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Comment by kensai | Hacker News Reader

It would be equally important to make a graph of how much CO2 they offset by paying taxes, even if only theoretically.

How do taxes offset CO2? If anything they indirectly contribute to carbon emissions by way of fossil fuel subsidies.

Fossil fuel is not subsidized with tax money. It’s subsidized with tax discounts. That’s happening regardless of tax income because the federal government doesn’t run a balanced budget.

In the sense that Taylor Swift and Elon Musk probably pay more taxes that can be used to offset the CO2 they produce by flying and being efficient for their work.

I don’t think anyone here can produce that information, tax records are private, right? We’d also need to know what percentage of our taxes go to cleaning up carbon emissions, which I think is… pretty low?

Taxes fund many things, but converting carbon dioxide and water back into carbohydrates is usually not one of them.

Interesting. Outside of that, do any of these people do any other activities that offset the damage they do with their private jets?

Just wondering because this is such blatant clickbait material for an editorial, I won’t be surprised if an article about it is being written right now.

Offsetting your damage doesn't change the fact that you are causing damage. What would be good is if these people stopped flying around the billionaire circuit on private jets _and_ paid their fair share of taxes but that's too much to ask these days.

I do agree having a separate list of who pays the most in taxes relative to wealth/income would be interesting but also obviously less accurat.

In some airlines you can pay some extra to offset the damage you do according to the CO2 you produced on said distance.

Paying taxes absolutely increases CO2 consumption because you are enabling the US military to conduct wasteful operations around the world.

We should pay less taxes because the government is extremely wasteful and polluting overall.

> US military to conduct wasteful operations

US military is the only reason you don't know what war is.

What? That’s not what taxes are for.

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