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Comment by AWildDHHAppears | Hacker News Reader

America can reduce its carbon footprint by 5%, save 300,000 lives/year, and save about $400 Billion dollars a year without spending a nickel.

If the 66% of the American population that's obese or overweight would just stop overeating, all of the above could happen overnight.

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It is a red herring.

It reminds me how soda companies shift blame on their customers: "exercise more, don't blame our sugar water". Actually, what and how much you eat/drink is much more important than the exercise, to fight obesity.

Another (BS) example: "shower less to save water" -- compare the agricultural water consumption (giant) vs. the household needs (negligible by comparison).

If a corporation destroys the planet; its products should include the price today (e.g., via a tax): the problem fixes itself.

Nobody ever said exercise more. (That may be bad advice for obese people too, because it will make them hungrier and they may injure their already strained joints). Plus, it won't help the environment. (That's the subject here!)

Just eat less!

In case you are not playing stupid intentionally, my point: blame corporations, not people: tax corporations that contribute to the global warming today (that may have a real effect even if it is almost impossible to implement -- it should be easier with each more frequent natural disaster) instead of suggesting "eat less" to the whole population (that won't have nearly the same effect and it is even more impossible to implement).

He actually has a point. While corporations have their share of responsibility, so do individuals who choose the quick rewards of sugar/sodium/fat.

Not that asking an addict to quit is really helpful...

Such a great idea. There was also a recent proposal to just breed humans to be smaller: http://www.smatthewliao.com/2012/02/09/human-engineering-and...

You missed the point. The majority of Americans _eat too much_. Why can't they just eat less and save the planet?

Well, why can't they?

(That's not rhetorical.)

[reading before posting, apologies for a rambling reply]

Personally, I see it as a very similar question as "why don't people just stop taking drug X" (to avoid side arguments, substitute X for a drug you see significantly altering people's lives for what you see as negatively).

Weight loss is typically very simple, but that gets confused with easy. really quite minor behavioural differences can result in fairly extreme weight changes over time.

Perhaps it's simply that people are prioritising short term things over long term. Short term the beer I'm drinking is nice, relaxing and great. Long term it's negative since it's at least taking me over my calorie limit for the day.

The risks are vague and hard to intrinsically grasp, the benefits are simple and local.

I think there are also significant effects of what people expect. With so many people overweight, what people expect has changed. I don't have statistics, but I've heard a large number of people complain about their families declaring them "anorexic" while still being quite overweight or even obese. If you're surrounded by people telling you to have more, having an expectation that people should be larger, and many external sources telling you that losing weight is complex (requiring weird and extreme approaches)

Fundamentally, we've not really evolved to deal with an environment of near infinite food available through very little activity (not suggesting work isn't hard for many, but we can sit down all day and easily get several times our required calorie intake). We have evolved in environments where we needed to get as much as we could from our surroundings, and it was hard to come by.

Food is also one of the most common ways of dealing with stress, depression, or all sorts of mental disorders, minor and major. It's readily available and socially acceptable, and most people associate good feelings with many foods that are particularly high in calories. For some people, it's one of the only consistently rewarding things in their day.

Yeah, because eating less is easy. If only overweight people knew that it would have a small impact on global warming, I'm sure they'd suddenly be able to cut back, even though personal health, physical attractiveness, and day to day comfort haven't been enough to get them to eat less. But yeah, a small potential impact on global warming will probably do it.

Because the commercial food business is all-powerful in Washington.

and why don't all (other) addicts just stop being addicts?

Given the chance, humanity naturally overuses... which is a problem, but not a wholly American problem.

How much is too much? Not everybody prioritizes health, enjoyment, etc. in the same way. It's easy to fall into the trap of assuming that our personal values are shared by all.

If you were simply expressing your opinion, that's perfectly fine. I only wrote this because it appeared to me as through you were attempting to portray what you said as an objective fact -- which it is not.

An easy measure would be: if all people on the planet would consume resources just like the people in a particular country, the number of planets needed to feed and entertain them should still be less than one. By that measure, I think Europe is somewhere between 2 and 3 and the US is beyond 4.

That measure doesn't deal with over population, which is a huge thing, and more likely to run out of control than consumption per person in a country. Although individual consumption is important as well.

For instance New Delhi is far more polluted than any US city, although energy consumption per capita may be 16 times more in the US than India.

In my opinion a measure like energy or resource use per square kilometer of land is a much better measure. Although it has its problems as well, such as land quality varying greatly between different areas, which would change the number of people an area of land could support in a sustainable way.

Sources: Population and energy usage per country http://www.worldpopulationbalance.org/population_energy . This uses Population Reference Bureau; 2012 World Population Data Sheet for population information and uses U.S. Energy Information Administration 2012 for energy use information. This is on the bottom of the page linked. For the Pollution index, it is Pollution Index 2016 Mid Year http://www.numbeo.com/pollution/rankings.jsp .

Disclaimer: I am not an expert in the slightest.

I wonder if those estimates attempt to account for supply and demand...

There's lots of "modest proposals" out there that would be just as effective as yours. Want to cut 5% of human energy consumption? Round up 1% of Americans and just shoot them. Mission accomplished! And why stop at only 5%? If we identified the 10% most intelligent existing humans and euthanize the rest, all our problems (aside from moral and ethical topics) are solved.

Wow! So telling people not to overeat--to save resources--is the same as rounding up people and shooting them! You YCombinator people sure are nuts!

Yet you'll gladly tell people to drive less, or to change their lightbulbs to LEDs, things that could either greatly inconvenience people or cost money. Eating less is free!

> So telling people not to overeat--to save resources--is the same as rounding up people and shooting them

Yes, they're both equally ridiculous impractical and unrealistic solutions to a problem. That's the point he's making, you seem to be missing it.

Agree! Also raising beef uses a huge amount of water and energy compared to supporting a vegetarian diet. Also, cow and pig farts might have an adverse affect.

When you lose weight, guess where the "lost" weight goes? Most people guess incorrectly that you lose it via urination, defecation, or sweat.

Where it actually goes is into exhaled CO2.

So your proposal is that to fight global warming, fat Americans should massively release CO2 into the atmosphere? :-)

You raise an interesting point! How much carbon could be captured by obese humans? Assuming they don't decompose? It would be some interesting math!

Reminds me that there have been some strange studies looking at the correlation of obesity and climate change. There was at least one presumably quack study that implied the obesity epidemic across all species could be a very weird natural reaction to increased carbon in the atmosphere and that carbon capture could actually be the real subconscious intent and that it may be a causal relationship.

(I don't think that is actually the case, but it's a fun weird theory to think about. Much like the FSM theory that lack of pirates has driven global warming.)

I propose we eat 300k fat people each year.

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