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Comment by herendin2 | Hacker News Reader

They refer to 'thousands of gallons of chain-and-bar oil... carried into the forests' every year

Is this quantity significant?

By “significant” I take you to mean, “causing enough harm to be noticeable.” I don’t know the answer to that.

Consider that chainsaws are only one of many polluting tools that people use in forests, e.g., snowmobiles, generators, of course cars. There are many non-petroleum pollutants as well, like lead ammunition and trash. I believe it’s a useful practice to reduce harm from each of these as much as possible. That reduction might come from banning them outright to small changes like using vegetable oil as chainsaw lube.

The opposite approach is requiring harm to be demonstrated by each of these small things in order to encourage or require change. This has gotten us roughly to where we are now, with much wilderness in the country despoiled by human practices.

All of us are better served by being conservative in this context: by intentionally doing the least harmful things possible, and looking for ways to improve.

A key piece of advice in performance optimization is to profile first. The same should apply to environmentalism. Some interventions have orders of magnitude more impact than others, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise

This is one of those times when programming analogies don't work. Ecosystems are diabolically complex and nonlinear. A small perturbation might be okay one year and collapse everything the next, depending on a thousand other factors. It's good to try, but it would be a terrible policy to mandate.

It occurs to me that large computer programs can also be diabolically complex and nonlinear. Changing a single byte of code can result in a huge change in process behavior.

I generally disdain the temptation to use computer analogies for natural processes too, but in this case your objection isn’t strong.

Humans tend to limit the complexity of their systems and declare tech debt bankruptcy long before they're comparable to an ecosystem. You certainly could build something distantly comparable (e.g. the internet as a whole), but it's obvious how difficult studying those sorts of systems is.

Exactly how to understand and intervene in complex systems is an active area of multidisciplinary research, not something trivial or remotely well understood.

That sounds like an excuse to completely ignore any evidence and just try whatever interventions you feel like. A far better approach would be to quantitatively evaluate the different possible options, and then take the one most likely to have the biggest impact. Maybe you pick the wrong one due to some complex effect you didn’t account for, but it is still better than picking at random!

I'm not sure how you got from "it's a good idea to try, but terrible to mandate universally" to "do anything you feel like", but it's a very uncharitable interpretation of what I said.

My point is that restricting yourself solely to the particular set of things you can understand quantitatively with all the real world practicalities that entails is limiting. Other than that one word, we're in complete agreement.

I repeat that wisdom about performance optimization more frequently than my coworkers probably like, but it can still be taken too far. If you have two approaches that are equally clear and equally easy, take the one that you expect to be more performant.

In this case, we have two lubricants that are apparently interchangeable. One we know has potential downsides (petroleum based oils are known to be harmful to the ground when spilled; this is part of why we have laws against doing so); one does not. Pick the one that doesn't, since all else is effectively equal.

Even in that situation it is still worth asking what order of magnitude the performance difference will be. If a junior engineer codes up the slower one, should they rewrite it or is it not worth the time?

I just don’t understand why environmentalists sometimes get so indignant when asked about the effect size of the interventions they call for. There’s a million low effort lifestyle chances that would be better for the environment, it is a totally fair question to ask if we want to maximize impact

An unfortunate effect of that measure is that it offers an excuse to 'do nothing'.

Both in programming and in environmentalism.

'The big issue lies not with X, but with Y, but Y is not my area/too big for now/etc. So I'll do nothing'

No. You run maybe a pint of bar and chain oil through a big felling saw in an entire day of running it.

More transmission and hydraulic fluid leaks from logging equipment constantly.

> You run maybe a pint of bar and chain oil through a big felling saw in an entire day of running it.

Without getting into whether it's actually a significant pollutant compared to other sources, I think your estimate is considerably low. I'm usually worn out before I can cut for a whole day, but I've gone through more than 2 quarts in a day. And here's someone professional who says he goes through a gallon a day of bar and chain oil with a similarly sized saw (possibly because he's able to keep going longer): https://forestryforum.com/board/index.php?topic=46008.msg662...

I'd say your oiler needs adjusting.

Being pedantic, any quantity >= 2000 would be "thousands", so...maybe?

Reminds me that I like the phrase "only a fraction of $x does $y." People seem to ignore 9/10 and 200/1 are fractions.

Or does it matter that the petroleum came from the forests, the deserts and some underseas equivalents? Petroleum is a natural thing.

There are no doubt problems with the refined versions of petroleum but natural oils have issues too.

The right solution might still be to ban petroleum oils from this job. But it seems foolish to pretend they are any less natural than vegetable oils.

It’s true that literally everything on Earth is natural by definition, either naturally-occurring or produced by natural forces like erosion or beavers or humans. But that’s tautological, and not interesting.

Refined petroleum does not occur naturally and is toxic to all life. Vegetable oils are produced by stepping on or chewing nuts or vegetables. There is no comparison.

> Vegetable oils are produced by stepping on or chewing nuts or vegetables.

Not really. Rapeseed/Canola oil in particular involves extensive use of solvents, bleaches, etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cfk2IXlZdbI

> Refined petroleum does not occur naturally and is toxic to all life.

Not all life[1].

[1] https://iscsales.com/item/55-gallon-oil-eating-microbes-lfs-...

Not all petroleum either. I bet a lot of people here have a jar of refined petroleum they apply to their skin regularly.

> Petroleum is a natural thing.

Cyanide is also a natural thing. Is it compatible with complex life in this planet? No.

Natural occurrence is not a sufficient measure for compatibility in an ecological context.

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