Note: This post was crossposted from the Coefficient Giving Farm Animal Welfare Research Newsletter by the Forum team, with the author's permission. The author may not see or respond to comments on this post.
Subtitle: On vegan advocacy, effective altruism, and FIFA
I turn 40 today. Here are some hot takes.
On factory farming
1. Our biggest challenge is salience. If factory farming led the evening news, it wouldn’t last lo...
On October 22nd starting at 10:00am Pacific Time, Every.org is matching donations to select animal welfare organizations at a 2:1 rate, up to $2,000 per donor per nonprofit (so if you give up to $2,000, they will contribute up to $4,000 and the nonprofit will get up to $6,000). The first donation a donor makes to each eligible nonprofit will be matched, and donors can get the match for multiple $2,000 donations. So, you can get more than $2,000 matched by donating $2,000 one time to multiple...
I like the idea of carbon offsets for flights etc, but I think most carbon offset schemes are probably garbage. A year ago I made a personal pledge that whenever I was prompted to pay extra to carbon offset something, I would decline, but then immediately donate the same amount or more to effective environmental funds (in my case, Effective Altruism Australia Environment.) It's easy to remember and easy to do. Perhaps this simple pledge will be similarly sticky for other people :)
My personal (skeptical) benchmark for price per unit of non-garbage carbon offsets comes from Scott Alexander's mention of Climeworks:
Climeworks actually charges more now, at least for their individual subscription pricing: $1,500/ton, no volume discount across subscription tiers.
I like the idea of immediately donating the same amount or more to effective environmental funds, thanks for sharing.