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Comment by whytaka | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry the non-sustainability of your lifestyle puts the world at risk.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19646040 and marked it off-topic.

The "non-sustainable" non-urban lifestyles are essential for our society. How else do you expect to get food, minerals, lumber, hydro electricity (heh), and so on.

By all means, price in the externalities, use a carbon tax or something. But the idea that we shouldn't go to the middle of nowhere because it requires a CO2 emitting vehicle is ridiculous.

Unless you’re a subsistence farmer in Bangladesh, your lifestyle is unsustainable. The average Canadian or American produces 15-20 tons of CO2 annually. Even assuming electric generation is CO2-free, buying a Tesla instead of driving your current car another 7 years will put out 11-16 tons of CO2 per year. Ditching the car might get it down to 10-13, but only if you don’t replace that with Uber, food delivery, etc. In the Netherlands, a country of dense walkable and bikeable cities, the average person puts out 10 tons of CO2 annually.

You know what really cuts emissions? Poverty. The average Bangladeshi puts out just 0.5 tons of carbon Per Capita.

EDIT: Apparently BC is mostly powered by renewables. Edited math above to subtract CO2 from producing electricity, but add in cost of producing new car.

> In a place like Canada, where electricity primarily comes from natural gas,

Come on, you don't just get to make up your own facts on the spot:)

https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/energy/facts/electricity/20068

> Total electricity generation in Canada in 2016 was 648 terawatt hours. Hydro has the highest share of generation at 59%, followed by nuclear at 15%, coal at 9%, gas/oil/others at 10% and non-hydro renewables at 7%.

Most Canadians get their electricity from Hydro and Nuclear. Ontario and Quebec. With Wind up there too. In BC, the majority of its supply is renewable too. So there is 75% of the Canadian population.

The other provinces vary, but make up a minority.

Industrial carbon sequestration costs about $150/ton, so that's ~$3,000 to fully eliminate your carbon footprint. Yes, that's substantial, but it's also not like we would have to got to a subsistence farming standard of living in order to stop contributing to climate change.

(Offsets via getting others to stop emitting carbon, like methane capture on farms, are a lot cheaper but harder to be sure of the counterfactual impact.)

Just adding on to this, some math:

The US emits about 11 gigatonnes of CO2 per year. At $150/ton, sequestering it all would cost 1.65 trillion dollars or about 8.25% of GDP.

That's about what we spend on social security and the military combined.

So, it's a lot. But it's possible to imagine doing it.

I kinda wish there was a company with a bunch of sequestration equipment out somewhere that people could just give money to in order to suck out more CO2 from the air. Why doesn't this exist yet?

Er, I screwed that up.

China emits 11 gigatonnes. The US emits ~half that. So more like 800 billion or 4% of GDP. About what we spend on Medicare.

Of course, even if US emissions went to zero, it wouldn't be enough to stop global warming. So there's that.

The average french person emits 4.57 metrics tons per capita (and there is diesel cars everywhere). One could argue they live better lives than most people in the US, and it's definitely not poverty.

You’re right. But I support legislation that aims to remedy that.

The way your comment came out made it sound like you don't know how the world works and that you would jump into supporting legislation that can have strong negative unintended circumstances (e.g. Farmers and miners in BC lose their jobs because they are not competitive due to the legislation you supported).

That does not mean you shouldn't look for legislation and solutions to ameliorate the issue, it just means that if you haven't done it already, you will need to think a lot harder with regards to the consequences.

What are you suggesting, that everyone north of Prince George move to Surrey?

Now, they should just stop existing. Because “the world” is apparently at risk. As philosopher Carlin once said: “the planet is fine...”

Even if you're fine with human civilization dying, this reasoning isn't right. It is possible that some processes could be started that cause positive feedback loops that eventually do hurt the planet as a whole, and Earth could eventually look like Mars. If you include the biosphere in your definition of the planet, it is already very much hurting. Think of overfishing, the species we've led to extinction, places where people have caused desertification, and so on.

Yes, the rocks will still be here. I don't think that means the planet is fine.

Human civilization will not being dieing if the small province of BC does not quit using gas for a few more years. BC is doing well with our greenhouse gas emissions. We can and will do better but we are a very small part of the problem, quit being dramatic.

The Carlin skit was not limited to British Columbia.

For the uninitiated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W33HRc1A6c

It's likely that your lifestyle requires mineral extraction workers to live in BumPhuck, B. C., along with those that support them. They're not necessarily living out there just for the wide open spaces, that's where the valuable rocks live. We all play our part, and we're in this together.

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