I get your point. There’s a lot hysteria right now. However I think people are willing to trust a capitalist realism hunch because over the last >20 years, that hunch is usually going to be right.
I think current livestock usage is driven by demand? I don’t think everyone needs to become strictly vegan. If every ate meat just two days a week that would have a big impact. Perfect being the enemy of the good and all that. For example if meat usage was rationed by the government WW2-style that would likely effect demand too.
You might argue that’s a ridiculous suggestion which is fair. The western world did mobilize for something that’s likely to end less of life that if we continue on our current trajectory.
This analysis might benefit from a multivariate regression. You mention a few different explanations for why performance differs and if you could get solid numbers for those you could try teasing that apart.
Also a small note: the axis on one of your plots alternates between 4% and 5% increments whilst holding the ticks constant. Maybe because of rounding?
It's been reduced before through cracking down on pollution. The results are directly suspected to be responsible for an increase in warming rate, both locally and worldwide. The only way in which it would be necessary to keep releasing it, and in increasingly higher quantities, is only if no other measure or action is taken, which is obviously not the intended goal: its purpose is to make up for the damage already done that will linger for longer than anyone currently alive.
The emission reductions in our simulations correspond closely to the emissions reductions realized in East Asia over the period 2010–2023, in magnitude and geographical location. This allows us to put our results in the context of the recent uptick in the observed rate of global mean surface warming. Here, we find that emissions reductions in East Asia have contributed up to 0.05 °C/decade since 2010, explaining a large fraction of the observed increase of 0.06 °C/decade over the same period, after filtering out the effects of interannual variability. (from https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02527-3)
Very good point. There’s clearly two different boxes in the public discourse when it comes to AI versus how we discuss animals. Willing to bet that 90% of the people who loudly make the argument about we should start considering if AI is sentient couldn’t care less about how other sentient animals are treated when they can provably shown to suffer pain and long lasting trauma.
Also I would say that we go much further than just enslavement - specifically looking at how male chickens and pigs are treated.
Factory farming is horrendous, but is far beyond "slavery" which is "just" a forced lack of agency, living conditions aren't relevant. A well treated horse is still enslaved. A chimpanzee in a zoo,
If we show models to be sapient, that's one thing. If they are shown to be merely sentient, there's no issue beyond the status quo of livestock and pets existing.
There’s an alternative not mentioned: company scrips. Historically Such as in coal mines, workers were “paid” in tokens they could only use at the company store.
I agree. I think it’s fair to say that while many people might agree Bush II is someone you could have a beer with compared to the current prest his foreign policy decisions lead to excess mortality in the range of half a million.
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