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Comment by tjansen | Hacker News Reader

Are these actually successes? I don't know how you can become carbon neutral by avoiding flights, SUVs and fast fashion. You can reduce CO2 emissions a bit, but won't come even close to 0. I think they are distractions.

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If you look at your individual emissions then an SUV, frequent flights and fast fashion will dominate everything else. The only reason flying isn't a huge percentage of global emissions is because few people fly. Even in the US less than half the population fly in any one year.

It's true, but why would you put your focus on reducing your individual emission by (rough estimate) 30%, instead of demanding solutions that can get your emissions down by 100%? There's this urge to self-sacrifice and then look down on other people who don't, and it's really counter-productive in every way.

Because technology alone won't solve the problem. There is no green alternative to flying across the Atlantic and there probably won't ever be.

Applying the same thinking that got us into this situation won't get us out of it.

then look down on other people who don't

That's in your mind, not mine.

"Because technology alone won't solve the problem."

Technology is more likely to solve the problem than reducing emissions by a certain percentage, which is guaranteed to be insufficient. Transatlantic flights are certainly a hard problem, but why should it be impossible? Either using hydrogen, synthetic fuels and/or by offsetting emissions with carbon capturing.

If all that comes along then great, take advantage of it. But right now there are no hydrogen planes rolling off the production line in Seattle. Carbon capture has been hyped for a long time now but we aren't seeing anything substantial happening.

Which leaves us in the situation that if you get on a plane to cross the Atlantic today you will add another ton of CO2 to the atmosphere.

Carrying on as we are right now is like spending next years pay rise before you have got the promotion, it will bankrupt us.

Technology eventually solved every problem by making the solutions cheap enough to be acceptable.

Back when every river in Europe was full of human shit, the air was full of smog and pretty much the entire continent was devoid of timber people were saying the exact same sort of "technology will never solve this, we need to make sacrifices" crap.

I could go on but "making sacrifices" does not work at scale because when you apply that one approach to more than one problem you wind up sacrificing so many things that the standard of living is driven back by hundreds of years.

Technology eventually solved every problem by making the solutions cheap enough to be acceptable.

Technology created this problem, applying the same thinking that got us into this situation won't get us out of it. All this wishful thinking crap won't get us anywhere.

You don't need to drive your standard of living back hundreds of years although if we don't get a handle on climate change that will happen.

Isn't this SUV x CO2 a post-fact thing?

Or to put in another way, is a new SUV worse than an Opel Corsa 1999 regarding CO2 emission?

Yes, because that new SUV will probably remain on the market for another 20 years. The 1999 Opel Corsa has at most 5 years of useful life left. So "new SUV" vs "old car" is a false dichotomy, and the real comparison should be between "20 years of fuel-guzzling SUV" or "20 years of fuel-efficient minicar" (mildly exaggerating, but you get the point).

So destroy anything that could be useful and reliable (which in turn decreases emissions as well because less things are being produced) and buy new shiny cars? Have you ever looked at how reliable modern cars are (especially with downsized engines which don’t do much about fuel economy but do a lot in reliability, not in a good way? you can’t expect most of them to last 20 years on the first engine and gearbox. While over 300k miles on the odometer was totally doable with 20 year old cars which are often rust free(not like 70s cars) and similarly efficient as modern cars, I don’t see why buying a new, more unreliable with almost the same fuel efficiency car would be better for emissions than keeping an old car running.

Maybe not, but that's probably not a fair comparison. Given same age, length and width, an SUV will be a bit heavier and have more air resistance than a vehicle with less height, so the energy use (and emissions) will be maybe 20% higher than a comparable station wagon.

Assuming that we are not talking about an hybrid/electronic SUV, right? I think the SUV theme is more a class struggle, trying to fit all SUV drivers into a stereotype (conservative/ suburb/family) than really a CO2 emission Per se.

It's also a thing for Europeans to criticize Americans about because most average people in Europe can't afford to have an SUV, whether due to money, lack of parking, roads not made for SUVs, etc.

so true. I'm one that, even if I wanted (and I don't), it would be hard to park and drive through our narrow streets.. add to that the risk to get the car trashed just because It's a SUV.

There are enough SUVs on European roads to prove it's possible. There are also countries like Switzerland or Luxemburg that have higher average incomes than the US, and still prefer Porsches or Mercedes to SUVs. Looking at the countries with slightly lower GDP per capita like Spain or France, you can restrict statistics to just the upper classes, and any group income-matched to the US population will have just as many garages but still far fewer SUVs.

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