This was going to be my original response actually, but then I thought: You don’t actually prevent specific suffering-filled lives from happening by being vegan, probably. Probably your effect is nothing at all, but there’s a chance that your reduced consumption will make the crucial difference between a factory farm deciding to produce X chickens or X+10,000 chickens next year. Similarly, with global warming probably your effect is nothing at all, but there’s a chance that your microwave-unplugging will be save the crucial amount of carbon that protects one refugee somewhere from dying of heat stroke or something fifty years from now. Moreover not using plastic straws also has a chance of saving specific lives, e.g. your straw might be picked out of a dump by a bird and then ingested by a sea creature or something.
This was going to be my original response actually, but then I thought: You don’t actually prevent specific suffering-filled lives from happening by being vegan, probably. Probably your effect is nothing at all, but there’s a chance that your reduced consumption will make the crucial difference between a factory farm deciding to produce X chickens or X+10,000 chickens next year. Similarly, with global warming probably your effect is nothing at all, but there’s a chance that your microwave-unplugging will be save the crucial amount of carbon that protects one refugee somewhere from dying of heat stroke or something fifty years from now. Moreover not using plastic straws also has a chance of saving specific lives, e.g. your straw might be picked out of a dump by a bird and then ingested by a sea creature or something.