But remember to reduce your personal carbon footprint! /s

We're expected to shave off a few kilos of CO2 here and there, usually at significant personal expense, while nothing is being done about these releases that a) could be avoided relatively easily b) have a much bigger impact.

The abstract mentions ~8 million metric tons of methane per year. Using a GWP of 28 (which seems to be the value from the IPPC's AR5) that's equivalent to around 224 million tons of CO2.

That's 224 billion kg CO2e, or around 28 kg CO2e for every human on the world, just from the large leaks (not from the ongoing smaller leaks which are >10x as big according to the article). So yeah, go ahead and tell me (and everyone else) to go vegan for a month [1] or make similarly impactful changes just so companies can continue venting methane.

To avoid being only negative: The obvious solution would be to require companies to buy emission certificates for those emissions, with a penalty factor that accounts for the probability of detection if they didn't accurately self-report and had to get caught. This would create an immediate incentive to reduce those easily avoidable emissions, and should be relatively easy to implement if we can get accurate enough data from satellites or aircraft. It would also ensure these emissions are accounted for in the emissions trading framework, so we don't emit the allocated amount elsewhere and are then surprised by the unaccounted-for emissions.

[1] Assuming I replace 250 kcal from pork per day with Tofu (around 100g of pork which seems to be considered "one serving"), this would be savings of ~1 kg CO2e per day: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore

“Personal footprint” is propaganda by oil/gas/coal industries, it’s absolutely idiotic. There should be a worldwide tax on producing greenhouse gas. Extreme economic, business, travel, etc, isolation on every country/corporation that doesn’t subscribe to it. Bankrupt them into the ground.

It doesn't even make sense because it ignores the fact that we literally cannot reduce our personal footprints to a level that would prevent significant climate change.

There is no sustainable level of emissions. In order for me to reach net zero I'd have to sell my house, car, give up all of the food that I eat (yes - all of it - my oat milk has a nonzero footprint that is not capturable), etc.

The only actual solution is to institute a carbon tax so that we develop technological solutions to all of these problems.

Basically, you can't choose to go net zero as an individual.

Where are you getting the idea that personal footprints have to be reduced to zero or less? That assumption only holds if there are no carbon sinks.

What you're really saying is you can't reduce your footprint and keep the same quality of life. The problem is, in part, when we define the quality of life by the amount of shit we consume. Some consumption is necessary or great, but probably not the amount seen in many industrialized nations.

> Where are you getting the idea that personal footprints have to be reduced to zero or less? That assumption only holds if there are no carbon sinks.

This is not really correct thinking, because you need to account for both sinks and sources of carbon. For instance, you could emit methane locally enough to, say, intensify a forest fire or dissolve methane clathrates. Then a forest somewhere else absorbs the original weight in carbon dioxide. This is net zero emissions for you, but certainly causes more warming. The best way to think of it is as a system with sources, sinks, and feedbacks.

But really, the biggest adjustment to your life to reduce carbon emissions is to get involved in politics. Everyone reducing to net zero at home would make a tiny dent in the problem. The big users are transportation and concrete and metals.

I agree with you on all of these points. I was simply advocating a system viewpoint (perhaps poorly) but you did a better job explaining.

(One exception: I believe when you combine commercial and residential facilities, their respective energy use surpasses transport)

By concrete, do you mean cement specifically? Or is there additional CO2 from the process of using aggregate?

I was just giving a concrete example (pun intended). There’s still some rock crushing for aggregate, but the energy is mostly in cement. Concrete uses most of the cement, so it’s a good target. Japan uses something like four times the concrete of California, despite similar population, land area, and geography.

I've heard similar about concrete as well, but have had a difficult time putting it in context.

"Cement (3%): carbon dioxide is produced as a byproduct of a chemical conversion process used in the production of clinker, a component of cement. In this reaction, limestone (CaCO3) is converted to lime (CaO), and produces CO2 as a byproduct. Cement production also produces emissions from energy inputs – these related emissions are included in ‘Energy Use in Industry’."

Unfortunately, it doesn't further breakdown what percentage of the cement energy inputs contribute to GHG emissions.

https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector

I was going to reply something similar, but I think the core of the comment you're replying to is that this is a collective action problem. Making any changes on my own will be harder on me than if everyone made a change. Both because technology can solve a lot of this, and because I look and feel worse positionally if it's just me making a change.

I don't think it's merely _hard_, I think it's fundamentally impossible for us to do it without technological advancement or at least greater application of existing technology.

I don't think that 7 billion people can live net zero without us building loads more solar panels, nuclear plants, changing a bunch of industrial processes, etc.

These are things that individuals literally cannot do. Even trivial things like - I can't buy a net zero fork to eat my dinner with. I mean, I'm sure one or two things I could, but at the scale of my entire life it would become a full time job.

I guess I could start a co2 capture company, that is actually feasibly possible. But I don't think that's what people are getting at with the personal responsibility stuff. It's all - "which brand of tape are you using to fix the leak in your roof?"

>I can't buy a net zero fork to eat my dinner with.

I mean, one argument is that removing yourself from the demand side and using a fork that already exists is essentially net zero. Is buying an EV really helping when it displaces a perfectly functional car? Or is it just sustainable theater? I'm sure there's a balance somewhere, but probably not near our current lifestyle in the west. Net zero is a lot harder when you have an economy predicated on the constant churn of consumerism.

I agree that consumerism is bollocks and is something we could easily get rid of whilst generally increasing our happiness.

Sure, so that works for a fork. And yeah, we can probably do it for all of the forks, so that's scalable.

How about rice? Laundry liquid? Humour me - surely you can think of things we use all of the time that are not possible to make net zero at present?

I mean, I can't even get off the gas in my boiler without putting in a heat pump that uses carbon to produce and maintain and repair. Even that one isn't fixed!

Yes, that's precisely the point. Save it for the items that really bring value to our lives. The reason we're so dependent on technology to help is because we dug a hole by doing the opposite.

And I'm not equivocating that it's easy. Your heat pump analogy is the perfect example where life-cycle effects should come into play. I think it would be very interesting to see a study of something like comparing a new EV with the impact of maintaining an older ICE car. I suspect a lot of EV purchases are about status veiled in sustainability.

I want energy to be spent on big impact things like healthcare and food and sanitation. But considering ~60-70% of the economy is based on consumerism there's a lot of room to improve

I agree, there's some tragedy of the commons here. But while I think technology will be one of the big factors, I also think it's used as a reason for people to avoid the cognitive dissonance of hard choices. Why should I have to do something unpleasant when I can just wait for technology to save us? We don't apply that same thinking to something like cigarette smoking ("why quit when I can just count on medical technology to save me?").

In abstract problems I think policy is needed to drive such collective action. The best outcomes seem to be when regulation and the market coexist toward the same goal.

I think you're muddling the directionality here.

What is your proposed "hard choice" that results in, say, my city being net zero or even drastically reducing its' emissions?

I can independently do it, probably by using a lot of land, finding a favourable spot to plop my passivhaus, and wiping the balance sheet clean at some point (e.g. I pretend that all of the material going into the solar panels, the wood etc 'doesn't count').

But what do the other ten million people do? Demolish all of the existing buildings and rebuild from scratch with far more insulation etc? Move in with each other and leave half of the buildings to rot?

This isn't intended as snark by the way, I just don't see the answer here. Is your point that we could slow down climate change a bit whilst we wait for the technology to catch up? Because it's definitely a hard requirement.

I don't think there is a single person that can do that and I'm not sure anyone would suggest there is. But saying a single action doesn't matter is not the same as saying a collection of single actions don't matter. Just like people shouldn't think working out once will magically make themselves fit, but string enough of those actions together and you can make an appreciable difference. The point is those other ten million people would need to make similar choices. Saying you can't control those other people comes across as just hand-washing yourself of responsibility.

My point is that I think a lot of people use the technological argument to reduce any personal responsibility. It's true that I don't think we can simply conserve ourselves to net zero, but I do think it's a part of the solution. I often see people use the technological excuse as a way to not change and just keep the status quo so they don't have to feel the pain of sacrifice. It's easier to keep the problem in the abstract where one doesn't have to make concrete personal choices. Sometimes those tough choices are supporting policies that may align against your own personal, short-term self-interest.

Yes, but what's the _point_?

Is your position that it at least slows climate change so that we have more time for the technology and political atmosphere to catch up?

If so, fine, that makes sense. But without some endgame it kind of just feels as if you're ideologically invested in the concept of personal responsibility.

I don't even think we disagree, I just find it bizarre to call reliance on other advancement an "excuse". It's a hard requirement, you can't not rely on it. The personal stuff is a bonus.

Do you litter? If not, why? Littering makes your life easier and has an immediate upside at the individual level. You can easily claim that your one cigarette butt makes statistically no difference.

I assume you don't because you realize if everyone makes that same choice it has a downside for everyone, because nobody wants to live in a trash heap. If the reason is simply because it's illegal, I'm not sure that's a very principled stance.

Climate decisions are harder because they're more abstract in effect and the uncertainty is greater. But they should be rooted in similar principle if we consider ourselves moral agents in society.

If you agree that collective conservation will have an impact (maybe that's where we disagree), then the only way it will have an impact is if people make the induvial choice unless policy forces that decision. I personally think that's a bit of an immoral choice if one recognizes it's the right thing to do but chooses not to, just like the litterer who knows better.

I'm not sure what your point is? Is it that it's best to wait until everyone collectively decides to make the choice to conserve? Because, ironically, that strikes me as the scenario where your choice has marginal impact at the individual level as well. That perspective is very much stuck in an individualistic mode of thinking that doesn't recognize collective efforts take many individual choices.

Circling back to the littering analogy, cultural values spring from many instances of individual choices. Having a culture of conservativism (or at least mitigated consumerism) is every bit as possible as having a culture of non-littering. But it does take the correct choices at the individual level to create the social pressure that brings along people who are less willing.

That last point is important. I'm reminded of a study where they tested three different modes of convincing people of energy conservation: 1) they focused on how much money it saved, 2) they focused on the positive impact of the environment, and 3) they focused on the fact that the majority of their neighbors were already enrolled in the program. The only method that made a significant impact on energy usage was #3. We're social creatures and social pressure is important to nudge collective action.

I agree, we need technology. But it shouldn't be an easy excuse for us to sit on our laurels with other choices, because, you know nuclear fusion has been 10 years away for the last 50 years.

I don't litter, no. But that's an example of a tiny and trivial change which has outsized impact. If no-one litters, it's not really that hard, and the world would be super clean.

This isn't at all comparable to the sorts of changes that are required to lower one's carbon footprint. You would have to take literally every single thing most of us do every second of every day and change it dramatically.

I grow tired of having these debates online because it's just so frustrating, sorry. It's not a good faith debate because you're just bouncing between trivialities and non-trivialities.

I use more than the global average just to heat my house. Like, that's _one thing_. And you can argue that I can change that, and I can.

But my entire country is built with these houses. It's total and utter bollocks to pretend that some sort of 'culture of conservation' could change this.

Technology might allow me to heat it without emitting CO2. Otherwise, we need to knock it all down and start again. I suspect we will, but not by choice.

I'm sorry you don't feel it's in good faith; it absolutely is. Ironically, I feel you were underscoring this strawman of zero emissions when I've stated early on that shouldn't be the goal but I gave you the benefit of the doubt that you were engaging in good faith.

Littering was used as an example not because it's a trivial gotcha but because it's trivial enough to understand immediately. I think analogies work best that way. Your claim about an "outsized impact" is exactly what I'm talking about with climate being more abstract and thus harder to connect individual choices to impact. Littering only seems like an outsized impact because you can literally see it change over the course of days or weeks on a small enough scale we can wrap our minds around. IMO we need policy to drive these issues because we did not evolve to think on the scale of worldwide effects. That doesn't negate individual responsibility though.

>But my entire country is built with these houses. It's total and utter bollocks to pretend that some sort of 'culture of conservation' could change this.

Ok. Maybe that's fine for you. But please understand there are other parts of the world that are having these exact conversations. Some are limiting single family homes because they are inefficient. They recognize their previous assumptions have all kinds of externalities that need to be addressed. Interestingly, facility energy conservation is one of the easiest areas to make an impact. Maybe that doesn't fit with your culture but that may be, at least in part, about what your cultural values are. And one way of defending those values is to say "I'll wait for technology so I don't have to change." That's what my whole point is about. So if you're banking on technology so much have you actually done anything about it? Do you invest in companies that are working on that tech, or maybe quit your job to focus on ushering it into being? Or is that someone else's responsibility too so you wouldn't have to change the status quo?

The world is full of people who are comfortable saying the big problems are someone else's problem. I'm saying those aren't the type of people I'd want my children to grow up to emulate. That means they would seek to take some ownership of the problem, even if it's on a small scale.

It's not "fine for me". I in fact do all of those other things that you're suggesting.

And neither am I "banking on technology". There's no hedge, I'm just as fucked as you are.

My original claim, which I stand by, is that individual action (in the sense of "just do fewer things") is trifling in the face of this. That's the only claim I'm making.

I've explained why, and you're coming back with bullshit about my culture. Mate, it's not my 'culture' to eat food and put the heating on in my house, everyone does it in every country in the world.

My argument is that we solve this politically and via collective action in things like basic research and development and not by joining support groups to tell each other about how many light switches we've turned off today.

We agree that policy is the best approach. But, the irony is that policy is needed because we can't rely on people to make the right choices at the individual level. While we agree that policy is helpful to wrangle bad actors, you seem to go one step further and insinuate it doesn't matter in the meantime if we all behave as bad actors. I get your pragmatic stance, I'm also saying there's a moral component to it.

>it's not my 'culture' to eat food and put the heating on in my house, everyone does it in every country in the world.

There's some irony in you claiming I'm acting in bad faith, yet you keep straw manning. I gave a specific example of housing zoning and you equate it to this?

Your defensiveness is telling enough that I'll just leave one more comment. Yes, every culture needs food and shelter. But how they go about those things is very culture dependent. Some may get their protein primarily from pork and beef while others from tofu. Some may live in a McMansion, while others have multi-generational homes. Those cultural choices have an impact.

Your comment about light switches is again bad faith attempt to trivialize salient points. An an example, residential energy use is higher on a CO2e basis than all of transport (road + aviation + shipping). It's actually higher than most sectors, save agricultural (barely) and industry. So let's just ignore all those, eh?

Edit: I think you're having a hard time understanding my point and are reverting to straw manning.

What I am NOT saying: "We need to have zero emissions."

What I AM saying: "Just because we can't reach zero emissions doesn't mean we shouldn't do everything we can to get reasonably close" Inability to get to zero is not an excuse to absolve oneself of personal choices.

If things are, in your words, properly "fucked" I'm assuming that means you're willing everything in your power to contribute to those big solutions. Are you willing to quit a high-status job to contribute? Or move to be part of an organization doing meaningful R&D? If not, there's some cognitive dissonance there.

Interesting thread. There is another kind of defeatism at play here. The sum of personal choices will only make so much impact. Let's say 20% (for sake of discussion). Unless the part that is causing 80% of the problem is solved, this won't be a solved problem and that 20% is not a very meaningful part of the solution.

I think that is a summation, no cognitive dissonance to it IMO. It's just saying the 20% does not matter, or would only matter when the 80% side is solved

There is a prisoner's dilemma here at play as well. At least the corporate actors need to change behavior.

Given all that, perhaps the debate is whether that hypothetical reduction is meaningful. To answer that, depends on your perspective on the scope of the problem and your response to that. Then throw in a prisoner dilemma part where you can potentially skirt by while everyone else changes, order declare it entirely hopeless because the actors that must change, are not. FWIW. Loved this thread

>At least the corporate actors need to change behavior.

Given all that, perhaps the debate is whether that hypothetical reduction is meaningful.

I think as you rightly point out, this is the distinction that I wasn't apparently getting across well. My point is that those corporate decisions are also made at an individual level to a certain extent. A CEO or board member can make a decision that scales, but it still starts with a few individual choices. The individual consumer can make a moral decision which corporations to support with their wallet. But I don't think that will happen if people figuratively sit on their hands maintaining the status quo because it's easier to wait for some silver bullet policy or technological advancement. I think it takes moral courage for those leaders and individuals to make those hard decisions.

This is not meant to say there's no role for regulation or policy, particularly as it pertains to asymmetries or misalignment in information. It's meant to negate the idea that individual choices are relegated to some marginal effect. That same marginal impact would extend to democratic voting to support said policy; your one vote quite literally has almost no impact, but that mentality is not how change is implemented. To reiterate, I think that becomes a convenient excuse to not do everything in our power to effect change. It can be a useful rationalization for lamenting about a problem while doing little about it.

Regarding the "meaningfulness" I do think it's meaningful. Looking at the breakdown of energy use, I don't think there is a magic bullet and it will likely take efforts across multiple domains and approaches. I also think reducing the use at the demand side is one of the quickest and straightforward methods that we don't need to wait on some technological leap forward. The OP seemed to take issue with conservation in buildings...building energy use is greater than that of all transportation. It's also low hanging fruit in many cases where 10-30% savings can be had for marginal cost through conservation. If we were talking about those savings in transportation vs. food or shelter, I think the conversation would have went differently. The fact that it didn't makes me think there are other cognitive biases going on.

Well, sure, fair enough, we need to get to the level at which our averaged personal consumption is (all_carbon_sinks / human_population).

As far as I know that's such a tiny figure that it may as well effectively be zero compared to what everyone I know is doing at the moment, not only in the UK but in less wealthy countries around the world.

Tax is not the answer.

Natural gas is the least expensive hydrocarbon coming from the oil well and the most expensive to contain.

The money lost to the escaping gas is usually more than recovered by the value of the accompanying oil that is marketed. It has often been financially affordable to waste lots of gas since forever.

Most of the wells will have total production "well" in excess of any tax that can actually be required on the gas. It will be too easy to pay new taxes.

Even if an authority was capable of the most effective action ever seen, it should still not be allowed to go for the money grab.

Needs regulation & enforcement instead, which doesn't make the same money, nor have a constant money stream.

I mean at the end of the day attempting to shift blame to "the corporations" for emissions is neglecting the fact that the corporations are emitting in order to (ultimately) supply consumers.

Massive negative externalities are exactly what the levers of policy and taxation should be pulled to address.

If corporations pass the tax to consumers and the price of their product becomes undesirable using current mechanisms of production, who cares? That's an unsustainable business. If the product is a necessity, run it as a non-profit government utility or businesses can adapt with technology.

I don't think the person you're replying to is saying anything else, but consumers could, if they decided in mass, do literally everything the government can do around pricing in externalities. Pricing in externalities isn't just forcing companies to pay for the price of their externalities, it's also forcing consumers. And honestly consumers do need forced. We aren't solving this through personal responsibility. But it's also ridiculous to say something like just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions when those companies are just fossil fuel extractors. I'm responsible for burning gas, not the company that just happened to pull it out of the ground.

>consumers could, if they decided in mass, do literally everything the government can do

this is kind of an aside, but i keep noticing this weird dissonance that keeps cropping up in conversations about regulation where people seem to assume:

consumers organizing to exercise power normally allocated to a government is somehow preferable to the existing government exercising power according to civil mandate

in a representative democracy, the latter is presumably the ideal. in the former situation, any context, you're talking about dual power, which is not politically stable, to put it mildly.

when people say "it's not my personal responsibility" to make all the personal choices necessary to reduce carbon output, they are stating an expectation that a responsible society would systematically account for these externalities and other obligations.

there is a bit of reason to this already discussed. markets by definition are not able to account for externalities, it's not possible for individuals to gather enough information to make these decisions reliably, etc. this political choice is an organized consumer choice, asking the socially approved bodies that have this information and power, to surface the results in a way that consumers can understand and react to.

when this political/consumer choice is undone or blocked, or dismissed as irresponsible in preference to individual consumer behavior, it encourages individuals to organize dual power and take direct action.

you can see this organizing developing through pipeline resistance and train sabotage and the like. sure, people could theoretically just buy gas from the least evil gas station or whatever, but once you've got enough people thinking about consumer choice to be effective, you've got enough people to literally just go and take apart the thing you don't like.

so this dismissal of regulation is necessarily combined with repression against people advocating for organized action.

i'm not sure everyone talking about this understands it or will like where it leads.

Yeah I think these are very good points. I think maybe what I'd like to have more clarity about is that fixing global warming does look like consumers making different choices. They may be forced to make different choices by the government in some way (carbon taxes, bans, incentives, ect), but it isn't like there are companies that can decide to do better, stop polluting and just stop it all. Part of fixing these issues will mean less European vacations as jet fuel gets more expensive. Part of fixing this might involve driving less or taking public transit more. There aren't tradeoff free solutions to these problems that are being withheld and while tech might fix some of this, developing that tech will come at the expensive of developing some other tech and that choice will impact consumers.

And just because you aim a policy on paper at big companies doesn't actually mean it doesn't impact consumers. You can say there are just 100 companies responsible for most global warming, but if you went and made them stop everyone would starve, and if you tax them everyone will find themselves not able to buy as much as they otherwise would. You can of course also accompany any of these policies with a redistribution of wealth, either by printing money, or by some tax scheme, but you are reducing the pie.

Obviously though we should still do this, the long term impacts of not doing it will be worse and also impact consumers

Not only that, but even then the 100 companies thing is complete BS. That's a measure of consolidation of energy companies, nothing more. If they all merged into a single gigantic hyper-corporation, it wouldn't change emissions. If they split into a million companies, all with 1/10000 the market share of the 100, again, the same.

The statistic is completely meaningless in the context of emissions. The only relevant statistics are total emissions. The atmosphere doesn't count a carbon atom differently by the market cap of the company that dig it up. It doesn't even count them differently if a person emits a tonne or 1000 people emit 1kg each.

The vast majority of people do not have the financial power to make changes like this.

There are meaningful alternatives. You can choose to pay more and get an electric car and pay for net 0 electricity. For a bit more you could shop from a local farm. If enough people did that it would incentive those options to get better, but they are all choices I could make today

edit: and in fact if we want to solve these issue the sort of actions we will need to take. There isn't anyone who could fix these problems easily without sacrifices and is choosing not to

Ah, yes, I will do this with all the free money I have laying around.

I guess my point is not to shame people and maybe responsibility gets a bit convoluted at some point, but the reason fixing global warming is so hard is that it does require a sacrifice of living standards. We can probably develop tech to make it less painful and ideally not even painful at all but that will come at the price of some other tech we could be having worked on. People prefer to frame this as a few bad actors who just need forced to do the right thing because they would rather not admit that they themselves are making the economic choices leading to global warming and I do really think most people on here could be sacrificing to lower their emissions

You can't make sacrifices on your living standards when you're already poor and don't have any room to sacrifice. You can't make an informed decision on sacrifices to your living standards when working all the time and don't have any time to go pierce through the veil of megaconglomerate multi source supply chains. You can't make meaningful sacrifices when you live in a community that is too small to be served by more than a virtual monopoly of suppliers.

Why stop at buying your own electricity plant? Make your own solar panels to make absolutely sure no chemicals are getting leached into the local water supply. Hell, mine your own cobalt or lithium while you're at it. How else are we going to make such a Great Leap Forward?

I think you're just describing why fixing global warming is hard. Literally the only way to fix global warming is making serious changes that will change how people live their lives. Obviously we won't want to do it all at once, but there aren't evil companies who can make some simple changes without impacting us.

Worth noting come of those tradeoffs may need to be accepting environmental pollution of the traditional kind. We also can absolutely redistribute wealth. Literally all standards, car safety, apartment safety, job safety, impact the poorest most, and we can and should solve that with redistributive policies, but I doubt most on hackernews are in the receiving redistributions slice of society

I'll volunteer the Facebook devs, there are plenty of talented people working on roles that I think most of us would be happy to do with out.

First of all, “attempting to shift blame” is exactly the kind of propaganda I’m talking about, so kudos.

Second, virtually nothing consumers require is inherently ghg-emitting, it’s just the cheapest way to satisfy the need, which is why trying to satisfy in a less ghg-intensive way is economically unviable until you start punishing ghg-intensive processes.

There is zero blame on consumers as I see it - they want something inherently ghg-intensive, they’ll have to pay higher price.

Incentives work on all levels but you need to start with the source - producers. They must pay for externalities.

>Second, virtually nothing consumers require is inherently ghg-emitting, it’s just the cheapest way to satisfy the need, which is why trying to satisfy in a less ghg-intensive way is economically unviable until you start punishing ghg-intensive processes.

You could say the same for corporations. There's nothing about an incorporated legal entity that requires the emission of greenhouse gasses.

>There is zero blame on consumers as I see it - they want something inherently ghg-intensive, they’ll have to pay higher price.

There is zero blame on corporations as I see it - if consumers don't want something inherently ghg-intensive, they’ll have to pay higher price.

Except the corporation has visibility into their production methods. I, the consumer, standing in a store looking at a tomato, have no way of knowing how it was grown, where it came from, how it got to my store, how the store is powering the lights to show me the tomato. All I want is a tomato. The fact it got drove across an entire country to get to me is conveniently hidden.

> There's nothing about an incorporated legal entity that requires the emission of greenhouse gasses.

Except profit maximization, you mean?

> if consumers don't want something inherently ghg-intensive, they’ll have to pay higher price.

And they will, that’s the point. Doesn’t shift an ounce of blame off of corporations to customers - they will proceed to destroy the environment because short term profits are more important than long term survival.

>Except profit maximization, you mean?

that just goes back to your previous comment. There's nothing about consumers that require them to emit greenhouse gasses, but they do so because it's the cheapest.

>they will proceed to destroy the environment because short term profits are more important than long term survival.

they won't emit greenhouse gasses if there's a market for non greenhouse gas emitting products. See for instance, all the GMO-free/organic/vegan/free-range/fair trade products at your local supermarket. I'm not sure about all the labels, but I know for a fact that organic products have better margins than conventional ones.

> nothing about consumers that require them to emit greenhouse gasses, but they do so because it's the cheapest.

Profit maximization requires them to use the cheapest method if they can get away with it.

> they won't emit greenhouse gasses if there's a market for non greenhouse gas emitting products

Except for pretty much the entire market of products that exist currently, you mean?

> I know for a fact that organic products have better margins than conventional ones

Right, because the 5-10% of consumers that are able to afford it and are shamed into “personal carbon footprint” mindset choose to take on economic harm in order to produce even more profits for the same scammy corporations that often own those “eco-friendly” brands.

It’s mind boggling you don’t see anything wrong with all this.

>Profit maximization requires them to use the cheapest method if they can get away with it.

well, not really. Just like consumers can be shamed into buying fair trade coffee rather than the non-fair trade coffee, corporations can be shamed into being zero emission. There's quite a few wealthy tech companies that do just that.

>Except for pretty much the entire market of products that exist currently, you mean?

And who's on the other side of those markets? Are consumers buying oil because oil companies has drilled them out of the ground and need to unload them, or do consumers want oil (and don't care much where it comes from) and oil companies are fulfilling that demand?

>Right, because the 5-10% of consumers that are able to afford it and are shamed into “personal carbon footprint” mindset choose to take on economic harm in order to produce even more profits for the same scammy corporations that often own those “eco-friendly” brands.

>It’s mind boggling you don’t see anything wrong with all this.

Flip side of this is that 90-95% of consumers can't afford it and/or don't care about the environment that much to pay for zero carbon gasoline or whatever, but you're unhappy with that and you want the government to step in and force them to switch to zero carbon gas.

> Blah blah consumers want oil

Do you drink oil? Do you eat it? Does your organism require it, so that you create this supposed INHERENT DEMAND FOR OIL? Of course not, but given how dishonest you’ve been so far, I foresee you trying to find some roundabout way to argue even that position.

> you're unhappy with that and you want the government to step in and force them to switch to zero carbon gas.

No, I want government to reduce profits of those who benefit off destroying the environment and use that money to subsidize environmentally friendly produce for consumers who wouldn’t be able to afford it.

>Do you drink oil? Do you eat it? Does your organism require it, so that you create this supposed INHERENT DEMAND FOR OIL?

Does my body need oil? No. Do I want a convenient and cheap mode of transportation that allows me to get me from my white picket suburban house (which I also want) to other places I have to be? Yes. Do I also want a cheap source of energy to power various creature comforts in my white picket suburban house? Also yes.

>No, I want government to reduce profits of those who benefit off destroying the environment and use that money to subsidize environmentally friendly produce for consumers who wouldn’t be able to afford it.

"We're going to [do thing to fix problem] and make [maligned entity] pay for it!"

> Do I want a convenient and cheap mode of transportation that allows me to get me from my white picket suburban house (which I also want) to other places I have to be? Yes. Do I also want a cheap source of energy to power various creature comforts in my white picket suburban house? Also yes.

Neither of those requires unsustainable energy production.

> We're going to [do thing to fix problem] and make [maligned entity] pay for it!

Got other ideas to address externalities? Or are you just like all libertarians going to pretend they don’t exist until it’s too late and nothing can be done about it?

>Neither of those requires unsustainable energy production.

Being able to fuel up your SUV without having to spend $10/gal does. The average HN user making $150k/year salary might be able to absorb such a bump in fuel price, but not the average american.

>> We're going to [do thing to fix problem] and make [maligned entity] pay for it!

>Got other ideas to address externalities? Or are you just like all libertarians going to pretend they don’t exist until it’s too late and nothing can be done about it?

The part I'm making fun of isn't "tax carbon to internalize externalities". The part I'm making fun of is the thought that you can do it without making the end-consumer pay for it.

> Except profit maximization, you mean?

You're playing into exactly what they are saying and you don't even see it, wow.

Enlighten me

No consumer asks for methane to be vented to the atmosphere.

Consumers have certain needs/desires (cooking, electricity, etc), but they don't have a need/desire for greenhouse gas emissions.

It may be most cost effective to allow gas leaks while delivering the gas, but that shouldn't be equated to demand leading to gas leaks.

but even cooking with fossil methane release a lot of fossil methane at the consumer home :

https://news.stanford.edu/2022/01/27/rethinking-cooking-gas/

But again, no one is asking for a stove that leaks methane. They may be asking for gas cooking (though inductive cooktops are a reasonable alternative), but no consumer said "Give me a stove that leaks natural gas into my house every time I use it (and even when I don't)".

I want to consume good. In order to consume good, I must purchase good from company. I have no say in how good was produced.

The goal is to align incentives such that companies can produce goods without destroying the planet. The goods themselves are not the issue.

You personally don't have a say but the market does. If it artificially costs more to produce a good, the market would ideally find a way to produce the same good in a manner that doesn't involve heavy carbon taxes. For carbon taxes, the company can either eat the cost and cut into profits or pass it onto the customer and hope their goods are inelastic enough to still make the same margins. If the demand was elastic, a company may decide to either not make that product any more or find a way to make it so that it costs less than the carbon taxed version. Unfortunately, researching new processes costs money and a company may just decide it's cheaper in the short term (which is only what Wall St thinks in) to just continue business as usual.

The problem is that at the end of the carbon tax equation, what does the money go towards? Can we significantly offset carbon emissions with the tax income? Is it already too late? Without some significant rebalancing humanity's greed and feelings towards nature, I'm not even sure any of this would ever work.

No, but the cost is still predictable. If you want a concrete patio then the process of making the cement for it will have produced a ton or so of CO2 given current technology even though you never touched the fossil fuels involved. If you want to fly to Europe and back that's two tons produced even though you never bought the jet fuel.

The per capita carbon emission of the US is about 14 tons or so. Of those, 4 are things the government or other entities are doing on your behalf that you don't have any control over but 10 are going towards your own consumption of things like patios and plane flights and beef. You can't realistically get that down to 0 but you can certainly cut back a whole want if you want to. Or you can pass laws that prevent corporations from producing carbon and offering you the things you want to consume, given the collective action that way makes a lot of sense.

Now, for some things like methane leaks there are obvious ways to reduce the carbon cost of our consumption out of proportion to the reduction in our consumption. But for others, like plane flights, we don't have any means yet of doing that.

In the end if we want large reductions in our carbon footprints without large technological innovations it's going to have to mostly result in us consuming less.

> In order to consume good, I must purchase good from company. I have no say in how good was produced.

You can buy from a different company, or a subsitute good, or not buy it. We aren't powerless at all. Companies live and die by consumer purchasing decisions.

> The goal is to align incentives such that companies can produce goods without destroying the planet. The goods themselves are not the issue.

It depends on the goods. Some can't be produced without destroying the planet.

Yep! Just buy from a non-emitting company. They wouldn't lie to you and claim to be non-emitting, because that would be mean.

> They wouldn't lie to you and claim to be non-emitting

I don't understand: Everyone is always lying? You have no power to identify the truth and act on it?

How would you verify a company's emissions? With your monitoring satellite? Otherwise, it's their word against your inability to verify anything.

It is not feasible for consumers to be informed at that level about all of the goods they consume and for most of us there I doubt there is a practical way to be informed about these sorts of things for most products even if we were to try. Furthermore, even if we were informed for a particular product there may be no better behaved alternatives in the marketplace for something we consider to be a necessity.

> It is not feasible for consumers to be informed at that level about all of the goods they consume

Nobody said "all", we don't have to live in a world of perfection and extremes. We can buy electric cars, use renewable energy.

> even if we were informed for a particular product there may be no better behaved alternatives in the marketplace for something we consider to be a necessity.

Things might not turn out well if you try something, so don't try? How do someone get out of bed in the morning on that basis?

Your point is that you are absolutely powerless to do anything? It's obviously false, but why is that important to you?

Yes, that is exactly what the “personal carbon footprint” propaganda wants you to believe. Majority of the planet is close to living in poverty, majority don’t have the luxury to go for the more expensive option because of their love of the environment.

> Majority of the planet is close to living in poverty

Who said anything about the majority? And that's certainly not the demographic of HN, or the people creating most of the carbon footprint.

Also, by advanced economy standards, most of the world is deep in poverty.

> majority don’t have the luxury to go for the more expensive option because of their love of the environment.

It's not luxury and love, but necessity, responsibility, and survival. The impovrished people will suffer the most. Also, the options aren't necessarily more expensive, and are generally much cheaper if you account for the costs of climate change.

> if you account for the costs of climate change.

either you were led to believe it's only personal responsibility of direct consumers to account for the costs of climate change, or you were paid to propagandize that claim.

if first - you're wrong, if second - i'll leave it unsaid.

So if my municipal water company, through its incompetent failure to maintain infrastructure, damages a road due to a water main break, that’s my fault because I need to drink?

It’s pathetic that the thought process of corporate PR flacks has sunk into the brains of normal people.

> the thought process of corporate PR flacks has sunk into the brains of normal people

I think it's the opposite: Saying that poeple are powerless, and entirely dependant on corporations, is the thought process and message of the corporations. We are just helpless subjects of the aristocracy.

> It’s pathetic

It's sad that people add these words, which rationally only indicate a lack of argument, and practically tell us nothing and inflame discussion on the Internet - where it hardly needs to be inflamed.

Not your fault, but in part your responsibility to fix it which would likely be incurred by higher rates in the future to pay for maintenance. Those maintenance costs can be an externality for end-users as well. Fines and costs will trickle down to consumers (that's not to say they are unwarranted).

Typically it’s cheaper to maintain vs wait for stuff to fail.

My wife used to be a finance director for a water utility. Part of that gig was having a capital program that proactively maintained infrastructure.

When they started that program ~20 years ago, they were criticized for a resulting higher rate structure. (5-7%) more than a similar city in the region. But now… that difference flipped and then some. A key failure of critical valves in the neighboring city cost nearly $10M, while the planned replacement was like 80% less.

I have experience as a reliability engineer in infrastructure. I would say it's very context dependent, but for the most part it's cheaper to maintain up to a point. A lot of the contextual distinction comes with the criticality of the component. Critical components, by the definition of being critical, have a high downside of failure (whether that's cost of operational). I will say that there are some occasions where it may be cheaper (both in financial cost and availability) to run something to failure.

The real problem IMO is that cognitive biases can prevent people from making those objective decisions. When dealing with things like probability of failure where there's uncertainty, it's easy to be swayed by a competing priority that feels like it has more immediacy and less uncertainty.

>I mean at the end of the day attempting to shift blame to "the corporations" for emissions is neglecting the fact that the corporations are emitting in order to (ultimately) supply consumers.

They want to make big money, the fact they give you products it is not the goal. Is it still legal to just burn the gas at the oil pumps?I remember videos of burning flames on top of this oil pumps and I don't think we the consumers asked for that, it is just that a billionaire oil dude won't invest into fixing the issue when he can open more oil/gas drilling sites and make more billions.

IIRC, flaring methane is better for the environment, because pound for pound, methane is a significantly more potent greenhouse gas than the CO2 that is produced. Capturing the CO2 would be preferable, of course, but this one's a bit counterintuitive.

I think methane lasts for less than a decade in the atmosphere before it's broken down into C02, so considering this has been likely going on for a long time, reducing it would probably have an immediate effect.

>I think methane lasts for less than a decade in the atmosphere before it's broken down into C02

Source? Google info box says:

>Methane is a powerful greenhouses gas with a 100-year global warming potential 28-34 times that of CO2. Measured over a 20-year period, that ratio grows to 84-86 times.

>Methane, by contrast, is mostly removed from the atmosphere by chemical reaction, persisting for about 12 years. Thus although methane is a potent greenhouse gas, its effect is relatively short-lived.

I was off slightly, but not an order of magnitude.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jan/16/greenhou...

But you could burn it with a purpose, like in a generator.

That assumes there's use for a generator out near the pump. I don't think that's generally the case, meaning the methane would need to be stored and transported. Considering it's literally these companies' business to store and transport fuel, I'd assume if it were economically viable to do so, they would. That's not to say something like a carbon-tax wouldn't sway the economics toward that side, but it's not just as simple as "burn the fuel in a generator"

For sure if you can transport liquids and gas you can transport some electricity to the nearby villages/city you pollute with your gases. I think you can make profiit but not big profit from this so why bother. It is like tech giants, why bother with a good product with paying customers if it does not make obscene amount of money.

Sure, but this is one of those arguments that only works well in theory.

Oil and gas companies are usually distinct from the utilities (regulated monopolies) that provide electricity. If you want the O&G companies to subsidize the local populations energy, it makes more sense for them to do so with their existing infrastructure rather than forcing them to use some inefficient process. It will be cheaper for all involved.

The better solution is to just price the externality with regulation.

The generator can power local bitcoin mining farm: no need to store/transport, frees up electricity in other places by making miners there less profitable.

Do you think there are local bitcoin mining in the middle of, say, the Permian Basin?

One of the points missed in this conversation is that a lot of oil/gas drilling occurs in remote or inhospitable regions.

I don’t think there is, but then if we’re talking about putting waste flare to use rather than release it into the atmosphere and pay hefty tax, I can totally see remote (even ocean) sites carry a standard container-worth of miners - potentially would pay for itself.

Edit: dropped a word

I'm curious why you think they haven't done so already? My guess is that the volatility of crypto creates too much risk for the infrastructure investment.

It’s too radical right now, while people mistakenly think that consumption of energy equals production of energy from dirty sources it probably won’t become the norm. But eventually it will.

There are companies that have solutions: https://ezblockchain.net/

Right, but the point is that it's only more profitable to open more oil and gas extraction facilities without repairing the broken one because there's demand for oil and gas in the first place.

As an example, about 20% of the emissions in the US stem from residential energy usage (0). Blaming energy companies for these emissions is ignorant of the fact that it's supplying the demand of the American citizens who are using that energy in the first place - and while shifting that blame off to some faceless corporation or billionaire villain might result in some good policy decisions to reduce emissions (for example, making gas and oil so expensive to extract or use for energy production that residential energy providers switch to renewables) but it goes too far from absolving consumers from the fact their demand creates the market that generates emissions in the first place - which leads to bad policy decisions like leaving homes to use natural gas for heating and cooking.

All I'm saying is that when it comes to emissions and climate change we need to look at it holistically, rather than come up with these mythical comic book villains.

(0) https://www.pnas.org/content/117/32/19122

>Sounds like we need to focus on the much larger 80% of emissions first to me, as that's where the vast majority of the problem lies, by definition.

Alternatively... What if we do both in parallel? I'm also of the opinion that you can more likely change things in your own life than get a big corporation to change something, so you could make small gains within the next year as far as reducing personal impact, and still keep on fighting for the bigger problem to be solved at the same time.

>All I'm saying is that when it comes to emissions and climate change we need to look at it holistically, rather than come up with these mythical comic book villains.

I agree that someone that keeps the lights or TV on while he is not using them is also at fault but it is not possible to catch the person that is doing this , where it is easy to make illegal the behavior that is easy to control for. Maybe the gas will cost a bit more but this might encourage new technology to appear or green energy to take over.

I am curious if this happens somewhere in US and if there are results or is too socialist to ever happen? In my country(Romania) there is a tax for polution (for ex cars with old or big engines pay a bigger tax), this tax money goes into green programs, like persons can install solar panel or isolate their homes and the government will give you some money up to 90%. (I am expecting comments like the poor pay for the rich solar panels but IMO you could make the rules to add limits on who can benefit.

The guy that forgets to turn a light off is pretty irrelevant, but you can look downtown in my city and see countless office buildings with all the lights on 24/7. They're literally keeping me up at night with the light that's shining in my windows. It would be relatively easy to create and enforce a rule for the largest wastes.

> someone that keeps the lights or TV on while he is not using them is also at fault but it is not possible to catch the person that is doing this

Punishment is not the only, and in fact one of the worst, means of changing behavior. You can also educate people, who despite the current devotion to cynicism, generally will do the right thing. Lots of people turn the lights off.

> I am curious if this happens somewhere in US and if there are results or is too socialist to ever happen?

How do you define socialist? There are many regulations and fines in the US. Climate change has been politicized by one party here in order to, afaict, make it to inflammatory to agree on any action.

The corporations are emitting to supply consumers because emitting is often a cheaper way to supply consumers.

The solution isn't to not supply consumers, it is to supply them in a more sustainable way.

In some cases this may not be possible, but in many cases it is. We shouldn't push to destroy our quality of life, we should push to make it sustainable.

This can only happen through regulation, because as a consumer, you can't really choose to pay 10% more to get e.g. a laptop where the aluminium was smelted using renewable energy.

But to solve that we could for example regulate companies instead of creating sham feelgood campaigns about reducing 'personal footprint'.

I think "blame" for emissions is the wrong lens here to get to a solution.

I do think there is a bit of asymmetry here and there is some blame to dish out, in that there are corporations (e.g. Big Oil) that are spending large sums lobbying to try to distract the public from implementing effective solutions that would eat into their profits. There isn't really a propaganda machine that's as focused on misdirection in defense of special interests in the other direction. (I suppose the Fox News retort would be that the IPCC are being alarmist to inflate their grant budgets? But I think we're many orders of magnitude off in terms of $-weighted harms here vs. emissions from the oil & gas industry.) I wouldn't say we should blame the corporations for their emissions, just for their shady astroturfing, self-interested lobbying, and other activities that misdirect the public dialog on the harms of their emissions.

At the end of the day, the high-level solution is simple (not easy): rather than thinking about emissions as something that is the "fault" of companies or individuals, if we tax the externality that we care about (CO2 emissions) at a consistent price, then the market will work out the rest. The CO2 tax will get baked in to the price of every good, and people will naturally shift their consumption away from goods that are unreasonably CO2-producing (as they will become unreasonably expensive).

I'm not a free-market maximalist, but this is one of the cases where markets are the best solution to the problem.

This isn't an easy solution to implement though, as it requires strong international coordination to prevent emissions from being offshored to countries that either don't sign up to the carbon tax, or that do sign up but enforce laxly. If the US was really on board with achieving this, they could probably team up with the EU and succeed.

This depends.

Well, kinda. We banned plasic straws to "save the seas", while most of the palstics in the seas are from industrial and fishing equipment, that are not affedcted by the banned straws.

Custumer wants a cooked burger, and sure, some emissions come from cooking burgers (and all the other processes, from the animals birth to a burger patty in the restaurants fridge), but I'm pretty sure none of the customers wanted gas leaks.

Same with plastics... we banned straws, so it seems that "the government is doing something", while most of the plastics in the seas are either fishing/industrial equipment, or trash from a few rivers in asia. Just look at the amount of plastic packaging that is used and discarded from production to retail of many items, even paper "eco" straws (if nothing else, the amount of plasic foil used to package the straws on the pallet).

It is BP that shifted the blame to consumers back in the 00s. And they spent hundreds of millions on this marketing campaign - more than they did on fixing their own house. The idea of a personal carbon footprint didn't exist before this.

You nudge the drug addicts and prosecute the drug dealers.

Also, re: veganism. Go vegan to reduce suffering.

It's exactly the same playbook the drink companies used to keep pumping out unlimited plastic bottles: it's on the consumer to recycle them.

Exactly. Milk is treated like toxic waste because of cow farts, but incompetent oil companies spew waste or flare gas for operational reasons. Trivial issue to fix.

I bet US companies get tax breaks for the lost product.

Of course, they use it as an expense to offset taxes on profits probably, even though the "product" is unusable (who's checking anyway?)

Only way that happens is if the USA leads it. Couldn't even get you guys onto the metric system, what do you think the chances are that you'll subscribe to this?

The USA does quite a number of good things. Don't buy into the hopelessness; it's just a message of the reactionary movement (which they successfully have many others repeating), to shut down their competition.

>There should be a worldwide tax on producing greenhouse gas. Extreme economic, business, travel, etc, isolation on every country/corporation that doesn’t subscribe to it. Bankrupt them into the ground.

But this punishes poor countries trying to modernize. Shouldn't the US pay for the ~412 billion tons of co2 it has dumped into the atmosphere since its inception? Same goes for EU.

Your math seems to be off, 250kcal apparently yields 8.8kg difference a day.

Anyway, the idea that personal consumption has no use is absurd. It portrays a false idea that these pipes and factories and what not are made for the personal use of the affluent when in fact all these machinery produce items demanded by the masses. That's why the owners are rich, they produce(facilitate could be a better word) the stuff we want and we give them money to receive the output. Obviously, reducing personal consumption or making choices directly reduces the output of the machinery of the rich.

If you want to blame a class, you are better off blaming private jets, mega yacht and golf courses if you are after the rich. These are the only emissions that are significantly different from the rest.

Then you come to transportation and large homes of the middle class in western countries, especially the USA.

The point is that they could still produce the exact same thing, and just _plug their leaks_, and everybody would be better off.

But it wouldn't produce the exact same thing. Going by the original figures, which were yearly, methane leaks have a harm magnitude of 28 kg/person/year, while the vegan switch would be 1 kg/day, which is 365 kg/person/year, still much more impactful than the savings from sealing leaks.

With that said, the OP's [tgsovlerkhgsel's] general point is still sound, that there is much lower hanging fruit for reducing emissions that would be revealed by a neutral penalty system applied universally, and also show lifestyle changes to be a disproportionately burdensome measure.

Why do you think they don't do that? Could it be because they are evil or because not enough people will care enough to pay for the price difference due to clean production efforts?

It comes down the masses demanding it or not demanding it. You say that personal consumption doesn't make a difference then those who believe you go for the cheaper option even if they can afford the cleaner option. You say that personal efforts can't make a difference then they vote for the party that promises tax reductions instead of the one that promises to enforce fixed gas leaks.

Are there that many industries where consumer choice would encourage companies to make those kinds of pro-humanity choices? I'd like to buy electronics that aren't manufactured in part by children but it isn't like companies advertise whether they do that or not. So outside of occasional investigative journalism or assuming that they (or one of their suppliers) probably do what choices am I left with?

They actually do, that's why some companies also engage in Greenwashing, which is the practise of pretending to be environmentally friendly when you are actually not.

Because the brand of these companies is so valuable, once exposed they actually take steps to fix issues. Perfection is enemy of the good though, but things are actually moving for the better when there is a trend to demand the better.

There's of course counter trends, like eat more meat burn more fuel, screw the foreigners etc. I bet you, if these become dominant, the same brand will be all over it. "For every phone you buy from us, we kill a baby seal and throw a battery in the ocean" could be the next campaign if the ant-environmentalism catches up.

Well guess what, a tax on ghg emissions will make both those that don’t care about environment and those that pretend to care about it, suffer economic consequences.

Win-win, isn’t it?

I agree this kind of consumerism moves the needle, however I'm not sure that this mechanism can be relied on at the scale required to help with problems like climate change. Millions of consumers in many countries would have to be convinced to do research/change their purchasing habits and potentially inconvenience themselves or even increase their cost of living, even to environmentally concious people I'd guess that's a hard sell

> Why do you think they don't do that?

Because they're a company, and the regulatory authorities (EPA & MMS successors) don't have enough funding and will for reliable enforcement.

There are already branches of government tasked with doing this. They just need Congressional support and/or prodding to make it a higher priority.

"because not enough people will care enough to pay for the price difference" the emissions are invisible, and thus people don't have the choice whether to pay more or not.

Especially as a lot of the consumption is indirect - you don't buy the gas, but you buy a meal in a restaurant that was cooked using that gas, or a car whose manufacturer bought the dashboard from a company that bought the plastic from a company that made it using gas from the national gas market, where all gas is fungible and it doesn't matter how it was produced.

the article says thats 10% of methane emissions.

Good progress but not enough.

The personal carbon footprint is just a dodge for the elite, a way to push the problem off onto us rubes. The reality is that the producers have far more power over CO2 output than consumers ever will. "Let the market decide" does not work with large, hugely imbalanced indirect externalities.

Seems like a good fallacy to keep running a old diesel and est meat at every meal because “the corporations do it” to me

"the corporations" have spent hundreds of millions in marketing and advertising pushing the idea of a personal carbon footprint. Just so we can point our fingers at eachother rather than them.

Money well spent I guess.

it only seems that way because you've been conditioned to feel shamefully personally responsible for things far outside of your control

>The personal carbon footprint is just a dodge for the elite, a way to push the problem off onto us rubes.

Some other questions that come to mind:

Who decides what the carbon footprints of everyone's behaviors are?

What level of surveillance is needed to enforce everyone's behaviors?

To what extent will carbon credits markets be subject to regular market events like boom/bust cycles, speculators and other market manipulators?

> Your math seems to be off, 250kcal apparently yields 8.8kg difference a day.

The difference per 1000 kcal seems to be 5.15 - 1.17 = 3.98 kg. Where do you get 8.8 kg per 250 kcal? Maybe you were looking at the least-efficient beef? 8.8*4 = 35.2 kg per 1000 kcal would match the "beef (beef herd)" value.

Yeah sorry, I was looking at beef. For some reason I kept reading pork as beef. So it's not 9 or 1 but 4, we met at the middle.

4 per 1000 kcal, so 1 per 250 kcal.

First of all let me say that I do absolutely agree with you that the whole concept of taking "personal responsibility" for our CO2 footprints is insane and we should clearly be creating tougher regulations on an international level.

However, from the perspective of "okay, but what can I actually do?", it's still worthwhile to do things like going vegan, flying less, isolating your house, etc. And on top of that: vote for green parties (if you country has any). If there are no such parties in your country, then vote for whichever politicians are in favor of regulation of industrial pollution.

I'm not implying that you don't know this, just putting it to text in case anyone reads this and thinks "yeah indeed, why would I have to change anything if those companies don't?!".

What about green parties that are against nuclear? They are green, but, IMO, in a retrograde way.

Not to mention these parties tend to attract some people with severe naturalistic fallacy biases that run _strongly_ counter to my techno-optimistic outlook. I feel getting greens in power would get them what they want but not what the world needs.

They are not really green then.

Well, nuclear has a much higher cost per kW than solar or wind, so it's not a very efficiënt alternative. The only real benefit of nuclear, as far as I can tell, is that it takes less physical space.

And mining for nuclear materials is quite bad for the environment of course, but so is mining for the materials needed for wind/solar.

The great thing about living in a democracy is that you can join these parties and change them from within or you can create your own party. There doesn't have to be single green party, if you believe that nuclear power should be considered green you have plenty of options to make it reality. Beyond direct involvement You can protest, you can campaign for it.

For some reason, in countries with strong democracies and pathways for impact the youth tends not to vote. It's beyond my why they think that they are powerless.

In many European countries, these green parties gained a significant boost during first hand experience of failing nuclear power during the explosion of the Chernobyl plant.

Chernobyl doesn't seem like a great example of failing nuclear power. It looks a lot more like crappy design and foolish incompetence.

You literally just described most operating nuclear power stations. The GE Mark I reactors had an OPTIONAL system to vent hydrogen from secondary containment, as but one example.

I don't know, a nuclear power plant exploding and raining fallout all over Europe sure does look like a failure of nuclear power, certainly for those who experienced it.

Dam failures have had orders of magnitude more impacts, are we calling hydro power a failure?

Let’s not move the goalpost: I am pretty sure we’re calling a dam failure a dam failure.

Yes, but if people hear about dams they don't even blink but they all lose their minds if they hear about nuclear. There is no goalpost moving here, just comparing risks and nuclear looks pretty good.

rootusrootus says we shouldn't call Chernobyl an example of nuclear failure, but I think we very much should because it was a nuclear power plant that exploded. Now you ask 'what about dams' and I'll happily call failing dams failing dams. We were not comparing risks, that's what you brought in - moving the goalposts quite significantly while doing so.

"Vote for the green party" in my country would, in many ridings, be the difference between the only climate-change-denying party winning a seat, and one of the three climate-change-believing-and-respond-to-it parties winning a seat. Which is less than helpful when it comes to addressing climate change.

I'm pretty sure you can do other things as well as Vote. It's not like voting is so all encompassing that you'd be unable to work/participate in other areas at the same time.

I wasn't suggesting that, I was just responding to the parent comment. Voting for the green party can actually cause anti-environmental outcomes (in my jurisdiction).

Hearing that this distribution of parties exists somewhere is great to hear. It's a proper baseplate for improvement.

To be honest, politicians are emperors without clothes.

Many Americans expected dems would fix the climate issue. Alas, it was all just talk. Joe Biden has allowed more oil drills than trump.

Seems like corporatism overshadows politics in countries like the USA which can make an impact in terms of Climate.

> The obvious solution would be to require companies to buy emission certificates for those emissions

Reality check: The companies the article talks about are in Russia and Turkmenistan. How would you impose these emission certificate regulations without invading them and/or toppling their governments?

Trade agreements conditioned on acceptance and economic sanctions and embargos if not. It's an economic measure you want, you obviously can motivate them economically.

a) Ask them whether they want to participate in the scheme to ensure the actual emitters pay their fair share.

b) If they decline, allocate the emissions from these sources to the products the country exports and impose import duties that correspond to (or exceed) what the certificates would cost.

Your comment reflects a strange perspective, as if the community to which you're talking is only from a single place and somehow excludes Russia/Turkmenistan/US/whatever. That's not the case, HN is an international forum.

These laws need to be implemented in each country.

Russia and Turkmenistan are both run by a single strongman.

I suppose HN comments could influence Putin or Berdimuhamedow, but I feel safe assuming they do not.

This is already getting coverage in Russian media.

Your assumption that our politicians need a lot of influencing to care about this is probably wrong, especially since these leaks lead to financial losses.

I'd be more surprised if the US did something about it than Russia, to be honest.

The leak is a cost of doing business of delivering gas to YOU the consumer. So the leak is actually part of your carbon footprint.

But I have no control over the leak part. I have no option to pay more to close the leak. In fact, most consumers don't even know about the leak. So I'm entirely unable to make a choice. It's irrational to expect that anyone would prefer to go vegan over just fixing these leaks.

This problem will remain till we have a proper carbon tax globally.

You can always vote for the politicians that are willing to go after the gas leaks, you can choose to buy from companies that are sourcing from leak-free gas pipes or use renewable energy sources etc.

Just because you don't have direct access to the pipelines so you can close the leaks with your bare hands doesn't mean that you have no power over it. None of us have any control beyond 2 meters of our existence because that's how far away we can reach with our hands but because we live in a society the things we say or choices we make have impact everywhere on the globe.

That's also why we can eat things that are further away than a few meters from us and the leak in question is from the machinery that facilitates all that.

> You can always vote for the politicians that are willing to go after the gas leaks, you can choose to buy from companies that are sourcing from leak-free gas pipes or use renewable energy sources etc.

None of these things are true for me. I'm not allowed to vote where I live and even if I could, the US election system doesn't offer a practical voice that reflects this (the broken voting method is arguably is the biggest problem the US needs to solve). I also only have a doctor gas company. So my alternative would be to switch my furnace, water heater and stove to electric. That's actually on my wishlist, but now we are talking significant money. People who live in apartments or even condos likely at best have control over the stove.

Edit: to be clear, I'm not saying that individuals shouldn't take responsibility. In fact I've moved to a largely vegan diet both due to carbon emissions and animal cruelty concerns. I feel guilty every day and wonder if my positive contributions outweigh the damage that my existence does to our environment and the harm and pain climate change will ultimately cause for other people as well as coastal cities behind uninhabitable, we see unrest over climate refugees, famines, etc.

This assumes the leaks are unavoidable. They’re not. There’s lots of technology the companies can use to find and fix the leaks. However the lack of regulation/enforced regulation means that it’s a race to the bottom. When I see these companies being proactive and pressing for legislation that raises the bar, I’ll buy the personal responsibility argument a little more.

This is what infuriates me about those so quick to criticize the "personal footprint" concept.

All of these things are done so that you can be provided with cheaper consumer goods. It's not some entity entirely divorced from your own complicity.

> All of these things are done so that you can be provided with cheaper consumer goods

Why would you assume that irresponsible practices that are bad for the environment but save companies money always reduce the price for the consumer when they could keep raising the price of their goods to the highest price point the consumer will tolerate and simply pocket the money they save by destroying the environment.

Because most of these emissions are for producing commodities which are generally heavily competed on price.

doubtful, but even when that's true you still don't have to reduce prices by the same amount as you save harming the environment. You only have to make your prices competitive with everyone else. It's why collusion and price fixing exist.

Foxcon's worker's deaths are a cost of doing business of delivering iPhones to YOU the consumer. Their blood is on YOUR hands.

Or you know, Foxcon and the pipeline companies are responsible for what they do.

Add in the fact that we have regulators and environmental regulations that we voted for and funded to try and stop things like this shows that the average person does not want this to happen.

> Foxcon's worker's deaths are a cost of doing business of delivering iPhones to YOU the consumer. Their blood is on YOUR hands.

Correct. If you bought iPhones from someone you know is driving people to suicide with their business practices, you're at minimum accepting that.

If there's an alternative to the iPhone that doesn't do that, then yes you should indeed be triggered to consider switching. To not have to consider it is to think you're not the one paying money to the party to run the business process they do, which drives people into suicide.

Of course culpability is not on a spectrum. Of course Foxcon directors are much more responsible than you as a consumer. But to act like you have no influence in the matter would be false.

Unless you have no other options. But in your example you do. And reducing your gas usage long-term also absolutely reduces the amount of gas infrastructure required, and the amount of gas leaks. Mad-made gas leaks and consumer gas usage correlate, perhaps not perfectly, but they obviously correlate strongly. Just like child labour and demand for diamonds correlate. Just like iPhones and worker suicide (versus say, a lower correlation for the Fairphone) So yes, it's entirely normal to consider green alternatives to gas as a consumer because in the end, the leaks exist because pipes were built for us because we demand gas.

Does that mean it's the only solution to these leaks? No. But apart from voting in elections or otherwise driving political change, (encouraging others to) voting with your wallet is one of the few influences you have to solve these problems.

>Foxcon's worker's deaths are a cost of doing business of delivering iPhones to YOU the consumer. Their blood is on YOUR hands.

Is it not? If you buy conflict diamonds do you get to wash your hands and say "there isn't any blood on my hands because it's the local warlord's choice to use child soldiers, not mine"?

Do people go out of the way to buy conflict diamonds? or is it more people try to buy cheap diamonds?

Even if you don't go looking for cheap diamonds, how can you be sure your diamond is conflict free?

>"Nearly nine years after the Kimberley Process was launched, the sad truth is that most consumers still cannot be sure where their diamonds come from", Global Witness founding director Charmian Gooch told BBC World Service's World Business Report. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-16027011

For fungible goods, you can not guarantee where and what made the product you are using. That is why we (try) to have systems in place to do so.

> Do people go out of the way to buy conflict diamonds? or is it more people try to buy cheap diamonds?

I don't think apple is going out of their way to find sweatshops either.

>Even if you don't go looking for cheap diamonds, how can you be sure your diamond is conflict free?

Are you arguing for nihilism here? ie. "we can't really be sure that even conflict free diamonds are conflict free, so it's fine for me to buy diamonds from a random diamond dealer in Sierra Leone"?

> I don't think apple is going out of their way to find sweatshops either.

Apple goes out of their way to find the lowest cost manufacturing that gets the job done. I think apple doesn't care what the conditions of workers are as long as they can pocket the money they save by selecting the manufactures that cost them the least. As long as people continue to buy iphones their factories could be fueled by burning children alive in furnaces for all they care.

I think the point is that the leaks are only hunted and fixed if it is economically beneficial and not environmental beneficial. This is something that the consumer has no direct control over. Leaks are not required to provide me gas. It's just an unfortunate side effect that can be addressed and drastically reduced if prioritized.

> usually at significant personal expense

IME, it's usually at no expense. Many/most of the things I've changed are merely a change of habit; some are easier and better. For simple example, I wash my clothes on a delicate cold cycle - the clothes come out just as clean, and suffer less wear, and my energy bill goes down. Overall, changes like that have reduced my energy bill by 70% with almost no impact on my lifestyle.

> We're expected to shave off a few kilos of CO2 here and there, usually at significant personal expense, while nothing is being done about these releases that a) could be avoided relatively easily b) have a much bigger impact.

The fact that someone else should do more has nothing to do with the impact and responsibility of what I do. Powerful people can do awful things, but that doesn't mean I shouldn't and won't do my best to do what's good and excellent. If we accept the lowest common denominator as our standard .... Why would you follow the worst of others. Look for the best, the most inspiring.

It's trendy to mock collective and individual action, including democracy itself - to give all our power, good or bad, to corporations (and mockery isn't an argument, just a signal that people lack one). They are happy to hear it.

> go vegan for a month [1] or make similarly impactful changes just so companies can continue venting methane.

That's not why.

> But remember to reduce your personal carbon footprint! /s

Why not both? I work to reduce my personal carbon footprint out of principle.

That's nice, me too, but it's important to not drown out the conversation with deflection. Ultimately it's difficult to rally people behind one thing, nevermind multiple things. So policy discussions should focus on matters with high return

It's also easier for discussions accusing people of being wasteful slobs to degenerate into partisan mud slinging

Very good point. I think you're right. It's more likely to succeed with a pragmatic and undiluted message of targeting the worst offenders first.

Because it's like trying to get to Mars by both jumping really high and building a rocket.

Maybe jumping is the only signal politicians have that people are willing to pay for a rocket.

Exactly ... I'm incredulous as to why this is even debatable.

Focusing on personal responsibility is a worthwhile thing to say to persons for whom their only contribution can be their own personal consumption. Also, in democracies, this will lead to political pressure for companies and government to make efforts that suit their status.

That seems overly cynical to me. People can tell when they are being guilted.

> People can tell when they are being guilted.

And it is an extremely effective way to alienate them and make them vote for the opposition party.

About "personal carbon footprint".

Life is not an Avengers movie. You and I are not superheroes that can save the world. What you or I do in our personal lives have, by any remotely realistic measure, exactly zero impact on the problem.

Thinking otherwise is to me - and I wish I had a less negative term for it - a form of "Delusion of grandeur". It's harmless in a sense, except that people could use the effort they spend to actually improve things for themselves and people around them.

In reality global problems are solved on the global level. Things like carbon taxes, technical innovation etc.

That kind of thinking leads to conclusions like "voting is worthless", or "throwing litter in the bin rather than street makes no difference".

> exactly zero impact on the problem

Exactly not zero. Small, perhaps, and smaller than global initiatives, but lots of coordinated small actions at scale do make a difference.

Genuine question. Is there any evidence that the thousands of Americans who have gone vegan over the last few years have reduced the carbon footprint of the meat producing industry at all? I checked us beef production, and the numbers are basically flat since 2000 increasing slightly since 2014.[1]

If thousands of people going vegan don’t reduce the beef production in this country at all, have they really saved any carbon at all? Would love to see someone with a good data science background look into this.

It’s all well and good to talk about personal consumption as if it has fixed carbon cost associated with it, but you have to remember that not consuming doesn’t reduce the emissions unless it affects production.

It’s still probably good to reduce consumption because it could affect the production, but it may not be enough to cause any change at all.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/194687/us-total-beef-pro...

> Is there any evidence that the thousands of Americans who have gone vegan over the last few years have reduced the carbon footprint of the meat producing industry at all?

Reminds me of the covid prevention paradox.

> the numbers are basically flat since 2000 increasing slightly since 2014.[1]

Looking at beef production numbers of a single country is pretty meaningless.

For one, you'd want to look at consumption. Production can be influenced by changing import or export balances without a change in consumption. You can also look at global production figures.

Two, you'd want to look at per capita numbers, to correct for population changes.

Three, you'd want to look at meat generally. (nitpicky) Beef is just one type of meat, it says a lot but not everything. Could be that dietary / health / business preferences shift to or away from e.g. chicken, that aren't related to veganism.

Four, you'd want a more sophisticated research method that'll indicate that veganism is a causal factor for meat consumption than a simple consumption graph. In countries rapidly developing economically (e.g. China), the meat consumption figures would be rising hard with or without say the percentage of vegans doubling from 20% to 40%, that doesn't disprove the impact of the extra 20% vegans. It only shows that other forces (e.g. economic growth) have outweighed the vegan impact, but it doesn't prove that without these extra 20% vegans meat consumption wouldn't be even far higher. % of population that's vegan would definitely show up as a causal variable across countries, almost obviously.

> the numbers are basically flat since 2000 increasing slightly since 2014.

The population has grown in the meantime. So on average, yeah, they seem to have reduced the carbon footprint.*

* It's probably people switching to healthier alternatives that have driven this per-capita decrease, rather than vegans specifically.

It's tautological. If more people go vegan, then there will be less meat consumed. I don't think we need charts to show that..

That assumes that consumption is otherwise fixed, right? Couldn’t the excess capacity be exported overseas or simply be consumed more by others?

Just approach it from a planetary scale. Total planetary demand is local + overseas demand. Suppose it was 5 + 5 units = 10.

If you reduce local demand by 2 and overseas demand remains at 5, then total demand will go down to 8.

Any economics 101 course will teach you that reducing demand will the equilibrium price, at which price point fewer suppliers are willing to supply. The end result is less production, less consumption on the planet.

As a thought experiment, imagine 90% of the world population disappears tomorrow (demand disappears). Will we produce just as much, simply because the remaining 10% will consume more? The answer is obviously no.

Demand/supply curves aren't flat, so indeed the change will not be 1:1. It's not the case that if 10% stop eating meat, that total consumption will drop by 10%. But demand reduction from one group does lead to a total production reduction and a total reduction in consumption.

Do you realize that the consequences of spreading this message (to the degree it's successful) is, ironically, to hand over all power to the corporations.

You are encouraging people to believe they are powerless and stop doing anything themselves. Action and collective action are very powerful and have changed the world. The Internet should empower that (and did, such as during the Arab Spring) but sadly, it is now used to shut it down through this kind of messaging.

Who does that messaging - despair, you are powerless, you are nothing - who does it serve? There you will find its source, I think.

It serves the consumers of course. Because the first thing it does is absolve all of them of any personal responsibility whatsoever.

No power --> no responsibility --> throw hands up in the air and keep accomplishing nothing, while pointing the finger back at everyone saying it's their fault.

It's the mindset of an 8-year old child.

Another way of saying it: Part of the problem is thinking of oneself as a consumer, an object of the corporations, rather than a citizen responsible for and in control of their country.

It is, at the most fundamental level, un-American, a betrayal of generations before us.

You assume, without any argument, that my message is wrong. Obviously none of those zero arguments convince me.

> You are encouraging people to believe they are powerless and stop doing anything themselves

I'm not! I'm saying people should spend their limited energy on improving things they can actually change. This is usually things in your family, workplace, neighborhood. The average person can make a real difference for people that way.

Trying to personally change the global climate will achieve nothing, while the people around you miss the help you could have given.

BTW, in hindsight, the Arab Spring was a disaster that ended with millions dead, and no real improvements, aside from maybe Tunisia.

I did make an argument and don't assume anything. The history books are rife with the power of collective action. Cryptocurrency is collective action, as is all of FOSS. Women's rights, minority rights, every election, etc. etc. Even the reactionary 'give away your power' message is collective action (ironically, against collective action).

> the Arab Spring was a disaster

That has nothing to do with how it was organized.

There is one thing everyone living in a democracy can do to make a huge difference -- write your elected official (specifically 6-12 months before an election) & include climate stance in your vote calculus.

Isn't a global solution to get everyone to do what they can personally? Why is it global when it applies to corporations but not when it applies to regular people?

The way you get everyone to do things in a society is not by setting an example and doing it yourself but by getting the government to set taxes, incentives, penalties, negotiate treaties - so that people have a clear incentive to behave properly (financial or otherwise).

This presupposes competent governments who care, obviously, which is the crux.

While I agree that we blaming individuals is ridiculous, actually addressing this issue and getting towards zero emissions anywhere near enough time will make:

> significant personal expense

Look like luxury living.

Our economy is energy, and currently the vast majority of the energy comes from hydrocarbons. We simply cannot scale renewables up high enough, fast enough, to avoid catastrophe without a change in live style so severe that most people would over throw governments in protest.

People on this site think wearing a face mask during a pandemic is a material injustice.

We aren't going to address climate change.

I dispute that the economy is energy or even proportional to it. California, as inefficient as it is on a global scale, has substantially decoupled its economy from energy consumption over the last thirty years.

You can't look at local energy usage and make this claim. It's not only the goods and services that come into the state that require energy in other countries, but all of the capital the flows in as well that ultimately has it's source in energy someplace else on the globe.

I recommend reading Smil's Energy and Civilization for a better picture of this.

California has similar consumption import patterns as other U.S. states like Texas, but compared to those other states the economy of California has departed from their energy/gsp ratios.

[1] Assuming I replace 250 kcal from pork per day with Tofu (around 100g of pork which seems to be considered "one serving"), this would be savings of ~1 kg CO2e per day: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore

I think most people get more than 250kcal a day from meat. Seems like a strong argument to go vegan to me.

Kurzgesagt made a really good video about climate change [0].

What stuck with me the most was that if I would eliminate 100% of my emissions in my entire life, I would save 1 second of global energy sector emissions.

[0] https://youtu.be/yiw6_JakZFc

> So yeah, go ahead and tell me (and everyone else) to go vegan for a month...The obvious solution would be to require companies to buy emission certificates for those emissions

Vegans are way more likely to vote for laws like you're suggesting. They can't be swayed by fear-mongering campaigns of "burgers are getting more expensive so we can save the polar bears".

> but remember to reduce your personal carbon footprint! /s

The best way to reduce your carbon emissions is to upgrade your life at the same time by electrifying it, as your economics permit.

Along with a silent zippy electric car, you get the added benefit of improving your local and hyper local air quality.

What moral ethics? A natural predator will eat its prey while it still lives, providing a slow and painful death. While I agree that livestock living conditions mostly suck, at least we provide a quick and painless death.

I think you will be hard pressed to assign a positive spin on the treatment of livestock as it stands today. The best take one could reach for is perhaps that it's a necessary evil for feeding the planet right now.

> at least we provide a quick and painless death

Without trying to sound like I'm on a pulpit, "quick and painless" is not how I would describe sow stalls. The prevalence of ag-gag laws speaks to this.

This is a subject that I don't have a good answer to, and I eat meat too, but I think we should at least call a spade a spade to start.

Last I heard the standard practice was that animals were stunned and then dealt a killing blow. Is this not true?

> but I think we should at least call a spade a spade to start.

Watching r/natureismetal and David Attenborough documentaries I find myself far more taken aback at the viciousness of some predators (even some trees!) than anything I read in Fast Food Nation, and sections of that book were absolutely disgusting

This is a strange, myopic argument.

The moral quandary around factory farms does not generally stem from how quickly abattoirs perform their job, as it is economically prudent to kill livestock quickly. There is not much incentive to treat them well beforehand.

And my point is that the bucolic pastoral life only exists as created by humans. Everywhere else almost all animals are subject to the whims of the food chain, which can be as cruel if not more cruel than we humans. It's a much wider variation, for sure, but I simply do not understand the moral superiority that animal rights activists feel.

Like, veganism because methane emissions are accelerating global warming? I can get behind that. Veganism because of some dietary need someone has? Sure. But veganism because we are mean to animals? You're stretching it...

We're doing animals a favor, see!

You're making the argument that cruelty to penned livestock is fine as the wild is also cruel. It is curious, then, that factory pigs live out just a fraction of their effective lifespan[0] - typically around 10 months. Wild boars have average lifespans measured in years.

There is a lot of nuance between the agricultural extremes we have now and what environmental activists desire, but I think your argument is specious, and the bar for how we treat livestock should probably be higher than "at least we kill them quickly."

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7286991/figure/...

> We're doing animals a favor, see!

Hardly. I'm simply arguing that some combination of current agricultural practice is little worse than the natural alternative of having to spend one's life constantly on-guard so that they don't become another animal's lunch. And then becoming lunch eventually (and viciously), anyway.

Can our practice be improved? Sure. But the "moral ethics" of "killing something for 5 minutes of taste pleasure" are not so black-and-white. I think your argument is unsustainably idealistic, and that you would deny people their "5 minutes of taste pleasure" because of that idealism

> I think your argument is unsustainably idealistic

While I have not actually been arguing for any specific changes here, yes - that is the thorn and the true reason ag-gag laws exist. I don't have good answers.

But when I say "call a spade a spade," I mean that we need to admit that the livestock practices of factory farming is something like animal cruelty. Even if, as I again have said, it's a practice perhaps needed today. The scenario can be both.

I do not agree that life confined to a metal crate for 10 months is one better than that of a life spent in open environments for far longer. Pigs specifically are social, active creatures.

> you should go vegan

Don't force anybody please. As for moral ethics, those are really different depending on where you come from, your current outlook on life, etc. Ethics are not universal. I'm personally 98% vegetarian due to the lesser ecologic impact. It's also healthier, not killing animals, and has a lot of side-benefits. But don't assume the reason you specifically picked will work for everyone.

You misunderstand. I'm not forcing anyone. I was replying directly to the original posters comment. Also to your last point, please dont assume that I am assuming.

Whether you choose to acknowledge it or not, dairy and eggs still contribute to mass slaughter and suffering so your point about not killing animals on a your stated diet is a bit misinformed.

Sorry for coming over as harsh, that was not my intention. It's just that I interpreted your should as a relatively strong word.

I agree that male chicks are being massively slaughtered after they hatch in order to get hens. For every male chick that dies, you get more than 300 eggs a year for a couple years. Hens are usually slaughtered too after some time because they get less productive.

My point was mostly that bringing ethics into any topic is something you can't do without acknowledging that people have different views on what's ethical.

At which point is it okay to terminate a chicken? That's a very debatable topic, same as abortion.

What is not up for debate is the carbon impact of various diets. That's quite easy to measure, and much more objective.

Why is killing animals bad?

For the same reason we don't have gladiators anymore. We are at a point in time where humans can meet all of our dietary needs through plants as we now understand what things need to be fortified and which don't. Eating meat, for many people, boils down to killing another being for one's own pleasure "tastiness" (I put it in quotes because most people butcher cooking meat at home). If one has no qualms with killing animals unnecessarily, then we should really be feeding all the stray dogs to the homeless but obviously this does not happen. Why? Because people have moral issues with killing dogs and cats. Not eating meat is simply an extension of this.

I would say the reason it's a taboo to eat predators and scavengers like cats and dogs and rats and bears and sharks and coyotes and tigers and lions and what have you is because predators and scavengers accumulate parasites and toxins.

At any rate, you're still not explaining why, merely pointing out an inconsistency across animals as a whole. What if it is wrong to eat dogs but right to eat cows? Why couldn't it be so?

Where I come from, eating bear was not considered taboo. Many places also with sharks. I'm not sure what kind of response you are looking for, but "thou shall not kill" is a pretty universal rule in all societies around the world. I think the onus is on you to explain why that rule should be broken. For instance, going to war to stop tyranny could be a justification.

Couldn't this line of reasoning also be extended to plants? Why is it wrong to eat a hamburger but not to mow your lawn or treat a bacterial infection? Surely, if all killing is equally wrong, then how can we go on living?

One could even claim to be righteously executing the murderous cow because it spends all day maiming and murdering innocent plant matter.

One could, but with that argument it equates all life as being equal. If that is the case, why is it wrong to murder?

Personally, I can very clearly see that a cow or a dog is concious whereas a plant (if concious at all) is very much further towards unconcious than a human understanding of conciousness. Therefore I opt to reduce the suffering as much as possible.

I would hope if an alien species that was much more concious than we could comprehend were to stumble across earth, they would not cause us suffering and eat us merely because we are not as intelligent as they are.

Your argument also hinges upon the lack of specificity in "thou shalt not kill" in extending it from humans to animals. Why is it wrong to murder conscious things but not unconscious ones?

> Therefore I opt to reduce the suffering as much as possible.

Isn't suffering an unavoidable part of life itself? If this is the aim, then we must immediately kill everything that is alive. That will end suffering the fastest.

> Why is it wrong to murder conscious things but not unconscious ones?

This is a bit pedantic isnt it? I would hope you can come to a conclusion which isnt borderline psychopathic

Yes, suffering is an unavoidable part of life which most organisms seek to reduce as much as possible. Given we all have existence bias and presumably dont want to end our lives prematurely, why would you knowingly want to increase it for others? I should have taken the hint from your initial response of "why is killing animals bad" that this would have been a pointless discussion. Why is killing anything bad?

>This is a bit pedantic isn't it?

This is an ad hominem fallacy. Mentioning it doesn't serve to invalidate the argument.

Anyhow, I think the point trying to be made here, is that you're arbitrarily drawing the line on what should be allowed to be killed based upon your own personal moral philosophy. What makes you the righteous one to get to dictate where to draw the line? Nothing but pure opinion (and that goes for anyone else too).

> This is a bit pedantic isnt it? I would hope you can come to a conclusion which isnt borderline psychopathic

If we want to find the truth, we must be brave and see what conclusions our line of reasoning result in. If our investigation leads somewhere too unpalatable, then no doubt one of the assumptions leading down the path is at fault.

> Yes, suffering is an unavoidable part of life which most organisms seek to reduce as much as possible. Given we all have existence bias and presumably dont want to end our lives prematurely, why would you knowingly want to increase it for others? Why is killing anything bad?

Couldn't this be from ignorance? The same way many people fear and avoid the dentist for a long time even though it brings them far greater suffering than the dentist would, couldn't avoiding death too be running away from something that is ultimately good?

Not sure where you're coming from here, but this 1-sentence comment sounds like something a serial killer would say.

If someone murders your dog, no big deal to you? And sure, this dog was YOUR dog, but you would probably still agree that, in general, dogs shouldn't be killed, right? I'm not saying this line of thinking extends to all living organisms, but surely you can acknowledge there's SOME gray area between bacteria and "organism as smart as a human".

Another useful thought experiment: what would aliens who are way smarter than us think of us? Mightn't they think of us as so dumb that our lives don't matter to them? How would you try to convince them otherwise?

Do you associate with many serial killers, so as to be familiar with what they say? Note that I'm not saying that killing animals is right, I'm asking why it's wrong. This is not a positive statement about the world.

It seems like you think this is very obvious, so why is it so hard to explain why? Shouldn't obvious things be easy to explain?

> But remember to reduce your personal carbon footprint! /s

Where do you think the demand for gas pipelines comes from?

Spoilers: our collective desire for it drives the development of pipelines.

It’s not as if PG&E has a checkbox like “Pay 5% more for us to fix gas leaks?” or gas stations have an octane selection that pollutes less. Consumers have the choice in some cases to consume less, but we need to affect one very specific thing (better maintenance) that companies with lower demand would, I’m sure, be happy to just pocket in additional savings or profit if they don’t have a damn good incentive to care.

Then on a political level, at least here in the US, the choice for politicians who could hope to influence this is between a party of “we don’t believe climate change is real // it’s real but not a big deal // inevitable / natural causes” and “climate change is real but we still won’t make much real change” or maybe even “climate change is real and we demand real change but Congress won’t pass anything even mildly changing the calculus for companies because 49% is the party who doesn’t care / is on the climate-affecting companies payroll and the other 1% required to swing the vote can be bought for 1/100th the price the proposed legislation would cost us”.

It’s frustrating, and the result is that the world burns and everyone just argues about whose fault it is while trying to do any small things they can to help while companies and politicians continue to not really care that we’re rapidly heading towards a non-inhabitable planet in a few generations.

Many places let you choose your energy provider. People choose the cheapest ones.

So yes, they're at fault. It's like crying about slaves making chocolate but paying for the cheapest chocolate bar instead of opting for more expensive ones that verify their supply chain. Talk is cheap.

"We" do not demand leaky pipelines.

But people sure do want cheap fuel and electricity.

Cheapness comes at a cost, and people consistently choose the cheapest providers when given a choice. Absolving ourselves is responsibility is why progress has stalled for decades.

Which is why the leakers should be financially punished so that they are no longer cheap. If their prices are so cheap they are unable to afford basic mantainence or quality builds, then a) maybe pay the C-suite people a little less (they can't afford it), b) they are not charging enough to actually run a business.

People want cheap everything. They also want clean water and air, that is why they vote for people who enact regulations.

Take software for example, people want cheap software. Paid software declines vs software with ads or tracking in it. People are upset because they don't want ads and tracking. Maybe regulations are enacted and paid software comes back.

Maybe it moves to a different model.

> EDF is planning to launch its own methane-detecting satellite in about a year, which will take much sharper pictures, showing smaller leaks. Other organizations are developing their own methane detectors.

When this does launch, the images taken should be open to public consumption, preferably on a website. Once we put these companies on blast with the hard facts, things will begin to change. Very quickly.

Yeah, just like how we started boycotting China when we found out about the human rights violations against their own majority population, and outright atrocities against their own people.

At worst, these sattellite images will cause an outrage on Twitter until the mob finds something else to be angry about. People are too dependent on their product to do something that would actually hurt these businesses.

Or how we started boycotting the United States when we found out about the war crimes where they put and tortured prisoners of war in 'dark sites' and concentration camps in no man's land (gitmo) without trial or basic human rights and dignity for two decades.

Or where they separated refugee parents from their children and put them in concentration camps where they had to sleep on concrete floors and beg for basic supplies, then 'lost' these children.

The whataboutism is right on cue today as always. Surely you're not suggesting a moral equivalency between Guantanamo Bay and the Uhygur concentration camps in Xinjiang?

Why do they have to be the same? Both are vile, just in differing/varying ways. "Don't judge a man for a spec in his eye while you have a plank in yours", "those in glass houses..." etc etc.

I'm not saying that condemnation isn't deserved in either direction, I'm agreeing that it is deserved in both directions simultaneously. For country A to tell country B they shouldn't do anything, they should absolutely expect country B to say what about X that you country A are doing.

It's ironic the cliche you use is contextually moral equivalency, the plank being more morally evil than the spec. Why do you absolutely think no one should be a recipient of moral condemnation given that no one is an angel? Do you think we should never hold people accountable?

The whole point of the parable is that if you aren't faultless yourself, don't go pointing out faults in others. That's why I used it. It seems self-evident that it's making fun of those that acuse others of doing the very things (or similar) themselves. The man was making fun of gaslighting 2000 years ago.

Where do you get that I'm suggesting otherwise?

Because there are differences in scale and severity. As an analogy, let's say I'm arguing with my neighbor over the loud parties he throw every night. My neighbor counters with the fact that he can hear my dog barking every morning when I take him out for a walk. My neighbor might be correct here. But he isn't engaging in good faith whatsoever -- instead, he's trying to conflate issues of very different scale to purposefully muddle the conversation. This is the problem of "whataboutism" and it's more complicated than just throwing stones in glass houses.

Part of the issue is that it's a problem that only exists in context. If I'm playing golf with my neighbor and he brings up my dog barking first, it's different than if he brings it up as a counterargument to my complaint about his loud parties. e.g. if someone on hacker news is bringing up criticisms of the US (e.g. Guantanamo Bay) in an unrelated topic, there's nothing wrong with that.

Whenever there is discussion of Guantanamo online, Xinjiang is almost never brought up. Here's a few (I promise not cherry picked, they're the first 3 results on google search for "hacker news Guantanamo" with more than a handful of replies) hacker news threads on Guantanamo to show this point: [0], [1], [2]. Not one mention of Chinese war crimes. There are debates over how bad they are, sure, but no whataboutism saying "Guantanamo is bad, but what about X issue in Y country?"

In contrast, there's not a single large thread about the Uyghur concentration camps in Xinjiang on hacker news (or any other major site) that isn't filled with comparisons to the United States of America and its current and historical problems (and thankfully people calling them out for whataboutism). It's a pattern, and it's a real problem, and I won't hesitate to call it out when I see it.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500597

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28195746

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28986757

>Because there are differences in scale and severity.

Is what has been said at the start of every slippery slope. "What I'm doing is okay because it's not nearly as bad as what someone else is doing."

It's a weak person's answer. Call it what it is, and it's just wrong regardless of "level" or reason.

Ok either I've slipped into an alternate reality or you have no idea what a slippery slope argument is, because it literally has nothing to do with any of what you said...

But furthermore, I never claimed that "what we're doing is ok" (it's not, Guantanamo is still bad obviously), rather I claimed that whataboutism is about CONTEXT. Bringing up tangentially related US issues in a debate about greater Chinese war crimes is a bad faith argument specifically because its purpose is to muddle discussion, confuse scale (less than 40 Gauntanamo prisoners vs 1,000,000+ prisoners in Xinjiang). The time and place for an argument makes a difference -- if you're talking about how bad the Germans are for the Holocaust, and I interject by talking about an event where an English Jew was murdered in 1935 by an anti-semite, are you not allowed to criticize me for derailing the conversation? I could say "anti-semitism is wrong at any level" or "the English do bad things to, why won't you acknowledge that", and I would be totally out of line because of the context of the discussion of the holocaust, because comparing some Englishman getting murdered to millions dying in death camps is dishonest.

It's not really whataboutism; plenty of countries and businesses commit terrible crimes without ever facing actual concequences. The Twitter mob won't actually do anything, and in the real world business goes on as usual.

This is a pretty low value comment. The fact that we can do something about gas leaks has nothing to do with China.

Also: the party owning the pipeline has a pretty strong incentive to stop those leaks, it costs them money.

Depending on the specifics, companies often don’t fix things because it would be more expensive, perceived or real, to fix the issue(a) than just dealing with the consequences of whatever it is being broken. Companies don’t operate on morals or principles outside of what makes them more money or what they think makes them more money.

Gas leaks have the potential of resulting in serious damage to the pipes, besides the losses.

According to the article most “leaks” are intentional venting.