Hacker News Reader

Please do get involved with Green New Deal activism. Personal responsibility is great but it will NOT fix the problem. We need fundamental changes in how our global economy operates. We are having a moment in politics where it seems real change is possible, so please don’t let the slow progress of past years get you down.

Remember civil rights took decades of hard, thankless work before MLK Jr. stepped on the scene. Or labor rights (Saturdays) or women’s suffrage or any major leap forward. Sometimes you have to strike the match a few times before it lights.

A starting point for GND activism is the Sunrise Movement: https://www.sunrisemovement.org/

Agree. Personal responsibility ALONE will not fix the problem. But it's not either/or. While I applaud activism movements like Sunrise, I believe personal lifestyle adjustments are indispensable. After all, in any scenario, the systemic changes we are talking about will have to include (mandated) reduction in consumption. We might as well start now voluntarily, and think about how to keep our lives fun and enjoyable while consuming less.

The big hitters in terms of CO2 are Transportation, Industrial production, Power Generation and Food production. For each of those, some big wins:

- Travel less, particularly long haul and travel more sustainable, share a train, avoid air travel

- Buy less, particularly clothes and consumer electronics that you don't really need. Make things last longer, own less. Boycott manufacturers who make deliberately disposable/single use products.

- Make your home more efficient, that means insulation if you're in a cold place and ventalation, use of shade if you're in a hot place. Replace fossil fuel heating with renewable electric where possible

- Waste less food, eat less meat particularly red, buy things that don't have lots of waste attached (like short shelf lives, lots of packaging), and buy food that hasn't traveled far to get to you

Any more suggestions?

People keep repeating to avoid air travel... but that's not what's going to make an impact.

People need to rank their daily activities and make changes in their daily lives where the impact is biggest.

Most people fly once a year at most.

In the US I'm thinking that daily transportation and daily use of energy in electricity/heating/air con are at the top of the list.

> Most people fly once a year at most.

IIRC (from https://www.withouthotair.com/ ) one round trip over Atlantic is around the same carbon emmissions as a daily commute with the car. So things are not that simple.

That's why I also think it needs to be cultural norm. There is small minority of people who air travel a lot. If we could somehow manage to change the norm so they would travel less (for example, stayed much longer in the same place), it would be great.

How often do most people fly across the Atlantic?

My point remains: Air travel is not at the top of the list for the majority of people so let's not always mention it as an important action.

It would probably be more productive to tell people to drop all fossil fuels energy at home, and for their car if they can.

> Air travel is not at the top of the list for the majority of people so let's not always mention it as an important action.

I disagree. It is important to realize its impact, so that we can organize the society so that it is not needed. The people who don't travel often still need to hold the minority accountable.

> Air travel is not at the top of the list

Almost nothing is at the top of the list. As I mentioned there are not low hanging fruits. Everything is important. Also, not flying might be exactly something doing on individual level, while "drop all fossil fuels energy at home" requires infrastructure change. Also not-flying is a more publicly visible action which might inspire others to follow.

The problem is we should stop with the PR bollocks of doing useless but "publicly visible" actions.

There are real, important things at the top of the list.

Changing electricity supplier, driving less, buying the most efficient car possible or an electric one (if you can charge it with non-fossil fuel sources), etc. should occupy the headlines more that "air travel is bad (TM)"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_avia... is a good read on this.

If the airline industry continues growing at current rates by 2050 it will consume the whole CO2 budget if we want to stay below 2°C.

In reality we now need to change everything and pretty quickly.

> The IPCC has estimated that aviation is responsible for around 3.5 percent of anthropogenic climate change, a figure which includes both CO2 and non-CO2 induced effects. The IPCC has produced scenarios estimating what this figure could be in 2050. The central case estimate is that aviation's contribution could grow to five percent of the total contribution by 2050 if action is not taken to tackle these emissions, though the highest scenario is 15 percent.

As I said, people tend to overstate the actual impact of aviation.

There are much higher priority things to do.

3.5% for a single activity is actually quite a big deal, particularly for something that in the main is non essential.

To me, air travel is one of those things that's artificially cheap. It's zero rated for tax and largely encouraged for economic growth reasons. It's direct impacts are perhaps not as bad, but indirectly someone going from the UK to New York for a hen weekend is the kind of thing that should be unacceptably and prohibitively expensive.

Actually there are a bunch of culprits and a bunch of solutions: drawdown.org

How do you buy less clothes? Having less clothes just makes the stuff you have wear out faster. All of my clothes have worn out in ways you can't repair. Putting a patch over a hole looks worse than having a hole.

You may buy only clothes that you need and that's great but I'm almost sure that you know someone who buys dress for a one night out. Media and celebrities are always showing on the red carpet in new clothes and you never see them in the same clothes again. It is encourage to buy more and more clothes that very often are getting worn couple times and left in the closet forever. Some countries are better or worst at this. Here where I live, a walk-in closets are pretty rare, in USA they seems to be pretty much a standard. Why would you need a closet the size of a small room just to put there clothes of one or two people?

This actually is surprising news for me. I know celebrities do this but I didn't think real people buy clothes they hardly use.

I just can't bring myself to throw out clothes with holes in them and wear them on the weekends because I don't want them to go to waste.

IME in certain american social circles there is often an expectation for people (especially women) to come up with 'new looks' for social occasions, and not doing so is a sign that the person lacks taste, class, or wealth (or a combination of all 3). The most common noticeable thing is if a woman is attending many weddings, a husband may notice she insists on not wearing the same dress to each wedding. This is because if she does wear the same dress, she is highlighting that she lacks wealth or class at weddings, and if anyone notices her repeating dresses it is considered an affront or disrespect.

Ok, we just need a marketing campaign to reverse that. Same dress better than many since you are damaging the environment - shame on you! :)

I encourage you to speak with someone who works at Primark, H&M or other shop of this sort and ask them how sale day looks like, how many of them are happening during the year and how many recurring, known-to-staff customers they have. You will be surprised. I don't even mention one-time-use clothes for special occasions like weddings (even as a guest), prom, Halloween etc.

If you wear your clothes until they're worn out you're already doing well. There are many people who buy new clothes because they get tired of the old ones.

I patch my jeans and my gloves. It might not look very good, but it increases their life by at least 50%. I've also replaced zippers on jackets because they wore out.

That only works if you wear the clothes you buy until they're worn out. Most don't, most buy clothes and have them sit in a drawer until they make up their mind they really don't like them and send them to landfill or the charity shop. From the sound of things, you're not the problem!

Buy for durability instead of trendy stuff. Favor trekking or work clothes.

I have found that some trendy clothes actually last a long time and some hardly lasts at all. I think I if I pay more attention I could work out how long lasting shirts feel so I can pick them out when looking for clothes.

When it comes to pants I find the pockets always rip first which is really annoying. I haven't tried to fix them yet but I have been keeping them for when I work out how to put new pockets on.

Look at quality of fabric, fastners, and stitching. No matter if 10th generarion grandma or last years sweatshop worker on a worn out machine, the result is where the value is. Cotton, nylon, hemp, even rayon over polyester, ykk zippers are still the best, look for triple stitching, nice tie offs at ends of hems, yank the seam to see if its too tight and will bind and break...

Better yet, many custom outfits can be specd and ordered online for a modest fee if you are like many who don't seem to fit americian vanity, nor asian sizing.

- I've never flown to a conference. I've been on a plane twice in my entire life.

- No investments

- I work remotely; no commute.

- I hardly ever buy meat.

Yet none of this matters. If everyone in my country followed suit, it still wouldn't amount to more than noise in the statistics. Individual action like this is pretty much futile. You just need to catch a glimpse of what are the largest sources of CO2 (and equivalent) emissions.

> Yet none of this matters

This is provably false. The effect of not commuting and avoiding animal products is measurable and very relevant.

Not to dismiss the important of collective action against industrial pollution.

> This is provably false.

Then I guess I just saved the planet, everyone thank me. I'll leave the proof to you.

You know why. Most of the world has market economies that rely on growth. The measure of growth is GDP and put simply GDP doesn't measure how much you're wasting, just how productive you are. Short term political aims are in conflict with long term environmental stewardship. The current US president only cares about his numbers, not the mess he's leaving behind. We'll be in full panic mode when it negatively impacts GDP, which will of course be too late.

The problem is the feedback cycle is far to long for us to handle. Most learning works by doing something, seeing a bad result and then stop doing the thing. Problem is by the time the bad result comes things will be so far gone there is no hope for fixing it.

For a lot of older people alive today they will never see the consequences of their actions so the selfish option is to carry on.

It is not about politics, it is about nobody doing anything. Just look on the streets, millions of cars all burning away litres of gas every day, releasing even more CO2 into the atmosphere. Everyone knows it and noone does anything about it. It is not "the elite" who is ignoring the issue, it is literally 99% of the people who don't care enough to even take the bus or bycycle.

I am not saying I am better, but is not anonymous "others" or our "GDP-based system", it is 7 billion people who don't care much.

Disagree. The reason fuel is so cheap to permit the cars burning gas is because it's priced artificially low. If you were to charge based on replacement value (it's almost priceless given the production time), the cost of fuel would go up massively, productivity would stop and Mr Trump (and all the other world leaders) would no longer be able to boast about their growing numbers. I'm not denying individual responsibility, that's vital too but the big change also has to occur at the top and a market that lives on growth is a problem.

It's important to uderstand that what's required is a collective action, and probably an unprecedented one. If yourself and a handful (let's say 1 million) of friends opt out of society, go off grid and eat pine trees like beevers, it will make exactly zero impact on CO2 emission. Plus we'll lose your voices in the actions we do need which are of a more political type.

I don't say "opt out of society". I say stay in the society, refuse to fly, and convince your friends/colleagues/bosses/employees to do the same.

> what's required is a collective action

Wound't that collective action include not flying? And what form do you imagine it will take - a government order that forbids flying and makes airlines illegal?

I would say refusing to join your team on a trip to that fancy conference of the year takes some courage. Surely not as much courage as violating segregation laws but still.

Climate change is not going to be addressed through individual actions. The only way anything substantial will get done is through concerted wide-scale government action. Get angry, get in the face of your representatives, be a one-issue voter and let them know it: https://rebellion.earth/

(Before some idiots comment 'b-b-but what about China and India?" we can put pressure on them too: carrot and stick with help to invest in green energy and trade sanctions if they continue polluting)

I admire and applaud people of XR who are willing to get arrested for the cause, and wide-scale government action is an absolute requirement, but while we are waiting for it, let's not use it as an excuse to not adjust our lifestyles today.

The problem is that most of the ideas you propose - although good - only have force in the West.

Western countries are not the major culprit at the moment. EU has decreased their CO2 emissions by 20% during the last 30 years. USA has maintained them. China and India, increased them by 300% and China alone now emits more CO2 than USA, EU and Canada combined.

This is not to say that Western countries can just cross their arms and do nothing, but, they are not the ones that are going to change the picture and all this discourse about global warming has been turned in an anti-West political weapon that never addresses the real issues and never has the courage to point their finger at the countries that are the biggest problem at the moment.

This way, I fear no real change will happen until it's too late.

> Western countries are not the major culprit at the moment

Disagree. How many products in your house/apartment are 'made in china'?

The West has simply outsourced its pollution.

> Western countries are not the major culprit at the moment...

I believe this is a misconception. We didn't decrease our emissions, we outsourced them. A lot of the China pollution is due to exports for western consumption. Just look at the trade "disbalance" between China and USA.

I don't think you can account anywhere near 100% of China's increased emissions by what the USA "outsourced" in shifting its manufacturing there.

China is developing into a first-world nation with over a billion people. That's a lot of manufacturing and infrastructure development for purely domestic purposes. Building cities, streets, highways, railways, automobiles, that's a huge amount of metal and cement production.

If you want to blame the USA and other China-product-consuming countries for China's emissions, it's more for sending so much money in their direction on goods to fund all this large-scale development.

Nobody is saying it's 100%

China is taking the problem seriously. Although their one-party rule is deplorable for human rights, it enables China to move rapidly on major technological issues like this because the economy is shaped by edicts from the top.

Anyone in the West who's trying to shift the blame to China is deluding themselves. We need to fix our politics so we can move with the same determination as China on this specific issue, not the other way around.

If they're taking it seriously, why do they keep building coal power plants, building ghost towns, and manufacturing products that won't be sold just to inflate their GDP numbers?

Despite the recent improvements, the EU still emits more CO2 per capita than China and India [1]. Thus, most of the reduction still need to come from the western countries. (Though that will change soon if the current trend continues).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

This doesn't make sense. Nobody is expecting Qatar (with the highest per capita emissions) to make the largest contribution to fixing the problem.

What's important is the actual reduction in emissions, and the jurisdiction with control over the largest quantity is most capable of reducing the total.

That's right, there are EU countries we could wipe off the face of the planet and it wouldn't make any difference.

Looking at per-capita numbers and trying to hold everyone in the world to the same standard has never been the way the world works, and if we tried to establish such a system, we'd never make any progress on this issue.

(If we wanted to hold everyone to the same standard, we could divert income from the rich and make them poor, because consumption pretty much increases linearly with income, except at the top decile where consumption increases massively. But attacking the richest isn't gonna save us either, because planet earth doesn't give a crap about the income levels of whoever's putting CO2 into the atmosphere. All that matters is how much of it we put in there.)

One of the best ways to instantly (almost) reduce emissions is to stop farming and consuming beef.

Better would be all meat altogether, but by far the lowest hanging fruit is to stop beef production and farming.

I don't know how you consider it "lowest hanging fruit" when beef is so tasty.

My current diet, I do not wish to state. However, I was a vegetarian in some phases of my life. If motivated enough, I could be a vegetarian for life. However, it would be a folly if I were to start believing that everyone can make sacrifices of this kind. For some people, giving up on things they like to eat is very hard. For some, giving up on using their car is hard. People can do different things to help and not everyone needs to do every single thing. An extreme approach is not practical and it's next to impossible to "sell" such an idea.

It's true, the USA isn't really at the helm anymore. We have high per-capita CO2 figures, but in absolute terms we're in the ballpark of just 50% of China's emissions.

India is set to explode, and there are already reports of manufacturing migrating there because China is becoming expensive as they get their act together.

When the dust settles I imagine China and India will be the dominant emitters with their massive populations. Every time these countries move their quality of life needle the slightest bit upwards across their population it makes a big impact.

What do you think about the tokenization of emissions? It's certainly not a silver bullet or likely even a good answer, but it could incentivize people to choose more sustainable options. This could shift reducing emissions to a form of social competition thus more people might do it. In this kind of system, people might self-motivate themselves for the fear of being held accountable, or just simply for presentable bragging rights.

Pricing emissions is certainly a good idea. EU is doing it - https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets_en, but it's too weak, prices are too low. And that's kind of my point - politicians will never price it to the point where it harms growth.

They could even reduce growth, but regulating one's continent out of competitiveness with the global market is one hard pill to swallow.

I upvoted you, all the 3 suggestions are very good. However, I don't think individual action is going to cut it, I think the government needs to start explaining the problem and coordinating change (especially in private companies), and that's why you need petitions. It needs to be on people's minds, so that they can support each other in doing all these things that you have suggested and more.

> I don't think individual action is going to cut it,

I agree individual action alone is not enough. But it might be a necessary stepping stone to start transforming the economy.

What we often don't realize though is how many of our own individual actions are actually due to societal (cultural) pressures.

For example, flying to conferences. It is considered to be normal, and people who would refuse to fly (as a conscientious objector to climate change) would be considered "weird". But it is really just a cultural norm here. We readily accept vegetarians, for example, and we accommodate for that. In a similar way, we could accept that some people object to flying (or it could even be the default).

> It is considered to be normal, and people who would refuse to fly (as a conscientious objector to climate change) would be considered "weird".

Exactly, shifting cultural norm is more important than an actual emissions saving from skipping a flight.

Why stop flying for conferences and not stop flying at all, holidays included ?

There should be a heavy carbon penalty on kerosene. It's surreal that people expect to fly across continents for €50.

My friend recently complained that our planned flights this summer (Germany-Scotland) are too expensive at the moment. He wants them for €150 and from an economic perspective he is right because you can have them for this little.

Flying needs to be far more expensive.

And for the poor among us, they should just have a higher percentage of their disposable income taken away for daring to visit their families?

No, I would counter that something needs to be done about poor train infrastructure.

You are mentioning an important problem but I firmly believe that cheap flights are not a future-proof, sustainable solution as long as kerosene is the fuel.

Trains on the other hand could be a wonderful approach. Political incentives have stifled train infrastructure in the past. Trains in Germany are already a joke but its insane how this concept is just non-existent in the US due to the reign of cars and flights.

But I guess its more important to spend $600bn on a massively overinflated military or in case of Germany to politically support Big Car.

So you would want to increase the travel time for people who can't afford air travel, which would increase the amount of time they would need to take off from work? That doesn't seem fair to people who depend on a job for their livelihood.

That would be even better of course. I just feel it's easier to convince people to start with conferences. I'm trying to be somewhat realistic.

Varying degrees of frivolity, absolute cessation is ideal.

I'm with you, you are far from alone. My own thoughts are to ignore the pessimism and what others are/are not doing. As an individual, this is the only way I can defeat the prisoner dilemma. In addition to your suggestions, I would also say we need to learn to bring this topic up in all areas of life e.g. around the office, family gatherings etc. Not talking about uncomfortable topics may end up killing us, and our children. I want to be a part of that 3.5% :D

I know I’ll be bashed for this, but: create fewer humans. Isn’t it obvious by now that population increase is a big part of the problem?

Edit: I am not thinking of the direct CO2 emissions caused by breathing. It’s all the habitat destruction done for each of us and by each of us, the pollution in various forms and so on. Can we really compensate for this by becoming more efficient? Can we become so efficient to handle a few more billion people? Where is the limit?

Whole village in South America or Africa will produce less pollution than one businessman with a private jet.

So by far the best way for the businessman to reduce their footprint is to not have more private-jet-flying-children

No, just stop flying private jets. Try to do online meetings and if you really need to be somewhere use commercial aircraft for travel to lower your footprint. It's easy. This hypothetical businessman can lower his footprint to level of South American villager with some effort and planning. As for the children of wealthy people I would rather have a millionaire with 10 kids which can receive proper health care and education (and with a bit of luck share their wealth with less fortunate people) than 10 kids living in poverty.

A: No that's not obvious at all.

B: Even if everyone cut their birth rate instantly it would be 100 years before there would be much change. (Think about how long people live and the birthrate is never going to actually be zero.)

So even if that was the problem, which it's not, it's not solvable by any method that has to do with reducing the number of humans.

Only a new energy source can solve this, which makes population increase a completely pointless thing to discuss.

Also stop procreating. What we really need is a global one-child policy.

China grew during a one child policy. Their ecosystem continued to change to support more people by growing more food. A global change that reduces food production by some % per year is needed to reduce the population.

Even if we had a major virus that killed 20% of the population once, we would still rapidly replace them and keep growing if we don’t learn to fit back into a sustainable lifestyle.

A similar comment of mine got downvoted, but I can at least upvote yours. Population growth is IMO a big part of the issue. I do not believe we can become so efficient and consume so little that adding more billions to the population can be compensated for. People need to be fed, at the least. Think habitat destruction.

People will still produce CO2 in various ways. So reduce CO2 footprint per person by, say, 50% while increasing population by 50% will bring us no benefits with regard to CO2.

Limiting population growth is desireable from a general environmental perspective, but it is a big red herring with respect to the climate change. The fight against the climate change needs to make some significant progress in the next 2 or 3 decades. In that timeframe, population dynamic won't have any effect, short of global disasters. So any discussion about population growth in that context sounds like an (intended?) distraction from the actual necessary means.

On the matter of population growth, the data is actually giving me a lot of hope: in most developed countries, the population is stable or even declining. China has a reproduction rate much lower than the equilibrium one of 2, causing a lot of problems on its own, still the population is growing a bit more as the average lifespan keeps increasing. But there is a clear maximum in sight.

The elephant in the room rather is: what if the average Chineese citizen would emit as much carbon and the average American one? Without any population growth, if that happened, it would be game over. So the immediate call to action has to be to reduce carbon emissions. In any country.

> So any discussion about population growth in that context sounds like an (intended?) distraction from the actual necessary means.

I'm only saying that we should think about population growth in addition to other measures. Also, it's not about limiting population growth but actually reducing the number of people living on this planet as quickly as possible. In the long term, I can't see a more effective way to save resources.

> what if the average Chineese citizen would emit as much carbon and the average American one?

Then global carbon dioxide emissions would rise by ~10%. It wouldn't make much of a difference, as serious negative effects from climate change seem to be unavoidable. But this doesn't mean "game over". Mankind is a lot more resilient than you seem to think. That's why there's still a need for long-term thinking (centuries, not decades).

The carbon footprint is extremely unequal and correlates very clearly with income/wealth.

That's already happening, fertility rates have fallen below replacement levels in most of the developed world. It's only Africa that is lagging but Africa isn't creating the problem.

The population is continuing to grow because life expectancy is increasing.

> Governments and politicians have failed to act.

They have not failed to act. Rather there is no action they can take. Not a single one of your suggestions, even all together, will make any meaningful difference.

> I am tired of waiting for systemic change. I am tired of waiting for technological breakthrough.

You're going to have to keep waiting because that is the only solution. There's simply is no other solution.

As proof for what I say, think about the ozone hole and freon. There was a problem, but in that case there actually was a solution. And the solution was implemented even though it was hard.

If there was a solution here, i.e. a new energy source, it would be implemented. And no, wind and solar as they exist today are not that solution although they are incremental help, and they are being installed incrementally, which makes sense.

But if this is the case then why don't we see a massive amount of research and development, like larger than the Manhattan and Apollo projects, to ensure we get a technological solution in time?

Instead we see that EU countries aren't even hitting the miserable EU target of 2.4% of GDP to be spent on R&D let alone the 3% 2020 target, and other nations fare even worse.

Because the only possible avenue: Nuclear power, is blocked by environmentalists.

The irony of that is not lost on me, but I suspect it is lost on them.

I agree that we should investigate nuclear power, especially fusion as it offers an order of magnitude more energy (I remember when Greenpeace denounced ITER, I guess because it used to have Thermonuclear in the name..)

But honestly, I don't think the environmental movement has that much power to block the research.

I suspect it's just that while people like the idea of scientific and technological progress, they don't like having to pay for it.

> to block the research.

To block implementation, not research. Why do you think nuclear power is so expensive?

> I don't understand why we're not in full-on panic mode yet. It makes me scared. Really scared. As in I've never been so scared in my life.

I am completely with your mindset here. However, I think it is rather trivial to explain why we are not in full on panic mode.

Short-term profit and power games are more relevant to sociopathic and psychopathic individuals such as Mitch McConnell, Bolsonaro and tens of thousands of others in leadership positions. Marketing, political campaigns and propaganda smearing do the rest.

In Germany, the conservative party (CDU) as well as the "social" democrats (SPD) are in power and absolutely refuse to phase out coal as quickly as they did nuclear because of a few thousand coal jobs. The target is 2038 - as long as it fits their bill. Neither is willing to do the right thing because short term it might lose them voters.

Yes you heard that right - they will lose voters. Demographics in Germany shows us, that Germany is old and continues to age. Nothing but immigration will stop this.

Young people who care are simply overpowered at the ballot. This can sometimes feel schizophrenic as the vocal voices online are part of the group that votes less...

wasn't it obama who said that just by checking our tire pressure we would save fuel and co2? and checking tire pressure is something so so easy to do...

A scientific perspective: https://hslahman.com/the-problem-with-greens-3/

Certainly not a scientific perspective. The typical false argumentation by climate change deniers.