Hacker News Reader

Comment by k_sze | Hacker News Reader

The “10 tomato plants per person” number makes things look pretty dire, in my eyes.

World population is about 7,800,000,000. The population of Germany is about 83,000,000. That makes roughly 940 tomato plants to offset the CO2 emission of one person.

Even putting that number aside, tomato plants are not exactly small plants. A significant part of world population won’t have the leisure to keep even one, let alone ten, tomato plants (or the equivalent in other plants). Think people who live in slums, people who live in dense areas (e.g. people who subsist with minimum wage in subdivided apartments in HK).

Yes, we should definitely grow plants, but even more so, we need to consume way waaaay less.

View on HN

The number that the author states is not just "10 tomato plants per person". But it is "10 tomato plants per person per year".

So that means to compensate for the stated amount of CO2, you need to plant 10 tomato plants extra each year (the second year you would have 20, the third year you would have 30, etc.).

Why adding 10 every year? Assuming that emissions of countries will go down...!

Plants only really consume CO2 when they grow (for fully grown plants CO2 consumption and creation balances out)

Sure, if emissions go down the number of plants goes down. But they aren't going down that much in the near term

Sure, you would grow 10 new plants every year since Tomatoes are mostly grown annually (while can be also grown perennial). I should have made that more clear in the blog post.

Common domestic tomatoes are annuals. They will stop growing at the end of the year and die after fruiting.

> Yes, we should definitely grow plants, but even more so, we need to consume way waaaay less.

Wouldn't it be the best when these two are actually the same? When growing more enables you to consume less? I didn't account for the savings you would do with consuming less in my simple calculation.

A large part of our consumption is not food. You can’t grow iPhones on a tree. You’re not going to consume less iPhones because you planted hundreds of tomato trees. You could argue that you can offset the total lifecycle energy for owning an iPhone (mining, purification, synthesis of raw materials, manufacture, packaging, transportation, recycling), by planting enough plants, but how many plants is that going to take?

That's a great idea for another calculation! You want to do this together? hello at permapeople org :)

Unfortunately I don't really know where to start.

I mean, I'm a software engineer by training. Back in university, we had a courses on engineering ethics, environmental responsibility, stuff like that. That's where I learned the concept of lifecycle energy assessment. I know it's a thing, but I never learned how to actually do the assessment (e.g. where to pull figures, the kind of ballpark calculations you do).

It might be interesting to make the methodology of lifecycle energy assessment more accessible to the general populace. I think everybody can benefit from a new perspective.

Look what I’ve found of a bit googling: https://www.apple.com/environment/pdf/products/iphone/iPhone...

While it is made by Apple itself it gives a rough idea of how much an iPhone costs.

On the other hand, this just came out a few days ago: https://debugger.medium.com/apples-new-iphone-is-far-from-gr...

This discussion also just came up 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24911413

Reply on news.ycombinator.com