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Comment by klyrs | Hacker News Reader

> It’s also worth noting that while planting trees is very good for the environment, it is not a silver bullet against climate change.

Not buying things is better for the environment. Projects like this are brimming with good intention but are little better than salve for consumer guilt.

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Yeah but objecting to every attempt to do good because, it doesn't go far enough! Is a recipe for doing nothing.

A card that leaks crude oil on every purchase would be more effective (if ridiculous from an engineering/logistical perspective) -- salves for consumer guilt aren't merely not doing enough, they're enabling the behavior that's doing the most harm.

I can imagine a variant of this card that tries to tackle the point you bring up. Not all purchases are equal. Some of them have negative carbon footprints. The tree planting offsets the footprint for every purchase. These things are not easy to estimate exactly but since there are probably order of magnitude differences in carbon footprints for different products there should be useful information about the relative impact of a purchase to display to the consumer and to demonstrate the overall impact of the project.

This feels very clever to me. I think people have very wrong senses of how bad various actions are for carbon footprint. I know folks who don’t eat meat for CO2 reasons (which I’m fine with) but fly across the US all the time—-sorry citation needed and happy to be corrected but I did this math once and it was roughly one year of meat = one (round?)trip.

A side-benefit, in my view, is to show that actually offsetting carbon footprints isn’t terribly expensive (for people who have the disposable income to fly across the country), which I think counters the “We’d have to shut down the economy to stop global warming” misconception that I believe a lot of people have (citation also needed here, just personal experience)

The Indulgences That Actually Work Card (in the sense of old Catholic indulgences), you could call it :)

How exactly would a card that leaks crude oil be more effective? Leaking crude oil is terrible for the environment. Planting trees is good for it.

It's a thought experiment, analogous to Tullock's Spike [1]. The idea is to modify incentives, by putting environmental impact at the forefront of a consumer's mind, by making them actually handle the mess that the card produces (thereby making them reluctant to make purchases).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tullock%27s_spike

Why would that modify anyone's behavior? Consumption already has negative environmental externalities, and it doesn't seem to be causing much modification.

Crude oil is nasty, smelly stuff. You wouldn't wanna pull that out for anything but the absolute necessities, because it's gross and you'd need to clean up the gross thing.

maybe take a closer look at the thread; they're saying that purchasing "stuff" is the worst thing for the environment, so a card that leaks oil on purchases would discourage the act of doing so, and hence do more good tha encouraging purchases to plant trees.

I read the thread. I get the idea, and it's nonsense. At scale, nobody cares about negative environmental externalities. If you added an extra one, behavior would not change in any scalable way. And it certainly wouldn't change in greater proportion to the damage it causes.

Is planting more trees actually good for the environment?

You plant a tree and it grows taking co2 from the air after a 100 years of so it dies it rots and releases all the c02 it captured.

What we need to do is massively reduce the amount of gress house gasses we release and then work on taking out of the air in a way that won't put it back in again.

"Enabling the behaviour that's doing the most harm" - I'm somewhat skeptical of environmental viewpoints that hinge on individual consumer guilt. As one random reference point, a single cruise-operating corporation was responsible for as much sulphur-based air pollution as all the cars in Europe in 2018/19 [0]. This is not so much to say that the card in question is a good idea, but more to point out that if you can salve some guilt and get people to vote green, you likely end up in a better position than if you maximise guilt.

[0] https://www.ft.com/content/8bceef94-86cd-11e9-a028-86cea8523...

This credit card doesn't enable anything that wasn't already enabled. That argument is similar to 'what-about-ism' where irrelevant objections about another subject are injected as if they follow from the premise.

Do you need to be such a judgmental scold? People need to pay rent. People need to buy food. People need to pay for all kinds of things that don't really constitute the kind of acquisitive consumerism that you're trying to criticize.

> Do you need to be such a judgmental scold?

Is the personal attack called for here?

What are we supposed to do? Live in trees? Build everything ourselves from raw resources we mined with our own hands?

If you want any kind of advancement in civilization you need commerce.

Processing a transaction might be a carbon negative interaction with this company. That is a noteworthy innovation.

Very well said! It appears like the other commenters deliberately try to misinterpret you. Consuming less is indeed one of the best things we can do.

Instead of buying new cheap clothes all the time to be trendy we should buy quality clothing and wear it for a long time. Repair it (and other things we buy) or sell it or give it away rather than dispose of.

Here in Europe things are moving in the right direction, but still too slowly, I am afraid.

I think people get tired of everyone bashing every initiative that doesn’t solve every problem that exists. If someone can plant trees with their grocery purchases instead of gaining points to purchase flights I think it’s a net win.

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