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29athrowaway

Burning Man:

- Environmental impact of roundtrip transportation to the middle of nowhere

- Environmental impact of structures and vehicles

- Environmental impact of burning large amounts of crap

- Environmental impact of littering

- Environmental impact of event-specific clothes, garments, accessories, etc.

- Encouraging others to engage into the activities above

- ...

Do you honestly believe that a person that voluntarily engages into all this pollution cares in any way about the environment? They're people living in a bubble, completely detached from reality.

In just 9 days, Burning Man pollutions as much as 19,000 families for an entire year.

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The people I know who go to burning man are incredibly thorough about picking up litter before they leave, and they wear the clothing at other events.

Roundtrip transportation to “the middle of nowhere” is no worse than rounddtrip transportation to somewhere. The only difference is that “somewhere” is sometimes accessible by train… but in the US, that’s only a small percentage of the country.

Ymmv, there are 70k people and there’s a lot of variation.

Yes, how dare people do things?

The emissions in 2020 were estimated at 100,000 tons CO2, which is roughly equivalent to five hours of air travel (2.5 hours each way) per participant. The lion's share of emissions are from road travel and air travel.

To their credit, the org is trying to green the event (and has been issuing very thorough reports on emissions), but it's difficult when the majority of emissions is due to off-playa transportation.

Moreover, it's an incredibly difficult environment, and not really one where you'd prefer to depend on less-reliable renewables. If you'd opted for solar this year, you'd probably have been wet and dark.

What you should perhaps sit with is: should we be similarly outraged about the climate footprint of tech conferences, or is it just easy to hate Burning Man in particular?

The best way to make the event green would be to cancel it forever and encourage all future similar events to do the same.

It was a mistake.

Same with every international conference that could happen online. Just gather online.

There is a middle ground between "let the planet warm uncontrollably " and "huddle in darkness waiting for death".

Meanwhile, I assume you're a vegan who bikes to work and never uses air conditioning? The difference between just one month of living like the average American and one month of living like the average Indian is significantly greater than the footprint of attending Burning Man.

It's absolutely possible for someone to attend Burning Man annually and still weigh in below the average emissions per capita, or even to be carbon negative.

We are all going to have to make sacrifices, but we aren't going to have to sacrifice everything, either.

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

The carrying capacity of Earth is approximately 4,000,000,000 humans. We have twice as much.

The only way we can have a chance (we really don't, but let's entertain the idea) is to have every person reduce their environmental footprint as much as possible.

The other alternative is the elites replacing the masses with AI, and use autonomous means to capture all resources.

>The carrying capacity of Earth is approximately 4,000,000,000 humans.

You know what they say about extraordinary claims…

Whatever the number is, it is clear we are past it, as evidenced by the fact that species above certain weight are going extinct, and key sources like topsoil, groundwater and others are being depleted much faster than they replenish.

> should we be similarly outraged about the climate footprint of tech conferences

Yes, even more so.

Meanwhile, airlines fly tens of thousands of empty flights a year, polluting the atmosphere, to "avoid losing take-off and landing slots".

You care so much about the environment, calculate how many Burning Mans that equates to.

It's just another incarnation of the sanctimony that adherents to the religion of climate change seem to inevitably feel.

It is not a religion, it is actually happening. How bad it will get before we manage to do anything about it is an open question. Sanctimony is the least of our worries right now!

Repent, Sinners, Repent! The End Is Near! https://youtu.be/xVlRompc1yE?si=kTZOC1ZSV2RKAAg0

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