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.
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