Climate change: Big lifestyle changes 'needed to cut emissions' | Hacker News Reader

Climate change: Big lifestyle changes 'needed to cut emissions'

bbc.com

20 pointsadrian_mrd6 comments

I think this is bullshit. It seems completely unrealistic to get everyone to reduce their meat consumption and cut down on e.g. holidays abroad.

I think it's much realistic to have people pay for their own negative externalities and use that money to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere. It should be the role of the government to tax all the shit we want less of, and use the revenue to remedy the situation.

In Norway the average person apparently has a carbon footprint of 9.27 tons per year. I'm carbon positive now after paying my way out, through the help of a local startup [0]. It's not that expensive, but it should be baked into the price of everything to drive changes in spending patterns.

An alternative would be to pay for reforestation. Off-setting 10 tons of carbon costs less than $100 per year [1].

Once we run out the incredibly low-hanging fruit (like paying to have coal plants shut down) and replacing forests that we previously cut down, we can start investigating more expensive technology.

[0] https://chooose.today/

[1] https://www.carbonfootprint.com/offset.aspx?o=10

Meat consumption exploded recently (20th century) and it isn't a big deal to reduce it.

Reducing meat consumption is actually an extremely low hanging fruit in many countries. E.g. the average American consumes 100kg of meat per year iirc.

I agree, the last thing I want is for the government to try to incentivize the desired behavior via the tax code unless it’s a revenue neutral carbon tax, alas that’s not what the bureaucrats want as it puts them out of work.

The volcanoes always have the last word on emissions: https://www.volcanodiscovery.com/erupting_volcanoes.html

The whole article is absolute nonsense.

> Asked why the UK should take the lead when China's emissions are so high, he answered that the Chinese government was very worried about the climate and was taking it very seriously.

The interesting bit in the graph is that aviation gets a pass. I'll better not fly to Thailand twice a year, but keep my diet.

It feels like those people don't want to prevent climate change. They just use that as a cover to push other ideological changes.

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