Hacker News Reader

Comment by emodendroket | Hacker News Reader

Trying to fix climate change as an individual consumer is hopeless.

It's like saying recycling is useless because no one recycles. You have to start somewhere

I don't disagree in principle, "Be the change you want to see in the world" and all that, but climate change from an individual level to me seems silly, or perhaps overwhelming. I have stopped really worrying about it in the Dr. Strangelove sense because it's out of control. We're supposed to sort our plastics and papers and yet all of our options available for purchase have been shipped, at least in part, from across the Pacific Ocean? There's airplanes littering the skies yet I'm supposed to worry about putting my banana peels into a compost bin? I actually don't understand. I feel like a lot of business decisions are made that we, as peons, have no say in that affect the overall biosphere a lot and then we're made to feel bad about it. "Ride your bike!" "Recycle!" "Don't forget to turn your lights off when you're not in the room!" Meanwhile: Fracking. ookay...

On topic: I have little doubt there's a strong link between climate change in general and the production and consumption of livestock.

It makes you think about it and sensibilize to it. Which probably failed by you considering :

>On topic: I have little doubt there's a strong link between climate change in general and the production and consumption of livestock.

The most common cow diet at the moment is 50kg of corn + 3 kg of soy + maybe 10kg (dry) of hay. Everyday. Do you think this grows out of the blue or uses arable land ? Also Europe imports soy (from southamerica mostly) to feed cattle. Add the transport costs & pollution and what have you and you might get a glimpse of how eating 100g of beef is producing way more GHG than 100g of beans.

I don't get what you mean. It doesn't seem like you actually disagree with the snippet you're quoting, yet it seems like you're trying to refute it.

I can't read, sorry :p

Right, yeah. If I jumped off a building tomorrow, thereby ending my carbon emissions forever, it would make zero difference.

Recycling is useless because the process takes more energy than mining new except for a few select materials. It’s a feel good exercise in wastefulness.

As mined materials start to get more scarce, their prices will rise, and mining companies will have increased power over markets. You can see recycling as a kind of "intertemporal power smoothing", depriving mining companies of future economic power by reducing the rate at which materials are mined. Economic concentration of power imposes tremendous externalities, most of which are felt by ordinary people in the form of price increases and political disenfranchisement due to lobbying and outright corruption.

I am willing to pay an energy premium today in order to avoid that human rights premium in the future. You may not be so willing, but I would urge you to consider that position.

As price rises, recycling will be more advantageous and will compete with mined materials reducing their future economic power by the same amount as it would if you recycle now.

The maximum effect of your policy will be to delay the moment when recycling becomes economic advantageous, and waste money/energy until then.

Good point. I guess we have solar as an example of that, but solar was also heavily subsidized by the US gov't.

But nonetheless, depletion of that resource or resources will slow down? Energy could be harvested from renewable energy for recycling? Bottom line for me sounds better for our world then mining new till we run out of something?

> Recycling is useless because the process takes more energy than mining new except for a few select materials. It’s a feel good exercise in wastefulness.

I would disagree. There is a benefit to keeping these materials out of a landfill.

Saying we should just throw everything into a landfill because that uses the least energy is not considering the other benefits of diverting waste from the landfill.

The damaging effects of modern landfills are so low as to be effectively negligible.

As traditional mining becomes more expensive, recycling certain metals becomes the new mining.

Also, certain plastics are very easy to recycle, so it's already profitable, I suppose.

Otherwise, you can see landfills as future mining sites, when technology improves.

Always recycle aluminum though!

Yeah, it's not like waste is going to end up in landfills or oceans anyway.

Strong statement - any data to back it up?

If policy dictated through incentives or exise taxes on not recycling then people will recycle.

If people were recycling and asking for change then the policies would be implemented.

I guess it's a matter of taking our own responsibilities or not

Yeah it's as hopeless as voting. Do you vote?

More specifically, it's as hopeless as voting in a planet-wide election.

So until we have the latter, or a forum with enough authority to have the effect of the latter, voting isn't a valid comparison.

Which is a shame as voting is actually quite effective sometimes.

It’s worse than that: it’s voting in a centuries-long election with no specific endpoint where everyone votes multiple times a day, and each vote costs them a little bit.

Correct, I think it would be more effective having this change on a production level where farmers and scientists possibly work together to make meat production more sustainable by for example beter utilizing and extending grass lands in barren regions. Trick is to not make the meat more expensive...

What's needed is a carbon tax. Yes this will make meat (among other things) more expensive, but it is generally offset by the tax savings.

Yea because taxing carbon will magically get rid of it! \o/

Strawman. No one is arguing that it would magically get rid of carbon. However, incentives and prices work. If we had a global tax on carbon that accurately reflected the externalities, carbon emissions would plummet.

Why not ?! It seems the most effective way to change peoples habits is still prices.

If you fob off prices to consumers you do risk creating a two-tiered society where the one class consumes just as much meat as ever and the other no longer has it, which doesn't seem like an ideal/equitable solution.

If it's more expensive the less eco friendly ways of making meat will be consumed instead.

Such as? You think if meat in the US doubled or tripled in price there’d be a black market that would overwhelm those gains? I really doubt that you have any evidence for that.

You're talking past each other because he is imagining some kind of more sustainable meat coexisting with traditional production in the market and you're imagining only this new kind of meat being available for purchase.

I mean the bio meat market for example. Here (netherlands) any bio product is more expensive on average, and the cheaper non bio products are cheaper, so guess what meats are consumed more?

I'm guessing that you mean "organic" here (since e.g., the French word for organic foods is "biologique").

Reply on news.ycombinator.com