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While it's true that I have taken a number of international flights over the past decade, I am very conscious of my carbon footprint in other areas of my life. For example, I've made the choice not to have children, I don't own a car and I live a minimalist lifestyle not buying unnecessary consumer goods. These decisions significantly reduce my overall emissions.
In terms of air travel, it's worth noting that commercial flights account for about 2-3% of global carbon emissions. When we consider the per-person emissions on a commercial flight, it is generally lower than that of other forms of transportation like cars, especially when flights are near capacity.
That said, I completely understand the concern around flying, which is why I purchase carbon offsets for all my flights. This helps to balance out the emissions created by my air travel. Additionally, my professional career is dedicated to working on climate science and finding innovative technical solutions to climate change. In this way, I am actively contributing to the global effort to mitigate the impacts of climate change.
It's important to remember that while individual actions do matter, the largest contributors to climate change are industrial emissions and companies that prioritize profit over the environment. By focusing on these larger culprits and supporting policies and initiatives that hold them accountable, we can create a more significant impact on reducing emissions.
Seems overly long/verbose/conscientious for a human
I mean how lazy these commenters have to be that their only complaint is "possibly written by GPT"?! Is there something wrong or incorrect in the comment? If yes, then say that! Is there something unclear? Say thta! Is there something insightful to add to the comment? If yes, then say that!
I don't fly nearly as much as you but I would like to buy offsets when I do fly (and in general.)
I saw that Airlines offer carbon offsets but I'm not sure I trust them.
Or maybe there are 500 zoom calls and 150 flights.
Assuming that GP is competent and smart, rather than that we are smart and they are stupid is more likely to be accurate. I don’t assume my situation is the same as others as this is unlikely to be true.
(Not saying flying a lot is good)
Yes, airplanes and jet fuel for example.
> Hundreds of reckless flights that could be zoom meetings benefit no one.
Sounds like they were recreational. Or is happiness not permitted either? I'd better not drive 10 minutes down to the beach to walk my dog tomorrow in case the carbon police catch me, lol. For that matter I'll bet having a dog in the first place makes me a greenhouse nazi because he doesn't much like eating bugs.
Excessive? Better no.
>I'd better not drive 10 minutes down to the beach to walk my dog tomorrow in case the carbon police catch me, lol.
"drive to walk" is this even real?
Excessive according to your judgement?
> "drive to walk" is this even real?
Absolutely carbon-haram? Driving only permitted for essential business reasons?
Commercial flights make up around 2% of global carbon emissions, so forcing people like me not to travel is not going to make a significant dent in climate change. Focusing on industries and companies that are responsible for the bulk of emissions might be a better way to go.
Rather than trying to control individuals, we need to hold industries and corporations accountable. Pushing for policies that target high-emitting sectors like energy, transportation, and agriculture can create real change. By tackling the main culprits, we have a better shot at making a difference.
Cheers!
Cheers!
750 kg (home energy) + 50 kg (public transportation) + 3,000 kg (flights) + 2,000 kg (diet) + 500 kg (shopping and waste) = 6.3 metric tons of CO2 per year, not bad for someone from a developed country.
Focus on improving, not limiting. Invest in battery technology, throw billions at it and we will have carbon free air travel
Carbon offsets for a transatlantic flight cost about $15-30. Challenge accepted.
Where does that estimate come from?
I can fly international 365 days a year for decades. But my children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren will have 0 carbon footprint because they’ll never exist.
Conversely, eat bugs and recycle coke cans if you want, but that’s a fraction of a fraction of a drop in the bucket if you’ve had even one kid.
We have to reduce emissions right now, not at your inexisting great-grandchildren generation.
This is the same reason I don’t save any money for retirement. Somebody will surely have figured things out by the time for me to stop working! I can do what I want with no consequences.
Also, the way the human brain's reward system works, lots of people will say: I have no kids, now I can take an extra far-away holiday.
All the kids that are being born anyway.
But it's hypocritical to both have a kid and then malign me for using 1 millionth of the CO2 the decision to have a kid results in.
While I think we need to find a way to limit the number of humans and think it's a perfectly fine decision for people to not have children, I will continue to criticize anyone who uses CO2 excessively whether they have children or not.
I don't have kids. I'm in my thirties. I really struggle with this idea. I fear that this notion is part of why I will run out the clock on my window to get kids.
All I see is finger pointing when everyone needs to rise to the occasion. I'm falling in that trap myself.
Taking responsibility for climate change solution and raising smart and productive kids is probably the single most positive thing one can do.
I will feel bad about the CO2 contributions of my children the day you feel bad about needing goods and services from them.
There will always be something less than ideal.
Of course if everyone dies, we mitigate anthropogenic climate change, but that doesn't really further our analysis of the issue. There is nothing inherent in children that uses carbon, it is human behavior in the context of petro-capitalism that uses carbon. If I have thirteen kids and they live on a farm cooperative, I'll be responsible for less carbon than the parent commenter.
The parent said:
> [international flights taken often] completely dwarfs any [CO2] savings I could reasonably expect to make.
What dwarfs CO2 savings isn’t so much an individual’s international flights, it’s an individual creating more individuals that create more individuals.
Your thirteen kids on a farm cooperative are likely to have and eat cows, which is plenty of tonnes of methane. Not to mention the number of children that 13 couples will produce afterward.
My 0 kids will require 0 cows and 0 methane.
Having children is important for the propagation of the human race and I want our race to be propagated.
But it makes no sense to lecture somebody about their greenhouse gas emissions while taking action that results in a thousand or a million more greenhouse gas.
If you believe having children is a net positive, go for it. I’m not lecturing you to avoid it.
That's certainly your opinion. My opinion is that this thread of analysis (a) is not interesting; (b) tends to propagate harm.
I think the discussion is not interesting because it lacks intellectual rigor. I mentioned that the subject of having kids is an irrelevant red herring. I think we can call your thesis a form of "whataboutism." You actually double down on this in your response. Kids on a farm? Whatabout cows? (It's a vegetable farm. Try again, I guess.) Let me also add that there is no logical limit to your analysis. Who is responsible for your carbon use? You or your parents? Is this toxic comment on the internet something I should address with you or your grandmother?
The harm-causing part is more important. You are saying--here and in siblings--that "other people" can/should have children and that society will be sustained by babies who are "born anyway," but that people who procreate have lost the moral agency to participate as your equals in the climate discussion.
This is toxic (harm-propagating) because it treats biological procreation as a distasteful externality. Procreation is not an external process when we are considering anthropogenic climate change. Worse, you are drawing an artificial line to separate people who can have valid policy opinions on climate change from those (parents) who can't. Ironically, this is the same thing that you accused me of doing when you objected to my use of the word "toxic."
"Why are you telling me where I can't go while blowing up large chunks of it with dynamite?"
"That's whataboutism. Besides maybe my dynamite isn't causing any damage, and I'm still right that you're trampling it."
Does it span more than one generation?
In the most developed countries, children are now more of a burden than a gain, which is why women are having fewer of them every generation.
Not only because they're expensive, but because they are often born unhealthy (physically, mentally, or both) and are a large, often unrecoverable blow to most careers.
Since we don't need children to work on the farm or to let us move in with them when we're old (er, less than previous generations, anyway), it becomes purely a "nice-to-have" decision.
And then if somebody does voluntarily have children, they don't have much of a leg to stand on when lecturing others about their impact on climate change.
I just want to add to the conversation, that somehow your reasoning strikes me as a bit selfish. It is of course true, what you are writing. Still reading it, makes me sad. I am missing some higher meaning. Who cares about a career in the end? A career in our system is just a story of someone, who exceeded at providing value. But for whom, if you do not have kids?
I am missing a bit of Kant in there. A little bit of "You get one (life), you give one back." We (including you) just cannot all do it like that, if we do not want to end our lives rather uncomfortably. So again something about ultimate maximes and what they should be.
It's more likely the opposite: a lot of people would agree that their parents' decision to have children, particularly at a time when they couldn't afford them or lacked the mental strength to care for them and raise them in psychological safety, was selfish.
Not everyone gets to make the conscious choice.
Sounds more like you've given up and are using it as the moral high ground.
To turn your earlier phrase- 'Sorry, I don't take advice from people who are removed from the human race.'
Sounds stupid, because it is.
You do what you can, I will do what I can. But don't think for a second you are better than anyone else over a single choice you made.
I'm suggesting childfree people have a negligible impact on climate change compared to people who have children.
You can bring "moral high ground" into it wherever it seems applicable, but I have not done that. I've said only that it's hypocritical to criticize a person for their climate impact while simultaneously making a thousand or a million times more of a climate impact.
You are making an assumption that children just are a net negative.
As others have mentioned the carbon footprint of a child is miniscule compared to an adult,
They are not driving, flying, owning homes, etc for a while, and many never will.
One of those children could very well be the solution to that, and many other problems.
As for moral high ground you insist that you are better for having made the choice not to have children, as you see their opinions as less than and not worth listening to, as they have had children.
Since life can just be given to the next generation and you have already gotten yours, it would be logical to return the favor to the next person and give a new life.
I did not say, that it actually is selfish. Maybe it is not. It just came off a bit like that to me, as I read your comments.
> It's more likely the opposite: a lot of people would agree that their parents' decision to have children, particularly at a time when they couldn't afford them or lacked the mental strength to care for them and raise them in psychological safety, was selfish.
Sure. Although most people would surely still choose to live.
You can have children if you want, but I'm not requiring that of you.
If your children take care of me late in life, it's because they're exchanging their work for money. And the reason they're obligated to exchange their work for money is because that's the economic system into which their parents decided to bring them.
It is not moral to not have children. Paraphrasing Kant: An action is moral, if the state improves when everyone does it.
You cannot recommend everyone to not have children, since you depend on them. So why bring it up as an argument in a thread about climate change in the first place?
The argument is hypocritical. It just does not make much sense.
Do you see it as an optimization problem, where others have exactly enough children to care for you at old age, but so few that the climate suffers as little as possible? If so, you are still relying on the children and do not gain any more imaginary rights to pollute than those parents.
The "career" is a great lie and joke. Imagine choosing to exterminate your heritage in order to please short term goals of politicians or company owners who at best see the career worker as a cost center on a spread sheet.
But even if it doesn't and even if we're forced to make hard choices, the hard choice won't be "should I skip my vacation flight?", it'll be "should I skip raising a CO2 machine?".
This is an oddly off-topic and mean-spirited comment!
Looking at the comment thread you can see how this comment suddenly changed the course of the discussion to something totally unrelated to this post. This is one of those things that can create deeply nested comment threads on an unrelated topic just because of the nature of the comment and how it can trigger people to get involved in an off-topic debate.
It's also so much more complicated. For instance I took 2 flights last year, but ordered hundreds of goods, all coming from a lot of places around the world, including some by plane that were needed within days.
Same for food, same for so many other daily actions that have impact beyond my immediate sphere and I have no idea how or why.
People ought to make an effort to not go overboard, but the generic "the gov should deal with balancing it" is I think a pretty valid answer. Individuals trying to manage their own CO2 is just impossible when we have no idea what each corporations involved are doing behind on their side.
So you shouldn't feel bad for your occasional air travel.
I don't understand the implied ethical rule behind this mentality. CO2 emissions are always a problem and to be avoided. What am I missing?
The biggest sector is enery use in the industry (24%), next is buildings, mostly heating (17.5), then transport (16%). Most of the transport emissions is road transport (cars and trucks) and air travel is only 2% of the overall emissions.
https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
And again, air travel is mostly frequent travelers who have no intention to change their habit. That means that as an occasional air traveler, if it makes you happy to visit a faraway country every few years, you should definitely not feel bad about it. Because even if all occasional travelers were to stop flying, it wouldn't make any significant difference.
Not possible without everyone simply deciding to not have kids.
Destroying the planet is indeed lowering not only your standard of life, but everyone’s. Remember there’s no planet B.
They want you focused inwards
I definitely understand your sentiment. It is hard to restrain oneself of a good for some cause to see other people using it.
In this case it might be productive to adapt a new view that better suits reality and increases congruence between ideas about the world and imperics.
The opinion that it should be addressed or not? Because there's no feasible route to addressing it that doesn't involve reducing fossil emissions.
The only thing that matters is preventing extraction of fossil fuels in the first place.
That's why the fossil fuel industry promoted the idea of "carbon footprints", and why Adtech make their datacenters renewable - greenwashing their business that makes money selling the whole economy of fossil-fuel derived stuff, including flights and the fossil fuel industry's actual propaganda[1][2].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
[1] https://www.clientearth.org/projects/the-greenwashing-files/
You can fly an airplane on non-fossil fuels.
As the original commenter also said: He'd rather focus on earning money than saving a bit. Maybe that opinion translates to the climate debate?
Maybe he wants to produce large amounts of energy with limited externalities instead of saving a bit.
Not at the scale of commercial airlines though and certainly not (yet) as cheaply.
Also, it is interesting to see, that you think it is more practical to eliminate air travel, than to employ new techniques to allow air travel while being climate neutral.
The climate morality debate is complicated because it's all statistical. "Drown Bangladesh and Florida" is obviously a wrong outcome, but there's no one individual wrong action that leads there. You could come up with an approximation like "each gallon of jet fuel consumed raises the sea level by one femtometre"; each action is individually trivial, but combined they are not trivial.
I think nobody disagrees. Your entire comment is rhetoric handcuffing. Nobody proposed to let "Bangladesh and Florida drown".
We are discussing ways to avoid current path of climate change which can involve other means than reducing mobility.
Unfortunately a lot of people are set on an extremely narrow path, which is a moral issue. How are you going to explain to third world countries that you do not think they have the right to prosper like the US did?
In the end, it is morally wrong to be single minded on the solution to the issues. We need to consider other means. Let the means compete and pick the best way.
No, the hard part is that we just can't do the obvious, because there is no one global government that could mandate it. Instead, everyone at every level - individual, corporate, governmental - is better off short-term by not doing any climate mitigation, because those who do will lose business to those who don't.
Or am I missing something?
The discourse on qualifying different forms of fuels is way more confusing.
It is also dangerous. If we allow marketing of "net-zero" fuels, fossil fuel companies will offset their fuel with CO2 certificates.
There really isn't any other way to address climate change than by reducing emissions.
Yes, and they reduce CO2 emissions.
A kg of fuel should have roughly the same CO2 emission regardless of how it is produced?
The thing it that synthetic fuels are cyclic. We collect the emitted CO2 again.
Like this:
> The thing it that synthetic fuels are cyclic. We collect the emitted CO2 again.
This is a bad argument, as you can employ the same argument with fossil fuels.
Fuels emit CO2. we can produce fuels by sequestration.
No you can't. "Let's burn oil/gas/coal and then re-capture all the CO2 back" is not something that you can do feasibly, economically, and at scale.
I recently had to figure out the cheapest flights I could find to keep my star alliance frequent flier status, which I was at risk of losing because covid changed my business travel behavior. So in the end I was just visiting random European cities, sometimes with a connecting flight (I was keeping my status via flight segments).
Even if the industries, the western world, developing countries forced to use coal plants for cheap energy (and you can choose many more actors that play a larger part in causing the climate crisis) contribute to the problem more than you as an individual, at least you're not actively making the world a worse place.