Hacker News Reader

Comment by CydeWeys | Hacker News Reader

I'm trying to do my part. I live in NYC, I don't own a car, and I very rarely take any method of transport that isn't walking, biking, or subway. Even my heating in winter comes from the steam system, which is co-generated with electricity (i.e. it uses the waste heat from power generation).

A huge part of my CO2 footprint is thus probably eating meat and airplanes.

View on HN

"The real problem is that [we] spent far too much time worrying about efficiency in the wrong places and at the wrong times"

How much money do you spend per year? The money you spend eventually goes into the hands of someone whose lifestyle is much less green than yours, and will get spent accordingly.

This analysis doesn't make sense to me. It matters greatly what you do spend your money on. And if you don't spend it, then someone else will (e.g. your bank will loan it out). Are you suggesting attempting to remove value from the economy entirely?

No, I'm suggesting that significantly reducing the world's energy consumption is intractable: at an individual level, our choices don't matter, because the slack created by a single person's efforts will eventually be picked up by someone else. At a national level, the slack created by one nation's efforts will eventually get picked up by another country. At the global level, well, good luck getting the entire world to agree to severe GHG emission reductions. We can't even get the highly developed nations to agree to that, let alone the developing nations. In short, I'm convinced that we're screwed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com