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Comment by 11235813213455 | Hacker News Reader

Money (spent) is the measure of someone's pollution footprint

My electricity provider has a program which accepts voluntary additions to my bill to fund projects for creating wind and solar farms (among other things). As far as I know, this is the single most valuable thing I can do with my money with respect to reducing my carbon footprint.

It’s not precisely a bad heuristic that buying many things is wasteful (as I assume this comment intends to argue) but “throwing things away” is the measure, rather than “spending money”.

What you're saying is a bit like offsetting your footprint. Ideally we should rather have very low consumption. Partly agreed on throing away, a car is not thrown away frequently, even if it's an EV, it has a large footprint from its maintenance and all the services and infrastrictures dedicated to cars, 25% of our cities space. Same for a swimming pool, for a tourism boat, planes etc..

What if you spend your money on solar panels? We produce twice as much power as we consume

It's better to consume very few electricity, produced from nuclear for example, than setting up solar energy (with a significant loss on conversion and a footprint in materials, as well as nuclear plants, but what I mean is it's more our lifestyle that matters rather than the solutions themselves

Indirectly consuming few electricity means you've few devices which also have a number of footprints, so it's quite a large gain

The only counter example to what I said is maybe buying land to convert it to a food forest / permaculture, and save it from another guy building a villa with swimming pool

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