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Comment by gopi | Hacker News Reader

This celebrities travelling in private jets and partying in yachts preach others about climate change!

People who take tax breaks can also oppose the tax breaks. I don't think this counts as hypocrisy.

Perhaps the savings you make from tax breaks can help fund your opposition to tax breaks.

if you took away celebrity jets and yachts, what percentage of CO2 would we eliminate? How many zeros should I use? Would this be a good approximation?

0.00000000001%

Why should we section off people that indulge with jets and yachts in a separate category and explain away their behavior on the basis that this is only a small group of people?

I'm not even sure why we're even talking about it. it's irrelevant. "Fixing it" wouldn't delay the problem by a day. There are 100,000 commercial flights every day.

https://www.quora.com/How-many-airplanes-fly-each-day-in-the...

We need to fix the big problems, not the irrelevant ones.

I'm rejecting how you are classifying the problem. Cornering off a specific subsection of the population and saying its too small to worry about is deflection.

Everyone can be classified and cornered off in some way. Does that mean that we should consider everyone's contribution to the problem irrelevant, or just those with a simple and easy to convey label?

How about we grill those people with leaf blowers and lawn mowers?

http://www.edmunds.com/car-reviews/features/emissions-test-c...

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=98532&page=1

Those little engines are particularly bad.

You're worried about a slippery slope that doesn't exist.

If I said "let π = 3.1415" would you be objecting that I might as well set π = 3, just because I'm not using its exact value? Are you really arguing that we can't afford to overlook any pollution? You don't solve problems by rejecting any solution that isn't absolutely perfect.

I didn't see any solution being proposed here...

I had a Bio professor in college who lectured every day about climate change, yet drove 2 hours to and from work every day, through the mountains. I booked to class, every day, and he still made me nuts.

I asked him about this hypocrisy, which led to a lower grade in the class. Worth it.

By how big of a factor do you believe consumer pollution effects outweigh industrial pollution? Also, do you really believe hypocrisy has any kind of standing as a rational argument?

Technically, without a consumer, there would be no industrial pollution.

How is that relevant? The concern here is industrial pollution in scale relation to consumer pollution. If consumer pollution is is significantly lower than industrial pollution, then it is easier to tolerate.

Nobody is hypothesizing the non-existence of consumers.

Because consumers drive industry, so more consumer pollution implies more consumption, which in turn creates more industry and more industrial pollution.

It's a system, not a balance sheet.

Of course we shouldn't. What we need is one simple rule: you pay for the damage caused by your indulgence.

If you can, fire away your jets. If you can't, don't. Just like every other aspect of life in a capitalistic society. I mean, can you imagine the chutzpah of hedge fund managers who claim they should be exempt from carbon tax because they are rich? Oh dear.

* Why are we talking about carbon tax here anyway?

I think you're assuming that paying for damage is equivalent to correcting it, which is a seriously broken assumption.

"Paying for damage" seems working pretty well for national parks. Besides, the choice right now is not between paying and correcting, but between paying and not paying.

Perfect is the enemy of better.

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