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Comment by boredemployee | Hacker News Reader

Please, highlight who said we need to lower our quality of life? Maybe avoiding waste is a great place to start.

Anyone who is being realistic understands that we have to stop eat food out of season, keeping all buildings at 68 degrees during the summer, getting rid of multi hour commutes in cars, taking vacations in cruise ships, buying new phones every year, shipping everything in multiple layers of plastic over 1000s of miles etc etc. We are so fucking far past "reduce reuse recycle." No one is changing anything about their lives and that should be more than obvious to anyone paying attention.

You won't get there through individual action, only through systemic change at the top levels.

And the top levels are put in place by either money or people who don't want to hear they need to change.

That's a binary way of thinking. Sorites paradox. Individuals taking individual action, collectively together over time, can influence systemic change at top levels, more effectively than just waiting for the top levels to change their mind on their own.

I agree, but then the best bang for buck is pushing to change policy, not making sure you close the light bulb when you leave the room.

Again, why not both?

Thousands of years of history disagrees with this kind of reductionism.

> getting rid of multi hour commutes in cars

Thats an improvement in quality if lude, held back by efficient free market

Your comment really is important. Most of these diacussions seem to assume that as long as we transition from ICE to EVs and Coal to Solar then everything will be fine. We need to learn to cope with less.

My wife and I were discussing this the other day actually. I was born in 86 so I'm not terribly old, but even I remember growing up as a kid in Idaho that one didn't just go to the grocery store to buy salmon--it wasn't really available. If you wanted salmon, you had to plan for it. Nowadays I can find salmon at every grocery store at any inpulse. Is it nice? Yes. Necessary? No.

Absolutely, and don’t forget that a ton of it (40% of food in the US is wasted) just gets thrown away. Available =/= used.

> No one is changing anything about their lives and that should be more than obvious to anyone paying attention.

Some people are changing things about their lives. It might be 1% of the population, but that 1% should be put on a pedestal instead of treated as non-existent like is happening here. A much more accurate statement would be:

"Only 1% of the population is selflessly making the choice to sacrifice quality of life/convenience to significantly decrease their emissions, whereas 99% is not doing this at all."

Honest question - if no one is going to change their life, shouldn't we then be focusing on creating a future where they don't have to change? If you gave people a choice between paying higher taxes to achieve abundant clean energy, carbon sequestration, new biodegradable packaging etc. or fundamentally changing life as we know it to slow down emissions, which is more likely to happen?

it's not food transportation that's the big CO2 emitter.

quite the contrary. trying to grow food where it needs a fuckton of water and fertilizer (and pesticides and herbicides).

because of idiotic subsidies.

similarly it's not the heating/cooling, it's the lack of modern insulation and heat pumps.

...

multi hour commutes are bad anyway, but even a few minutes in cars every day at the same time as everyone else is bad (because it's not scalable)

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