Being Green, It’s a Rich Man’s Game | Hacker News Reader

Being Green, It’s a Rich Man’s Game

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8 pointsbeardyw8 comments

So very true.

Where I live, many people still rely solely on wood stoves because it's radically cheaper than the alternatives (propane, fuel oil, electricity). And when insurance companies refuse to insure their homes because of that, they really have zero choice: they go without having insurance.

This is how you know the entire green and progressive movements are primarily created by rich, entitled people who've never experience hardship in their lives! They have no idea what real life is like from most people.

Electric car, solar panels on your house, living in the city, family in a nursing home in case they need support.

I think this is very much true, although comparatively richer people use flights much more and they have a worse co2 budget if you price in their consumption of food, clothing or luxury goods in general.

I think the meta issue is that existing is expensive when you have to price in not adding to climate change or biosphere impact. Existing is cheap when you can consume factory farmed meat, fossil fuel products without a carbon tax (for both mobility and electricity), etc.

We overshot what was sustainable as a species and now it’ll be terribly painful paying back the debt hangover. We have to provide for 7.5B people today, 11B by the end of the century, and generate enough clean energy to sequester all of the CO2 emitted during the industrial revolution.

I think the key point here, which seems sound and important regardless of what we think of his examples, is that people who want to maximize the impact of their green tech work should focus more on minimizing upfront adoption costs

Not sure that is necessarily a green issue.

More of a being “poor” issue in general. Many cost savings require up front capital.

Be it not paying rent or leveraging credit cards (and paying them off on time)

Seems fair since rich men caused most of the problems to begin with.

It takes money to make large scale changes that involve vast efforts and highly specialist careers to develop and deploy new technology into other areas? Stop the presses! I guess we had better quit while we are ahead - only rich companies could ever afford computers and it wouldn't be fair to continue development when we could just pay millions of human calculators instead.

Seriously the mentality is wrong on every level.

I guess I don't agree with the authors premise that "it’s not so much the greenness that matters as being seen to be green."

In fact, it is the greenness that matters, and the author is just self-conscious and wants to appear green. Who cares what other people are doing? If you can pick up a biodiesel fuel car for a "song" and use free/cheap vegetable oil, why not just do it? You are saving all the emissions related with producing a car and transporting it.

I know in many cities they have EU 3/4/5/6 requirements to drive inside the city, but I would hope that a car that runs on vegetable oil satisfies these requirements.

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