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Comment by cynicalsecurity | Hacker News Reader

Chinese and Indian CO2 emissions dwarf anything you mentioned. You can stop eating meat altogether and move to a small doghouse, it won’t make any global impact at all.

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This line of "hurrr but they are doing it too so why should I stop!" reasoning constitutes a logical fallacy that a motivated 9 year old is probably already able to reason themselves out of

How many people living in doghouses does it take to offset emissions from large industry?

The large industry largely emits to help us build and maintain our too-large homes, and fill our large houses with junk. So it would help reduce those, too.

This is not what I'm saying. Telling people to eat less meat or live in smaller houses is not only inefficient, but a counterproductive way to protect environment. This is environmental protection theatre, if not circus. It makes environmental protection measures look laughable and ridiculous. Unless something is done against the biggest pollutors, eating less meat (now think about how dangerous this advice looks without taking into account who it's addressed at - stupid parents can stop feeding their children meat and cause them lifelong health problems) won't prevent environmental problems. Sorry, I'm interested in participating or endorsing environmenal protection circus.

Cool, so what have you personally done to reduce your co2 emissions? How do your co2 emissions compare to the global average? Or are you just pretending the problem is other people?

Another name for that 'logical fallacy' is prisoners' dilemma and "never play a dominated strategy".

Even if you don't take it as prescriptive, it would be dumb not to take it as descriptive (i.e. what the other player will do in a situation)

If the factory is in China but the product is consumed in the US who should the CO2 emissions be attributed to?

Irrelevant anyway, because USA consumption is on the decline and China consumption is on the rise.

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