Hacker News Reader

Comment by Slimbo | Hacker News Reader

The big hitters in terms of CO2 are Transportation, Industrial production, Power Generation and Food production. For each of those, some big wins:

- Travel less, particularly long haul and travel more sustainable, share a train, avoid air travel

- Buy less, particularly clothes and consumer electronics that you don't really need. Make things last longer, own less. Boycott manufacturers who make deliberately disposable/single use products.

- Make your home more efficient, that means insulation if you're in a cold place and ventalation, use of shade if you're in a hot place. Replace fossil fuel heating with renewable electric where possible

- Waste less food, eat less meat particularly red, buy things that don't have lots of waste attached (like short shelf lives, lots of packaging), and buy food that hasn't traveled far to get to you

Any more suggestions?

View on HN

People keep repeating to avoid air travel... but that's not what's going to make an impact.

People need to rank their daily activities and make changes in their daily lives where the impact is biggest.

Most people fly once a year at most.

In the US I'm thinking that daily transportation and daily use of energy in electricity/heating/air con are at the top of the list.

> Most people fly once a year at most.

IIRC (from https://www.withouthotair.com/ ) one round trip over Atlantic is around the same carbon emmissions as a daily commute with the car. So things are not that simple.

That's why I also think it needs to be cultural norm. There is small minority of people who air travel a lot. If we could somehow manage to change the norm so they would travel less (for example, stayed much longer in the same place), it would be great.

How often do most people fly across the Atlantic?

My point remains: Air travel is not at the top of the list for the majority of people so let's not always mention it as an important action.

It would probably be more productive to tell people to drop all fossil fuels energy at home, and for their car if they can.

> Air travel is not at the top of the list

Almost nothing is at the top of the list. As I mentioned there are not low hanging fruits. Everything is important. Also, not flying might be exactly something doing on individual level, while "drop all fossil fuels energy at home" requires infrastructure change. Also not-flying is a more publicly visible action which might inspire others to follow.

The problem is we should stop with the PR bollocks of doing useless but "publicly visible" actions.

There are real, important things at the top of the list.

Changing electricity supplier, driving less, buying the most efficient car possible or an electric one (if you can charge it with non-fossil fuel sources), etc. should occupy the headlines more that "air travel is bad (TM)"

> Air travel is not at the top of the list for the majority of people so let's not always mention it as an important action.

I disagree. It is important to realize its impact, so that we can organize the society so that it is not needed. The people who don't travel often still need to hold the minority accountable.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_avia... is a good read on this.

If the airline industry continues growing at current rates by 2050 it will consume the whole CO2 budget if we want to stay below 2°C.

In reality we now need to change everything and pretty quickly.

> The IPCC has estimated that aviation is responsible for around 3.5 percent of anthropogenic climate change, a figure which includes both CO2 and non-CO2 induced effects. The IPCC has produced scenarios estimating what this figure could be in 2050. The central case estimate is that aviation's contribution could grow to five percent of the total contribution by 2050 if action is not taken to tackle these emissions, though the highest scenario is 15 percent.

As I said, people tend to overstate the actual impact of aviation.

There are much higher priority things to do.

3.5% for a single activity is actually quite a big deal, particularly for something that in the main is non essential.

To me, air travel is one of those things that's artificially cheap. It's zero rated for tax and largely encouraged for economic growth reasons. It's direct impacts are perhaps not as bad, but indirectly someone going from the UK to New York for a hen weekend is the kind of thing that should be unacceptably and prohibitively expensive.

Actually there are a bunch of culprits and a bunch of solutions: drawdown.org

How do you buy less clothes? Having less clothes just makes the stuff you have wear out faster. All of my clothes have worn out in ways you can't repair. Putting a patch over a hole looks worse than having a hole.

You may buy only clothes that you need and that's great but I'm almost sure that you know someone who buys dress for a one night out. Media and celebrities are always showing on the red carpet in new clothes and you never see them in the same clothes again. It is encourage to buy more and more clothes that very often are getting worn couple times and left in the closet forever. Some countries are better or worst at this. Here where I live, a walk-in closets are pretty rare, in USA they seems to be pretty much a standard. Why would you need a closet the size of a small room just to put there clothes of one or two people?

This actually is surprising news for me. I know celebrities do this but I didn't think real people buy clothes they hardly use.

I just can't bring myself to throw out clothes with holes in them and wear them on the weekends because I don't want them to go to waste.

I encourage you to speak with someone who works at Primark, H&M or other shop of this sort and ask them how sale day looks like, how many of them are happening during the year and how many recurring, known-to-staff customers they have. You will be surprised. I don't even mention one-time-use clothes for special occasions like weddings (even as a guest), prom, Halloween etc.

IME in certain american social circles there is often an expectation for people (especially women) to come up with 'new looks' for social occasions, and not doing so is a sign that the person lacks taste, class, or wealth (or a combination of all 3). The most common noticeable thing is if a woman is attending many weddings, a husband may notice she insists on not wearing the same dress to each wedding. This is because if she does wear the same dress, she is highlighting that she lacks wealth or class at weddings, and if anyone notices her repeating dresses it is considered an affront or disrespect.

Ok, we just need a marketing campaign to reverse that. Same dress better than many since you are damaging the environment - shame on you! :)

If you wear your clothes until they're worn out you're already doing well. There are many people who buy new clothes because they get tired of the old ones.

I patch my jeans and my gloves. It might not look very good, but it increases their life by at least 50%. I've also replaced zippers on jackets because they wore out.

Buy for durability instead of trendy stuff. Favor trekking or work clothes.

I have found that some trendy clothes actually last a long time and some hardly lasts at all. I think I if I pay more attention I could work out how long lasting shirts feel so I can pick them out when looking for clothes.

When it comes to pants I find the pockets always rip first which is really annoying. I haven't tried to fix them yet but I have been keeping them for when I work out how to put new pockets on.

Look at quality of fabric, fastners, and stitching. No matter if 10th generarion grandma or last years sweatshop worker on a worn out machine, the result is where the value is. Cotton, nylon, hemp, even rayon over polyester, ykk zippers are still the best, look for triple stitching, nice tie offs at ends of hems, yank the seam to see if its too tight and will bind and break...

Better yet, many custom outfits can be specd and ordered online for a modest fee if you are like many who don't seem to fit americian vanity, nor asian sizing.

That only works if you wear the clothes you buy until they're worn out. Most don't, most buy clothes and have them sit in a drawer until they make up their mind they really don't like them and send them to landfill or the charity shop. From the sound of things, you're not the problem!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com