Comment by berkes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by berkes | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> It is measurable, it improves the standard of living of those affected, and has other environmental benefits.

The last two parts have nothing to do with greenhouse emission reduction. They are important, don't get me wrong. And valuable.

But if the only reason to start reducing greenhouse emissions in a sector is "it is measurable", we are doing a poor job. Because I am certain there's far lower-hanging-fruit, that is also measurable, but simply not as popular as "these other people have to change their lifestyle" and therefore omitted. Edit: I am specifically thinking about severely reducing meat from our diets (i.e. go partially, or entirely vegetarian), or about not flying to Bali for a 2 week holiday. Because those are far bigger than 2% globally. Estimates go to resp. 30% and 15%. Reduce half of all of them, and the "cooking on wood" might reduce 1% (which acc. to the article actually is merely 0.1%) and 15% or 7.5% resp. It is blindingly obvious what has the biggest impact on greenhouse gas emission reduction.

There've been charities working on this since before carbon credits were a thing; they're practically a byproduct. Bad cooking equipment is a huge killer, literally millions of people a year.

> these other people have to change their lifestyle

In this case, the lifestyle change is "not dying of poor indoor air quality", so I think people will generally be fine with that. You're generally looking here at some combo of replacing open fires with stoves, replacing inefficient solid fuel stoves with more efficient solid fuel stoves, or replacing solid fuel stoves with LPG stoves (plus venting improvements etc).

Meat is another thing that is oversimplified. It varies a great deal between countries, and depends what meat you compare to what vegetarian food. Locally produced grass fed meat vs grain fed meat, for example. Fake meat suffers from many of the same problems as meat.

There are gains but not that astronomical when switching diets to vegan/vegetarian (based on googling carbon footprint with diet comparisons), looking at stats the major emission problems are due to beef consumption, likely the numbers would be way better with poultry consumption instead of beef in these calculations.

Also simply with the world population increasing if everyone would switch to vegan diet we'd still reach these emission numbers just a little bit later.

I wonder if methane/carbon capture projects will eventually "monkeypatch" this issue or not.

No one is going to agree to such non-trivial impacts to their lives so long as it seems unfair. I will never give up meat, but will do so tomorrow if we blocked all mass global transportation networks, mandated fruit trees in all houses, and blockaded all imports from China. Those are far bigger issues for me and that means I'll be stubborn as a voter.

Yeah, that is my issue with all that climate-saving, top-down efforts. Normal people have to ditch everything: meat, travels, stoves. And they probably really should, but EVERYONE should do that. Yet, those that advice or enforce such polices always have some excuse that justifies their exclusion from their own policies.

So it is not that suprising that there so much resistance, because it really is just another way for the rich and powerful to keep poor people in their places.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com