391–400 of 522 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One return flight from Los Angeles to Europe creates as much CO2 as the rest of your life for a year, if you live reasonably eco friendly (still drive to work, but have solar panels for example) Best to skype
Or move to Europe, of course.
The message I"m getting is not that I have to prepare for something or change energy sources , it's that "our lifestyle is killing the planet much faster than we thought". CO2 levels is just one of a myriad of indicators that are off the scale now. By lifestyle I mean supermarkets and restaurants and iPhones and planes ... all the stuff that we're so proud of as a society. Winning, getting ahead, being number one, ou…
Look, we're not "killing the planet". Humans are organisms like any other. Sure, human populations have spiked from millions to billions in recent millennia, and mean per capita resource utilization has increased dramatically. But that's just what organisms do. So anyway, the planet will be fine. Human civilization may collapse, given the risk of crop failure and war. But even humanity will survive. Edit: Many other…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the alternative? As an EU company, if I need to do business in the US then I can't say "let's schedule a meeting in a year while I go on a boat cruise". Virtual meetings only work to an extent -- they lack a human interaction touch. I suppose I can take a train if I go on holiday somewhere in the EU, but insane prices for international trains as well as other shenanigans are not making it an attractive choice.
There's another alternative - the slow boat. You can get from Europe to the US for around $700 on a cargo ship. The biggest difference is that it will take around 5-7 days one way. Most programmer's productivity wouldn't suffer too much from this, though managers or business owners might.
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That's true, but it's also not very relevant. Many asteroids and barren planets are also going to be fine, but I don't think anyone cares about that. People care about the future of human civilization, which is very much at risk.
Yes, but that's very different from "killing the planet". If what you care about is the future of human civilization, then that's what you ought to be talking about. Bringing up "killing the planet" just invites eye rolls. Personally, I care more about the future of consciousness than about the future of humanity, per se .
edit: /mute/moot/g
This is very simple, but something most of the HN people won't be able to do. STOP FLYING! Passenger numbers have gone up in a step change with CO2 count over the last 50 years, contrails compound the effect. The sad thing is - you will all look at this message and think. Why should I have to change? Why me, surely someone else must fix this? Don't wait for governments, don't wait for industry. Make individual choice…
As a % of CO2 emissions, how much is flying?
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss... says that transport is 14% of total global GHG emissions.
And http://www.atag.org/facts-and-figures.html says that airplanes are 12% of transport emissions.
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On the other hand, who needs nation-states when they're submerged under water and their populations decimated?
Keep in mind that it is a perfectly reasonable position to both: a) agree with you and GP (though perhaps not to such a dramatic end), and b) slap on the brakes when discussing constitutionally perilous endeavors that could ultimately harm us more than this discussion can forecast; what else can I forbid or do in the name of existential issues? That I'm in the apparent minority here based on voting is far more alarmi…
Even the constitution does not consider itself infallible, or it would not include instructions for its amendment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Five_of_the_United_Sta...
That said, forbidding advertising of meat is obviously an extreme proposal, not least because of things like this:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/aug/05/synthetic-me...
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/06/21/482322571/sil...
The message I"m getting is not that I have to prepare for something or change energy sources , it's that "our lifestyle is killing the planet much faster than we thought". CO2 levels is just one of a myriad of indicators that are off the scale now. By lifestyle I mean supermarkets and restaurants and iPhones and planes ... all the stuff that we're so proud of as a society. Winning, getting ahead, being number one, ou…
Look, we're not "killing the planet". Humans are organisms like any other. Sure, human populations have spiked from millions to billions in recent millennia, and mean per capita resource utilization has increased dramatically. But that's just what organisms do. So anyway, the planet will be fine. Human civilization may collapse, given the risk of crop failure and war. But even humanity will survive. Edit: Many other…
I don't think anyone really believes the giant ball of iron we live on is alive or can be killed.
"Killing the planet" is shorthand for "making the planet inhospitable and causing harm to a majority of its living inhabitants" or something like that.
So why do so many people feel compelled to derail conversations about global warming by pointing out at length that the earth itself is not literally going to be killed?
It's not informative and not helpful.
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The planet is going to be just fine, the only thing that we can screw up is our ability to live on it in large numbers - which matters a lot to me for obvious reasons. Unless we're speaking about things that literally are extinction events for us , the larger organism doesn't really care about extremely short term fluctuations; in the scale of a few hundred million years the current climate change (or the temporary e…
The sun is hotter now than it was at the PT event. There are serious climate scientists saying that, its possible that a greenhouse effect similar to the PT event happening now, could push earth into a Venus like state.
The Venus atmosphere is 50x thicker than Earth's, Venus is also ~1.4x closer to the sun. Where will all this extra atmospheric mass and incoming radiation come from?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Look, we're not "killing the planet". Humans are organisms like any other. Sure, human populations have spiked from millions to billions in recent millennia, and mean per capita resource utilization has increased dramatically. But that's just what organisms do. So anyway, the planet will be fine. Human civilization may collapse, given the risk of crop failure and war. But even humanity will survive. Edit: Many other…
We're an integral part of the current ecosystem on this planet. We are not killing the planet, we are killing the current ecosystem on the planet; i.e. we are killing ourselves.
The message I"m getting is not that I have to prepare for something or change energy sources , it's that "our lifestyle is killing the planet much faster than we thought". CO2 levels is just one of a myriad of indicators that are off the scale now. By lifestyle I mean supermarkets and restaurants and iPhones and planes ... all the stuff that we're so proud of as a society. Winning, getting ahead, being number one, ou…
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2376452-l-existentiali...