Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seanwilson | Hacker News Reader

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I think you're underestimating the impact of livestock:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_meat_p...

"At a global scale, the FAO has recently estimated that livestock (including poultry) accounts for about 14.5 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions estimated as 100-year CO2 equivalents.[60] A previous widely cited FAO report using somewhat more comprehensive analysis had estimated 18 percent"

> There is also nice political side of Emissions Trading Schemes. It had no effect when it was introduced and it's impact increases little by little each year. Not everyone who would be opposed realized effects of that system when it was introduced.

I'm in strong agreement that taxing emissions is the long-term solution but do you not think the collective actions and influence of individuals have had a part in paving the way for solutions like this to appear? Don't companies, products and political parties appear and adapt (however slowly) to meet the needs of individuals?

I think individual actions are not alternative to systemic changes. Certainly blaming individuals is not a good strategy.

But I agree that everything counts, including political aspect of individual actions.

We just can not feel good about ourselves because we don't eat meat, fly airplanes and avoid buying plastic. It's not enough.

The story with livestock is complicated. From that same Wikipedia article.

> The indirect effects contributing to the percentage include emissions associated with the production of feed consumed by livestock and carbon dioxide emission from deforestation in Central and South America, attributed to livestock production

So now deforestation is equivalent to livestock? Should I say shopping malls and residential areas are a problem because they require all the plants on the land to be cut down and paved over? I really wish these '% of everything' statistics would go away. It is almost always more complicated which fosters climate skeptics.

Energy production - aka fossil fuel burning such as coal for electricity and gas/diesel for - is the vast majority of emissions. We should be focusing on getting our democratic voting power focused on one that one easily digested story to get things done on a nation-state level instead of getting bogged down in these micro-issues. "Everything causes climate change" is impossible to fix. "Fossil fuels and especially cars and coal" cause climate change is very possible to address.

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGG-A80Tl5g and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdrhpThqlCo for examples of more nuance.

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