So your entire diet would cost somewhere between 50 cents and $600 per year (with a point estimate of $20, but dominated in expectation by the right tail), and going vegan would maybe save a majority of that. I don’t expect the other environmental damage to be as costly as the carbon emissions, but of course I could be wrong.
However, if (as I do) you have more uncertainty over animal suffering- and thus a higher average expected value- cutting out meat entirely seems like it’s worth a significant but not overwhelming dollar equivalent, measured in hundreds or in thousands of dollars each year.
And that’s enough for me to at least 80-20 it, cutting out any meat that I was just eating by habit (instead of because my body feels it needs it or because it’s a particularly delicious meal).
Here’s another attempt at CO2e: I see 2.5 tCO2e for a typical diet and 1.5 tCO2e for a vegan diet [1] and a typical American household carbon footprint is ~48 tCO2e [2]. So going vegan shrinks your footprint by about 2%. If you told me I needed to shrink my footprint by 2% I can think of lots of things I’d much rather give up than eating animal products.
But it also doesn’t have to mean giving things up: electricity is something like 10% of my footprint, and I could pay to convert some of that to solar, which wouldn’t be that expensive.
What happens after you factor in the environmental impact? Amount of water used, pollution, etc
The total carbon footprint of the typical American diet is… one set of numbers says 5-15 tons per household, another says 6 tons per person, of CO2-equivalent emissions. And carbon offsets are sold from 10 cents per ton to $40 per ton, with an average of $3.30. (I’m betting the cheapest ones are likely fake, but I don’t think all of the offsets are fake.)
So your entire diet would cost somewhere between 50 cents and $600 per year (with a point estimate of $20, but dominated in expectation by the right tail), and going vegan would maybe save a majority of that. I don’t expect the other environmental damage to be as costly as the carbon emissions, but of course I could be wrong.
However, if (as I do) you have more uncertainty over animal suffering- and thus a higher average expected value- cutting out meat entirely seems like it’s worth a significant but not overwhelming dollar equivalent, measured in hundreds or in thousands of dollars each year.
And that’s enough for me to at least 80-20 it, cutting out any meat that I was just eating by habit (instead of because my body feels it needs it or because it’s a particularly delicious meal).
Here’s another attempt at CO2e: I see 2.5 tCO2e for a typical diet and 1.5 tCO2e for a vegan diet [1] and a typical American household carbon footprint is ~48 tCO2e [2]. So going vegan shrinks your footprint by about 2%. If you told me I needed to shrink my footprint by 2% I can think of lots of things I’d much rather give up than eating animal products.
But it also doesn’t have to mean giving things up: electricity is something like 10% of my footprint, and I could pay to convert some of that to solar, which wouldn’t be that expensive.
[1] http://shrinkthatfootprint.com/food-carbon-footprint-diet
[2] http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/carbon-footprint-factsheet