alt Hacker News> Is your carbon footprint below what is sustainable?
What a waste of time this is. Carbon footprint? Zero-emission homes? The climate is global and the balance sheet is spread across all of us. Someone with a disability might have much more use for cars and transporation than someone who is able-bodied. And homes out in the boonies without much sun (for solar power) might need a diesel generator for their three-times-a-year power outages in order to keep up productivity and a comfortable existence. And twenty miles from that house is a village full of grid-connected homes running on hydropower. As long as the “balance sheet” is okay we should not fret about this individual stuff.
“Carbon footprint” was explicitly designed as a distraction away from British Petroleum and onto the consumer. I think the kids call that a “whataboutism”.
> I consume things produced all around the globe, either as items like phones, or food, and the food I do probably daily (I really like fruit, so bananas, mangos, avocados etc).
Yeah things are made in Vietnam and China now. And that is the consumer’s fault? That eco-friendly wooden utensils used in Europe are made in China?
Step one. Create and design a deeply interconnected, global market with specializations. The signal is just money, the most fungible asset. Step two: externalities. Step three: use money (see step one) to market your scapegoating to everybody, in direct contradiction with the sheer simplicity of step one; no, consumers aren’t supposed to just use money/price as the signal, that’s evil and has a high Carbon Footprint.
> My point is: my carbon footprint is pretty low, and I try to be mindful about not wasting resources. And it's not that hard, I don't feel like I am missing out on something if I don't drive a car. But I still took my kids to Spain on a vacation, and we still flew there to sit on the beach. Giving that up is hard, and making them sacrifice their childhood fun is hard.
I dunno, an extra twelve degrees Celsius and beaches is worth those flights? And sacrificing childhood fun? Children are an endless maw of desires. Of course if you give them the idea of something (or the TV does) and then don’t go through with it is the greatest crime in the history of humanity. And yet, our parents went without all of that, etc., despite their identical child programming.
Replies
Honestly the only thing I see here that is a waste of time is trying to communicate with people that don't read and stick to canned tired responses they iterate on like an LLM.
I was replying to a very specific comment that said paraphrasing "I don't get how people can choose to ignore it". The point of what I wrote was, to an extent almost everyone ignores it, even I do, and I asked what is it that you actually DO that makes a difference. Because I don't know a single person that makes a total commitment to fixing this problem. Discussing who's fault is it is for useless people. Solutions aren't done by assigning blame so you can continue on with your day. The world can likely not survive people in every corner of the world eating food grown in some other corner of the world. The "balance sheet" is clearly not okay.
Now continue having fun proposing simplistic snap your fingers it's done solutions to the hardest problem humanity has ever faced, right at the intersection of basic human psychology, needs and desires to lead a comfortable life, and an economic system that by definition doesn't see further than its own nose.
So step one is actually: people do ignore it and this is not going to change. How do we fix the issue with this constraint in mind?
I don't think GP is trying to say they're so much better than the rest. Their point is that the majority of earth-dwellers, including their own relatively climate-conscious lifestyle, are not (and are not willing to) do nearly enough to meaningfully affect the situation.