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Comment by jos_pol | Hacker News Reader

I've been trying to figure out what the best way to become a "net zero carbon human". Although there's a clear consensus that reducing emissions is great, but what's next? What do you do with the emissions you inevitably produce? As an amateur, it's super confusing: - offsetting is criticised as "paying of your guilt without fixing the problem" - carbon capture is next to impossible as an individual because there are so few projects to sponsor, besides planting trees which has questionable returns in the long run since who can guarantee these trees will not be burned 50 years from now?

Any ideas or good overviews are welcome.

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A short list of things which are fairly easy to do. Don't have children. Switch to a vegetarian or vegan diet. Use public transport or bikes / walking rather than petrol cars. Use solar panels to offset your electricity consumption. Improve the thermal efficiency of your home to reduce energy usage. Switch to "green" energy suppliers. Lobby the companies you use to become more environmentally friendly. Ask your pension provider whether they have a low/no carbon plan - if so, switch your investments to it. Plant a small garden that you can take care of. Encourage others to do the same.

Those are all things I've done. Some may be easier or not depending where in the world you are, and your financial means.

I don't know why you are downvoted, those are exactly the main steps to reduce one's emissions.

I have heard somewhere that emissions can be divided roughly in 4 categories:

- Transport. To reduce this category, you need to travel less and if you need to travel, go by foot, bike or public transports.

- Food. To reduce this category you need to reduce you meat consumption, 2 or 3 times a week is enough, buy less transformed goods, ie cook more, and buy local grown food.

- Consumption. To reduce this category, follow the 5 R: Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose, Recycle.

- Public emissions. This one is tied to all the public services we get. It can only be reduced by reaching agreements as a society.

As for the children, obviously if we all stop having children, this is all of no use. In developed countries we already have stabilized our demographic growth, so I don't think there is a need for limiting oneself.

> I don't know why you are downvoted, those are exactly the main steps to reduce one's emissions.

Any ideology that demands you not have children is for those who will leave neither physical progeny nor intellectual ones.

Implying people can't intellectually affect people other than their own children.

Fair point.

Thank God for that.

> In developed countries we already have stabilized our demographic growth, so I don't think there is a need for limiting oneself.

This presupposes that the current population density in developed countries is sustainable, with the foreseeable level of consumption per capita. Is it?

Sustainability is a factor of the population times its emission. So the answer would depend on how much we can decrease our emissions.

If I had to guess, I don't think we will be able to reduce our emissions enough to sustain the population density of developed countries. But I am pretty sure that it could be doable if we took all the measures we could take.

Children in developed countries involve significant changes in lifestyles, adding to the consumption of resources.

Reducing personal emissions is a red herring. The vast majority of emissions are not coming from individuals, but from industry. And contrary to popular beliefs, there is no way to dismantle an industry by changing your personal behavior - we need massive political and economic overhauls to have any measurable impact.

And telling people that a sustainable world requires them to be vegetarian or vegan is wrong and counter-productive. We do need to significantly reduce consumption of animal products, but there is no need to eliminate them from our diets completely.

I live in a small country (~5.5M people) that is near the top of the list for CO2 emissions per capita. The usual argument around here for not spending any effort in reducing CO2 emissions is that it won't matter: as a nation, we're so small compared to China and the US that we'll make no difference. Therefore, we should sit on our hands and tell the rest of the world to fix the situation while we watch.

By your logic (edit: unnecessarily harsh. "by the logic you present here"), everyone else but the absolute largest single CO2 emitting entity shouldn't do anything (because there's someone who's even worse), and that largest one can point back to the others blaming them for not doing anything either.

Isn't it an optimization problem though? Focusing on anything but your bottleneck (or largest carbon producer) has minuscule effects.

If the largest carbon producer did do enough work to become tied with the 2nd largest producer, there's now an argument for why the 2 largest must do something while the rest watch.

Granted, yeah, it'd be better for everyone to do what they can and let's all kumbaya, but it doesn't look like the incentives will ever line up for that.

Optimization isn't about focusing on the largest resource consumer, but on the most reducible. (Note that this makes your statement basically tautological)

And given that China's main problem is its population (which is basically impossible to reduce much more right now and they're still dealing with negative side-effects from their effective but not-very-nice One Child policy), not it's emissions per person, China doesn't have as much to reduce. Whereas if the US lived at China's level of emissions per capita, then the world's total greenhouse emissions would drop by over 10%.

The problem with this individualistic agenda is two-fold: some people who understand how dire the problem is believe that individual action is the way to go, and don't pay enough attention to the politics of climate change because 'everyone should just offset their own carbon footprint like I do, and then we wouldn't need big government to come in and take our rights'. Then, there are other people who think 'these damn hippies want me to become a vegan and stop using a car, this is obviously not tenable as a way to save the world, let's look at carbon sequestration so we can continue living like today'.

I'm not claiming that these are the only two ways people react, but I do believe they are two common ways. I also believe many companies and political parties encourage those two ways of thinking, because they allow them to maintain the current status quo.

Norway, Finland, Denmark, or Slovakia? I'm guessing either Norway or Finland.

Granted sweeping political legislation will have larger effects but a lot of industry is fundamentally driven by consumers.

Like voting a single individual can feel helpless but on mass changes that reduce ones own footprint and focus more on net-zero and sustainable produce will ripple through industry who will react to customer demand.

I think consumption behavior is much more controlled by industry through pricing and advertising than the other way around. There are very few examples of successful campaigns to change behavior on aarge scale, much more so if we are talking about industries with high investments, like animal stocks, or for industries that are far away from the consumer, like power generation, plastics etc.

Reducing personal emissions can help increase political will to take on the industry. Voters who don't eat hamburgers can't be swayed by "Hamburgers will cost $50 if we have carbon taxes" campaigns.

> Don't have children.

I think you are being too conservative here. Just kill yourself, thus sparing the rest of humanity from the CO2 you will inevitably produce over the course of your life.

You can also sell your organs and donate revenue and your whole estate to some reputable organization that fights with global warming.

If you go down that road, it'll be much more impactful if they stick around and start killing others, instead. Just saying.

Although nice, a single person won’t make a difference. We need to change as a whole of society, and that means legislation. 2020 showed society can shift when faced with dire consequences.

The idea that individual action even can is so utopian. When I'm emperor there will be no crime because everyone will recognize that crime is bad, even if doing crime benefits them.

Individual action isn't bad or anything, but we can't just wish away our problems by saying that everyone will get along.

For your own ethics and morality you should try though.

Society needs pioneers to show that you can reduce your environmental impact whilst still having a good quality of life.

A lot of things need critical mass. Being able to fly now and then increases my quality of life. Quitting flying won't lead us into a future of carbon free air travel, but legislation might.

Legislation can't really make air travel carbon neutral, there is no technology on the horizon that will allow crossing the Atlantic without emitting a ton of carbon.

Synthetic carbon based fuels for instance could be made green house gas neutral. It's just not economical so far.

Great set of actions.

Cutting down on flying is another action you can take, I looked up emissions from taking flights and its a significant chunk of annual emissions.

The first few are little better than buying carbon offsets, IMHO.

> don't have children

This still leaves the rest of humanity! We need to change the system so that human existence is more sustainable. While having fewer humans on earth might seem to make the challenge slightly smaller, if we have a huge generation of people in retirement and a tiny fraction of working age folks who are both supporting the older generation and rebuilding all our industry, that actually makes the problem harder!

> vegetarian diet

Looking at the bigger picture, if you discard of your vegetarian foods scraps in the trash, they get converted to methane, having emissions on the same order of magnitude as cattle emissions. And we need ruminants to provide the fertilizer to soil to make it into a positive carbon sink.

We must instead look at soil, and using soil as a carbon sink. Modern industrial farming causes huge amounts of carbon release from soil, and that includes organic farming on the industrial scale, like what one could buy in Whole Foods. We instead need to shift agriculture to modes (e.g. no-till) that regenerate soil rather than depleting it. And that will include some animals. Preventing a burn of a gallon of gas has clear and definable implications, and if we stopped all gas burning tomorrow, that would be fantastic. However cutting out all beef tomorrow would leave us in a tough spot for our food system, everything is far far more complex when it comes to out agricultural web. We must come up with a food system that is carbon neutral, and preferably carbon negative. That means composting, no landfills, and some degree of animals. Fixing the food system requires systems change, just like fixing industrial processes does, and personal action can not cross that gap.

As far as personal things one can do, I would add a few more:

1. Replace natural gas furnaces and water heaters with heat pumps. These are a carbon win even if tour grid is burning a lot of natural gas, because heat pumps move 3+ units of heat doe every unit of energy consumed. If you can't do that now insulate the hell out of your home (a good idea anyway)

2. Get involved in local politics, to force local policies to encourage systemic change. A local government with a policy of only financing construction with carbon-neutral steel and cement has a chance of forcing market change, where personal action has no chance.

I do a lot of your list, because I want to do something, but I think we need to realize that it's not really close to enough. We need to change all of society, and personal responsibility will not get us there.

> Looking at the bigger picture, if you discard of your vegetarian foods scraps in the trash, they get converted to methane, having emissions on the same order of magnitude as cattle emissions

Oh, c'mon. 1. No they don't. 2. Cows' methaney burps aren't the only greenhouse gas issue w/ animal agriculture. Those animals definitionally eat more food than they produce (in in the case of cows, it's by a large factor). Meat is inherently an inefficient form of food. 3. Don't throw your food scraps in the trash—it's easy to compost.

> need ruminants to provide the fertilizer to soil to make it into a positive carbon sink

No. No you don't. Composting works just fine. But furthermore, the number of cattle we have today is laughably excessive for talking about fertilizer production. It's not even worth mentioning at this point in time.

If you don't have children, why should you care for the future generations? There could be some abstract argument about the unborn being as human as currently living people, but it cuts both ways.

Do you mean to say you don't care for any living thing but your family?

The point of fighting climate change is to preserve human life on earth (and in good conditions).

If we destroy the environment, nature will survive - some spiecies will die off, but new ones will emerge.

Nature was doing very well when co2 was a few times more than today. It’s just humans that were’t there to witness it.

This is just so human centric surely you can see how caring for all of Earth's biome is important.

Personally, I care about Earth's biome in its current state, and do not want to cause unnecessary suffering to animals or plant ecosystems because people trashed the joint especially since we had the ability not to.

It is human-centric, yes. However, the argument "don't have children for the only reason that they will trash the planet" is broken in its very core. First, because a person making it will have a difficulty explaining their own existence, and second, because if they don't have children, the chances are that their values will die with them and the Earth shall be inherited by the wasteful.

> First, because a person making it will have a difficulty explaining their own existence

Maybe to you. I derive a great enjoyment from just being alive myself and living my own potential. Considering a life meaningless without procreation is a very unintellectual perspective in my opinion.

You miss the part where the very existence of the person brings suffering through the consumption of all kinds of nature destroying goods. Obviously such person values their enjoyment over the suffering of others. This is one of the main issues of utilitarian philosophy where the attempt of applying universal measures of cost-benefit analysis returns unpleasant results.

How do you know nature will survive? Records of previous climate changes indicate the change occurred more gradually in tens of thousands of years, not within 200 years. So nature may not have time to adapt. Also the living earth may have just been lucky the last time drastic climate change occurred; it's not that we have thousands of earths to exclude survivorship bias.

BS. You had a fucking meteorite wiping out the dinosaurs in a year or so. Everyone who has a tiny bit of education has heard about this. Everyone who has a bit more education knows that sterilizing Earth will take much more concerted effort than a nuclear war.

So, yes, I know it will survive.

We're not talking about sterilizing earth but a runaway greenhouse effect. For example Venus seems not to have survived: https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2475/nasa-climate-modeling-sug...

Venus is like Earth the same way both a table and a cow have four legs.

From the announcement you read only the parts how Venus and Earth are similar, but not how they differ. The runaway effect was possible because Venus had less water, is closer to the Sun, and has no magnetic shield. The runaway effect you imagine on Earth needs significant changes in its chemical composition, in its mass, or its physical attributes like magnetic field and thermal input. Humanity is still far from doing something like that. Weight until we start building a cosmic mirror, have self-sustained nuclear reaction on a global scale, or build an earth spanning superconductor network with massive energy volume that would counter the magnetosphere.

People care for their close ones much more than for strangers. It's human nature. It's not binary between caring and not caring.

I think if you read the parent comment it was a binary question.

Not disagreeing with your comment though.

I mean that not having children is denying unborn people from the lives that they might have for no better reason that this might be easier for someone else unborn. This line of thinking leads to a suicide as a logical step which is rather bad extreme.

Saving potential people from being not-born leads to very bad extremes as well (maximizing reproduction). This is not a useful model of thinking.

I agree. My point is that having children or not is the wrong argument. Decreasing population growth is much more ethically achievable by decreasing child mortality in developing countries, providing women there with the education to be self-reliant on their own, and providing them with birth control so that they can plan their parenthood.

Rejecting the issue based on the fact that both logical extremes are failures is case of double headed reductio ad absurdum I think :)

The argument itself is reductionist in nature. No man, no problem. I'm not sure if you are arguing because of love for formal proofs or because you want the full treatise why it sucks, but if the latter, just say so.

I'm not sure what "it" is any more, but I think having modest amount of children is a good idea, and people from rich countries don't get to recuse themselves - we have such big carbon footprints. And appeals on behalf of unborn people sounds suspiciously like some of the dramatic appeals to emotion favoured by christian fundamentalists in the context of birth control.

I definitely do not ask people to have children for any reason be it moral, ethical, religious, or any other. I'm not asking them to abstain either. Vice versa, my argument is that having children is not analogous to using plastics and should not be considered in one's carbon footprint.

Go to school and become an engineer. Help develop a battery that's 1% better. Get a job and invest the money you make from it in a company that produces a solar cell that's 1% more efficient.

You're in a position to help on the credit side of the ledger way more then you'll ever be able to do on the debit side.

The Carbon Majors Report of 2017 (summarized by Guardian [1], original PDF here [2]) found 71% of greenhouse emissions caused by 100 companies, the top dozen(s) being fossil fuel producers. I think there's much more needed to be done than a single individual, hermit-style approach.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...

[2] https://b8f65cb373b1b7b15feb-c70d8ead6ced550b4d987d7c03fcdd1...

I think there's much more needed to be done than a single individual, hermit-style approach

You don't have to become a hermit to lower your emissions. It is entirely possible to have a good social life whilst lowering your emissions. In fact I would argue that many of the changes you can make will improve your quality of life.

You could always buy some cheap land somewhere, start a coppice and produce charcoal that you bury.

Unless you're in the tropics, where soil has a hard time hanging on to nutrients, you can probably skip the biochar step. Just bury the wood in hugelkultur.

The biochar step has the advantage of giving you back a bit of energy while you're doing it.

Zoom out. You are a tree. You need to see the forest. If you can get you & twenty of your friends to cut emissions 10%, that's far better than becoming a net zero human, and if you can get a thousand to cut 5% that's better still.

This is a collective action problem. You need to do better to lead by example, but spend most of your brain cycles on influencing others.

Okay it's a self plug but it you want to be an early adopter and help carbon removal along check out carbonremoved.com

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atmosfair

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