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Comment by dgrin91 | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I look at these numbers and I think 'is it really worth it to complain about these private jets?'

Looking at the top slot on the list, Thomas Siebel, he uses ~300x an average American. There are maybe 100 names on this list? And each uses less, so ballparking, lets call it ~15k Americans worth of CO2/year.

Yeah, thats a lot, but in the grand scheme of things its a drop in the bucket. If 15k Americans disappeared off the face of the earth today then nothing would change in the climate crisis.

To me this just tells me that we need to be focusing down on the bigger sources (big companies that make lots of CO2)

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The sum of the 161 names on the list is 209109.64, or 13.4K Americans (making your estimate a pretty good one).

Thanks, this made my day :)

Agreed. It's also not the whole picture. Bill gates is pretty high on that list, for example, with 3,058.71 metric tons of carbon dioxide emitted. But he also buys DAC carbon capture to literally take those all of those (and all of his family's carbon footprint) emissions back out of the air. That's not even talking about the secondary effects of being one of the world's largest funders of green energy innovation.

It is not about the numbers. It is about publicly shaming something shameful. Instead of condoning it.

This seems like an emotional angle rather than a rational one.

We are emotional beings. And it is past due for some strong emotional reactions on this topic.

Why is it shameful?

Because it is wanton destruction of public property.

If Bill Gates didn't illegally monopolize desktop computing, his customers would have that money to pay in taxes or donations to fund green energy innovation.

Consider also that Americans are quite high on the list of people with the largest carbon footprint compared to the rest of the world.

> Honestly, I look at these numbers and I think 'is it really worth it to complain about these private jets?'

This got me thinking about Nest thermostats, and how impactful it would be to simply mandate new constructions (or help retrofit existing ones) to have these programmable units that can decrease indoor temperature at night or when nobody is home.

I'd hate to find out that American houses don't have heating/cooking thermostats with a clock.

That doesn't automatically handle people being out, but for several decades they've been standard in other countries.

I can't figure out what you're trying to say

A programmable thermostat has been a basic part of any central heating system in Britain for over 40 years, probably longer. They are essentially timer switches.

One from 1980 would have a 24 hour clock face and two or four coloured pegs at the edge, labelled "on" and "off". You slide the pegs to the time you want the heating to turn on and off. If you have four pegs, there's a switch to use only the first pair, second pair, or both.

That was easily sufficient to set the heating to be on in the morning, off as everyone goes to work/school, on again in the evening, and off at night.

The more modern equivalent has a digital display and badly labelled buttons, and in reality is much more fiddly to use.

If these aren't also normal in American houses then I'm shocked at the waste of energy.

You can see both types here: http://www.gasapplianceguide.co.uk/Danfoss/Danfoss%20Heating...

> ~300x an average American

Usage of average American on that page is 15.52. Not sure what the source is so I will use ourworldindata. It was 14.86 per capita in US in 2021. For example in UK it was 5.15 and in France 4.74 ...

There are two problems with your assessment:

1. This is an underestimation of the actual flight durations:

> However, there are few enough volunteers outside the United States and Europe that coverage may be limited, leading to underestimation of flight time and distance.

2. Much bigger issue is that the comparison used is apples-to-orange. Comparing the gross footprint of an average American to just the private jet use of another person is not a fair comparison. From https://www.npr.org/2022/11/09/1135446721/billionaires-carbo...

> Some of the world's richest billionaires each emit about 3 million metric tons of carbon dioxide on average per year, more than 1 million times the amount emitted by 90% of people, according to a new study.

If you take into account all modes of travel and entertainment by the richest (yatchs, planes, fancy cars, giant mansions etc etc) and how investment props up fossil fuels, 15k quickly grows to be orders of magnitude more.

Your link compares is talking about emissions of their investments, which doesn't make sense to include as part of their CO2 footprint. If the ownership of these companies somehow were magically distributed in a "better" way, the incentives to pollute would roughly remain the same.

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