Comment by 29athrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 29athrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Shit that is environmentally unsustainable at scale:

- Air travel: The carbon footprint per person is similar to burning your trash for a full year. Did you recycle bottles for a year, planted a tree, donated to WWF, rescued a bird from an oil spill then traveled to an environment conference on another continent? Congratulations, you now pollute more than someone drives monster trucks to work and on burns all of their trash.

- Pollution holidays: Wow, it's that non-descript holiday again. I need to buy lots of single-use decorations made out of plastic and then throw them away days later. For this, I will go to a party store that sells only those items. Most of them are made out of toxic stuff like phthalates, PVC, vinyl, and stuff that will poison me, but hey... It's the non-descript holiday again! If I do this, people will encourage me to do the same every year because I am contributing to the creation of trash that will not degrade for thousands of years, and I will do the same for Halloween, my birthday, Christmas, and every minor holiday in the calendar including my dog's birthday!

- Technology: Oh, look, this hardware runs 5% faster than my current one. I need to dispose the one I have and buy the new one for an absurd amount of money, then discard it again when the next one comes out. It's all sealed and glued inside so that you can't repair it, and no replacement parts are sold. That's a really good idea. I am going to support the companies that do this so that they can continue to sell things that cannot be repaired and will become trash in less than 5 years! Look how fashionable I am with my soon-to-be piece of trash! Surely software companies will make the most out of my new hardware by rewriting everything in BloatedScript to save development costs and adding useless eyecandy that requires a supercomputer.

- Burning man. Need to deal with your emotional problems in a pyromaniac way? just watch a video of a previous burning man burning instead of burning shit every goddamn year, or get into a Minecraft game in VR (preferably your own server) and set all shit on fire, or, even better, work for the fire department and see shit burning all the time, how about that? Fuck...

Edit: corrected wrong info about leaded fuel in aviation. Thanks for the correction

Only piston-powered air travel uses leaded fuel.

Overwhelmingly, anything that you bought a ticket for (and certainly anything that you took to another continent on a ticket) is burning Jet-A, which does not have a material amount of lead content.

What's wrong with not traveling?

Oh no, I won't be able to spend the money I don't have to impress people that do not care about me in the slightest via Instagram.

Oh no, I won't be able to attend that conference that's 100% recorded and available in video format where I see the material and the presenter in better detail than in person with the ability of replaying, pausing and resuming at any time I want, where 90% of the time the content talked about is an abridged version of what can be learned from a used book, free online documentation or a PDF I can buy for a few dollars.

Oh no, I won't be able to visit some random distant place while there are plenty of nearby places that are just as nice.

Oh no, I won't be able to visit some snobby establishment that sells overrated products such as fermented fruit juice that I don't even really like that much and can't even distinguish from a boxed product sold at 1/100th of the price at my local grocery store.

Surely in 2 generations where everyone is living in a ruined planet eating diseased vermin people will care about my pointless traveling. I am such an important person! I am surely more important than the environment that sustains the life of everyone in the planet that's why I am so entitled to such things.

You should consider giving travel a try, though. When done right, it has so many benefits that I cannot recommend it enough.

Among them: it gives you a better perspective on life, it gives you a better understanding of what is there to improve in your own community that you didn't notice before because "we have always done it this way", and it tends to make people less judgemental and/or racist.

People won't care about droughts in Africa they see on TV, but if you could bring them there and see it with their own eyes I can guarantee you they would.

> it has so many benefits

... but that's true of everything that we could ever consider banning in the name of combatting climate change.

The majority of benefits you mention are absolutely not applicable to the majority of travelers, specifically those only visiting countries for a short time in areas designed for tourists. Also doesn't take into account repeat tourists (e.g. masses in North/West Europe going south by plane every summer).

There's a humongous difference between your average Ibiza tourist and someone visiting Asia to study the culture. From experience, the majority is far closer to the former than the latter.

When done in a purposeful way, sure.

But for 99% of the people it's like:

- "white sand good. clear water good. sun good."

- "yum, food."

- "tee hee. disney."

Not all travel is frivolous, and demonising ordinary people as if they’re doing it for no reason is unhelpful.

There are those who move to new countries and have an entirely reasonable desire to still see their families from time to time.

For business deals and diplomacy, meeting in person remains a far more effective way of building rapport and good working relationships than anything tech can provide just yet.

And travel for tourism, while arguably unnecessary, does contribute to producing more educated & empathetic segments of the population who are more likely to see themselves as part of the world rather than identifying only with their tiny corner of it. It’s a difficult one to quantify, but something we’d notice if it ended. There are also parts of the world that would become much poorer if not for tourism.

I’m all for finding ways to reduce the need for travel, asking people to travel less where possible, and of course pouring investment into decarbonising aviation. We’re at the point where it’s one of the necessary actions society needs to accept.

But don’t pretend these are not very real and in many cases very painful sacrifices we’re asking people to make.

You can mention all reasons you want. But travel has to adapt to the needs of a healthy environment and not the other way around.

If that means you have to travel on a donkey for 5 years to make it to a really important conference then so be it. If that's too much then do it online.

You have spectacularly missed the point, and that’s not a good faith response.

No, you miss the point.

My point is attacking the central belief in this civilization, which is that human convenience is more important than everything else.

What is more important: a) the extinction of a mammalian species, or b) a few people not being able to see their family? To me the response is very clear: a)

If a) is more important then if 2% of humanity cannot see their family that's OK. It's the cost of sharing the planet with other species that also need to survive.

I don't care if a few million people cry at night, that's better than a species going extinct. Extinction is forever.

In perspective, none of the stuff you mention really matters. Your convenience is not as important because there's 8 billion of you. You are not as special as you think.

That is, again, not what was argued.

Your comment claimed all travel is ‘pointless’ and without any reasonable justification. It was filled with invective for anyone who might have chosen to travel at some point. It was an argument lacking in perspective or empathy.

You’re now trying to turn this into a question of whether these might be justifiable sacrifices but that was never a point of contention. In fact, it’s something I raised first.

As I said, not a good faith response.

Humanity has to downsize its expectations and ego. Cutting most passenger air travel is a key part of that. Next we should ban most non essential plastic objects. Then slam a sticker in front of every product with its carbon footprint.

All beings on Earth will go extinct at some point; it’s a matter of when. Extending that significantly has merit, but must be traded off against many factors, including convenience and quality of the lives lived until the point of extinction.

Perhaps we should ration the population to 2 Billion or so, to give everyone who lives a better life, mean, median, and mode, than we can at 8 Billion. Perhaps 8B is OK, but only if those 8B each make deeper sacrifices than the 2B would have to…

Starting by eliminating all expectation that it is normal for a human being to travel frequently on planes.

Is that the optimal first step in terms of return for the environment over delta-convenience, delta-fun, and attention budget?

I’d expect that other improvements sort far, far higher on the return over expense scale, but are not as symbolic.

Convenience? fun? Dude... there's a literal extinction going out outside.

Cargo ships produce upwards of 30% of all NOx pollution, 10% of sulfur dioxide and 3% of all CO2.

When almost everything (except food) that you need to buy comes from China, it is impossible to not be a part of the problem.

> When almost everything (except food) that you need to buy comes from China

When almost everything (except food) that you want to buy comes from China

I'd love to buy UK-made stuff but the country sold out to cheap sweatshop nations decades ago

Or buy used stuff that's usually better quality and built to last.

NOx and SO2 are (primarily) local pollutants, and get broken down over time. Cargo ships is a relatively small contributor to greenhouse gases for most items. (I would not be surprised if a few hundred km by truck causes larger greenhouse gas emissions than around-the-world by ship.

That is an out of date factoid intended to stop the transition to EVs by making ICE pollution seem minor. Even when it was popular it ignored the work being done to fix that problem.

Fortunately, we moved to EVs and now all but the particularly resistant to reality accept they are better than ICE, in quality, efficiency, cost and carbon.

Meanwhile, we also passed some regulations to stop the cargo ships burning really dirty fuel which we were just letting them do for no good reason.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/at-last-the-shipping-industry...

> Public health experts estimate that once the 2020 sulfur cap takes effect, it would prevent roughly 150,000 premature deaths and 7.6 million childhood asthma cases globally each year.

> “There are very few examples of air quality regulations that have as broad a reach of benefits as this one,” said James Corbett, a professor of marine science and policy at the University of Delaware, who has conducted seminal research on international shipping emissions. “This is going to benefit children and adults in coastal communities located along major shipping lanes — not only [near ports] where ships are delivering cargo.”

So now cargo is both efficient and clean. And people are working on ways to make it even better, usually involving global regulations.

It's true that some planes fly on leaded fuel, but commercial airlines generally do not. It's only piston engine planes that fly on leaded AvGas, all jet aircraft including tubroprops fly on fuels like Jet A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_fuel)

Jet fuel (including that burned in turboprop planes) is not leaded.

yes it is

https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/leaded-aviation-fuel-and-enviro...

No, it's not. That article is clearly about leaded aviation gasoline, not Jet-A.

> Avgas is a specialized fuel used to power piston engine aircraft

The vast majority of airplanes in operation - be it per passenger numbers or cargo tonnes - aren't piston engined but turboprops, turbofans and turbojets.

The link says "Jet aircraft and turbine-powered, propeller aircraft do not use avgas, but instead use fuels very similar to kerosene, which does not contain a lead additive."

So I think the reply was accurate.

That’s not jet fuel.

Might be easier to say 8B people wanting to live the developed country lifestyle most people desire.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com