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Comment by dmbche | Hacker News Reader

Your AC use is nothing compared to shops and malls running AC outside of work hours. Do not live in discomfort for nothing.

Buy an AC, get comfortable, and if this is a real issue to you, sit down and think long and hard about how best to affect the problem. You'll find better options than not running your AC.

(Edit: for perpective, most residential dwellings in Canada run heaters from november to march and AC from june to september. This is a big problem - your AC, your whole carbon footprint is less than a fraction of a percent of CO2 per year. This issue is systematic and will not be solved by voluntary simplicity

And about moving - where do you go? I'm happy where I am with hitting -30C to -40C in the winter, but we are having historical forest fires right now, first ever acutal tornado alert in my life and are hitting 30-35C multiple times a week, and trying to go higher North is only mining towns and fishing villages. Southern Hemisphere?)

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I agree with you and the GP… individual responsibilities are frauds ( CF : recycling)

At the same time I live in New Orleans where house are wooden box without a inch of insulation.

It’s a vaste on a large scale to AC that city ( or the south at large, housing are as shitty in MS, AL and so on.

But I command GP to at least think about it.

I agree with him that paying the real cost of things would help our best friend the free market do it’s only job.

( carbon intensive goods and service should be priced at a large premium IMO )

I would also add : tax incentive to keep lodging energy efficient ( heat pump, insulation, yada yada )

Just to get a single data point from a canadien resident : what do you think of outlaws AC in malls and shop that do not keep the cold air inside?

I am leaning more and more towards what you say, but on the other hand, I do really believe in doing my part and setting an example.

I really think that "after all I don't have much impact" is what's killing the planet. It's always somebody's else fault and no one takes responsibility or does anything.

My reasoning is that it's actually backwards.

So this is a systemic issue, where the people actually impacting the problem are at the top of compagnies, governement and international regulators. That's where any change can happen - any individual change has an effect that is either non perceptible ("setting an example for others" is impossible to measure) or measurably negligible (making your footprint smaller).

So things like recycling or running the AC less have nothing to do with the problem or the solution - we need to affect the system itself, and to do that we have to go through companies, governement and international regulation.

Issue is that virtually no one is trying to do that. Few people try to impact local governement, fewer national or international entities.

I think this is because the "energy" needed to think and find a way to have an impact is drained into all the individual action stuff.

Like a pressure cooker - individual action is the valve letting of enough steam so that nothing happens. Remove the valve - what happens?

You make a good point. What really irks me is that our so-called captains of industry are cynically extracting wealth from this system at rates that are indecent while at the same time externalizing all of the problems first on the 'regular people' and then on a larger scale on the developing part of the world, who are utterly without a chance at dealing with this.

Big industry is one of the major root causes of all of this and even if individual choice is a factor I'm pretty sure that if just 500 people would stop lining their pockets for a couple of decades and instead really took our global interests to heart that we might be able to put a dent in this. But as it is I'm not very hopeful that that will ever happen. In fact they'll probably use the crisis to further increase the wealth gap.

To add to this argument, I'd suggest framing it in terms of harm reduction too.

To illustrate, we know that a bullet proof way to make a person's carbon footprint zero is for them to die. But no one would ever advocate this for obvious reasons.

So lowering carbon footprint should not be the only goal. One should be reducing the harm done.

There's a study in Japan showing that people avoid using heating due to inflation and more people die from stroke for example because of this. I.e. discomfort is not just a feeling, it can have harmful consequence.

> Your AC use is nothing compared to shops and malls running AC outside of work hours. Do not live in discomfort for nothing.

It's important to understand where the biggest offenses are and keep things in perspective, but this shouldn't absolve one of all personal responsibility either.

As individuals, pretty much the only ways we can influence the world for the better are going to be small by definition, and it makes sense to be considerate of which levers we do decide to pull.

> Southern Hemisphere?

Tasmania will fare well (probably) and has hydroelectricity (and inbreeding (allegedly)).

New Zealand has geothermal, two islands to choose from, but is getting over run with hollyweird seppo's looking for Middle Earth. At least Sam Neill is a (recent) native New Zealander.

As a Canadian you're welcome in either although you may get tired of explaining your accent isn't from (central northern) America.

The nordics still have winters that are filled with wet cold darkness and short summers that are wet and cold or just cold. Temperatures above 30c are mostly on a tuesday once a year on a sunny hillside.

I feel the same way about getting an AC and have held off until I also can get solar panels. Is that an option for you?

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