Paris accord says 1.5t per person per year, from all activities, Felix's flying alonre is ~10-15x current European yearly per person emissions and ~50-75x those compatible with +1.5C.
Shaming individuals doesn't seem to be productive or helpful.
Air travel works for people if the benefits outweigh the costs. The only thing that changes behavior is to change the costs.
And even if costs were 10x there are still plenty of people who will fly tons, because it would still be economically productive. There are always going to be people who fly 10x more than others, because certain jobs and roles simply require it.
I don't see how much support from history for that viewpoint. Some examples of positive societal change driven in part by shaming individuals: drink-driving, civil rights, sexual harassment, automobile safety, the slave trade, McCarthyism.
Automobile safety in my life has only changed after fines. Sexual harrassment still happens and doesn't seem to be helped by shaming someone as much as firing them. Though we often don't have the guts or legal backing to publically shame someone.
This hasn’t been a good few years for your examples.
Let's raise the tax on an activity according to its negative side effects, while pointing out individuals that do a lot of it and dont take personal responsibility.
I don't know this guy's personal life, but the people I know who fly tons fit into this profile. E.g. the wife can't move because she's a tenured professor at her university, and he's got to be at both offices regularly. He's best qualified to run the company/companies, and he's not going to get divorced to reduce his CO2 emissions.
What exactly is the solution you propose? What personal responsibility do you expect them to take? You think he should get divorced? Only see his wife and kids four times a year? Have his company/companies suffer because he can't be there in person? Quit his jobs?
And let's be clear, there are lots of jobs that require tons of air travel. If you're a highly specialized repair technician for certain equipment, all you do is constantly fly around the world fixing equipment wherever it is. If you're a CEO of a multinational company, you're constantly flying around to different offices. Are you looking for "personal responsibility" here too? How?
I'm sorry, I don't want HN to to be the place where we get into a fight over the mildest inconvenience for people who are already living extravagant lifestyles.
I suggested raising taxes in the first place.
What I'm opposed to is some hand-wavy demand to "take personal responsibility" without suggesting exactly what they're supposed to do and whether any tradeoffs involved are reasonable.
And please don't call people names. You can write comments here without calling other people "keyboard warriors". Nor is it helpful to try to shut down some viewpoint by claiming that somebody doesn't need any extra support.
And I think most people would consider not seeing their family more than e.g. four times a year more than just the "mildest inconvenience".
Knowing this completely changes the tone, I’d missed that you were that same commenter too.
I don't see any shaming. It was all matter of fact, free from judgement.
Do you think that comparing someone's CO2 emissions with the average and pointing out that it is much higher is value-free, just a totally neutral observation for no reason? That the commenter is fine with it? Or even that it's a good thing?
But I'll also respond to your questions: my purpose is to show that your claim that the original comment was "free from judgement" is wrong. I'm not neutral, I'm attempting to show that your claim is obviously false, that it's not plausible at all. Of course I'm trying to judge a comment that seems wrong.
So now that I've replied honestly to your questions, will you reply honestly to mine? Repeating:
> So you think the commenter was neutral? No judgment? Again, what was the purpose of the comment then?
Because if the purpose wasn't to shame the person for their carbon footprint, I can't imagine what else it possibly could have been.
But you see: not one comment here is neutral. It would be silly to expect a comment to be neutral, such a comment wouldn't be written in the first place. I think the original comment expressed the point while staying as neutral as possible.
> So you think the commenter was neutral?
Yes, it stated some facts.
> No judgment?
Yes, it contained no explicit value judgement. Any value judgement we bring into it is our own.
> Again, what was the purpose of the comment then?
How would I know the purpose of someone else's comments? I don't even really know what my purpose is debating here with you. I certainly don't see myself persuading you of anything :)
I don't know what definitions of neutral or value judgment you're using, but I hope you can use this as a learning opportunity. The original comment has the obvious implicit judgment that a greater CO2 footprint is a bad thing. This is shared context. It is so obvious it doesn't need to be explicitly stated, any more than "murdering people is bad". The purpose of the comment is clearly to shame the person for having such a high carbon footprint, otherwise there's no purpose in bringing it up. I don't know what your purpose was in trying to deny that. But if you genuinely didn't understand before, I hope now you do, and that this has been helpful in improving your reading comprehension or understanding of shared/implicit context.
No it did not contain any judgement. That is your reading and not the comment.
> This is shared context.
The world is a large place and different people share different context.
> The purpose of the comment is clearly to shame the person for having such a high carbon footprint, otherwise there's no purpose in bringing it up.
Informing perhaps?
I wonder what your gripe is: Do you think it's inappropriate to mention the CO2 at all? Or do you think that the poster should have said it in a different way? In what way?
That makes as much sense as saying that the comment being written in English is just my "reading" of it, and that in a different context all the words could have entirely different meanings. That is technically true, but also completely useless when you're engaged in a real-life conversation with the rich context of the year 2026 on planet Earth... I tried to explain to you the shared context in case you were somehow ignorant of it. If you insist on denying that, then you're going to have a very hard time communicating with others, as you seem to be having with this conversation. Good luck.
> Shaming individuals doesn't seem to be productive or helpful.
First, none of us have any power to "tax it more" so this is a dead end of discussion. Second, people have agency and we can hold them accountable socially for negative actions even if they are abiding by the current laws (or tax regime). This happens all the time, because laws don't fully align with morality in a culture. Suggesting that we should leave such things to the sole discretion of the economy and taxes describes a strange unhuman-like society that we don't live in.
You probably have more power over that than changing a whole population's behavior.
I'd wager you probably have more power over that than changing just one person's behavior (Felix).
> Second, people have agency and we can hold them accountable socially for negative actions even if they are abiding by the current laws (or tax regime).
And people are holding you accountable for the shaming. This leads primarily to polarization, not change. Polarized folks are more likely to increase the negative behavior.
Well, the choice is: either we leave it to economy and taxes which work, or we'll rely on shaming which doesn't work. To put it another way - it depends if you want to actually fix the problem or just want to have a moral high ground and don't really care about solving the problem.
That said there are probably some work-arounds, tax free twice a year, tax rebate or some-such.
No, it's the other way around. If flying is bad then poor people absolutely have to be priced out of it. I know that it sounds absolutely awful, but unfortunately taxing just business and first class won't do much for reducing emissions if flying will be affordable for and used by billions of people.
Of the very few "f*cks" I can give in my life, I prefer to spend mine as I choose rather than being scolded for not giving mine to the pressing issues that others deem important.
If you truly care about the planet, don't have children.
At the very least don't brag about not giving a crap.
That's a fallacy; people care about the planet precisely because of children. I don't care about the planet for its own sake; I care because of the humans who inhabit it and their future lives.
Also, humanity spent 100,000 years without flying around the globe, and I doubt they were all living hermit martyr lives.
The fact that I happen to care about other things more than this specific flavor of global catastrophe is morally OK.
Shame is not necessary, but callous indifference is not acceptable. There is a middle ground where you treat it like a habit to improve, like a step count.
I'm also not going to take shorter showers when people are farming in a desert and shipping the crops to China.
You might think this makes me a terrible person. That's probably good. Because it will help people understand what we're up against and what needs to happen to actually solve the problem.
"Take less flights" isn't the solution.
You may wonder how this is consistent with my propensity to recycle and follow traffic laws and not do crimes and other socially beneficial minor things to which a comparison could be made to CO2 output: because those all have a greater benefit:cost ratio than flying and eating meat, by far. I am including the benefits of living in a high-trust society in that analysis.
Instead we're razing the forests and bragging about our indifference.
Some — eg. those who've moved for work — probably fly 10-15x the average, and 10-15x of people fly 1/100th of average. Flying cost and availability correlate with average needs, but that presupposes that some people have higher needs altogether.
That's 14 round trip flights. A little over once a month. Not at all surprising if once a month. Or divorced and kid is in another state.
If we're generous and assume each trip is actually 2 flights (i.e. connecting flights), then it's 7 per year.
Yeah, more than typical. But not insane.
Typo: Should have been "Not at all surprising if for work".
We're adults, we can keep many things in our minds at one time: We should all reduce flying. Regular working people should not be shamed for taking a holiday and flying there. The most frequent fliers for work should make a personal effort to reduce their flying. And companies, conferences, etc. should work much harder to facilitate remote participation and reduce stigma around it, as well as encouraging other modes of travel. Governments should improve alternative solutions such as rail and high-speed rail.
I get that you may have to see family abroad or maybe indulge for a holiday, but this is "I'm using an airplane to commute" kind of level.
And here I am trying to book my train tickets to go to London instead of flying even though it costs three times as much just to avoid a few kg of CO2 (among other things), it's making me angry.
Reminds me of the soggy straw memes floating around now. I've been having those why bother? thoughts as well.
On the price, the very annoying thing is that fuel for planes is not taxed! Changing this would require quite some effort (falls under some specific laws, that are old and nobody wants to touch, etc.) but I think everybody should just ask "honest tax on fuels!" as this will make less people say (or thin) "but climate change is a hoax". Planes are just unfair competition to other transport due to taxes!
An alternate approach that would be seen as consumer and business-friendly would be subsidizing companies with a certain level of fuel efficiency per passenger mile, targeted above current levels.
What does this have to do with Felix?
Unrelated link: https://xcancel.com/Ryanair/status/776292730179682304