EA - Longtermism and alternative proteins by BruceF

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Longtermism and alternative proteins, published by BruceF on June 27, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.I spoke at EA Global London 2023 about longtermism and alternative proteins. Here’s the basic argument:1) Meat production is a significant contributor to climate change, other environmental harms (pretty much all of them), food insecurity, antibiotic resistance, and pandemic risk - causing significant and immediate harm to billions of people.2) All of these harms are likely to double in adverse impact (or more) by 2050 unless alternative proteins succeed.3) Their X risk level is sufficiently high (Ord chart) that they warrant attention from longtermists. Especially for longtermists in policy or philanthropy, adding alt proteins to the portfolio impactful and tractable interventions that you support can allow you to do even more good in the world (a lot of it fairly immediate).In the talk, I cite this report from the Center for Strategic & International Studies’ director of global food security & director of climate and energy, as well as a report from ClimateWorks Foundation & the Global Methane Hub (1-pager w/r/t the points I made in the talk here).Below are the recording and transcript - comments welcomed.Here's a link to the slides from this talk.IntroductionThe observation is that we have been making meat in the same way for 12,000 years. Food is a technology. Making meat is a technology. The way we do it now is extraordinarily inefficient and comes with significant external costs that do indeed jeopardize our long-term future. This is Johan Rockström after the EAT-Lancet Commission called on the world to eat 90 percent less meat back in 2018 and 2019. He said, "Humanity now poses a threat to the stability of the planet. This requires nothing less than a new global agricultural revolution." That's what I'm going to be talking about, and I'm going to situate it in terms of effective altruism.There are five parts to the talk. The first one is that meat production has risen inexorably for many decades, and there is no sign of that growth slowing. The second is that our only strategy for changing this trajectory is support for alternative proteins - there's not a tractable plan B. The third point is that alternative proteins address multiple risks to long-term flourishing and they should be a priority for longtermists. I'm not going to try to convince you. They should be the priority - they're on par with AI risk or bioengineered pandemics. But I am going to try to convince you that, unless you are working for an organization that is focused on one thing, you should add alternative proteins to your portfolio if you are focused on longtermism. Fourth, I want to give you a sense of how GFI thinks about prioritization so that what we're doing as we expand is the highest marginal possible impact. Then we'll have some time for a discussion which Sim will lead us through.Meat Production has risen by 300% since 1961.The first observation is that, since 1961, global meat production has risen 300 percent.In China, it has skyrocketed by 1,500 percent. It's 15 times up since 1961, and meat production and consumption is going to continue to rise through 2050.There have been 11 peer-review articles looking at what meat production and consumption are going to look like in 2050. The lowest production is 61 percent more. One of the predictions is 3.4 times as much, so 340 percent more. Most of the predictions hover at about double. Most of that growth is not in developed economies. Developed economies have leveled off. They're going up a little bit. Most of that growth is in developing economies and in Asia.The world doesn't have tractable solutions to this. Bill Gates when he released How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, on his book tour was talking about how the cl...