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Comment by schiffern | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps surprisingly, I agree! But those are the things people actually complain about on social media etc.

Why? Partly because paper straws are accepting a significant comfort compromise for a tiny (supposed) environmental benefit, and vice-versa for private jets. Your lips will feel like you're licking a dry stamp every day for the rest of your life, thank you for your service, meanwhile I'll be emitting a year's worth of pollution in one day for more legroom.

Paper straws and private jets are indeed a small part of the total environmental problem (we've all read Without Hot Air), but I think those two examples best illustrate why people feel the unfairness so sharply.

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Not just for more leg room. I'll take three times as many flights because they're so much more comfortable!

But I don't really think tiktok activism is the answer here. Pretty simple: carbon tax. (Maybe if there were a carbon tax us humies could hang on as competitive elements in the workforce for an extra 6 months?)

Perhaps I shouldn't have said "think are important" but instead said something like, "are emblematic of some problem but are actually insignificant to that problem".

The whole inequality angle of private jets is one thing (which I also think is irrational) but the environmental angle of it, imo, comes completely as a way to deflect from the actual reason people don't like it, envy that people they don't like get to so things they want to do.

It's basically, "I'm not jealous, I actually just care about the environment!"

  >Perhaps I shouldn't have said "think are important" but instead said something like, "are emblematic of some problem but are actually insignificant to that problem".

No, I got your meaning! My goal was to create a good emblem. ;)

  >It's basically, "I'm not jealous, I actually just care about the environment!"

Of course people are jealous. Should they not be? Jealousy is an adaptation to dysfunctional resource hoarding in social groups.

That doesn't invalidate the fact that wealth inequality by itself is also (oddly) bad for the environment.

I highly recommend going back up and watching Donella Meadowa original talk on this. She explains it much better than I could! Cheers and salutations

> Jealousy is an adaptation to dysfunctional resource hoarding in social groups.

I wouldn't agree with that at all. If jealousy, as an emotion, is an adaptive strategy, it's certainly for promoting success of the jealous individual, as any successful evolutionary trait is. That seems entirely functional to me. The most successful succeed the most making everyone else want to be successful.

> That doesn't invalidate the fact that wealth inequality by itself is also (oddly) bad for the environment.

I don't think that goes without saying at all. What drives wealth inequality, in modern economies a free societies, is success and innovation. The richest man in the world got his start by helping create a widely used and safe way for people to make financial transactions in the Internet. He then rolled that into popularizing electric cars along with creating what still is the only reliable charging network . He then rolled that into making home batteries accessible (and trying to innovate in the solar field with the solar shingles).

So many of the innovative ideas that have progressed us towards more environmentally friendly technologies have come from and aided wealth disparity.

> Cheers and salutations

To you too!

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