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Comment by kayodelycaon | Hacker News Reader

You’d be better off getting cargo ships to stop using sludge for fuel and getting countries to stop burning coal.

Private jets aren’t even close to the worse things. They are just easy targets. Your worst offenders are industry.

> You’d be better off getting cargo ships to stop using sludge for fuel

We're doing that. The thing is, cutting the sulfur aerosols emitted by bunker fuel burning ships has possibly led to a rise in ocean surface temperatures. The sulfur oxides were like a mini, constant Krakatoa. They caused a minor volcanic winter year round. Lots of anti global warming geoengineering projects involve emitting sulfur higher in the atmosphere to block the sun, and we were already kind of doing that. So it turns out we've really _really_ painted ourselves into a corner as regards global warming.

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shippin...

> Your worst offenders are industry

Which produces for?

People.

Not for all of them in the same manner though. The richest 1% have a carbon footprint equal to the "poorest" 66%, for example.

Only when looking at things globally, and that's mostly because the vast majority of the world population is exceptionally poor with a matching low standard of living. If you look at things in developed countries, the difference in carbon footprint between rich and poor is not nearly so stark. We are /all/ to blame, and we are /all/ going to suffer for it, so we need to pull our heads out of our asses and stop turning this into some ridiculous "us" vs "them" situation that it isn't. There is no us, there is no them, we're all on the same spinning rock in space, breathing the same air.

"Only when looking at things globally" is a very interesting thing to say. I'm with you, generally, only that I consider myself part of the "them", and us v them definitely makes sense, given the absurd distribution of resource consumption.

Except that it literally is "us vs them", with "them" being the tiny fraction of humans with nearly all the money and "power" who want to keep right on with "business as usual" because money is more important than life, and "us" being all the rest of humanity who literally don't matter in the slightest to "them". We can all die a horrible death for all they care. They just don't understand (nor want to understand) that their actions are gonna end them just as surely as it's gonna end the rest of us. It just might take a tiny bit longer for them to die in their luxury doomsday bunkers.

Irrelevant. You don’t get major changes like this through individual action even when a large majority want it.

You have to regulate industry to achieve such change. Or regulate consumers to indirectly influence industry. “Well people evidently want them to pollute or they’d do something else” is somewhere in not-even-wrong territory—it can only come from not being familiar with the problem space.

They produce largely for the rich, is what I'm hinting at.

Ah—the global rich (so, most of the people who live in OECD states), yeah, true.

And all those industries use 100% perfectly minimal pollution and carbon releasing systems, processes, and services right? What's that? They don't because it costs 2% more to sequester the carbon you release rather than just looking the other way and pocketing the money while you sell.

Industry helps everyone.

Private jets are so the rich can avoid the peasants. There’s no benefit for 99.99% of the rest of the world.

Private jets are an industry too so they must also be helping everyone

Everyone who uses them!

I interact with concrete on a daily basis, not so for private jets.

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