I've been thinking about getting involved in climate activism, particularly during the US election season, but one nagging concern has been preventing me from doing so: that climate change mitigation could actually result in increased suffering.
I'm looking at this from a single angle: factory farming. My personal moral philosophy places a much greater degree of emphasis on intense suffering than on widespread suffering — in other words, five individuals' each experiencing a (hypothetically quantifiable) utility of negative one thousand is far worse than one thousand individuals' each experiencing a utility of negative five. From this perspective, wild-animal suffering is essentially negligible in comparison to domestic-animal suffering — human impact on wild animals consists mostly of relatively quick deaths, whereas factory-farmed animals spend their entire lives in horrifically inhumane conditions.
Factory farming is entirely a product of human civilization — and relatively recent human civilization at that (my understanding is that it only really came about after World War II). Climate change is one of the greatest threats to human civilization. While experts seem to generally consider full societal collapse to be an unlikely result of climate change, climate change could lead to a lower level of civilization overall. As more and more parts of the world become increasingly unlivable, the capacity of those regions to support a level of civilization in which factory farming exists could decrease. A place that is repeatedly hit by storms or devastated by droughts seems less likely to contain factory farms.
These are the concerns that I have. What I don't have is the scientific expertise to evaluate how reasonable my concerns are. Would a world with, say, 2.5 degrees of warming have less factory farming than a world with 2.0 degrees of warming? It seems similarly plausible that the opposite is true. Perhaps by blunting human prosperity, climate change will limit our evolution away from factory farms, leaving us at the top of a sort of animal-cruelty Kuznets curve. Animal welfare is often derided as a concern of the privileged, and there's some evidence that the prevalence of factory farming will decrease if societies become richer. Meat consumption is on the decline in several Western countries. Alternatives to meat are a booming market. The proportion of hens raised cage-free has risen sharply in the last decade in the US and Europe. If more prosperity frees people to care more about animals, climate change could leave both humans and farm animals worse off.
So, ultimately, my question is this: Would a marginal degree of climate change mitigation compared to the status quo have a positive or negative worldwide effect on factory farming and, by extension, intense suffering? This is obviously a very complicated question, and I don't expect any one person to necessarily have a perfect answer, but I'd be interested in your thoughts!
I think intense suffering is not that uncommon among wild animals, particularly leading up to death. I wouldn't be surprised if wild mammals and birds have far worse deaths than farmed mammals and birds on average, because farmed mammals and birds are often stunned during slaughter. Of course, many farmed animals (and especially those other than mammals and birds) die on farms before slaughter or aren't stunned (or stunned properly) for slaughter.
For example, being swallowed live is a common way for wild aquatic animals to die, and that probably usually involves suffocating and burning in gastric juices over several minutes, at least for prey fish. It's probably the suffocation that kills them. The fisheries scientist Gerald Waterfield (2021) wrote:
Furthermore, an aquatic animal can have hundreds or thousands of offspring, the vast majority of which die within days of being born, often due to predation.
I imagine many factory farmed animals suffer "disabling pain" basically daily throughout their lives, and this is quite intense each time, while wild animals are more likely than farmed animals to suffer "excruciating pain", which is even more intense, over the seconds or minutes before dying. This is borrowing the pain intensity categories from WFP and based on their analyses for farmed egg-laying hens and farmed meat chickens.
I can see how my use of the word "intense" was imprecise (the part about utility was likely worded better; I guess I didn't want to open with utilitarian jargon that I probably don't fully understand myself), but I still think domestic-animal suffering is much worse than wild-animal suffering, because death is only a small portion of overall suffering. Being eaten alive is obviously very unpleasant, but at least it's over relatively quickly. The same can't be said for the lives of factory-farmed animals.
To be more open about where I'm coming from, my level of horror at suffering relies heavily on to what extent I think I could deal with it myself. Minutes of excruciating pain is something I've personally experienced, whereas intense (even if not excruciating) pain on a continuous basis over the course of months or years is something I can't even really imagine.
Frankly, I don't see a version of 'climate change is good actually' that just stops at 1 degree of warming. If you end up believing that human civilisation is bad for animals, I don't really see a point where you apply the brakes short of wanting to end human civilisation that doesn't look like severely motivated reasoning.
I'd add that the transitional effects of climate change look like they would have particularly negative effects on poor crop farmers in places like the Indian subcontinent who are unlikely to source much/any of their diet from factory farms, and relatively little effect on wealthy Western consumers who eat particularly large quantities of factory farmed meat (it's even conceivable that price pressures resulting from shortages of some staple crops in some countries could benefit Western factory farms' profitability...), so it's really difficult to see the negative animal welfare impact of slowing climate change down a bit
I'm applying the brakes short of ending human civilization because, according to most experts, that's not currently something that's on track to happen (at least because of climate change). The world is currently on track for somewhere in the vicinity of 2.5 degrees of warming; my question is whether taking action to reduce that value by x degrees is a net positive or a net negative.
Yes, but if you’re concerned about animal suffering to the extent that you’d be willing to cause humans to suffer in order to mitigate it (as long as the math works out), then I think it’d be hard to get off the train that justifies ending all human lives, which will be a short-term blip that will improve wild and farmed animal suffering immensely.
I think the question is more, "do your philosophical views imply that ending all human civilization would be desirable?" as a gut check, rather than whether climate change is likely to lead to that. The implicit question is whether you are okay with philosophical views that imply it's good to end human civilization.
This is a good question. I didn't see climate change as threatening enough to affect factory farming a lot but I haven't thought about it much.
I think the question is more salient with work on global catastrophic risks : is it risky to stop pandemics, AI risks and nuclear wars when by doing that we are responsible for allowing factory farming to continue for a long time ? Unless we think that the future is going to be super positive (with factory farming ending) I think there's quite a risk here.
In any case, a way to perform mitigation on a way that also reduces farmed animal suffering is plant-based diets.
I don't have a clear answer - but if your concern is intense suffering of animals, why not get involved with animal rights/welfare activism? Is there a reason to favour climate activism?
I dug up an old Open Phil newsletter that you might be interested in.
It's ~4-5 years old so some things might have changed since then, but it addresses some of the questions you pose here quite directly.