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Comment by blck | Hacker News Reader

I'm reminded of the comment linked here on reddit from a former Boeing employee employed 2008-2009 (allegedly).

>To this day, I refuse to fly on a 787. I'm sure that the Dreamliners that came off the assembly line after about a year or so were fine but there's that first year of production that, as far as I'm concerned, are ticking time bombs. I talked to many engineers who had worked on that program to know just how badly they rushed that initial production.

Honestly, I already feel guilty flying due to the crazy amount of pollution these planes put out. Now I've got a slight fear that my plane might randomly fuck up due to software and now I feel like I should just stay grounded.

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Is this some new thing making rounds on the internet? Airplanes account for 5% of all CO2 emissions, and only a fraction of that is individuals flying. The average American would have to take a dozen New York-Tokyo flights per year to even double their carbon footprint.

I assume you’ve addressed more important sources of carbon emissions, such as moving to a state that doesn’t require heating in the winter or AC in the summer. (And it goes beyond saying that you don’t use Amazon prime or buy anything shipped air freight.)

This is off topic but it was startling to me when I looked at CO2 stats that there was so little air travel and so much energy generation and heating. I think we have just stumbled upon the real reason we haven't fully grokked climate change yet.. the problem is much simpler and more brutal than most of us perceive.

Installing a foam roof or replacing the insulation in your walls goes a long way and saves a lot of money on energy costs over time.

My family has installed a house-fan that we use whenever we like the out-doors temperature moreso than our in-doors temperature, which is quite often in our summer months at night.

The world's population can't all move to California, so that's not a sustainable option. But yes, improving home insulation is a low hanging fruit.

The overall impact of aviation is actually less than 5%, though it's fast growing and projected to be 5% and more. (And I doubt only a fraction is related to moving people around.) Note that aviation contributes to global warming in excess of its pure CO2 emissions; at very high altitude even water vapour is an issue. Another point of comparison: aviation's overall impact is about 10% of the entire transport sector, the same amount as all water based shipping.

Either way it's a huge amount, there is no such thing as just an integer percentage of overall emissions.

Source: Wikipedia and IPCC, mostly https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/02/ipcc_wg3_ar5...

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