What is a bit tiring is that we already have quite a good solution for a lot of it (for the jobs most people on HN have): internet. The fact that a lot of people (even here) want to travel to offices is frustrating. Stay home, work from home, walk or cycle to get groceries (I cry when I see people taking the car to get an egg, yes 1 egg, from a shop 1km away, what is that?). The only thing in the way is your own resistance, but that is very high... For reasons I myself never understood. Understand and accept that the new communication is digital and no longer in person and that it is healthier, in every single way (meaning for you and the world), to walk or cycle everywhere.
Decarbonize as soon as you can. If you own a house, add rooftop solar. It can be financed pretty easily these days. If you have extra spending power, give money to Climeworks or Carbon Engineering. Tradewater might be even better bang for your buck.
Consider changing your career path to work on climate issues.
Invest in moonshot ideas like sustainable fuel, small-scale nuclear, fusion, etc.
Get involved locally. Set a good example, and help others follow your lead.
All those are good examples, especially for HN readers who can leverage their work experience and investment portfolio. I’ve done that with the mindset that if those investment don’t work, I wouldn’t have a world where to retire so those are sound either way.
I'll add, at a personal level:
* promote remote work: commutes are an astounding part of the carbon footprint, and unlike a warm home and diverse food, often not that enjoyable; this is the one where you can influence your colleagues the most: if you are at home, why would _they_ go to the office have a meeting with you?
* set-up a heat pump, preferably a ground-based one, if you have a heating bill; isolate your house better either way, have horizontal shades to block Summer but not Winter sun;
* eating less red meat and dairy — once a week, once a month; I’m no vegan and I’ll gladly share a Porterhouse with you for either of our birthday, but in the Wednesday bolognese, plant-based substitute are fine;
* travel less far, by train if you can.
There’s more you could do, like recycling, but if you check, the impact of those is minor for now or at least, your ability to encourage those as a consumer isn’t great. Running a personalised carbon estimation is a good exercise to see what’s your most impactful effort.
> If you own a house, add rooftop solar. It can be financed pretty easily these days.
Before you do that, check where and how your power is generated. You might never break even (carbon-wise) on your solar roof.
If your energy is already clean, gas heating and electric cars are the way to go. EVs are getting better and better, especially if you have two cars, check if one of them isn't only used to make small sub 100 miles trips.
I think there's a case to be made for rooftop solar even when your local power generation is green. The reason is that the grid is a distribution network. By lowering demand on local generators, you're lowering the relative price of green energy across the grid.
This might have worked twenty years ago, had we as a society done anything. But it is too late for that now. Since we put off doing anything, it is now going to be much harder to solve the problem. Eating any beef at all now is immoral.
A roundtrip flight from LA to NY releases 1.1 CO2 tons. A sustainable carbon budget is somewhere between 1.5 and 2.5 CO2 tons / year / capita. [edit]Among many other creature comforts[/edit], mass aviation simply has to go. No more vacations in Thailand. No more Thanksgiving family visits. No more business trips. No more tech conventions. No more scientific conferences.
Harder, we must learn to let go across all sectors of the economy, for all countries, for all society strata.
Action follows desire. As a species, we must shift the conceptualization of the world from globalism to localism. Return to the world view of people living in 1900 or before.
The average individual view of the world must stop 100 miles from the place he/she was born. As a New Yorker, seeing an image filled with beaches and palm trees advertising Cabo vacations should raise the same level of revulsion as an image filled with vast open spaces and wild horses advertising for Marlboro cigarettes.
Aviation is also a sector where emissions are pretty much unavoidable (long distance electric flight is untenable), and offsetting emissions is the only path forward. Drawing a line and restricting aviation can't work: think of all the important connections, collaborations, business deals, etc that require aviation. One might argue they aren't needed, but such restrictions will reduce the rate of progress/innovation, which is a necessary prerequisite for climate change action. A new solar cell (for example) will not be developed in isolation.
The fact that governments don't mandate carbon offsets for aviation at this stage is appalling though. Trivial to do relative to the impact and doesn't really raise ticket prices a whole lot.
Governments forcing action will not work. Or maybe it will but indirectly: people will revolt, chaos will ensue and economic activity will drop like a rock. For example flying will become too unpredictable.
Assuming we want to preserve some semblance of social order, the task ahead is to downsize our intimate desires and expectations of the world.
For things like gas in cars, I’d agree with you: making electric cheaper is the way. But aviation is seen as a luxury and a corporate expense, not something for which people would go to the mat. Even the most authority-defying actors have exemplar record on safety (flying, on-board behaviour and identity checks); it’s an international body by construction.
As long as a tax or a compensation program is announced in time, fair, uniform, rational and effective, they won’t have the political power to oppose it. You can encourage research and development of electric planes: it’s unclear if it will make sense for larger, or longer distance, but politically, encouraging a shift in technology is a better message than banning, or discouraging flying altogether.
If you demand it now, after 18 months of near bankruptcy, many companies will go down (which could be the goal, but I’m not sure that’s the easy way to put it) but if you make the impact on ticket prices progressive in time and clear, I’m not seeing anyone in the street — other than pilots and attendants, and they’ll find a new job.
This is like those Californian appeals to shower less to save water, when some ridiculous majority of water use comes from irresponsible agriculture. You can tell they are bullshit, and as a result through a 'crying wolf' effect they weaken the power of better informed calls to action.
Aviation contributes a relatively small amount of emissions in the transportation sector, which in turn also contributes about 1/4. So why does it have to go? Why not attack the actual big problems first? That would be passenger vehicles and medium/large trucks. I am pretty encouraged by where the industry is going so far, even if the trucking sector is not as far ahead as the passenger cars seem to be.
> Harder, we must learn to let go across all sectors of the economy, for all countries, for all society strata.
I fully appreciate your frustration. I have a similar reaction when I hear cycling being proposed as a solution, with one difference: flying is largely an optional luxury, driving to work is not.
As an individual, flying roundtrip once from LA to NY, is sufficient to eat up about half the CO2 budget for the year. That is too much in itself. It does not mean that there mustn't be deep cuts everywhere else too. Americans, and especially well off Americans like the ones I expect populate HN, fly around without even thinking of the costs.
Therein lies the immensity of the task ahead: nobody is willing to give up their creature comforts. Not even relative luxuries like the vacation in Cabo. No, we rationalize our inaction by pretending the problem will solve by itself, via some futuristic tehno wand: carbon capture, fusion, solar power, anything but downsizing our expectations and desires.
For anyone who flies, aviation is a huge fraction of their personal emissions. It isn't about "targeting aviation." Just any individual (who isn't an anarchist) should reduce their flying. But as you say, they should also reduce their emissions from ground transportation.
Beyond the personal, on the broader political scale, I also don't know that targeting any particular thing makes sense. All emissions, from all contributors, need to fall. Something like a carbon tax would cleanly attack the least efficient carbon emitters first.
> Action follows desire. As a species, we must shift the conceptualization of the world from globalism to localism. Return to the world view of people living in 1900 or before.
Ouch. Lots of one way tickets for anyone who isn't white in Europe or America.
This is the dumbest thing I've read today. It's noble, but just completely and utterly unachievable. Most people would choose the global warming over not seeing family for Thanksgiving or not being allowed to travel over 100 miles.
I believe that a lot of people did opt for a video-conference family events in the last 18 months. That was to prevent millions from dying.
I don’t know how many people you or everyone expect will die from global warming, but I believe that the number is some orders of magnitude around millions; I also believe that the estimated impact in people’s mind will consistently go up, and that more people will opt to make remote family function more common — of use trains, electric cars and boats to travel.
I anyone had told me, two years ago, that my elderly and technophobe mother would have an informed discussion about which VC technology to use for us to attend my brother’s wedding, I’d be dismissive (maybe not insulting) too: she barely understood that FaceTime and Facebook are not the same thing. But after her mother’s funeral on Zoom, and her nephew’s wedding on Hopin and her being asked to help film christening because she became her parish tech expert… Things have changed.
The easy answer is to point to some of the myriad things one can do. Aviation has perhaps the biggest bang for the buck, easy to unilaterally give up and with quantifiable significant impacts. And yet, utterly insufficient by itself.
The hard answer is that we need to downsize our expectations by an order of magnitude.
