271–280 of 1001 posts
At some point we need to consider ramping down mass production no matter the consequences. This is getting out of hand.
It's not like there are not options available, many states are not exactly poor and past experience has shown we can scale production insanely fast if there is an important reason for it.
It’s just so hard to know what actions have what impact on CO2 production. Some are high-pain, low-gain (switching devices off instead of standby?), some are opposite (cycling instead of driving when possible etc). For that if for no other reason, I’d rather if consumer prices included an explicit CO2 tax. The here can be a rebate for poorer people, or personal allowance, whatever, but there would be a fixed yardstic…
I felt exactly the same a couple of months ago... I spent hours researching what actions could we individually do and what was its impact. Then I created an app that compiles all this information. You can check it out here https://changeit.app Hope it helps :D
It’s just so hard to know what actions have what impact on CO2 production. Some are high-pain, low-gain (switching devices off instead of standby?), some are opposite (cycling instead of driving when possible etc). For that if for no other reason, I’d rather if consumer prices included an explicit CO2 tax. The here can be a rebate for poorer people, or personal allowance, whatever, but there would be a fixed yardstic…
The emphasis many countries take is to focus on car owners and drivers by taxing private commuters to death, with dubious environmental gains outside of increasing state income. Meanwhile one cargo ship or cruise liner arguably pollutes way more than millions(!) of cars. I'm not sure that's a great route to take politically, no pun intended. They seem to go for the lowest hanging cash grab before going after those wh…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's nothing to "keep" under 1.5C, we are pretty much already there when error bars are considered. 2C is going to be breached regardless because even if we went carbon neutral today we have decades of locked in warming. Why the scientists are not communicating this information which has been in pop-science (as early as An Inconvenient Truth (2006), which documents the lag between CO2 rise and temp rise) is beyond…
> Why the scientists are not communicating this information which has been in pop-science (as early as An Inconvenient Truth (2006), which documents the lag between CO2 rise and temp rise) is beyond me. I might be biased but popular newspaper in my country have interviews in which scientists do talk about that.
The world's population was at around 5.3 bn in 1990 and is now approaching 7.7 bn. This ain't a popular opinion on HN, but I think a key factor to getting climate change under control (whatever that means), is to reduce the growth and to stabilize the population.
The best way to do that is probably improving the education of girls in developing countries: https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/health-and-education
It's invisible, and difficult to measure, so little gets done about it. But if you're a developer who wants to help. Check out:
https://sustainablewebdesign.org/
Pretty much all the solutions to making a greener web would make the web better in general.
- Send less data (efficient video, images, fonts, etc) - Make fewer requests - Use a CDN (the greenest one you can) - Stop collecting vast amounts of personal data - Better bot blocking - Use PWAs when appropriate
- Change the culture, foster competition for doing the above.
I'm sure there's a thousand more items you could add to the list.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The emphasis many countries take is to focus on car owners and drivers by taxing private commuters to death, with dubious environmental gains outside of increasing state income. Meanwhile one cargo ship or cruise liner arguably pollutes way more than millions(!) of cars. I'm not sure that's a great route to take politically, no pun intended. They seem to go for the lowest hanging cash grab before going after those wh…
Cargo ships "pollute" as much as millions of cars, but that pollution is sulphur, not carbon.
It’s just so hard to know what actions have what impact on CO2 production. Some are high-pain, low-gain (switching devices off instead of standby?), some are opposite (cycling instead of driving when possible etc). For that if for no other reason, I’d rather if consumer prices included an explicit CO2 tax. The here can be a rebate for poorer people, or personal allowance, whatever, but there would be a fixed yardstic…
The emphasis many countries take is to focus on car owners and drivers by taxing private commuters to death, with dubious environmental gains outside of increasing state income. Meanwhile one cargo ship or cruise liner arguably pollutes way more than millions(!) of cars. I'm not sure that's a great route to take politically, no pun intended. They seem to go for the lowest hanging cash grab before going after those wh…
It’s just so hard to know what actions have what impact on CO2 production. Some are high-pain, low-gain (switching devices off instead of standby?), some are opposite (cycling instead of driving when possible etc). For that if for no other reason, I’d rather if consumer prices included an explicit CO2 tax. The here can be a rebate for poorer people, or personal allowance, whatever, but there would be a fixed yardstic…
If you're here there's a good chance you have the ability to help engineer these techs. That's going have way, way more impact than riding your bicycle.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It’s just so hard to know what actions have what impact on CO2 production Not really. For some reason the actually quite simple problem is needlessly complicated in the discussions. Stop digging up ANY carbon from below ground where it was safely buried. Any carbon above ground is part of the cycle that includes atmospheric CO2. You need huge effort to change how much of it is in CO2 form at any time while still ha…
You're describing the objective function, but ignoring the constraints. Stop digging up coal - fine. Cut off power to people who have no other power sources? Erm... What about emergency diesel generators for hospitals, diesel use for shipping goods (lowest-carbon-emitting means of transport). It's just not that simple.
Use carbon capture to generate fuel from the air. Yes it's expensive compared to regular diesel, but for use-cases with low consumption like emergency generators that really shouldn't be a huge issue.