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Comment by antod | Hacker News Reader

> How can you tell me I'm the problem with my single truck and couple of commercial flights each year when you've got multiple Teslas and hundreds of private flights each year?

Because there are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of other truck owners also using the same justification to keep their truck?

This isn't sticking up for hypocritical wasteful billionaires, just pointing there are not very many of them in the grand scheme of things. Truck owners reducing emissions by a few percent (let alone dropping to what a car would do) would have a much bigger effect than billionaires or celebs reducing by 100%.

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So the poor and middle class have to go beyond comfort and make concessions every day while these billionaires are free to burn the world at a 10000x rate of a normal person because “there’s not enough of them?”

Great logic. By that strand, I suppose they could also be allowed to abuse people, I mean it’s more important that we make sure the general population doesn’t abuse right? That’s what truly moves the statistic, not the crime perpetrated by a few billionaires?

You call out "Great logic" with an immense whopper of your own.

Where did I say it was OK for billionaires to waste so much? Did calling them wasteful and hypocritical sound to you like I was supporting them?

If we want to extend the fallacies in the other direction - Why should the rest of the world do anything when these wasteful Americans insist on having so many trucks?

Total strawman. We want everyone to emit less (or pay a steep price for the privilege) including and especially billionaires. It's just that billionaires are a drop in the bucket so them altering their behavior will factually not change much.

The 15 largest shipping container ships produce as much sulfur pollution as all non-commercial cars on the entire planet put together. There's thousands of those ships. Of all vehicle pollution, something like 95+% of it is large commercial vehicles.

Your switching from a truck to a car makes effectively ZERO difference in global emissions. If EVERY non-commercial vehicle in the US went down to ZERO pollution, it wouldn't even be noticed in the statistical noise of the country's pollution.

Sulfur dioxide has a cooling effect. So keep doing that, I guess.

My first web search seems to disagree on those numbers: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1185535/transport-carbon...

But if everyone just cherry picks a worse example than themselves to justify not doing anything until they are the worst, then no progress will ever happen.

You are making the mistake of thinking that CO2 is the biggest or worst polluter and that only greenhouse pollution matters. Look up sulfur pollution. It is basically non-existent in gasoline, but rampant in other fossil fuels and is far more impactful.

No, CO2 was just the context of the discussion.

I specified I was talking explicitly about sulfur pollution.

FWIW, often statistics talking about CO2 are actually talking about CO2 equivalent, which is a way of normalising the harm levels of different pollutants. Typically this is used to compare things like farming and fossil fuels, which produce very different gases.

Unfortunately, I can't tell if the source linked actually uses this metric but isn't being clear, or if it's just focused on CO2, and I'm struggling to find another source that does use CO2 equivalent emissions as a metric.

One mouse drops more mice hair in nature than all humans (~8B!) combined!

One mouse do what now?

But they only tested on mice so we can’t be sure

On such polarizing topics, there is no neutral. Both sides will detest you for not being on their's.

Logic won't win you any friends; and it certainly won't change anyone's feelings.

As trite as my post is: I don't see the merit in yours.

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