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Comment by arccy | Hacker News Reader

if you travel a lot... maybe the co2 saved from not lugging around a cheap thing offsets the production waste.

If you are flying with any regularity, you are completely exhausting your carbon budget. The remaining carbon budget is the CO2 if emitted will lead to 2C warming. IPCC estimates it to be 1150 GtCO2 in 2020 [1]. Which is ~140 tCO2/person over however many years we use to spend this. So if we want to limit warming to 2C by 2050, that leaves a budget of 4.7tCO2/person/year.

A transatlantic round-trip alone can be 2.3tCO2 [2].

[1] Page 48 https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6...

[2] https://co2.myclimate.org/en/portfolios?calculation_id=82395...

The elephant in the room. Even one flight per year per person is basically too much. Flying, above all else, is how middle-class folks (like those in this thread) explode their carbon footprints. For obvious reasons very few of them want to hear this.

In the limited amount of experience I’ve had with researching these things, embodied carbon can be a much higher number than you might think, even with something as simple as a cotton t-shirt. Odds are that shirt had already sailed around the world once or twice by the time you buy it, and it might make its way to another continent once you’re done with it as well.

> Odds are that shirt had already sailed around the world once or twice by the time you buy it,

That's like... 40 grams of CO2 for those 2 trips for a t-shirt. Aka, a 2 min uber ride.

Shipping containers are incredibly efficient.

Modern large container ships consume about 200-300 tonnes of fuel per day, and could carry 742 millions t-shirts [1]. It takes 16 days to do something like Shanghai - LA, so that ends up being like 20 grams per shirt per trip.

[1]: https://www.howandwhy.com/15-mins/huge-ship-shirts

I did make it sound like transport was contributing to the lion’s share of the embodied carbon and I shouldn’t have - it’s more in the production process. Would have been well served by an ‘in addition’ in between those statements.

Fair, didn’t mean to strawman.

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