“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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How can you be responsible for the burning of the gas when there is no meaningful alternative? I don't ask to have my food shipped across country. I don't ask my electric company to burn oil. All I want is food. All I want is heat in my house. But the only places to get those things from are burning carbon fuels.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
>Sucks to be gas-fueled SUV owner. Or are you saying that’s some inherent requirement of human life?
Posting on HN from a computer isn't a "requirement of human life" either. Why are you wasting electricity (presumably from a carbon emitting source) to post on HN?
>Are you seeing ghosts? Who made a statement like that?
"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."
A carbon tax wouldn't come out of the profits of companies. It'll get passed on entirely to consumers.
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)".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
