Hacker News Reader

Comment by noahth | Hacker News Reader

Except for a practically limitless number of other ways to save money while being more environmentally friendly. For example, buying flour in bulk and making your own bread regularly, or repairing holes in clothes rather than buying new, or, y'know, not living 40 miles from your place of work while commuting by car.

View on HN

Minor point but there's a reason that lots more people don't make their own. Read and a lot of it comes down to time. If 15 mins to 3 hours to make bread is worth less to you than the 2-3$ for a loaf of bread then good for you; otherwise it doesn't make much sense.

And it you get a breadmaking machine then I would argue that it's likely to be less environmentally friendly: a small oven is less efficient than a large one; plus the resources to make an electronic item vs centralised distribution.

I really don't see how making your own bread can be argued to be both environmentally friendly and cheaper, but am happy to be enlightened

When I was coming up with quick examples earlier, I was thinking more of packaging than energy costs, and most store-bought bread is wrapped in non-recyclable plastic. I do wish we had the tools and information to make better calculations of these kinds of trade-offs. I could also contend that the quality of fresh homemade bread beats the crap out of what $2 gets you at Safeway.

But the point I'm most interested in discussing is the idea of maximizing the economic value of your time. In some cases this can be a useful heuristic, but the trick is knowing where and where not to apply it. If you were to apply that line of reasoning to every moment of your life, I doubt that the results would be satisfactory. Personally I'm more of a Gross National Happiness type. Of course, you're welcome to prove me wrong too :)

Just in terms of power efficiency, I doubt baking your own bread is a win (I earned my spending money in high school baking bread from scratch). It takes maybe fifteen minutes (aside from waiting) to make bread dough and shape it into loaves when you're experienced, so time isn't such a big factor.

Making your own bread can be much tastier than store bought loaves. Especially if you catch your own sourdough, and the alternative is buying British bread.

I'm certainly not against baking your own bread, I just doubt it's beneficial to the environment. A good naighborhood bakery is probably an all round win.

Environmentally, baking your own bread might still beat eating meat.

And if the energy to heat your oven comes from a clean source, you are good.

But it would still be more efficient to bake more bread at once using clean energy.

>or, y'know, not living 40 miles from your place of work while commuting by car.

In most American places, it's illegal to build sufficiently dense housing to make it plausible for most people to live within walking or biking distance of their place of work (see Matt Yglesias's book The Rent is Too Damn High for more on this subject). While I agree with your point about not living 40 miles from your workplace, it's simply not possible in most of the U.S. for most people to commute by a means other than cars.

This is only true for certain values of most, and even if it is, has nothing to do with the point that it is possible to arrange one's life so that a car isn't necessary. I won't deny that there are many potential obstacles to the sort of widespread societal change you seem to have assumed I was advocating. Mostly I just wanted to make the point that there are plenty of cheaper ways to be "more green" (than an unknown baseline of green-ness) than buying a Tesla vehicle & installing solar panels at one's home. We all get to make choices with positive or negative consequences for the environment, and not all of them are choices about what or which thing to buy.

So what you're saying is that people choose to live in locations with elected representatives that carry out their will, and yet, it has nothing to do with choice?

Perhaps road funding should only be paid out of gas and car taxes, and the federal government should stop subsidizing people's choices with other people's money, and then perhaps more people would choose to live closer to work.

I.e. you advocate the following?: make road funding as local an affair as possible. Even interstate highways should never go above the level of a few states collaborating.

Can you believe that in Germany you even get a tax rebate for living further away from work?

Rather, the residents of cities should recognize the wider consequences of the policies that they chose, and vote accordingly.

If only America was a democracy, then these laws could be changed.

> or, y'know, not living 40 miles from your place of work while commuting by car.

That's pretty funny since recently here in south eastern Canada we're being reamed up the ass by our current federal government for lack of jobs.

The government is demanding people find work even if it is an hour away which would be roughly 100km (62 miles).

Using leisure time to being more environmentally friendly and living more healthy.

Peddling to work takes longer. But I get exercise. The cave man diet takes quite a bit of effort. But it tastes damned good, is quality time with friends and family, keeps my money in the local economy (farmers markets vs big box grocers) and improves my health.

It just depends what a person chooses to optimize in their lives. When I was working more, it was not feasible to do the cave man diet or home remodeling.

> Peddling to work takes longer.

For me it's actually faster. Due to heavy traffic at rush hours.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com