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Comment by 1337shadow | Hacker News Reader

Each human being emits 25 tons of CO2 per year just by breathing, should the businesses also be taxed based on their number of employees? People often forget the good parts about the little CO2 increase from the past century, I care a lot about environment (I'm a countryside person) but CO2 - many people forget it is the food of the plants that we need to eat - just takes all the place in the environmental debate and what I think are more important matters such as waste reduction, ocean cleaning, recycling, durable/fixable hardware... I'm hoping for people to do a cost/benefit analysis of the CO2 situation and start thinking rationally and work on what is actually bad for us, not just CO2 greenwhashing bs.

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I feel we need a new, completely separate word for "net emissions", because too often the discussion gets confused around this point.

> Each human being emits 25 tons of CO2 per year just by breathing

In almost all cases we care about net emissions. Breathing is net carbon neutral.

What we really need is to tax the net carbon that's added to the "fast carbon loop" (the biosphere). That is, carbon that's being dug up from the ground.

Yes. Of course, the business would also receive a tax credit for all the CO2 being sequestered by employees eating food. /s

Also, your 25 tons number is wildly wrong. It's simple to work it out on the back of an envelope:

CO2 is a produced from O2 and sources of carbon in your food. C + O2 = CO2

The molecular mass of the Carbon in CO2 is 12, the total molelcular weight of CO2 is 44. So, 27% of the mass of the CO2 you breath out ultimately comes from your food.

25 tonnes of CO2 being breathed out a year would imply 18.5kg of Carbon being consumed per day.

You must be hitting leg day hard.

Indeed, I feel developed countries have grown far too fond of brigades that end in legislation that no one understands but it placates the loudest people enough that no one actually checks to see if legislation even worked.

The vocal dissidents will attach their reputation to said legislation and become an apologist regardless of the legislation's efficacy - so we end up with a legislative body that doesn't have to fix anything, they just have to do something noticeable.

Reminds me of when there was legislation put out that blended gas and biofuel would get tax credits in order to increase biofuel (the greener energy) usage - instead paper plants that used exclusively biofuel started adding gasoline to their biofuel just to get the tax credit and no one cared.

It's my understanding that they attempted to close the loophole in 2009, (4 years after the credit was created), but it wasn't actually closed and no one cares anymore.

Obviously there are many other big issues, but the things you've listed don't have a (direct) impact on climate change specifically. There's lots of things going on that damage the environment in various ways and I agree that we should work on those too, but if we can't take action on climate change all that other stuff will sort of take care of itself when society as we know it ceases to exist.

Googling this number gives different answers for respiratory CO2 emissions per person. Various forms of wildlife obviously also emits CO2 and historically, this has not contributed to climate change prior to the last century. This is a moot point.

"Durable/fixable hardware" is a more important matter than climate change? Only on hackernews folks...

> Each human being emits 25 tons of CO2 per year just by breathing

I believe you may be off by two orders of magnitude.

Everyone always forgets the good part of mass extinction events

Maybe you believe that the temperature is going to rise infinitely because of CO2 emissions, I believe it's going to top at 2.5C degrees and that we can not only manage it but benefit from it.

Are you overconfidently wrong in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence a lot in life or just on this?

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