climate change and how many animals are killed (slaughtered) for the production of one kilogram of meat. This animal deathprint of meat only includes the animals that will be consume...