Hacker News Reader

Comment by stingraycharles | Hacker News Reader

I think it's partially related to something akin to the prisoner's dilemma: it's a world-wide problem, and "we" might not want to take the financial hit for being the first in leading the cause.

I spent quite some time in South-East Asia the past few years, and when you see the sheer amount of boats that just dump all their trash in the ocean, and the sheer lack of awareness of the issue, it makes you hopeless. I come home, diligently recycling my trash, and I can't help but wonder whether this is all just a show, and not addressing any of the core issues that are needed to fix this.

View on HN

I share your feeling, but I also note this contradiction:

> I spent quite some time in South-East Asia

> I come home, diligently recycling my trash

Not saying you shouldn't recycle your trash, but your flights are much more impactful for the environment than your trash.

Is flying really that bad compared to ocean pollution? I feel like flying is overall a pretty efficient means of transport, everything is geared towards efficiency.

Plastic in the oceans, now that’s a mess.

Consider a world where every human traveled by plane like you do and where also every human used recycling as you do. Would you prefer living in that world?

yes?

Not the OP, but if jet fuel were more sustainable or electric planes more common then certainly.

(I too feel conflicted about plane travel and it's long term impact.)

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_juice/2014/07/dri...

> Consider a world where every human traveled by plane like you do and where also every human used recycling as you do. Would you prefer living in that world?

According to the above article, one would prefer that.

> The trend has continued so that in 2010, flying burned just 2,691 BTU per passenger mile—an improvement of 74 percent since 1970. That was 43 percent better than driving the average car, which gets about 21.5 miles per gallon (4,218 BTU per passenger mile)

Flying is ocean pollution.

By emitting that large amount of co2, you are disrupting the ocean co2 flux, reducing o2 available and causing acidification. The warming caused by the thermal capacity of the co2 melts the polar ice , cooling the oceans and reducing their salinity. Plastic is relatively a small problem.

Agreed, but air travel is only 5% of global emissions. There is much more low hanging fruit in electric vehicles and moving building HVAC to electricity (AC and heat pumps). Eliminate natural gas and fuel oil for heating, eliminate petroleum for moving people and goods around, and start feeding cows seaweed to reduce their methane emissions by 95%.

Air travel research has shown biofuels are production ready, but it’s not cost competitive yet, although that’s a market failure through the externalization of emission costs.

The impact of flying has been very nicely estimated in the freely available book "Sustainable Energy - without the hot air" by the late Prof. David MacKay FRS: http://withouthotair.com/c5/page_35.shtml and http://withouthotair.com/cC/page_269.shtml if you are interested in how he arrives at the estimate.

The book also remarks upon how a (theoretical) revival of ocean liners would actually be worse.

Well, it's actually that I spent 2.5 years in the area non-stop, and came back last year pickup up my habits again.

Having said that, I agree with aircraft pollution. And this indeed implies that I recycling is silly compared to other things I do. So this only fuels the apathy I'm starting to feel towards this whole thing.

In my perfect world air travel would be one of the few remaining uses for petroleum.

"Tragedy of the commons", it's called.

Thanks, I never fully understood what people meant with that phrase. :)

No problem, it's when something can be improved when everyone does the right thing together, but nobody has any incentive to do the right thing alone. Exactly like dumping trash everywhere, if you do the right thing alone, you're just inconveniencing yourself by spending money to dispose of trash properly while everyone else dumps it wherever.

Thanks again, very informative. So does that mean that the prisoner's dilemma is unrelated to this ?

The reason I mentioned that is that I figured there were two outcomes:

- be rich/save money now, and get a possible competitive edge over other countries

- invest in your future, long-term assuming other countries do the same

The tragedy of the commons can be modeled as a game, and the matrix can be similar to the one from the prisoner's dilemma, but they're not exactly the same. For example, if you properly recycle and I just dump my trash, I'm not better off than if we just both dumped our trash, which is what happens with the prisoner's dilemma. Basically, the prisoners have an incentive to deceive each other, whereas in the tragedy of the commons, you generally don't.

It is too late to worry about going first. A great many countries have already stepped up.

Recycling isnt much help. Putting a few meters of solar on your roof is far more important. Not taking a first-class flight to vacation on the other side of the planet is also good. Installing an entire roof of solar, and making sure your grandparents vote against the coal lobby, that's the best anyone can do atm.

> I can't help but wonder whether this is all just a show

Do you know that the garbage that is "recycled" in the USA used to be sent (until Dec 2017) directly to China? This is one of the scams of the century. Nobody knows what China does with the material they cannot use, and in fact they just decided not to take it anymore.

I can't help but wonder whether this is all just a show, and not addressing any of the core issues that are needed to fix this

That´s exactly what is going on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com