It's difficult to pinpoint a definition of conservatism. Modern politics tends to follow in the Burkean conservatism tradition. One of the animating forces is the belief that hierarchy is necessary for a just an prosperous society. It is to varying degrees a "might makes right" value system, summed up in this quote by Plato: " ...nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker; and in many ways she shows, among men as well as among animals, and indeed among whole cities and races, that justice consists in the superior ruling over and having more than the inferior."

Another style is Christian conservatism with dominionism, that believe animals are biblically placed on earth for humans to do with as we please. Many still believe in Descartes Cartesian dualism that humans are distinct from animals in that animals do not have consciousness and even cannot "experience" pain.

These belief systems are unlikely to yield concern for animals, and are usually ambivalent to them. There may be some appeal to a "with great power comes great responsibility" mindset that animals are weak and need our protection.

Another angle is to realize many wear the label of conservative loosely, and can be persuaded to adopt or appreciate other value systems that are much more concerned with the well-being of animals.

I think it is more likely than not that failure to pass this bill as is was net harmful.

• Ozone air cleaners are a significant source of indoor air pollution, producing indoor particulate levels just slightly less than second hand smoke. Particulates account for 85%+ of morbidity from indoor air pollution in residences. There is a serious harm in keeping these air cleaners on the market. All major health and air quality organizations oppose them. But there is no ban on their sale, so they remain available to uninformed customers. Killing this bill keeps a major harm on the market.
• There are many pollution control technologies besides Far-UVC that can reduce infection risk, including UV technologies at longer wavelengths that do not produce ozone. Far-UVC is not a far superior technology, and it's not clear to me that a setback in the Far-UVC industry meaningfully delays adoption of infection control technologies generally.
• Scrubbers are likely going to be necessary on Far-UVC devices because of how much pollution they produce. As HVAC engineers, we have a duty of care that will likely prohibit using control technologies that worsen indoor air quality. There isn't an easy solution to the problem beyond scrubbers; if you use ventilation or filtration to control it, you could have just gone with a ventilation or filtration solution from the start.
• The majority of CA buildings are in a mild climate and energy recovery and or economizing is likely going to be a cheaper solution overall compared to room air cleaners in new facilities.

Overall, I'm discouraged at the broad EA obsession with Far-UVC instead of coordinating with leading organizations like ASHRAE to promote the uptake of infectious disease control standards and design generally. In this case, that obsession did cause clear harm, with unclear benefit.

You can buy whey made from precision fermentation (PerfectDay). That changes several elements of your post, particularly the claim that whey is necessarily not vegan.

"we are biologically programmed to not care when eating animal flesh" this isn't obvious or intuitive to me. It seems like our attitudes toward eating animals are largely culturally conditioned. Regardless, even if it is "innate", a personal insensitivity to animals is not a moral reason to treat them as interchangeable, expendable, or offsetable.

It seems your justifications for offsets are bit of fanatic consequentialism and a belief that animals do not deserve similar moral status as humans.

Two points in response. First, many vegans were similarly callous towards animals before they became vegan. Cognitive dissonance is incredibly powerful. It's why many vegans first went vegan for health reasons, then were able to earnestly consider animal moral status, and then stayed vegan for the animals. Second, I think you should be horrified at how some animals are treated as if they were human. Pigs for example are similar enough in biology that they are used for organ transplants and to test painkiller efficacy. There don't seem to be good reasons to think the experience of pain to a pig is all that different from that of a human infant.

A useful test when moral theorizing about animals is to swap "animals" with "humans" and see if your answer changes substantially. In this example, if the answer changes, the relevant difference for you isn't about pure expected value consequentialism, it's about some salient difference between the rights or moral status of animals vs. humans. Vegans tend to give significant, even equivalent, moral status to some animals used for food. If you give near-equal moral status to animals, "offsetting meat eating by donating to animal welfare orgs" is similar to "donating to global health charities to offset hiring a hitman to target a group of humans". There are a series of rebuttals, counter-rebuttals, etc. to this line of reasoning. Not going to get into all of them. But suffice to say that in the animal welfare space, an animal welfarist carnivore is hesitantly trusted - it signals either a lack of commitment or discipline, a diet/health struggle, a discordant belief that animals deserve far less rights and moral status as humans, or (much rarer) a fanatic consequentialist ideology that thinks offsetting human killing is morally coherent and acceptable. A earnest carnivore that cares a lot about animal welfare is incredibly rare.

Maximization is not as simple as choosing the single action the produces the most benefit; actions are not necessary exclusive. If I go to the grocery store, I don't only by beans because I think they have the highest nutritional value per dollar. I buy other things too, and need to be because beans alone are insufficient. One can donate to animal welfare charities and be vegan; those aren't exclusive.

Can you elaborate on why you think we will never eradicate factory farming? You point to near-term trends that suggest it will get worse over the coming decades. What about on a century long time scale or longer? Factory farming has only been around for a few generations, and food habits have changed tremendously over that time.

I think it's important to consider how some strategies may make future work difficult. For example, Martha Nussbaum highlights how much of the legal theory in the animal rights movement has relied on showing similarities between human and animal intelligence. Such a "like us" comparison limits consideration to a small subset of vertebrates. They are impotent at helping animals like chickens, were much legal work is happening now. Other legal theories are much more robust to expansion and consideration of other animals as the science improves to understand their needs and behavior.

Using your line of argument applied to the analogy you provided would suggest that efforts like developing a malaria vaccine are misguided, because malaria will always be with us, and we should just focus on reducing infection rates and treatment.

ASHRAE has long had standards and working groups on UVC, and recently published standard 241 on Control of Infectious Aerosols. The goal is to reduce transmission risk, not to support any one particular technology. Filtration is usually cheaper than Far-UVC and easier to maintain for the same level of infection control. Far-UVC/UVC is better in some niches, particularly in healthcare settings that require high air flow rates.

I suggest getting involved in ASHRAE and the research community that has been working on and developing standards for infection control for over a century.

From an EA perspective, I think it is more effective to promote adoption of ASHRAE Std 241 than the adoption of Far-UVC specifically.

-perspective of a Ph.D. mechanical engineer and ASHRAE member with experience in IAQ

Academic freedom is not and has never been meant to protect professors on topics that have no relevance to their discipline: "Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject, but they should be careful not to introduce into their teaching controversial matter which has no relation to their subject. Limitations of academic freedom because of religious or other aims of the institution should be clearly stated in writing at the time of the appointment."

If, say, a philosophy professor wants to express opinions on infanticide, that is covered under academic freedom. If they want to encourage students to drink bleach, saying it is good for their health, that is not covered.

We can and should have a strong standard of academic freedom for relevant, on-topic contributions. But race science is off topic and irrelevant to EA. It's closer to spam. Should the forum have no spam filter and rely on community members to downvote posts as the method of spam control?

A clear example of a post that would be banned under the rules: why-ea-will-be-anti-woke-or-die.