Launch HN: Bend (YC S22) – Automatically measure your company's carbon footprint

I see this point over and over again about how carbon footprint is a scam forced on citizens by companies, and it doesn't make any sense to me. Companies are made of people. If people didn't use a company's products, the company wouldn't exist. Seems like the folks making this point are just more invested in avoiding collective accountability, like they want some mythical powerful government to step in and force all the companies to solve the citizens problems for them while the citizens keep consuming whatever they want. It just seems totally backwards to me.

I agree with your general premise.

10% of companies advertising that they use 100% green energy, while the other 90% of society uses 0% is no better than the government forcing 10% of all energy to be zero carbon.

Economist agree that carbon taxes work, but they work at every level not just the first time it's spent which amplifies the effect.

However, I think I disagree on two important things:

a) fixing climate change is the cheaper option. We're "doomed" only to the extent that system incentives drive us to do the wrong, more expensive thing

b) more info can only help that case, even at the margin.

Voting is the most powerful way for most people to act. Voting with your wallet helps too.

I'm sorry but your are wrong on this one. The carbon footprint is a scam because it is not made to change things but simply shift the blame on citizen Lamda when in fact citizen Lambda has nothing to do with it.

Its been proven time and time again that recycling as it has been sold to the world is a scam. To understand that you only need to look at the years 2019/2020 when China decided to not accept anymore plastic material for recycling. The reason is obvious, it does not work.

But its not news really. Governments and companies have known for decades that we were heading down the wrong path yet chose not to act.

If you want to stop climate change, there is a simple and easy solution. Ban fossil fuels. But that will send our civilization back to the dark ages.

What we should have done is make a plan and start the transition early but instead as always governments have waited and waited even though countless reports warned over the years that we were making things worse.

Alas, governments all around the world were just too happy to collect taxes on petrol/fuel and even encourage citizens to embrace technologies that turned out to have deadly side effects on the local population(see the Diesel scandal in France).

All the while the governments have been pocketing the money in their coffers never to be seen again and the investments in renewable energy have been delayed and/or cancelled(see Germany circa 2010 in response to Fukushima)

It's only in the last few months that most of Europe started waking up to the fact that burning fossil fuels was not going to be the way to go forward. Mind you, not because they all suddenly realized that we should really push renewable energy, no, it's only because the main supply of gas is about to be cut off.

Yet, somehow we see governments and companies turning around and say: You need to watch your electricity usage, you need to stop using plastic wrappers, plastic straws and what not, you need to drive less.

As if people have choice...

But people will make due with what they have. If we don't want people to use plastic straws, then lets ban them. Alas, once again the big companies are against that.

Mc Donald's famously rejected a ban on plastic straws when they could have been at the forefront of this fight and show the way, instead it chose it's bottom line.

Governments could have not incentivized car usage by building better and denser neighborhoods but instead we now have urban sprawl and god help you if you live on the country side and if you don't have a car.

So to sum it up I reject the fact that it is somehow my fault that climate change is happening. I reject the fact that I should try to calculate my own carbon footprint while airlines, car companies and governments just sit by and continue to spew more and more carbon in the atmosphere while I need to feel guilty because I bought some food in a plastic container.

You talk about collective accountability, I am more than happy to do my part when everyone does their part including big companies and governments.

Quite simply, this is a pointless, inaccurate, and expensive method for determining CO2 emissions.