If we, the tech-savvy people, start pushing for it, it may have a chance of succeeding. On the other hand, if we take your defeatist approach, it's an absolute certainty that nothing will change.
>For example, me posting this comment is pushing for it a tiny bit.
>Some organization like the EFF could campaign for something like this.
what is "it" and "this", though? can you give me something a little more specific than "restore all the mechanisms that made the use of smartphones and internet optional"?
>Making algorithmic social media unappealing could help too.
i mean, i absolutely agree that this would be a net positive for society. but i dont see how it fits into your statement of making the internet optional.
Would the A/B filesystem approach à la Android be a good way to distribute Linux with ZFS-on-root without all the angst from DKMS modules versioning?
[Maybe unrelated, but just occurred to me (some horror stories have prevented me from trying ZFS-on-boot in linux after Ubuntu botched it with their Zsys “adventure”).]
If i understand the intention of a zfs root combined with an a/b approach — it feels like this btrfs root and immutable gives you the same benefits but with better mainline support.
> Would the A/B filesystem approach à la Android be a good way to distribute Linux with ZFS-on-root without all the angst from DKMS modules versioning?
This is exactly what Valve's Steam OS 3 does. (Except it uses Btrfs for the two root partitions, not ZFS.)
You might be interested to check out the Viennese model - Approximately 220,000 municipal flats and 200,000 subsidized dwellings form the backbone of Vienna's housing system, housing about 50% of the population.
Prices in Vienna are so much more affordable than in comparable European cities - Munich, Hamburg, Berlin to speak of Germany, not to say Madrid, Paris, Barcelone, Milano.
I'd assume the point is that they think that the possibility of serving the website to an individual physically within a prohibited country constitutes unacceptable liability.
A simple back of the envelope calculation shows that Felix causes between 70 and 110 tonnes of CO2 emissions per year just from flying.
Paris accord says 1.5t per person per year, from all activities, Felix's flying alonre is ~10-15x current European yearly per person emissions and ~50-75x those compatible with +1.5C.
If you want to reduce air travel for environmental reasons, then tax it more.
Shaming individuals doesn't seem to be productive or helpful.
Air travel works for people if the benefits outweigh the costs. The only thing that changes behavior is to change the costs.
And even if costs were 10x there are still plenty of people who will fly tons, because it would still be economically productive. There are always going to be people who fly 10x more than others, because certain jobs and roles simply require it.
> If you want to reduce air travel for environmental reasons, then tax it more.
> Shaming individuals doesn't seem to be productive or helpful.
First, none of us have any power to "tax it more" so this is a dead end of discussion. Second, people have agency and we can hold them accountable socially for negative actions even if they are abiding by the current laws (or tax regime). This happens all the time, because laws don't fully align with morality in a culture. Suggesting that we should leave such things to the sole discretion of the economy and taxes describes a strange unhuman-like society that we don't live in.
> Suggesting that we should leave such things to the sole discretion of the economy and taxes describes a strange unhuman-like society that we don't live in.
Well, the choice is: either we leave it to economy and taxes which work, or we'll rely on shaming which doesn't work. To put it another way - it depends if you want to actually fix the problem or just want to have a moral high ground and don't really care about solving the problem.
> First, none of us have any power to "tax it more" so this is a dead end of discussion.
You probably have more power over that than changing a whole population's behavior.
I'd wager you probably have more power over that than changing just one person's behavior (Felix).
> Second, people have agency and we can hold them accountable socially for negative actions even if they are abiding by the current laws (or tax regime).
And people are holding you accountable for the shaming. This leads primarily to polarization, not change. Polarized folks are more likely to increase the negative behavior.
Do you think that comparing someone's CO2 emissions with the average and pointing out that it is much higher is value-free, just a totally neutral observation for no reason? That the commenter is fine with it? Or even that it's a good thing?
But I'll also respond to your questions: my purpose is to show that your claim that the original comment was "free from judgement" is wrong. I'm not neutral, I'm attempting to show that your claim is obviously false, that it's not plausible at all. Of course I'm trying to judge a comment that seems wrong.
So now that I've replied honestly to your questions, will you reply honestly to mine? Repeating:
> So you think the commenter was neutral? No judgment? Again, what was the purpose of the comment then?
Because if the purpose wasn't to shame the person for their carbon footprint, I can't imagine what else it possibly could have been.
But you see: not one comment here is neutral. It would be silly to expect a comment to be neutral, such a comment wouldn't be written in the first place. I think the original comment expressed the point while staying as neutral as possible.
> So you think the commenter was neutral?
Yes, it stated some facts.
> No judgment?
Yes, it contained no explicit value judgement. Any value judgement we bring into it is our own.
> Again, what was the purpose of the comment then?
How would I know the purpose of someone else's comments? I don't even really know what my purpose is debating here with you. I certainly don't see myself persuading you of anything :)
What you write doesn't make any sense. You say it's "silly to expect a comment to be neutral" but the comment is "as neutral as possible" and then answer if the commenter was neutral with "yes". Those aren't consistent.
I don't know what definitions of neutral or value judgment you're using, but I hope you can use this as a learning opportunity. The original comment has the obvious implicit judgment that a greater CO2 footprint is a bad thing. This is shared context. It is so obvious it doesn't need to be explicitly stated, any more than "murdering people is bad". The purpose of the comment is clearly to shame the person for having such a high carbon footprint, otherwise there's no purpose in bringing it up. I don't know what your purpose was in trying to deny that. But if you genuinely didn't understand before, I hope now you do, and that this has been helpful in improving your reading comprehension or understanding of shared/implicit context.
> The original comment has the obvious implicit judgment that a greater CO2 footprint is a bad thing.
No it did not contain any judgement. That is your reading and not the comment.
> This is shared context.
The world is a large place and different people share different context.
> The purpose of the comment is clearly to shame the person for having such a high carbon footprint, otherwise there's no purpose in bringing it up.
Informing perhaps?
I wonder what your gripe is: Do you think it's inappropriate to mention the CO2 at all? Or do you think that the poster should have said it in a different way? In what way?
> That is your reading and not the comment... different people share different context.
That makes as much sense as saying that the comment being written in English is just my "reading" of it, and that in a different context all the words could have entirely different meanings. That is technically true, but also completely useless when you're engaged in a real-life conversation with the rich context of the year 2026 on planet Earth... I tried to explain to you the shared context in case you were somehow ignorant of it. If you insist on denying that, then you're going to have a very hard time communicating with others, as you seem to be having with this conversation. Good luck.
You wrote one of the solutions as if it conflicts with the other one.
Let's raise the tax on an activity according to its negative side effects, while pointing out individuals that do a lot of it and dont take personal responsibility.
If you run a company or companies on two coasts and have a wife and family on another continent (say she has her own career and can't move), then what exactly are you supposed to do?
I don't know this guy's personal life, but the people I know who fly tons fit into this profile. E.g. the wife can't move because she's a tenured professor at her university, and he's got to be at both offices regularly. He's best qualified to run the company/companies, and he's not going to get divorced to reduce his CO2 emissions.
What exactly is the solution you propose? What personal responsibility do you expect them to take? You think he should get divorced? Only see his wife and kids four times a year? Have his company/companies suffer because he can't be there in person? Quit his jobs?
And let's be clear, there are lots of jobs that require tons of air travel. If you're a highly specialized repair technician for certain equipment, all you do is constantly fly around the world fixing equipment wherever it is. If you're a CEO of a multinational company, you're constantly flying around to different offices. Are you looking for "personal responsibility" here too? How?
I can't tell if you're serious or if you really think someone who has a family on another continent and is running two companies on opposite coasts is some kind of victim of their circumstances and needs a special keyboard warrior to comment on HN in support of them, lest they face the consequences of a little more tax that they'll never miss or some social shaming.
I'm sorry, I don't want HN to to be the place where we get into a fight over the mildest inconvenience for people who are already living extravagant lifestyles.
What I'm opposed to is some hand-wavy demand to "take personal responsibility" without suggesting exactly what they're supposed to do and whether any tradeoffs involved are reasonable.
And please don't call people names. You can write comments here without calling other people "keyboard warriors". Nor is it helpful to try to shut down some viewpoint by claiming that somebody doesn't need any extra support.
And I think most people would consider not seeing their family more than e.g. four times a year more than just the "mildest inconvenience".
I think a broad tax would just make it more difficult for middle and lower class to fly. Tax the business/first class and frequent flier, but don't push people who can already barely afford to fly out.
> I think a broad tax would just make it more difficult for middle and lower class to fly. Tax the business/first class and frequent flier, but don't push people who can already barely afford to fly out.
No, it's the other way around. If flying is bad then poor people absolutely have to be priced out of it. I know that it sounds absolutely awful, but unfortunately taxing just business and first class won't do much for reducing emissions if flying will be affordable for and used by billions of people.
I appreciate this concern, but "poor people exist" is not a valid reason to continue destroying the environment, imho. It's not just people that have to bear the repercussions.
That said there are probably some work-arounds, tax free twice a year, tax rebate or some-such.
> Shaming individuals doesn't seem to be productive or helpful.
I don't see how much support from history for that viewpoint. Some examples of positive societal change driven in part by shaming individuals: drink-driving, civil rights, sexual harassment, automobile safety, the slave trade, McCarthyism.
All those cases also have huge penalties or effective costs associated with them. Is there an accurate "shame first, then penalties came later" stand point?
Automobile safety in my life has only changed after fines.
Sexual harrassment still happens and doesn't seem to be helped by shaming someone as much as firing them. Though we often don't have the guts or legal backing to publically shame someone.
Most people don't spend a lot of time wistfully considering their CO2 usage, myself included. The religious zeal by which people feel the need to tell me about the ever-warming planet is honestly more off-putting than most actual religions.
Of the very few "f*cks" I can give in my life, I prefer to spend mine as I choose rather than being scolded for not giving mine to the pressing issues that others deem important.
The thing is that everyone alive today and in the future is footing the bill for that indifference. It's nice that you don't care, but it's not something I'd brag about.
I too don't want to be a martyr hermit who don't travel and consume just to cur my CO2 emissions in half, while someone else generates 10x of that living a full life. That's just dumb, and I consider this whole movement rich people telling poor people that they should be considerate and sacrifice themselves.
If you truly care about the planet, don't have children.
It's an "all hands on deck" situation, yet everyone seems to think that someone else has to do something. You don't need to be a martyr, just to make an effort.
At the very least don't brag about not giving a crap.
> If you truly care about the planet, don't have children.
That's a fallacy; people care about the planet precisely because of children. I don't care about the planet for its own sake; I care because of the humans who inhabit it and their future lives.
Also, humanity spent 100,000 years without flying around the globe, and I doubt they were all living hermit martyr lives.
Is the OP flying a private jet or something? Unless he is, it's a useless metric. The people flying private are responsible for a 1000x a regular persons emissions. It's offensive to suggest regular salaried people are supposed to be "doing something" in this CO2 effort.
It's true that a single private jet is causing tons of CO2 emissions. But in the end, all consumers control the market.
You can jump one link further in the chain to regions with much lower emissions. Somalia/Congo emit over 200x less CO2 per capita in comparison to the US. Do you think that's fair for them if the "regular salaried people" don't care?
If responsibility always gets dismissed by pointing to someone emitting more, nothing changes.
I don't feel it's properly engaging in good faith to say that I don't care. I don't specifically care, in the "feeling shame" sense that the GP had mentioned. As I pointed out, we all have a limited number of things we can realistically care about.
The fact that I happen to care about other things more than this specific flavor of global catastrophe is morally OK.
The way I see it, "from each according to their ability" is the right approach here. If you can afford 30% less flying, red meat etc, then it's your duty to do it. You don't need to make your cat go vegan; just... do what you can, even if imperfectly.
Shame is not necessary, but callous indifference is not acceptable. There is a middle ground where you treat it like a habit to improve, like a step count.
And this is it. This is why we are where we are today. That it is seen as taking a religious zeal to realize how flying very frequently is disastrous for the climate. That's our bar and what we have to work with. Yes, we are properly fucked.
I refuse to worsen my life for an absolutely minuscule abstract benefit to someone, eventually, maybe. I am going to continue eating meat and flying when I want to, and I don't feel the least bit bad about it. It's unfortunate that climate change is happening, but my personal actions are not meaningfully contributing. My choices do not have cascading effects on others; whatever I do, the climate will change in the same manner as it otherwise would have. In that light, I am not going to reduce my QOL just to feel self righteous for no actual benefit to anyone.
You may wonder how this is consistent with my propensity to recycle and follow traffic laws and not do crimes and other socially beneficial minor things to which a comparison could be made to CO2 output: because those all have a greater benefit:cost ratio than flying and eating meat, by far. I am including the benefits of living in a high-trust society in that analysis.
Me planting a tree results in a tree existing for progeny. Me skipping a flight results in absolutely no difference for progeny. I pick my battles. I also plant a lot of trees, literally.
I would totally do this without any shame if I had the need/desire. CO2 isn't going to be solved by well intentioned individuals making absolutely no impact. It will be a generic solution that solves it for everyone, or it won't be solved at all.
I'm also not going to take shorter showers when people are farming in a desert and shipping the crops to China.
You might think this makes me a terrible person. That's probably good. Because it will help people understand what we're up against and what needs to happen to actually solve the problem.
I work as an airline pilot, and I just recently calculated mine to be 65,658 tonnes in my 10-year career so far (not quite so bad when calculated per seat-mile, but still eye opening!).
https://jameshard.ing/pilot/#statistics
There is a section comparing flight emissions to US citizen average total emissions. This might make him feel good, but only 30% of an average American's emissions come from transportation and just a sliver from flying, so it's very likely his total emissions are much higher.
I believe you misunderstand what "average" is: Americans (or people in general), on average, do not fly much.
Some — eg. those who've moved for work — probably fly 10-15x the average, and 10-15x of people fly 1/100th of average. Flying cost and availability correlate with average needs, but that presupposes that some people have higher needs altogether.
Isn't this a drop in the ocean? Why would any 'normal' person forgo flying? How much CO2 emissions have 'world leaders' produced going to summits, or Taylor Swift and her fans flaying to concerts or war flights?
Couple of things: 1) NO ONE is suggesting any one forego flying altogether, or skipping their once-a-year overseas vacation or periodic family visit. 2) THIS level of flying is not normal and is exactly the kind of harmful behavior people have in mind when they complain about frequent flyers. 3) Whinging about summits and Taylor Swift is just a bad faith red herring argument. Obviously less flying is better, no matter by who. To the extent it's related to the topic at all, it bolsters the case for less air travel.
For this particular person, the inordinate factor is not the frequency of flights, but the distance: 40 flights in 2019, mostly from the US to Austria via Frankfurt. Now, there are some jobs that really do require such travel (though the business should probably consider hiring locally even though it might be more expensive?), but probably fairly few. The individual doesn't show flying stats after 2021, but presumably the work did get done even in the pandemic years when they couldn't fly as often.
I don't know why someone going on a vacation would have moral high ground over someone that HAS TO travel for his work. If you are scientist you absolutely have to fly a lot to visit lots of conferences, disseminate your work, provide lectures etc.
Understand this is both an individual and systemic critique. We have the internet. Much of the travel you describe can and should be done remotely. The top 1% of flyers account for 50% of emissions. I would argue most of that probably is unnecessary technically, but there is both a push and pull factor from people expecting some things to take place face to face.
We're adults, we can keep many things in our minds at one time: We should all reduce flying. Regular working people should not be shamed for taking a holiday and flying there. The most frequent fliers for work should make a personal effort to reduce their flying. And companies, conferences, etc. should work much harder to facilitate remote participation and reduce stigma around it, as well as encouraging other modes of travel. Governments should improve alternative solutions such as rail and high-speed rail.
Everything any one person does is a 'drop in the ocean'. Thankfully, we organize and do things collectively very well - it's in our fundamental nature going back to non-human ancestors, and there is a long, rich history of how much we accomplish. Alsmost nothing that has ever been accomplished has been done without a lot of people doing it together.
The general concern around Taylor Swift's emissions has always struck me as shortsighted. Her Eras tour is estimated to have generated around $5bn in economic uplift in the US, at an estimated 10,000 tonnes CO2e for her personal travel. Even if the total footprint is higher, that is thousands of times lower than the emissions intensity of an industry like fast fashion. From an environmental point of view, attending a Taylor Swift show is a much less carbon-intensive way to spend your money than ordering from Temu.
Exactly, I stopped reading when I saw the flying stats. There are people who still haven't clocked where our climate is headed.
I get that you may have to see family abroad or maybe indulge for a holiday, but this is "I'm using an airplane to commute" kind of level.
And here I am trying to book my train tickets to go to London instead of flying even though it costs three times as much just to avoid a few kg of CO2 (among other things), it's making me angry.
Depends where you take the train to London, it is a much nicer experience anyhow than going to airports and people should consider that as well (ignoring climate stuff)!
On the price, the very annoying thing is that fuel for planes is not taxed! Changing this would require quite some effort (falls under some specific laws, that are old and nobody wants to touch, etc.) but I think everybody should just ask "honest tax on fuels!" as this will make less people say (or thin) "but climate change is a hoax". Planes are just unfair competition to other transport due to taxes!
I agree re: fuel taxes, but it’s a complete nonstarter: passengers would be voting against their wallets, and airlines would lobby against it since it’s a vote against their business model.
An alternate approach that would be seen as consumer and business-friendly would be subsidizing companies with a certain level of fuel efficiency per passenger mile, targeted above current levels.
Eh, other people throw litter on the floor and rob elderly folks in their homes. Those people hardly ever get caught, but neither you nor I are are going to start copying their actions.
> The electricity needs of industry cannot be met in a market-oriented manner
Do you care to elaborate? AFAIK, the EU electricity market is... a market?
The design is debatable, as always with these things. Perhaps you wanted to say something precise about subsidies?
One important consideration is that Germany profited from cheap Russian gas, and continued building Nord Stream 2 post Russian operations in Ukraine in 2014. This is a bet that a huge geopolitical risk would not actualize, which it did in 2022.
> If you sell a weapon to the department that is in charge of killing people and breaking things, you don't get a say in who gets killed or how. It's never worked like that.
I can't agree that this is the right comparison. What is being sold here is not just another missile or tank type, it is the very agency and responsibility over life and death. It's potentially the firing of thousands of missiles.
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