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Comment by tinco | Hacker News Reader

Do you think that private jets and yachts are a significant portion of CO2?

First of all, such things are of the top 0.1%, not the 10%. You need to be thinking of more mundane things. As someone on this forum you very likely belong to the top 10%.

How often do you order on Amazon? How often do you dine out? Do you have a heated pool? How often do you fly? How often do you eat beef or pork? How long is your daily commute?

Those are the sort of things that influence your CO2 expenditure. Sure you could 10x that with flying private jets, but almost no one does that so it's not as significant.

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A household would need to earn an annual income of around $200k to be in the top 10%. Are you saying most people here earn that amount of money?

The proportion of people in the top 10% of the general population here is expected to be much higher than 10% but I would expect most probably less than 50%.

It's not almost no one.

When my boss's boss's boss spends 4 hours on a private jet he creates as much CO2 as I do in a year.

I need a house. He doesnt need a jet. His jet should be banned yesterday.

You don't need a house as big the one you have, and you (as an example of the average middle class american) don't need to live in the suburbs, with inefficient construction techniques, dependent on a car to go anywhere, ordering ubers to conveniently bring packages of food twice a week, etc.

Between banning private jets and banning parking lots, guess which one would be better for the environment?

Americans really don't understand (a) how wealthy they all are and (b) how a lot of this wealth is based on completely wasteful spending.

Flagging won't change the facts. High density housing is bad for the environment, especially high rises.

(Discussing pros and cons, with links to the research.) https://humantransit.org/2010/03/does-highdensity-life-have-...

High density destroys plant life, increases traffic delays for delivery of goods, and increases the number of goods that are delivered. Transporting humans to their jobs is a very small fraction of our carbon footprint overall. And there are more pressing environmental concerns than just carbon emissions.

Larger homes promote sharing. One vacuum cleaner for example.

Stop parroting high density marketing. Stop destroying the environment to enrich investors.

Who gets to determine need?

As you get wealthier, you believe you need things, like a 3 br home where each kid has their own room. If money gets tight, you realize a 2 br is actually fine. Problem is, when you consider downgrading you feel that need a lot more than if you’d never had it. Same goes for the jet. That 2 hr trip suddenly feels really critical compared to just planning your travel better. Wasn’t there a post here recently where Musk redirected his cousin’s plane to go unplug some servers? Where was he going that was so important in the middle of the night? And could that detour have waited for a normal flight booking? And apparently the decision turned out do be a mistake according ti Musk himself.

So to answer, money determines needs.

So each person by itself.

People pushing this agenda, obviously. Think about the regulatory capture poosibilities!

Credit rating agencies, who never done their job properly.

Statistics do.

We have tried this before and it wasn't great.

>guess which one would be better for the environment?

According to who?

I guess the point is there's only 1 of him, and thousands of you (i.e his peons).

So it doesn't matter what he does, it's not statistically significant.

Sidebar: your boss's boss's boss's should be allowed his private jet - he should just pay a fair price for the fuel that reflects the damage he is doing. Like 10x the current price.

What’s the point of money if everything costs in proportion to how much you have? Then everything costs 1.

I don’t think the argument being made is that the cost should be proportionate to wealth, but proportionate to impact or alternatives.

If flying private incurs 10x or 100x the externality costs of flying coach, it should be priced (taxed really) to reflect that a significant portion of those externality costs are an unnecessary luxury benefit.

"Based on the damage he is doing" is not " based on the money he has"

He is already paying like x50 the public jet ticket price.

The point being that even though your boss’s boss’s boss has an outsize impact, there aren’t many people like him, whereas there are millions of people like you, so in absolute terms “your” emissions matter too.

Because a small group of people refuses to fly commercial, more CO2 emissions are produced than the entire country of Uganda.

You dont think they need to take personal responsibility for their actions? That we dont need to hold them accountable?

Sure, tax the 0.1% in proportion to the damage they are doing, but don’t use that as an excuse for the rest of us to sit back and think we’ve made much of a difference to the overall problem.

Polluter pays would be a pretty significant improvement.

This is the comment I wanted to make :)

Climate change is not some game where the goal is to enact petty revenge on people who are trying to lose the game.

It's not about accountability, it's about stopping climate change so our current biomes don't degrade.

Directing your anger and energy at some small group of people that have an insignificant impact as small as the country of Uganda is simply not worth it or even relevant.

While you're whining about rich people, wealthy people in general are destroying the fucking planet. It's them who should be held responsible. It's them who complain when gas prices get high, it's them who vote against participating in the Paris accord. It's them who vote against stopping trade with China. It's them who should have been educated, who should have taken it seriously.

So making people poor is solituion for global warming?

> Because a small group of people refuses to fly commercial, more CO2 emissions are produced than the entire country of Uganda.

Commercial flight is not great for CO2 emissions either. Because a small group of people flies instead of walking or bicycling, a lot of CO2 emissions are produced.

I bet the sum total CO2 of commercial flight is way higher the sum total of CO2 from private flights. Neither is necessary.

> Because a small group of people flies instead of walking or bicycling

I tried walking across the Atlantic once but didn't get very far.

Yesterday I also couldn't find any commercial flights to the grocery store either, so I had to bike there.

> I bet the sum total CO2 of commercial flight is way higher the sum total of CO2 from private flights. Neither is necessary.

The notion that flying is "unnecessary" ignores those of us who immigrated across an ocean. Unless I never want to see my aging family again I will have to fly every now and then.

> Because a small group of people flies instead of walking or bicycling

I would love to know why/how you believed that line makes any sense.

Because setting a minimum quality of life as being able to fly anywhere around the world is environmentally untenable for 8B people. So if it cannot be accessible to all 8B people, then it brings up the question for how to determine who deserves it and who does not.

Which then leads to who deserves first class rather than coach, which then leads to who deserves a private jet versus a plane. Or even who deserves a personal car rather than using the bus or having to carpool.

I can't bike across the Atlantic. I can't bike to see my family 2500km away.

So the societal cost of banning private jets is approximately zero?

Why is it even worth discussing then?

It’s not, it’s a massive distraction that makes people feel like they’re doing righteous class warfare, while barely making a dent on climate damage.

I think the reason it's discussed is "if I cannot destroy the planet in your country, I'll do that in another country (which won't change anything for the planet) where I'll go invest my money too (which means less money for your country)". And politians seem to buy on the threat, either because they truly believe it, or because they don't want to piss of the rich guys so they can get an overpaid job in one of their companies after their political career.

Because it creates an easy scapegoat for our problems. It's much easier to point to the behaviors of a very tiny group of individuals and lay all the blame on the them than it is to grapple with the real truth of climate change: that our modern society is unsustainable. Barring some grand technological revolution, reversing climate change means bringing us all back to a pre-modern society. And that really sucks.

You need somewhere to live. He needs to get somewhere.

Neither house nor private jet is an environmentally conscious choice. Either way you've both told every other inhabitant on the planet to suck it, you're getting yours.

> How often do you order on Amazon? How often do you dine out?

You took the bait. Swallowed it hook, line and sinker.

I bought shrimp the other day, they were farmed locally, transported to Malaysia, peeled there and transported back. I bought canned pears, they traveleled the world too.

So while you are arguing and pointing fingers at other consumers over irrelevant cocempts like eating out, industry continues its destructing practices that are actually responsible for majority of emissions

I'm not pointing fingers at other consumers, I'm just pointing out the sort of things that have impact. I eat out regularly, I have a transcontinental flight planned for a holiday with my family this year. And I'm sure I've bought products that have had less than ideal CO2 footprint.

Industry and consumers will continue these destructive practices until they're forced to not engage in them.

By the way, not that it's relevant. But the locally produced tomatoes that I buy in the super market have a way higher CO2 footprint than your shrimp that have been shipped to Malaysia and back. But that might be a quirk of the country I'm in.

edit: eh unless the shrimp have been cultured in heated pools, that might be even worse than our heated tomato farms.

Well, Transcontinental flight, sure.

But your point about carbon footprint of tomato vs shrimp perfectly ullustrates that the issue is too complex to lay on the consumer.

You can't be expected to do hours of research on every grocery item you buy. And most people don't even have the required knowledge for this kind of analysis. And the companies mislead consumer on purpose.

Recently relatives sent me a viseo which claims avocados are terrible because they need much more nutrients per kilo of product than tomato does. Which is not a reasonable comparison because avocado has fats and calories and tomato is mostly water. But they were convinced by this misinformation.

So I think the responsibility lies with the industry first, and consumer second.

Correct, I'd like to add two big mundane factors; Intercontinental flights and heating and cooling your house - the second one is a big contributor to global CO2 expenditures and is strongly influenced by the size of your house.

> First of all, such things are of the top 0.1%, not the 10%.

Exactly, the 0.1% are part of the 10%

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