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Comment by davkan | Hacker News Reader

I think there’s lower hanging fruit for reducing carbon emissions than swapping the annual family vacation for a bunch of VR headsets.

By all means if you’re willing to make that sacrifice be my guest, but I can’t imagine experiencing Venice through a headset.

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> lower hanging fruit for reducing carbon emissions

Taking a bike (when possible) instead of a car, for example. I think many things that we can do fail because of our collective convenience: why take public transport when I can have my private space in a car?

There might be low hanging fruits, but there is human convenience to take into account. Making potential low hanging fruit become had to implement.

> I can’t imagine experiencing Venice through a headset

Most certainly it wouldn't be the same however experiencing a Venice during the Renaissance period using a VR device? That would be better than nothing and would also equate to a "type of" holiday (if done well). Its certainly not something that I can do physically.

> experiencing a Venice during the Renaissance period using a VR device

That's not a holiday. That's a game.

Gamification of holidays! /s

Literally: it's an ever-so-slightly more immersive Assassin Creed 2. I mean, great, but worth spending a grand? Probably not.

I’m 100% down the idea that we have individual responsibility to the environment and must make some personal sacrifice. Paper grocery bags are much less convenient than plastic but I’m in support of legislation to ban plastic bags even if all the cost and inconvenience is passed on to the customer. Biking to work is a great choice if you live in range.

Neither of these deprive you of truly transformative experiences like travel. Air travel will never be a green endeavor. It will always be something that we’ll have to compensate for elsewhere in pursuit of being carbon neutral.

I’m not willing to tell someone that they should not fly across the country to see their friend in order to be an environmentally responsible citizen. Not while we still burn coal and gas to keep the lights on.

Apparently global trade via ships is much worse than airplanes - in terms of environmental impact. Apparently container ships burn extremely dirty fuels once they enter international waters.

I guess regardless where humans start, the dependency on fossil fuels is simply too vast to rollback.

Container ships are definitely worse, but also sadly not feasible to electrify. Power plants are a good start. Short range commercial vehicles as well.

I believe the OP was more thinking of all those corporate flights for a one hour talk. But you don't need VR for that. They could hold them over sms if they could read and write.

Real deals aren't made over a zoom call. They just aren't. That's why they still fly there even though they are well aware of how to use zoom.

they fly there and do the deal over email from the hotel.

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