Answer six questions, and see how you affect the climate | Hacker News Reader

Answer six questions, and see how you affect the climate

blog.thealmanacapp.com

11 pointsaditya28 comments

I'm very confused by the other section and see no explanation anywhere but it takes up 75% of my pie chart :/

Edit: Even if everything is set at zero everyone still raises the earth by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit.

If this site wants to educate people they need to give out more information but as of now it looks like they are just gathering data and making a silly pie chart and map.

There is a how it works link: http://thealmanacapp.com/question_sources

Interesting, they assume you get 20mpg. Does the fact that I get 50+ change my impact, per miles driven? Apparently not.

As noted in the how it works link (posted twice on this page, or at the bottom of your chart), they've assumed you have the average emission levels for all sorts of other activities, such as home telephone service, car purchases, apparel purchases, and, of course, alcohol and tobacco.

Got to love the US Consumer Expenditure Survey...

EDIT: tl; dr: the people who made this want you know it isn't ready for prime time.

Hey folks, Jonah here from the Almanac. Although Aditya very kindly published our survey, it's still rough as everyone here has pointed out. We assumed it wasn't going to be seen by too many people at this stage, but of course one should always be careful publishing information to the web, especially about something as contentious as global warming. However, given that it IS now out in the open, I might as well take this opportunity to respond to people's thoughts.

The main thing I would caution is that part of the point of this survey is how inadequate six questions is to cover a persons' footprint (thus that huge other). The main service we want to develop goes into a lot more detail about peoples' consumption, and will track this information automatically.

You could have made a similar poll in New York in 1900, only with regards to how many pounds of horseshit you created. Ok, you'd need a team of ledger operators with slide rules to work it out, but you'd get frightening figures projected forwards over 50 years. One would start to get terribly frightened about where all that horseshit would go. Politicians would come up with ridiculous schemes to put an artificial price on horseshit to reduce the production of it (which had a marketable value, but supply overwhelmed demand)

The thing is though, within 50 years you could fit all the horseshit in New York city into one dumptruck. All because of a game-changing technological introduction - the motor car.

That's the problem I have with this type of thought experiment. It assumes constant growth of everything else but technological breakthroughs.

50 years ago you couldn't easily speak to someone on the other side of the world. Sending international messages was so expensive you paid per letter. Now I can speak to multiple people in multiple countries in full video conference, and all for basically free.

I think it's either naive or arrogant to think the problems of 50-100 years time are constrained by the technologies we have today, and I think it's the wrong response to try and dial back peoples lives to achieve it.

I'm optimistic about our ability to develop technology that addresses climate change, and perhaps some sort of function based on increased efficiency (or the development of new technologies altogether) should be introduced – some sort of constant growth of technological breakthroughs. That's a legitimate criticism.

However, I take issue with the idea that people shouldn't try to dial back (or change) their consumption now to deal with the issue. Until someone invents that car (very low emissions energy, for instance), we still have the horseshit piling up, and there's no guarantee the car will be invented any time soon. I don't want to simply sit around watching it accumulate until someone invents a car, especially when its accumulation could potentially have large negative effects that would be hard to undo (a whole other technological problem).

We do want to help introduce people to these technologies as they emerge (reduce your load of horsecrap, drive a car!) – we just also want to allow people to try to deal with the problem with the tools at their disposal.

PS: Our site is written mostly in slide rule.

If you enter 0 for everything, the average global temperature change is still +1.8°F.

Clearly, you produce too much body heat. We must eliminate you.

As an educational tool, this is flawed. Anyone with curiosity and an attentions span longer than 10 seconds will try the 'all zeros', and the message this sends is that purely by existing, you are screwing up the world. This is not true, as best I know!

Yeah, I don't think the current framework we use for helping people think about their impact is very good. It is not very motivating to show people a bad consequence even when they are obviously doing nothing to cause it. Even when it does show them a bad consequence, it is not one that will actually happen (considering that most of the world will not consume nearly as much as your average American, which is who our surveys' written for).

We're trying to find better frameworks, and one of the ones we've been considering is not to worry at all about talking about the size of our users' footprint, but rather to talk about the benefits of various types of changes in consumption if they were widely adopted. That way the negative situation presented isn't some confusing, oversized and hypothetical scenario, but simply the one we think is happening; and the benefits of one's changes aren't hypothetical, but potentially part of some larger (if unlikely) movement.

We're looking for the best way of presenting information about this issue and the benefits of actions people can take. If you or anyone reading this have any ideas about you'd want to see someone do this, we'd love to hear them.

A common tactic for motivating people to change is instead of showing them how bad things are, you show them how bad things are AND how much better they could be.

Additionally, it helps if you paint the most-desired result as attainable. Instinctively we understand that +0 F change is the best. Explain how that might be attained (in a more friendly manner than 'sack and pillage most of the world's population'). The data is against you, but it helps if people feel the ultimate target is not impossible to reach.

Thank you; this is quite useful, and it confirms some of the same feedback we've been getting from other sources. We will definitely start a new iteration of this page using these ideas. At the very least, we can figure out a way of setting of our goal such that the instinctively "best" value is unattainable. And we will try to keep pillaging to a minimum...

They're projecting using historical data, so that makes sense (if everyone stopped consuming over and above what they've been consuming the temperature would still rise.

From the how it works link: http://thealmanacapp.com/question_sources

also, the pie chart has a slice of a significant size for the $0 electricity bill

This is because of two things; the first is what Aditya pointed out (emissions from the past continuing to have an impact) and the second is that because we were only working with 6 questions, we didn't have room to address some areas of consumption (like most food, or goods and services in general), so we just assumed a basic amount of emissions for those categories.

Do the averages for beef consumption and airline hours seem low to anyone else?

I checked the sources for beef...it's only the amount you eat at home. Doesn't include eating out, which would like double or triple it.

Couldn't find fault with the airline numbers, but four hours a year? One two hour roundtrip flight? Srsly?

1) That's a good point about beef – we hadn't realized that! 2) I can't find anything wrong with the airline methodology either (barring the fact that like everything else, there are assumptions that introduce a lot of uncertainty, like average flight speed). It does seem a little low, though...

1) Is the gas cost per year?

2) Is the electricity cost per year?

3) Am I more polluting because my government taxes energy more, which multiplies my electricity cost by more than a factor of 4? Probably better to allow people to enter the amount of energy.

4) Why only ask about beef, not about meat in general?

1), 2)--probably per month. 3) Well, of course the actual amount of energy would be better, but the poll did say "average American." 4) Because raising cattle is an incredibly expensive way of producing meat. For example, producing one pound of beef takes several thousand more pounds of water than a pound of chicken does. Did you notice how in their energy consumption pie chart how beef alone took up a big slice?

More sources on how expensive beef is: http://michaelbluejay.com/veg/environment.html

Except for the small issue that more water does not equal more emissions. It's not like most cows are drinking desalinated water.

The link between increased emissions from beef and warming is tenuous at best. Cows eat grass or other feed, which absorbs co2 in order to grow. They don't eat coal. Therefore their net impact has to be very small. You can try and argue the 'methane more impact than c02' line, but the sensitivity of both methane and c02 forms the basis of most of the argument around the global warming theory.

I think it would be better with another, more relevant factor for that one of your choices. The comments here say six isn't enough and the beef link is very tenuous. To me it comes across as veganism dressed up as global warming.

We're open to suggestions for a better sixth question. Right you are, the beef one was suggested to us by a vegan, who pointed to some articles suggesting that red meat was a major cause of global warming. Our research hasn't confirmed this, and that is obviously coming through in the survey.

I should mention that the main emissions issues with cows that we are aware of are from methane and nitrous oxide. The former comes both from the cow itself and its manure; the latter from its manure and from the fertilizer used to make its food. There's some issue with CO2 and land use changes (e.g. cutting down forest for cows to graze), but that's not as big. Methane and nitrous oxide are 20 and 300 or so times as strong greenhouse gas as CO2 on a 100-year time scale. However, we clearly didn't find it to be nearly as significant as the other categories.

We wanted to include some question about a type of consumption that wasn't about home energy or transportation, because a significant part of one's emissions does come from the supply chains that lead to one's purchases. It may be that there is no one question that would be very useful in this regard. Perhaps we should ask something about which car you drive, or something else to help refine one of the already mentioned questions.

Just wanted to add that we've updated three figures for average consumption of Americans based on errors you guys pointed out:

- average electricity and natural gas use were mistakenly per capita rather than per household

- beef consumption didn't include beef eaten outside of the home

Interesting, I got +3.7F despite living in Manhattan, never using a car, not eating beef (silly Indian morality) - but all these boxen in my apartment are increasing my electricity bill. Also, those plane trips without carbon offsets...

My electric bill is HUGE compared to the average American. Do people living in regular houses really have $50/month electric bills?

I don't know, but since I moved from a house to an apartment building, my electricity bill is within that range.

You're right – this is an error. We divided the average monthly bill by the number of people in the average household, which we needed to do; really the average is a little more than $100/month. Thank you for catching it!

I got a +5.2F living by Edmonton, Alberta and we don't even have two cars. The poor world - what are we going to do to you?

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