Carbon emissions from tourism are rising at an alarming rate
nature.com
nature.com
Recycling is a bandaid. Fast fashion is a nightmare. Agriculture is one of the biggest causes of carbon emissions.
It is unfortunate that travel is creating such an impact but I personally get annoyed whenever I see an article try to make an individual feel guilty for their contribution to climate change. Nothing one person could ever do could hold a light to the amount of carbon released by industries. Not that you shouldn't recycle but I find it weak reporting to guilt individuals rather than actually talk about the real problem.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...
I feel this creates a bizarre boundary between "individuals" and "industries." "Industries" didn't just magically spring up, created by an unknown exogenous force. They are created by, for, and sustained by individuals.
I want a iPhone -> I buy it from Apple -> Apple sources said iPhone from a host of companies wrecking extreme environmental havok. Because I didn't directly create strip mine the precious metals required, I am somehow absolved of all responsibility for the effects of someone else doing it? To me this just seems like a big guilt laundering scheme.
It doesn't feel fair to lop on the blame on industries when we are consumers supporting them.
This is a coordination problem. Yes, all the individuals on the market for an iPhone combined create the environment for a bunch of companies to damage the environment. But in trying to tackle it on consumer end, you're basically asking each individual in isolation to make a big personal sacrifice (of all the personal, social and productivity benefits coming from a high-quality smartphone) for distant, abstract, and completely uncertain gains. Uncertain, because they depend on most other individual to decide the same way. Most, not every, so maybe I'll buy my iPhone but tell everyone else not to buy it - every single one thinks.
There are many other situations where this happens in life, and the solution is universally to not depend on individuals, but create coordination mechanisms that help force the issue from the top. Like environmental regulations in this case. Or worker unions in case of employee/employer power imbalance.
A good proxy for energy is price. This is a heuristic of course, it's not perfect.
So if you want to know what it would take to do good for the environment, imagine that you can only spend half as much on everything. Your backpack, your iPhone, ... everything. Not because you don't have the money, but because environmental regulation means you can't spend it like that.
So only $20 restaurants. No iPhones, only cheap androids (no flagships) (or of course, if you like featurephones that's fine). No BMW 5-series or SUV, just a hatchback, and one of the smaller ones. And so on and so forth.
If you want to regulate this, that means those products would simply become out of reach of the normal person. Not even because they don't have the money, but because it's forbidden for them to spend it like that.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/dominicdudley/2018/01/13/renewa...
One might similarly argue that there is no point in voting (or feeling bad for not voting in elections) as no individual voter can expect to change the outcome of an election. Elections also require coordination.
Industries face the same coordination problem as individuals. Choosing to be environmentally friendly in most situations puts your company at a distinct competitive disadvantage (which often means your company goes out of business). I'm sure many companies would only be too happy to adhere to environmental regulations if all their competitors in all countries adhered to the same standards.
If we want environmental change, need to stop waiting for everyone else does to clean up their act first. Why shouldn't we start with ourselves?
Yes.
No individual voter can't expect to change the outcome, so if you really want to change something in your country, this is by far the least effective thing you could do. It's also very much low-cost, so you may as well do it anyway.
I see voting more like ensuring your opinion is heard, with no expectation whatsoever of it making a difference. After all, the point of democracy is to weigh your opinion equally with everyone else's.
> Industries face the same coordination problem as individuals. Choosing to be environmentally friendly in most situations puts your company at a distinct competitive disadvantage (which often means your company goes out of business). I'm sure many companies would only be too happy to adhere to environmental regulations if all their competitors in all countries adhered to the same standards.
My point exactly! That's just the same problem one level up, and that's why the solution usually involves regulations. Free market is an extremely efficient mechanism for ensuring everyone defects on everyone else.
(Then again, countries face the same problem one level up. They compete for money and influence too. Corporation exploit this to get themselves out of inconvenient regulations by threatening to move jobs they create to another country. There's no global meta-government one level above to solve those coordination issues.)
> Why shouldn't we start with ourselves?
But how come that we don't start with ourselves? Because it's a coordination problem. Starting with ourselves means life-quality sacrifice on individual level - and life-threatening sacrifice on company level - for zero gain, as almost nobody else bothers with that sacrifice. Proclaiming that "[we] need to stop waiting for everyone else does to clean up their act first" doesn't really make anyone stop waiting and do the changes.
(And if it happens that your proclamation resonates enough to simultaneously capture minds of enough individuals, what happens is the market economy exploits it immediately. Like with every other fashion, the market will provide you with products and services that fulfill your heart's need to be environmentally friendly. Products that make you feel you did your duty, even though those products at best are environmentally negative by very virtue of existing, and at worst they do much more damage. Compare to how this plays out with "healthy" food via this subthread about restaurants from half a day ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17020635.)
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Ultimately, it's not about absolving one's share of responsibility. It's about recognizing that the problem can not be realistically tackled by making individuals feel responsible and directly asking them to change their behaviour. If it could, then by the same method we could also solve poverty and world peace.
I don't really see good, reliable methods of winning. Couple strong contributions I see are:
- People with money and power growing a spine and putting their influence to use in solving those issues. Not democratic, but works. See cases like Gates Foundation or Tesla.
- Governments growing a spine and passing environmentally sound regulations. There are basically only four that matter - the US, the EU, Russia and China. Everyone else will follow.
- People inventing new tech and doing their best to ensure it's not misused. New technology means the same market incentives can result in a more environmentally friendly outcomes, without requiring any kind of spontaneous large-scale coordination.
Beyond those, I have no idea.
Couldn’t disagree more strongly about the voting. The cost is almost nothing (maybe half a day of effort tops), and the potential gains are massive (including potentially having a government with a “spine”).
RE voting, all I'm saying is that - yes, the effects of an election are huge, but the marginal influence of an individual vote on the outcome is near-zero. Note that people don't go voting "by default", you need to either encourage them (by e.g. persuading them that it's their civil duty), or force them.
Are you guilty that Apple or other big tech companies allow a child to mine for your tech products?
Or is this a problem that big companies would have better power to fix than you?
On the other hand, I think Apple is buying their own cobalt mines so hopefully, your Apple products are or will be child labor free... [2]
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cobalt-children-mining-democrat...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-21/apple-is-...
By far the best thing you can do for the environment is to not procreate.
But in 4 billion years nature has in fact realized that just blindly maximizing procreation at all costs is not often the best strategy. It is well known that animal procreation follow an S-curve. This would not happen if everything just maximized reproduction. Then you'd see bubbles and crashes.
Well, all of nature except some viruses. They don't tend to survive for long, but some do a lot of damage before they go extinct, which of course may be why most species regulate their reproduction.
People need to be held accountable for what they do.
We peasant, unlike the Royals, cycle to work, recycle, don't spend million on candles on our yacht (yachts pollute much more per passenger), but must feel guilty for our once-a-year plane trip.
I feel the pain of climate change, but this must be a shared and planned action, not just a one-off "tells the peasant to don't fly" action:
- industries must change (and the aviation industry is creating cleaner engines [1][2])
- industries MUST be regulated (don't expect a corporation to act in the public interest)
- better public transport should allow us to leave our cars at home
- cities must be planned so we can walk to the store, park, etc
[1] http://aviationweek.com/commercial-aviation/airbus-rolls-ult... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geared_turbofan
You know what that's called ? Sacrifice !
http://dailycaller.com/2015/12/03/paris-un-global-warming-su...
I agree it’s a bit silly to lay that entirely at the feet of airplane travel, but even if we could magically halt all other carbon emissions tomorrow, we would still probably need to deal with carbon emissions airplane travel in the near future if we want to avoid catastrophe.
As for the rest, I guess the question is whether you consider “trouble for life on earth” to necessarily mean complete annihilation of all life vs. just killing off most of the species and fundamentally altering most of the ecosystems.
What are people going do with all their free time. Big cities and tourist destinations are already cramped to the point where there are demonstrations and you have to shut them down because of the toll it takes on the environment.
https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2017/aug/10/anti-tourism-...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/destinations/2018/04/0...
I cannot imagine how bad this will be in 10-20 years.
There’s no problem if some researchers exclusively focus their time on discovering and describing problems. Someone else can explore possible solutions. Someone else can try to plan/develop an implementation of each of those. Someone else can work on political advocacy to build support for one or another solution. Etc.
It seems you have already brainstormed a few personal steps you could take to combat this problem at an individual level. But that isn’t going to cut it at a societal level.
For that we probably need some combination of (a) less carbon-intensive but still convenient modes of transportation, (b) globally implemented carbon taxes [or the like] which force consumers to confront the true costs of their consumption, including plane flights, (c) large-scale public education campaigning, possibly including discouraging the public from traveling halfway around the world multiple times per year, etc.
Unfortunately that doesn't seem to be the case. We don't even have a clear majority in America.
http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/10/04/the-politics-of-climat...
I wish local travel got the same attention and appeal as international travel as well. Depending on where you live of course. But America and Australia at least are wildly varying lands, with myriad ecosystems within their respective continents.
Reduce international tourism? Sounds completely fine as a potential solution. We survived for 99.99% of our species' and civilization's lifetime without it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...
Travel for a year, and you don't need to use planes at all. You have the time to slowly make you way around a long distance. Hell you could walk.
Inbetween gap years, travel to closer destinations without a plane.
Travel forever, take a tent, and then you don't need a house.
What is needed are large-scale systemic changes, not canceling one or another particular meeting.
Individual people’s personal sacrifices are barely going to dent global carbon emissions. We need to tackle these enormous global problems systematically. For example, we might be able to substitute less carbon-intensive means of long-distance transportation, impose significant taxes on jet fuel, figure out ways of discouraging business travel by plane, or raise public awareness of closer-to-home vacation destinations.
But even more: This has diminishing returns. These schemes rely on getting relatively cheap ways to reduce carbon emissions. If you scale this up you end up not being able to do this any more.
2) Sibling comment mentions traveling more, but not on plane. Some careers could afford that, I guess. Business owner can have a vacation, return after a year and continue where he left. But simple math and reason says we cannot all be in this priveleged position
Wait, how? Going to the same place millions of people are going to every year, taking the exact same photos you can find on Flickr, of exact same things, from exactly the same spots? Experiencing the completely fake "local culture" created for tourists? All to get some memories that will quickly fade away into the general feeling of "I've been there, it was great"?
Maybe it's a personality thing. I've never been into tourism, and find it weird, to say the least.
Next year, I plan on overlanding from Bali to London, possibly kicking on to New York and then the West Coast of the USA or Canada, depending on how much money I have and spend on the way.
It would be interesting to see how that compares to flying for carbon emissions.
Now I'm interested, so lets crunch some numbers:
The drive from Bali to London is roughly 18,000 km (Bali -> Bangkok -> Hanoi -> Beijing -> Ulan Bator -> Moscow -> London). Using numbers from a spreadsheet I found [1], a bus emits roughly 27 grams of CO2 per passenger km. So the bus trip is 490 kg of CO2.
Flying emits 280 grams of CO2 per passenger km (from the same spreadsheet), the flight is about 13,000 km (DPS-KUL-LHR). That's 3600 kg of CO2 emitted. Clearly I'm saving the planet by taking the bus.
However, it takes time to drive from Bali to London, and just existing causes CO2 emissions. According to Rome2Rio [2] it's almost 7 days (168 hours) of non-stop travel. Let's assume 12 hours of travel a day, because we aren't complete masochists, that's 14 days of traveling. The Rome2Rio route does include trains, but let's imagine that it's busses all the way and they're magically as fast as a train (which they are certainly not).
Apparently as a New Zealander I emit somewhere around 10 tonnes of CO2 per year [3], let's imagine that I continue emitting that much while travelling through the developing world. That's 27 kg per day. For 14 days that's 380 kg. So the total emissions from overlanding from Bali to London is roughly 870 kg of CO2, or around a quarter that of flying.
So, in summary: If you have too much time on your hands and want to save the world, don't fly, take a bus. Of course, it will probably take me closer to 3 months than 14 days to get from Bali to London, which would clearly tip the balance in favour of flying, but the trip isn't about getting from A to B, but getting from A to Z and visiting the 24 letters in between, to terribly paraphrase Grace Slick.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/datablog/2009/sep/02...
[2] https://www.rome2rio.com/trip/sbcgbmie
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/datablog/2009/sep/02...
Maybe a better way to think about it is to compare CO2 per day from different ways of spending your time?
And this isn't something to minimize, but rather to make sure it's worth the cost.
It seems like we should start by reducing business travel, since most people don't enjoy it much? Also: combine trips when possible.