> there's not enough space in the world to ethically raise $animals_to_slaughter
Well, also including the caveat "at current levels of consumption". As far as I can tell, the incredibly low cost and high consumption that's come from these farming practices is a historical aberration. What was once a luxury became a commodity and then an expectation. The meat from ethically-raised animals is expensive only by comparison, and to my mind it should be regarded as a re-adjustment that reflects the true cost -- and worth -- of the product. If the societal expectation could be reformed to treat meat as a special food, rather than an essential component of every meal, the need for intensive and harmful animal farming would decrease a lot (hopefully by 100%).
I feel like when people talk about "the true cost" of things, they probably haven't done any calculation. What does that, and glib talk about externalities really mean?
I remember wondering just how much the estimated cost of global warming would be, in terms of dollars per gallon of gasoline, so I looked up what the Natural Resources Defense Council estimated the costs per year would be in a few decades, and divided them by the amount of fuel used in a year.
The number I got was on the order of a few dollars a gallon, something like the difference between US gas prices and European gas prices. Or the difference between the peak and valley of recent market fluctuations.
Whether or not you have a problem with doing a cost benefit calculation on preventing global warming, that's not my point.
My point is when you think about the numbers, making meat prohibitively expensive and justifying it by internalizing externalities, would mean you're assuming there are externalities that are orders of magnitude larger than global warming. That seems implausible to me.
If everybody paid $6/gallon for gas, it seems obvious to me it wouldn't be nearly enough to reduce meat consumption to what it used to be. As, of course, people in Europe do continue to eat meat.
Well, also including the caveat "at current levels of consumption". As far as I can tell, the incredibly low cost and high consumption that's come from these farming practices is a historical aberration. What was once a luxury became a commodity and then an expectation. The meat from ethically-raised animals is expensive only by comparison, and to my mind it should be regarded as a re-adjustment that reflects the true cost -- and worth -- of the product. If the societal expectation could be reformed to treat meat as a special food, rather than an essential component of every meal, the need for intensive and harmful animal farming would decrease a lot (hopefully by 100%).