I appreciate your concern about CO2 emissions and the effort you're making to reduce your own carbon footprint. It's important to be conscious of our impact on the environment. I wanted to share some of the ways I also work to reduce my carbon emissions and help address climate change.
While it's true that I have taken a number of international flights over the past decade, I am very conscious of my carbon footprint in other areas of my life. For example, I've made the choice not to have children, I don't own a car and I live a minimalist lifestyle not buying unnecessary consumer goods. These decisions significantly reduce my overall emissions.
In terms of air travel, it's worth noting that commercial flights account for about 2-3% of global carbon emissions. When we consider the per-person emissions on a commercial flight, it is generally lower than that of other forms of transportation like cars, especially when flights are near capacity.
That said, I completely understand the concern around flying, which is why I purchase carbon offsets for all my flights. This helps to balance out the emissions created by my air travel. Additionally, my professional career is dedicated to working on climate science and finding innovative technical solutions to climate change. In this way, I am actively contributing to the global effort to mitigate the impacts of climate change.
It's important to remember that while individual actions do matter, the largest contributors to climate change are industrial emissions and companies that prioritize profit over the environment. By focusing on these larger culprits and supporting policies and initiatives that hold them accountable, we can create a more significant impact on reducing emissions.
I think the current LLM and GPT overdose has really affected the quality of discussions here. Write a long and thoughtful response and be immediately accused of being a GPT! What is happening to this forum!
I mean how lazy these commenters have to be that their only complaint is "possibly written by GPT"?! Is there something wrong or incorrect in the comment? If yes, then say that! Is there something unclear? Say thta! Is there something insightful to add to the comment? If yes, then say that!
It’s not verbose, it just follows the same best practice. State premise, expand for a bit, restate premise. ChatGPT leans heavily on that style, mostly because people do.
It varies. A lot of airlines offer carbon offsets directly as an option when you buy your ticket. Also, sometimes I buy mine in bulk and not per-flight. Here's a good overview of buying carbon offsets for flights: https://thepointsguy.com/guide/everything-you-need-to-know-c...
I use Wren (YC S19) which is a monthly subscription (pay what you want) for projects like biochar, tree planing, and refrigerant destruction:
https://www.wren.co/projects
And sadly industry dwarfs the CO2 emissions of this frequent flyer (and the rest of us personally). While it's admirable to work on ways of ways to reduce your personal footprint (especially as a way to communicate the problem to others) - actually impacting CO2 levels needs to come from broad regulation. The numbers are just too large and skewed.
What makes you think these flights could be replaced by zoom meetings. Why not assume that GP has spent lots of time carefully considering if they must travel or could replace.
Or maybe there are 500 zoom calls and 150 flights.
Assuming that GP is competent and smart, rather than that we are smart and they are stupid is more likely to be accurate. I don’t assume my situation is the same as others as this is unlikely to be true.
> Industry provides valuable products for billions of people.
Yes, airplanes and jet fuel for example.
> Hundreds of reckless flights that could be zoom meetings benefit no one.
Sounds like they were recreational. Or is happiness not permitted either? I'd better not drive 10 minutes down to the beach to walk my dog tomorrow in case the carbon police catch me, lol. For that matter I'll bet having a dog in the first place makes me a greenhouse nazi because he doesn't much like eating bugs.
If you're worried about climate change, you should not spend your time and resources trying to reduce your own CO2 emissions, but instead, supporting and promoting regulations that force people like yosito to not being able to travel that much, so they will also forcibly start to reduce their footprint.
I get what you're saying about limiting air travel, but let's look at the bigger picture.
Commercial flights make up around 2% of global carbon emissions, so forcing people like me not to travel is not going to make a significant dent in climate change. Focusing on industries and companies that are responsible for the bulk of emissions might be a better way to go.
Rather than trying to control individuals, we need to hold industries and corporations accountable. Pushing for policies that target high-emitting sectors like energy, transportation, and agriculture can create real change. By tackling the main culprits, we have a better shot at making a difference.
Absolutely, I agree. And while we were talking about commercial flights, it's true that it's only a small part of the problem. But my message was that I think there is no point in trying to cut down your emissions individually while no one else does. So I think it's either we put limits (both for individuals but also and specially for industries and corps) or we forget about it and just keep having fun until we no longer can.
I don't think there's a lot of value in putting limits on individuals. That's not an effective way to change the problem at scale. But FWIW, the average American can an annual carbon footprint of 16-17 metric tons of CO2. Here's some back of the napkin math estimating my annual carbon footprint:
750 kg (home energy) + 50 kg (public transportation) + 3,000 kg (flights) + 2,000 kg (diet) + 500 kg (shopping and waste) = 6.3 metric tons of CO2 per year, not bad for someone from a developed country.
Batteries are not really considered at realistic option for airplanes, AFAIK. The best hope is that they can use synthetic fuel, at a cost of, say, x7 the current price. Regulation could definitely help make that happen -- and those who fly a lot should have to pay for the real price of their transport.
We all know how much of a scam carbon offsets are atm. Realistically I think it will be at least twice that amount just for carbon taxes, never mind the additional fuel price.
Don’t take CO2 behavior instruction from people who have children.
I can fly international 365 days a year for decades. But my children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren will have 0 carbon footprint because they’ll never exist.
Conversely, eat bugs and recycle coke cans if you want, but that’s a fraction of a fraction of a drop in the bucket if you’ve had even one kid.
Not having children isn't going to solve the climate crisis because the effect are at a very long term. Children have a very small carbon footprint, they only have a significant footprint when they're adults so we're talking 20 years from now.
We have to reduce emissions right now, not at your inexisting great-grandchildren generation.
> Children have a very small carbon footprint, they only have a significant footprint when they're adults so we're talking 20 years from now.
This is the same reason I don’t save any money for retirement. Somebody will surely have figured things out by the time for me to stop working! I can do what I want with no consequences.
Yes, but those kids are now more likely to be raised by people who are not aware of the problems, or deny them. "Well-raised" is a key word in my previous comment.
While I think we need to find a way to limit the number of humans and think it's a perfectly fine decision for people to not have children, I will continue to criticize anyone who uses CO2 excessively whether they have children or not.
"Having kids is bad" makes sense as a rule of we assume it kids will have the same footprint as us. But that sounds like another way to admit defeat.
I don't have kids. I'm in my thirties. I really struggle with this idea. I fear that this notion is part of why I will run out the clock on my window to get kids.
All I see is finger pointing when everyone needs to rise to the occasion. I'm falling in that trap myself.
I don't understand this argument. Children are individuals as well that would have their own carbon budget. Not to mention the threat of demographic collapse is serious among almost every developed country
Then it’s time to move onto other pressing environmental issues, like recycling all the electric car batteries, and the ethics of lithium and rare Earth mineral mining.
In addition to being toxic and irrelevant to the parent comments (who mentioned kids?), This argument is a red herring.
Of course if everyone dies, we mitigate anthropogenic climate change, but that doesn't really further our analysis of the issue. There is nothing inherent in children that uses carbon, it is human behavior in the context of petro-capitalism that uses carbon. If I have thirteen kids and they live on a farm cooperative, I'll be responsible for less carbon than the parent commenter.
Labeling a comment “Toxic” is a good way to shut down interesting discussion.
The parent said:
> [international flights taken often] completely dwarfs any [CO2] savings I could reasonably expect to make.
What dwarfs CO2 savings isn’t so much an individual’s international flights, it’s an individual creating more individuals that create more individuals.
Your thirteen kids on a farm cooperative are likely to have and eat cows, which is plenty of tonnes of methane. Not to mention the number of children that 13 couples will produce afterward.
My 0 kids will require 0 cows and 0 methane.
Having children is important for the propagation of the human race and I want our race to be propagated.
But it makes no sense to lecture somebody about their greenhouse gas emissions while taking action that results in a thousand or a million more greenhouse gas.
If you believe having children is a net positive, go for it. I’m not lecturing you to avoid it.
> Labeling a comment “Toxic” is a good way to shut down interesting discussion.
That's certainly your opinion. My opinion is that this thread of analysis (a) is not interesting; (b) tends to propagate harm.
I think the discussion is not interesting because it lacks intellectual rigor. I mentioned that the subject of having kids is an irrelevant red herring. I think we can call your thesis a form of "whataboutism." You actually double down on this in your response. Kids on a farm? Whatabout cows? (It's a vegetable farm. Try again, I guess.) Let me also add that there is no logical limit to your analysis. Who is responsible for your carbon use? You or your parents? Is this toxic comment on the internet something I should address with you or your grandmother?
The harm-causing part is more important. You are saying--here and in siblings--that "other people" can/should have children and that society will be sustained by babies who are "born anyway," but that people who procreate have lost the moral agency to participate as your equals in the climate discussion.
This is toxic (harm-propagating) because it treats biological procreation as a distasteful externality. Procreation is not an external process when we are considering anthropogenic climate change. Worse, you are drawing an artificial line to separate people who can have valid policy opinions on climate change from those (parents) who can't. Ironically, this is the same thing that you accused me of doing when you objected to my use of the word "toxic."
IMHO a voluntary reduction in human population by a few billion through reduced birth is a perfectly viable, sustainable long-term strategy; all the drawbacks and criticisms appear when someone wants to encourage that with various means (i.e. not fully voluntarily) or when it's posed as some solution to things which need a faster reduction than possible this way, e.g. climate change won't be prevented even if we went totally zero-birth for a decade but the current population kept the current emission rates.
It doesn't even have to be voluntarily in the sense of "making a decision to". More like voluntary in the sense of "have no specific need to".
In the most developed countries, children are now more of a burden than a gain, which is why women are having fewer of them every generation.
Not only because they're expensive, but because they are often born unhealthy (physically, mentally, or both) and are a large, often unrecoverable blow to most careers.
Since we don't need children to work on the farm or to let us move in with them when we're old (er, less than previous generations, anyway), it becomes purely a "nice-to-have" decision.
And then if somebody does voluntarily have children, they don't have much of a leg to stand on when lecturing others about their impact on climate change.
I get your point and am on neither side of the fence here, since I do not think, we should rely on individual action at all.
I just want to add to the conversation, that somehow your reasoning strikes me as a bit selfish. It is of course true, what you are writing. Still reading it, makes me sad. I am missing some higher meaning. Who cares about a career in the end? A career in our system is just a story of someone, who exceeded at providing value. But for whom, if you do not have kids?
I am missing a bit of Kant in there. A little bit of "You get one (life), you give one back." We (including you) just cannot all do it like that, if we do not want to end our lives rather uncomfortably. So again something about ultimate maximes and what they should be.
What's selfish about not having children? To whom or to what do I owe bringing a child into the world?
It's more likely the opposite: a lot of people would agree that their parents' decision to have children, particularly at a time when they couldn't afford them or lacked the mental strength to care for them and raise them in psychological safety, was selfish.
You have misunderstood: I'm not suggesting childfree people are better than people who have children.
I'm suggesting childfree people have a negligible impact on climate change compared to people who have children.
You can bring "moral high ground" into it wherever it seems applicable, but I have not done that. I've said only that it's hypocritical to criticize a person for their climate impact while simultaneously making a thousand or a million times more of a climate impact.
I get where you are coming from, I read all your comments here.
You are making an assumption that children just are a net negative.
As others have mentioned the carbon footprint of a child is miniscule compared to an adult,
They are not driving, flying, owning homes, etc for a while, and many never will.
One of those children could very well be the solution to that, and many other problems.
As for moral high ground you insist that you are better for having made the choice not to have children, as you see their opinions as less than and not worth listening to, as they have had children.
> What's selfish about not having children? To whom or to what do I owe bringing a child into the world?
Since life can just be given to the next generation and you have already gotten yours, it would be logical to return the favor to the next person and give a new life.
I did not say, that it actually is selfish. Maybe it is not. It just came off a bit like that to me, as I read your comments.
> It's more likely the opposite: a lot of people would agree that their parents' decision to have children, particularly at a time when they couldn't afford them or lacked the mental strength to care for them and raise them in psychological safety, was selfish.
Sure. Although most people would surely still choose to live.
I don't owe having children to your children, or to you.
You can have children if you want, but I'm not requiring that of you.
If your children take care of me late in life, it's because they're exchanging their work for money. And the reason they're obligated to exchange their work for money is because that's the economic system into which their parents decided to bring them.
You do not owe anything to anyone here. You just cannot construct a moral high ground based on your childlessness.
It is not moral to not have children. Paraphrasing Kant: An action is moral, if the state improves when everyone does it.
You cannot recommend everyone to not have children, since you depend on them. So why bring it up as an argument in a thread about climate change in the first place?
The argument is hypocritical. It just does not make much sense.
Do you see it as an optimization problem, where others have exactly enough children to care for you at old age, but so few that the climate suffers as little as possible? If so, you are still relying on the children and do not gain any more imaginary rights to pollute than those parents.
It is absolutely incredible that your sensible comment gets down voted, but it says a lot about the diseased state of mind of some of the people commenting and voting here.
The "career" is a great lie and joke. Imagine choosing to exterminate your heritage in order to please short term goals of politicians or company owners who at best see the career worker as a cost center on a spread sheet.
Long term the population is flatlining and dropping and the price of renewable energy with it.
But even if it doesn't and even if we're forced to make hard choices, the hard choice won't be "should I skip my vacation flight?", it'll be "should I skip raising a CO2 machine?".
Not having children is certainly not the ultimate sacrifice. That seems like a really silly sentiment.
I think suicide would be the ultimate sacrifice, although stupid for climate change. Ultimate because it’s the last act and ultimate because it’s everything that can be spent.
As far as difficulty, devoting one’s life to improving the environment is a bigger sacrifice than childlessness.
And raising positive children is much harder and more of a sacrifice than choosing not to have children. As far as difficulty, it’s like choosing to go to the gym two hours every day vs not.
Wether or not you consider it a sacrifice is really a question of frame of reference. I don't think there's any objective truth in it being a sacrifice or not.
However, given that the person I responded to want to have kids, I assumed that having kids was important to them.
And given that getting kids is basically something that you devote the rest of your life to it comes in the ball park of "as important to you as your life" if you choose to have them.
Good point, sacrifice certainly has some subjectivity to it. If someone uses the term “ultimate sacrifice” then they are ranking sacrifices and have some rationale.
I don’t think there’s an objective arbiter, but for terms of communication there is some need for subjective consensus. I might view chewing sugarless gum as the “ultimate sacrifice” but many others will not.
I don’t think that choosing not to have kids is the ultimate or greatest sacrifice and I gave some of my reasoning. Perhaps if someone thinks kids are the sole purpose in life then giving that up would the ultimate, but I don’t know if that’s very common. And if so, would be quite sad as such a sacrifice for the sake of climate change would be so inconsequential and a waste (like ending one’s own life to prevent emitting carbon from breathing).
I agree with you it was needlessly rude and combative to say. Although I don't feel like I'm making a sacrifice by not having kids and I'm certainly not doing it to benefit that person's kids.
I just don't need or want any.
I only pull the "no kids" card when somebody who does have kids starts complaining about my greenhouse gas unit count.
For someone who wants to have kids it ought to be an extreme sacrifice since they will change most aspects of your life and you will need to spend so much time on them.
For someone who don't it's not a sacrifice. But the person I responded to obviously wants children. So for them it would be an extreme sacrifice to not.
How is intentionally choosing to not have children a sacrifice if you live in a western country? We're at a point where these countries need more people, not less, to have children. Having and raising a child is a difficult thing to do
There are many people who really, truly want children, who would be sad not to have them, but feel it is morally questionable-to-wrong (rightly or wrongly) to bring more people into what they view as a failing world. That is a sacrifice, whether you perceive it as such. It is people making an eventually irreversible decision to not live the life they want to live.
And I disagree with the idea that we need people. The capitalistic society we built needs more people, the planet most certainly does not. I do not think the needs of humanity are de facto more important than the health of the global ecosystem.
> It feels so utterly helpless and pointless working on mitigating my own CO2 emissions when I learn there are people like you taking 100-150 international flights in 10 years. That completely dwarfs any savings I could reasonably expect to make.
This is an oddly off-topic and mean-spirited comment!
Looking at the comment thread you can see how this comment suddenly changed the course of the discussion to something totally unrelated to this post. This is one of those things that can create deeply nested comment threads on an unrelated topic just because of the nature of the comment and how it can trigger people to get involved in an off-topic debate.
It's also so much more complicated. For instance I took 2 flights last year, but ordered hundreds of goods, all coming from a lot of places around the world, including some by plane that were needed within days.
Same for food, same for so many other daily actions that have impact beyond my immediate sphere and I have no idea how or why.
People ought to make an effort to not go overboard, but the generic "the gov should deal with balancing it" is I think a pretty valid answer. Individuals trying to manage their own CO2 is just impossible when we have no idea what each corporations involved are doing behind on their side.
This is the reality of air travel, 90% of the flights (thus the CO2 emissions) are made by a handful of frequent travellers. Moreover those are very unlikely to be willing to cut on air travel for CO2 emission reasons.
So you shouldn't feel bad for your occasional air travel.
CO2 emissions are going to happen, we need to reduce them in a meaningful way. We do that by looking at the breakdown of emissions.
The biggest sector is enery use in the industry (24%), next is buildings, mostly heating (17.5), then transport (16%). Most of the transport emissions is road transport (cars and trucks) and air travel is only 2% of the overall emissions.
And again, air travel is mostly frequent travelers who have no intention to change their habit. That means that as an occasional air traveler, if it makes you happy to visit a faraway country every few years, you should definitely not feel bad about it. Because even if all occasional travelers were to stop flying, it wouldn't make any significant difference.
The biggest change we can make to reduce air emissions is replacing short flights with high-speed rail. There are 400 flights a day between DC and NYC. It should be zero.
It's the opposite IMHO.
Reducing emissions directly will never work because of the Jevons Paradox[0] (at least for CO2 - crazy-high-CO2-equivalent-pollutants are something else).
The only thing that matters is preventing extraction of fossil fuels in the first place.
That's why the fossil fuel industry promoted the idea of "carbon footprints", and why Adtech make their datacenters renewable - greenwashing their business that makes money selling the whole economy of fossil-fuel derived stuff, including flights and the fossil fuel industry's actual propaganda[1][2].
You reduce your travel, presumably for the purpose of reducing jet fuel usage. A few things can happen.
1) Someone else buys the plane ticket anyway, due to availability or reduced ticket price, jet fuel usage remains the same.
2) The plane ride got cancelled due to low number of passengers, replaced with another plane ride, total fuel used by airline remains the same.
3) Jet fuel gets cheaper or more available, so the fuel you thought you saved gets bought for another use, total fuel use remains the same.
Indifferent to how practical you might think it is, one can still hold the view that it is more feasible to combat climate change that way.
Also, it is interesting to see, that you think it is more practical to eliminate air travel, than to employ new techniques to allow air travel while being climate neutral.
The climate morality debate is complicated because it's all statistical. "Drown Bangladesh and Florida" is obviously a wrong outcome, but there's no one individual wrong action that leads there. You could come up with an approximation like "each gallon of jet fuel consumed raises the sea level by one femtometre"; each action is individually trivial, but combined they are not trivial.
The statistical part is the easy part. You can handle the femtometres by estimating how much it'll cost to mitigate the damage, and taxing jet fuel per gallon in proportion (among with other CO₂ emitters). Put tax money to mitigation, and you'll even get a negative feedback loop that'll settle something reasonable.
No, the hard part is that we just can't do the obvious, because there is no one global government that could mandate it. Instead, everyone at every level - individual, corporate, governmental - is better off short-term by not doing any climate mitigation, because those who do will lose business to those who don't.
I think nobody disagrees. Your entire comment is rhetoric handcuffing. Nobody proposed to let "Bangladesh and Florida drown".
We are discussing ways to avoid current path of climate change which can involve other means than reducing mobility.
Unfortunately a lot of people are set on an extremely narrow path, which is a moral issue. How are you going to explain to third world countries that you do not think they have the right to prosper like the US did?
In the end, it is morally wrong to be single minded on the solution to the issues. We need to consider other means. Let the means compete and pick the best way.
I put "fossil emissions" in my original comment for a reason; things which are made from atmospheric CO2 and not fossil carbon, but then release CO2 again when used, are "net zero" and should not be counted unless you want to confuse people.
There are fuels that consume CO2 from the air during production and then burn it during usage (net being close to zero depending on the energy used to generate it).
There is a plethora of alternatives. Synthetic fuels and nuclear energy are well established. bio-fuels is another alternative (though it might not scale).
Yes, when you realize you're wasting your time and energy on something pointless it is time to stop doing that and focus on what you can change. If you want to control of how people travel all over the planet your best option is the fantasy world of computer games, or to vote for a politician that promises this fantasy.
I find very difficult to believe that any personal effort on mitigating CO2 emissions is worth it. A single decision by an individual working on a big company does make the difference, either for better or for worse, but not our own indvidual actions as CO2 emitters.
You don’t know GP’s contributions so it’s pointless to compare your own changes to GP’s. This is fatalistic thinking and ultimately boils down to focusing on the known negative and ignoring the unknown positive.
The idea of an individual carbon footprint was invented by oil companies to shift responsibility for climate change from corporations (the cause) to consumers (the victims). Your personal responsibility to address climate change begins and ends at the voting booth (direct action is also good if you really want to make a personal impact). Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
I feel the same. There are millions upon millions who use a fossil-fuel-powered wheelchair to get anywhere outside of their own house. The house opposite me right now has no less than three SUVs and they are all obese, including the dogs. I was depressed for years trying to live minimally and "do the right thing". Now I've adopted a can't beat 'em, join 'em approach. I just do what I want with little regard to my footprint, just like everyone else.
You think that's bad? The people telling you to eat bugs and stop driving cars and buy fraudulent carbon offsets from corporations they own fly around in private jets sometimes hundreds of times per year.
You are a climate masochist. I recommend emotionally disengaging from topics that cause you grief and that you absolutely can not impact. The thought of personal CO2 emission reduction behavior having any kind of measurable impact on the climate is laughably naive.
I recently had to figure out the cheapest flights I could find to keep my star alliance frequent flier status, which I was at risk of losing because covid changed my business travel behavior. So in the end I was just visiting random European cities, sometimes with a connecting flight (I was keeping my status via flight segments).
That's like saying you shouldn't worry about reducing your personal wasting of food because it doesn't solve world hunger—like when choosing not to fly often there's a small impact that is very much noticeable on a larger scale if more people did it.
Even if the industries, the western world, developing countries forced to use coal plants for cheap energy (and you can choose many more actors that play a larger part in causing the climate crisis) contribute to the problem more than you as an individual, at least you're not actively making the world a worse place.
That makes me sad. Just flying for the sake of keeping a few small green pieces of paper. I guess the airlines are mostly to blame here for this bad method of pricing, but I'd really hope people would not do things like this.
