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Comment by sublinear | Hacker News Reader

What's missing here is a sense of scale.

Routine private jet flights are nothing compared to last mile freight such as Amazon. Short frequent trips by delivery drivers from your local warehouse to your doorstep should not be so wasteful.

The largest source of pollution is freight in general. Hating on individuals solves nothing at all.

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> Short frequent trips by delivery drivers from your local warehouse to your doorstep should not be so wasteful.

Don’t they bundle these up so each trip serves as many people as possible?

Also isn’t the alternative where the customer drives themselves to the store to pick up the same good just as bad if not possibly worse?

My friendly neighbourhood Amazon driver fills his vehicle with packages, then drives a highly optimised route to deliver those packages to many destinations along the fastest/shortest route. Often when I'm tracking my package, I see that the twenty or thirty deliveries before me are all within a mile or two of my house.

At some point soon I expect he'll get an electric van, but other than that, I'm not sure how anyone could get stuff from businesses to people in a more efficient manner.

I mean, bicycles would be more efficient. Not faster or requiring less employees, but less emissions.

Are you sure about that? Human power has a surprisingly high carbon footprint, because the supply chain for their fuel is complex and inefficient.

That’s not true. The carbon emissions of rich people are enormous compared to that of regular people. Here’s just one finding, that the richest 1% of the world’s population cause as much carbon emissions as the poorest 50%:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/21/worlds-r...

The richest 1% in the world is 80 million people, a god chunk of the Western population.

Private jets are a distraction from the real sources of emissions. But people start rioting when their power bills go up.

The 1% don’t have pj’s, more like the 0.01%

It's sad they haven't invested billions in electric delivery trucks.

Oh wait: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/transportation/everything-y...

Talk about moving the goalposts. As if these same individuals don’t also have a large freight footprint.

That's like saying a murderer shouldn't be chastised because vastly more people die from a bad diet (or not having food) than by their hands. Who cares?

Celebrities probably order from Amazon too.

> I mean it's one banana, Michael. What could it cost? Ten dollars?

If you had people to do that for you, why would you do that yourself? You tell your personal assistant to get a new iphone for you, new drapes for the living room, whatever.

It doesn't matter who presses the button. It's still getting done.

I'm arguing a tool like this could counter act the pressure of the societal delusion caused by these celebrities berating the working class about their virtue signalling causes like plastic straws while incurring such outsizes externalities. I'm not arguing against a big to small approach but this effect on discourse is important and its hypocrisy currently harmful.

> > Hating on individuals solves nothing at all

It does. It's a huge problem with so many complexities and requires so many sacrifices by all inhabitants of the planet.

The celebrities are already calling dibs on the problem claiming that they are the ones who solved it. If sacrifices are needed then some climate change dividend is also required at the end of such effort. And if there is no dividend for us then there shouldn't be for the celebrities.

It's only positive that an out of scale public shame would fall on them for flying private as it counteracts their massive PR effort orchestrated to fool the world into thinking that they alone have solved climate change or that they are 'the person who is doing the most in the world to solve climate change'.

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