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Comment by greggman | Hacker News Reader

Im sure this is a dumb question but why are your energy wasteful activities ok but others' are not?

Who gets to decide that? Maybe you flew 5hrs somewhere and your jet fuel environmental damage ends up being larger for the year than the suv driver who didn't make any long distance trips

I think this points to a basic issue. The only way forward is progress like Tesla and Impossible Foods and not in some elites choosing which wasteful activities are ok and which aren't

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The difference between driving an SUV in towns and taking a flight is that there aren't many more fuel-efficient ways to cross the pacific.

Agree with the sentiment, though. We all want to make improvements. The strongest way to cut waste probably is less around making our current lifestyles cleaner (electric cars, easier to grow food), and more around making our lifestyles themselves cleaner (walkable cities, stop eating as much, or as much meat).

EDIT: Yeah, maybe I shouldn't ever cross the Pacific. It is a luxury in itself.

Sail across the Pacific! I mean it's incredibly slow but guilt free, if you buy a used boat.

Yes I know it's impractical advice but it's technically not wrong and hopefully also funny.

Pros:

-Lots of fun, at least for a little while

Cons:

-Perhaps increased possibility of not making it across

-Would have to quit your job(maybe file this one under 'pro' instead?)

buying phones and computers that fly, yes FLY, from China is acceptable to many because they don't see it. however they see a lone driver in a CUV/SUV and freak out without thinking beyond the fact that most families can afford one or two cars and don't have specific vehicles for commuting. So it is far easier to lump guilt on what you see or have to see versus what you cannot.

The way forward isn't tied to any particular brand. Its pulling back from a marketing driven world which has convinced people that not only do they need all of it they deserve it.

Whoa, hit a raw nerve there. Seems like you feel 'people' have been a bit holier than thou, a bit preachy about this whole 'I'm doing my bit why aren't you'?

I got to break it to you, this is not about making sure you get your fair share of the pie. This is about there being any pie at all.

And whatever the reason is that people are deliberately choosing massively more costly vehicles (in terms of gas and capital costs), there needs to be a lot more persuading of people in their purchasing decisions. It needs to be not cool to buy a truck to drive to the office.

I'm sure their will be an electric F350 (massive torque! The Model S P85 weighs half as much but has 50% more) but do we all need to drive one to work?!

You ARE being preachy. You're calling people who drive SUVs 'rude about' actually being climate deniers, with zero effort applied to try to understand and empathise with what might motivate these people.

It's so easy to point to other peoples apparently wasteful behaviour from a distance, and much easier than introspection. So the question is reasonable: Have you "deliberately" been on a not-absolutely-necessary long haul flight this year? Because then you don't really have anything to tell families who prefer SUVs.

This 'If you're not a vegan bicycle rider don't tell me what to do' logic is absurd.

The point is that people have so little understanding of what is going on with the climate they won't even modify their behaviour slightly, even when getting a sedan with higher efficiency and better safety will cost them much less.

So no, I'm not calling SUV owners rude, it's a rhetorical device to highlight that they are metaphorically thumbing their noses.

Forget about the environment! Being hit by an SUV instead of a mid-sized sedan increases your risk of death by over 50%, even if the SUV has no cargo in it and the driver is commuting, alone, to work.

Choosing SUVs and trucks and other oversize vehicles that are bigger than your actual use case calls for also violently inflicts greater risk of death and injury upon other road users at no benefit to you.

This is because doubling the weight of two cars in a collision does not make either driver safer; it's a zero sum game. (It's also because bigger vehicles reduce visibility for everyone else.)

It also indirectly creates more congestion -- the vehicles have to fit on the road, slowing maneuvers at intersections and making it less feasible for jurisdictions to manage traffic by repainting N lane roads as N+M lane roads with narrower lanes.

I'm all for getting a large vehicle if you actually use it to haul, but I get angry[1] whenever I see people driving around massive brand new pickup trucks with totally empty beds, two rows of seats, and all the luxury passenger-oriented option as a "lifestyle choice" because it "looks cool" to their buddies. It's essentially a sedan with a bunch of wasted weight and horsepower that fulfills the same goal a T-shirt reading "I'm a real man who needs a truck" would fulfill.

Some references:

http://www.accessmagazine.org/articles/fall-2014/pounds-kill... http://www.accessmagazine.org/articles/fall-2002/suvs-really... http://www.accessmagazine.org/articles/fall-2012/slower-road...

[1] Although I temper my anger with a grain of salt since maybe they do use the bed, just not this time. My anger is against the general trend, not any individual. Still, two rows of seats in a pickup truck is usually the tipoff that the owner primarily uses the vehicle like a sedan. And when I do see stuff in the bed, it's rarely something that wouldn't have fit in a station wagon or minivan. It's just so rare to see someone actually using a pickup truck to haul the kind of weight that kind of horsepower is made for...

The logic seems to be 'If I hit a sedan, I'll be better off', which ceases to be meaningful if the other person is driving a truck, or you hit a tree.

Great if you hit a Prius though.

Would it be elite to tax both activities relative to the estimated damage?

(Passenger miles really aren't so bad, an airliner with a few hundred people on it is doing a lot more work than a commuter's SUV)

According to Wikipedia 1mile in a plane is equivalent to 1 mile in a 4 seat car per person. So your personal emissions from say round trip SF to NYC is the same as driving a car for 8200 miles. And that doesn't include the other enviromental impacts. In other words travel is arguably a very environment unfriendly thing you to do

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_avia...

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