Or having no public transportation whatsoever and move every day a 2000 kilogram vehicle with yourself inside back and forth from point A to point B? With incredible amounts of wasted energy?
It can be marginal at the individual level but very important if it scales to the societal level.
You buy electricity and it's yours to decide how to use it. i.e. heat up your house or mine crypto.
IMO the extreme libertarian view works fine for small groups but does not do a good job of managing collective action problems in large societies when the scope exceeds our psychological bandwidth.
What you are free to do is choose how to allocate resources—heat up or cool down your apartment, train/run a neural network, watch a plasma TV, etc.
Telling people what to do with their resources is central planning, and it has never worked.
And it is true that if they sequester the CO2 that they generate, it's their entirely their business.
The problem is, the actions of others have an effect on me, my kids, and the rest of the world. One person's freedom ends where another's begins.
So whilst I generally feel people should mind their own business, I can't really see how we can just let people do whatever they want without at least having a public debate.
Such lectures are better to conduct somewhere in ultra-luxury resorts, (flying in private jet of course), to decide what "plebs" are allowed to.
Just a couple examples of hypocrisy. 1. COP28 in Dubai (2023): The 28th UN Climate Change Conference saw approximately 644 private flights associated with the event, resulting in around 4,800 tonnes of CO₂ emissions.
2. World Economic Forum in Davos (2022): During this annual meeting, 1,040 private jets flew in and out of airports serving Davos, leading to a significant increase in emissions compared to previous years.
3. COP29 in Baku (2024): The 29th UN Climate Change Conference in Baku experienced a notable rise in private jet arrivals, with 65 private jets landing in the week leading up to the event, doubling the number from the previous year.
I get it. Other people are worse than me, so I have no responsibility and do not have to change anything.
Same thing my kids say about their scholastic results. Very appealing, I get it.
Unfortunately it is not very constructive or responsible. It means only the very worst person has to do something while the other 8b of us can point fingers and sit back.