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Comment by telesilla | Hacker News Reader

Anyone worrying about what you can regarding climate change, it's nice to stop driving etc but the big issue is fossil fuel consumption. That's in the hands of big money. How that changes is another story but they've been clever to put the blame on domestic, urban consumers when we're a tiny minority of the polluters. Knowing that should help those keen to help out know better where to look.

In the meantime, no or little meat and flying is the best you can do.

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> it's nice to stop driving etc but the big issue is fossil fuel consumption. That's in the hands of big money.

Driving is the biggest source of fossil fuel consumption. Where are you getting your talking points?

Think about the last time you filled up your gas tank. Let's say it's 20 gallons of gas. That's an absolutely massive massive amount of fossil fuel, if you think in terms of 5-gallon buckets.

Each gallon of gas emits 20 pounds of CO2 when burned (it gets heavier because each carbon atom gets two oxygen atoms are arched to it). That's 400 pounds of CO2.

Now let's compare that to meat. A pound of beef, something that lasts 2-10 meals, averages 20 pounds according to the all-in estimates that I've seen. (Note that the 400 pounds of CO2 from a tank of gas underestimates true emissions because it skips the 10%-50% extra energy for extraction transport and refinement, that gets cou United against beef).

Other meats, from non-ruminants that don't emit methane from digestion, have a fraction of the carbon footprint.

Run the numbers on flight, and it's about the same emissions as a single passenger gas vehicle driving that distance.

Run the numbers on your fossil gas furnace fossil gas water heater, and it's about as much as a typical car.

All the stuff you buy that's not directly fossil fuels? Tiny fraction of this all.

Climate change will not be solved by individual action. It will be solved by collective action to change everybody's behavior. Everybody. The biggest impediment to that change is politics, and the biggest impediment to political change are the forces mobilized by big money interests. But what you are repeating here plays right into their hands, not into the changes we must make to all of society.

First: the bigger point is that it will be systemic and collective actions which result in meaningful change. Individual mindfulness and advocacy help, but they're by no means sufficient.

On fossil-fuel consumption and carbon emissions:

Natural gas and coal combined exceed total petroleum usage (measured in quadrillion BTUs) for the United States. Much of the coal and gas is used in electrical generation, though also in industrial and commercial use.

https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/energy/us/...

It looks as if transportation net carbon emissions are slightly less than 50%:

https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/assets/images/charts/Car...

It's close enough that this is something of a niggle, but in terms of accuracy, whilst it's fair to say that transport is a major source of CO2 emissions, it's not quite the majority contributor.

I said biggest, not majority. But there are also other reasons to focus on transportation over other sectors. The US is an outlier from other developed countries in their high CO2 emissions per person because of their transportation choices. And these choices are hard-baked into the design of our land use, and will be the hardest to change.

Despite the existence of a tiny fraction of electrical vehicles, we are nowhere near on track to decarbonizing in time. In order to naturally shift over to EVs in time, with the natural aging out of gas vehicles, we would have had to be at 100% EV for new vehicles in 2020. We won't be to 100% new EVs any time soon at all.

In contrast, other sectors are really easy to decarbonize. Electricity generation will decarbonize faster than current predictions, because everybody uses old data in their models, and even two year old renewable data is hopelessly out of date.

Heating by heat pumps rather than natural gas is also fairly easy to transition through building codes. Simply requiring all new outdoor AC units to include the $200 switch to also heat would result in a fairly speedy transition for the second largest residential use.

So with the conundrum of transport, the only real solution we have is for people to drive less, while also transitioning to EVs as soon as possible. However we have planned nearly all of the US for car-dependency, and there are very few places to live in the US that don't require a car. Very few. This land use change, to allow car-free living, is a bigger battle than switching away from meat, and far harder to convince people to do. There are so many more vegetarians and vegans than people that acknowledge we should allow less driving, and it's a switch that takes far longer to make.

Further, this switch to less driving is under local control, controlled by local planning committees and local transit committees, not mysterious billionaires living in mansions. It's under supposedly-democratic control, it's just that the people showing up to these meetings are not people who care about climate change, or at least they don't realize the connection between land use and climate change.

Vehicle fleet transitions do take time, though if there's a committment to all-electric (and some countries are getting there, none have currently-operative mandates, there's still roughly a 7-year lag for 50% conversion given vehicle life, absent some trade-in scheme.

Another alternative is to promote private-vehicle alternatives: transit, bikes, walkable neighbourhoods, etc. That might occur more quickly, at least within some regions.

Residential retrofits are similarly slow. New-construction mandates effect only a thin margin of housing, and in regions where new housing construct vastly lags demand (coff-California-coff), that would be centuries. There's now talk of retrofits, though easy replacements (stoves/cooking) neglect hard ones (water and space heat, clothes dryers). Again, replacment cycles for those are on the order of 10--20 years, and require considerable grid upgrades.

Your point about the US (and much the rest of the world) being designed for car-dependence is precisely what I'm talking about by "collective action". The private automobile singlehandedly created the dominant land-use patterns of the 20th century, and reversing reliance on the automobile will require utterly transforming land use, again. And that is a collective problem, not an individual one. The most gold/platinum/green LEED ratings for a building do nothing if it induces 40,000 miles of daily private vehicle commute demand. Convert that to walkable, bikable, and LRV transit, and you're avoiding 800 gallons of fuel consumption a day, 160,000 gallons/year.

And that doesn't happen simply through individual mandates.

The influence of "billionaires living in mansions" on housing is stronger than you give credence, as real estate forms a principle asset class for the financial sector, and hence, asset inflation serves multiple interests. This isn't the only factor behind promoting auto-dependent sprawl, but it's an extraordinarily powerful one.

>Climate change will not be solved by individual action

Thanks for clarifying - my post was badly written and it was what I meant to convey. Small individual action is really meaningless compared to the massive polluting done by industry - collective global action is the only thing that will change this. On the scale of saying, obtaining voting rights for everyone outside of white men or men who owned property (the norm until the late 1800s).

Also, I'm in an area right now with few cars so I probably just forgot about them.. definitely, don't drive too much either. Or carpool. Trains are better: According to the European Environment Agency, rail travel accounts for 14 grams of CO2 emissions per passenger mile, which is dwarfed by the 285 grams generated by air travel, and the 158 grams per passenger miles from journeys in cars.

I’ve seen this posted a lot and I read it as an excuse to throw our hands up and do nothing individually. However culture matters and as we shift our behaviors as individuals, pressure builds on corporate behavior as well. Both through local politics and internal politics within the company. We do need drastic regulatory changes, but we also need as a society to put our weight into it.

Source? At least in the US, cars make up a decent share of our carbon emissions, around 16%. Other greenhouse gases like NOx or Fluorinated gases are mostly produced by industry though.

https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-...

The top source of greenhouse gas emissions in California is passenger vehicles.

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/CkDmyLFljut4y3amem_3slBySxw=...

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/8/22/1617782...

Depending on how much time you're willing to invest, the best thing you can do might be joining lobbying efforts like the citizen's climate lobby: https://citizensclimatelobby.org/

Collectively, consumer behavior makes a big difference, as we saw when oil prices dropped very low during the pandemic and are shooting up now.

But it’s true that what an individual does makes little difference, unless you figure out how to make it scale.

What if every manufactured good had a nutritional label that told how much energy, oil and minerals were spent on it?

Driving uses fossil fuels, unless you're in an electric car - and even then, depending on electricity mix.

Is "big money" doing it for no particular reason though? My impression is that it's mostly large enterprises that, at the end of the day, serve consumers, so consumers are ultimately deciding, and so far, very few of them care enough.

Even among those who are very vocal about climate change and ask for regulation, to many, overseas vacations are more important.

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