21–30 of 80 posts
This is why I am in favor of a carbon dividend: tax carbon emissions at the source and distribute the revenue equally among residents. This way the average person doesn't experience any difference. The main challenge is finding a reasonable way of dealing with imports.
Which requires revisiting the postal treaties that lead to shipping from China costing less than across town.
I can find 3.7 * 10^13 kg CO2 for energy yearly worldwide.
On the other hand, there are around 25 * 10^3 private jets each emitting 4.9 CO2 kg/mile, with mach 1 being 767 miles/hour, which gives 4.9 * 25 * 10^3 * 767 * 24 * 365 kg CO2 = 8.23 * 10^11 per year assuming the jets are running all the time at the speed of sound.
8.23 * 10^11 / (3.7 * 10^13) = 2.2%, with assumptions that make this a significant overestimate. Internet sources claim 0.9% from civil aviation.
But let's do another thought experiment: take everything from everybody. Clothing, housing, cars, infrastructure. If you also take away agriculture, the current population's numbers will starve, but not before foraging anything left. If you don't, then the environmental footprint of a naked and destitute human population in its current numbers will still be damning to the planet.
If you don't think any of this is accurate, take a look at the Middle East. Most of what once was the cradle of civilization because of its fertility is now cracked desert. And that happened way before the modern age. You can also go a little back in time, to the beginning of the Holocene, and see how humans had already managed to cause a great extinction.
Maybe there is a "middle way" where we enforce an acceptable level of wealth and well-being for each human being, and keep our demography in check, and we escape runaway greenhouse effect. It will be a regime that many today would find disagreeable (myself included), but some sacrifices must be made. And/or we start talking seriously about those rockets to move out of the planet....
Was it really so hard to find an ineffective policy for reducing carbon that he had to name check one aimed at a different environmental goal?
I bet they are. Regulation impacts everybody equally. So if you have a poor person who is responsible for 1% of the emissions compared to a rich person increased regulation applies to each of them in the same way, for example paying more for a hamburger. That is not disruptive or consequential for the rich person either financially or in their emission footprint and they get to feel good about making the world cleaner.
Aren't "personal carbon footprints", whether of the rich or not, insignificant compared to industrial carbon emissions? I can find 3.7 * 10^13 kg CO2 for energy yearly worldwide. On the other hand, there are around 25 * 10^3 private jets each emitting 4.9 CO2 kg/mile, with mach 1 being 767 miles/hour, which gives 4.9 * 25 * 10^3 * 767 * 24 * 365 kg CO2 = 8.23 * 10^11 per year assuming the jets are running all the tim…
I'm not confident that when people make this comparison, they account for the double counting. After all, most (?) industry does something that's eventually consumed by someone. What proportion of responsibility goes to the industry versus the consumer? Obviously not a well-posed problem.
I don't think I disagree with anything in the article. However, I'd weary that many people extrapolate the conclusions to mean that the average person shouldn't do anything differently. For many many people in the world (not all yet), their ROI is positive for most household and transportation electrification projects. That is, they not only help the environment by switching to electric appliances and cars rather tha…
It’s like everyone shares the pool, and everyone gets out and goes to the bathroom to defecate. But not this one guy, he “doesn’t have time” to get out and shit, so he just shits over in the corner of the pool.
It’s still better that most people use the bathroom, but it’s pretty demotivating to some people to see that guy celebrated for his achievements while he’s shitting in everyone’s pool. Hopefully his contributions to society are ambitious enough from a humanitarian and humanist perspective to make it worth it to most people.
This perspective is why I try really hard to avoid shitting in the pool, as well as only pursuing goals that I believe can have a genuine and sustainable improvement, no matter how small, on the quality of life of most everyone on the planet-either directly or indirectly.