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Comment by pydry | Hacker News Reader

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.

Who gets to determine need?

Statistics do.

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

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.

Credit rating agencies, who never done their job properly.

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

>guess which one would be better for the environment?

According to who?

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.

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.

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.

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?

> 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.

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

> 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.

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.

This is the comment I wanted to make :)

Polluter pays would be a pretty significant improvement.

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?

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.

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