>I may be wrong about this (please correct) but I think over 10% of the world's carbon budget is spent on running computers. It's everyone's fault and we all need to fix this. Don't just blame bitcoin miners.
This part seem much more important, compared to trying to offset plane travel by buying carbon credits.
Computers have completely changed the world. Do we all use more carbon or less in total because of that 10% now being used for computing? What did we get for it compared to other uses of carbon?
One way to think of it: Computers enabled massive economic growth, which in turn led to higher carbon emissions. It would be interesting to try to quantify the increase/decrease in carbon emissions due to computing.
Computers can be run by cleaner sources of energy, not planes (at least not with what current technology permits; batteries don't have enough energy density). I prefer plane travel myself, but let's be honest, emissions-wise planes are a horrible way to travel [1].
Comparing planes to cars is slightly silly. One cannot drive across the Atlantic and it’s quite possible to fly much farther in a year than drive.
Flying e.g. 6k miles is reasonably easy to do in a year. I think it is easy to not think about the impact as it all happens in a few gos.
Driving 6k miles takes a long time and would be felt more acutely. It is easier to switch to cleaner forms of energy for this travel and one may be more inclined to reduce this energy usage as it is also a huge time sink.
>A commute of 40 miles per day is ~9600 miles per year.
That's a somewhat short commute by modern American standards too.
Honestly, we'd all be better off if we stopped driving to work and made our cities denser and used trains to get around, had more/better train service between nearby cities, and then took annual holidays in Europe on Airbus A380 aircraft that were configured with only economy seating (700+ passengers per plane).
The difference in difficulty of redesigning all cities, remaking public transportation, and locating all workers near their workplaces or figuring out a way they can telecommute, as opposed to skipping the annual holiday to Europe, is vast.
Well it's never going to happen if you just throw up your hands and say "it's impossible". How about starting right now, by raising gas taxes and changing zoning regulations and encouraging denser development?
Now imagine you go to 2-4 conferences a year, like the plurality of the respondents. In addition to your own 40 mile commute.
If we're making great efforts to even slow down the acceleration of greenhouse gas emissions, I find it odd to come up with ways to rationalize emitting 2-3x the result of a very long commute. Especially when the endpoint is a programming/software conference.
This does not factor in the fact that planes cover vastly more distance than cars though, right? People rarely drive 10000km to eg a conference or vacation.
How common is it to trade those off against each other? "Oh, because I went to that conference, I'm cancelling all my driving meetings for the rest of the year." is a sentence that has probably never been uttered before I just did now.
Depends upon how you measure it. The image impact of flying to climate change conferences is likely far worse than the image impact of using a computer. This can sway opinion enough to change elections and to change the priorities of politicians.
Next week I'm taking a 5 hour train journey rather than flying. When I figure in the time to get to the airport, the waiting in the lounge, baggage retrieval, etc. then flying doesn't save much time.
On the train I can work all the way, stretch my legs when I want, use WiFi / 4G, and bring as many liquids as I like. The environmental benefits are a bonus on top.
I wish more of Europe was accessible directly via Eurostar from London, but I'm quite happy with Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam for now.
If it's the UK, then you can book a seat on most services... if you're travelling distance during peak time, and you know in advance, then I'd recommend it - and being prepared to politely but assertively ask people to move if they are sat in your seat.
One thing that comprehensively confuses people using UK railway train reservations: The 'A' suffix on your seat number doesn't matter. When you have a reservation for 44A that doesn't actually mean there is a seat 44A distinct from seat 44, it's because somebody thought it's important to bake in metadata about how seats are arranged in trains, the A apparently stands for "airline" style for some reason.
If you hate reservations or are too disorganised to book one for a busy train, but also dislike being disturbed by someone who does have a reservation and wants you to move, most train operators have some rule about which parts of their trains aren't reserved, you can find that out and then travel in the unreservable part of the train. Finding a seat there won't be any easier, but you won't be asked to move later.
It is interesting how trains are offering better services even as planes suck more over time. Ten years ago knowing where to find power sockets in the Standard class 444 series (next to the cab at the far end from First class) made the difference between charging devices and going without, now almost every train has power sockets and/or USB, free WiFi (not _good_ WiFi, you won't be streaming video - but it'll let you check email and read Hacker News) and air conditioning.
Nope. Both aisle and window seats will be suffixed A. I almost invariably book window seats, they have an A suffix anyway.
There are other suffixes, but they relate to the layout of seating in a carriage and apparently almost all trains have "airline" style according to the nomenclature of whoever decides these things.
> Finding a seat there won't be any easier, but you won't be asked to move later.
It used to be really easy. Reserved seats had a paper ticket stuck in the back. Virgin trains switched to a small LED display on the edge of the luggage rack. Rather than have a single word like "Vacant" it has a scrolling message. As do reserved seats. So you have to peer at every single display as the text slowly scrolls past to figure out where you can sit. I don't know if this is gross incompetence or part of their ongoing efforts to discourage unbooked travel.
The longer scrolling message is telling you, as you'd know if you read it, that this seat can be reserved even though it currently isn't. As I indicated, some seats can't be reserved, and in this case the message is far shorter and doesn't scroll. "Unreserved" is usually the word used.
Paper tickets can't be updated and so in some cases they reflect no longer accurate information. This is especially misleading for long distance services where many reservations may happen after the service departs from its origin.
The unreserved message definitely used to scroll without any mention of future reservations. Perhaps they've updated them or perhaps it varies by region.
I've found this to be a fantastic resource for creating travel plans in Europe (and beyond) without flying: https://www.seat61.com/
No affiliation, just been using it to help plan all sorts of travel since I stopped flying in 2011 (although I have to say the best way to travel long distance in Europe is by bicycle, if you can make the time).
As behind as the US is on this front, the NE Regional and Acela are fantastic for NY-DC travel. It's infinitely less headache in terms of what you can bring (liquids in baggage and not really much of a weight limit), space (leg room for days), general comfort (no cabin pressure)... I could go on about this.
I used to travel NYC to Boston fairly often for work and I absolutely loved the experience of taking the Acela. The problem is that it’s so expensive! This was fine when my employer was willing to pay, but I wouldn’t pay it myself (it’s usually far more expensive than flying in my experience)
The problem for the US in the case of trains is that the US government owns Amtrak and they own no actual train tracks. Therefore when there are 2 trains competeing for the same track, Amtrak has to yield to the commercial trains. I have seen recent court arguments that it should be the other way around, but as of last year when i brought my father down from chicago to san antonio that was the case (that is a near 40 hour train ride).
I would ride the trainmore if it were quicker and a 4-5 hour flight or 18 hour drive didnt take 40 hours on a train.
With no noxious TSA checkpoint and a streamlined boarding process, it's amazing how much more pleasant travel by train is. I often arrive an hour early, if not more, to an airport. Between unpredictable TSA wait times and the lengthy boarding process of airplanes, it's a huge waste of time. When I'm traveling by train, I often arive at the train station no more than 5 minutes before I am sitting on the train. There are no lines to enter the train station and the line to board the train moves quickly because the train has more space to move around on and because the train has multiple entrances and exits. It's totally feasible to walk into a train station then without stopping walk straight onto a train.
That's an experience I'm generally willing to pay extra for vs flying, but unfortunately in America the opportunities to take advantage of trains are lacking if you live outside the Northeast Corridor, as I now do.
I'd say 5 hours is about the limit where the train makes more sense practically than flying. An eight hour train isn't worth it IMO compared to a 1.5 hour flight.
Sleeper services are usually much, much more expensive than a regular seat, so it doesn't help in trying to compete with air service (where you don't need sleeper service because it's so much faster).
I used to do a hard sleeper from Beijing to shanghai or Hangzhou (overnight train), and it was definitely cheaper than flying at the time. But hard sleepers aren’t for the feint of heart, especially if you get a dreaded top berth.
Sleepers are appreciated on planes enough that they charge a lot for them (a 12+ hour long haul in business class is mostly sleep, in economy it’s watch whatever movie you can find).
Sleepers on planes certainly are expensive (you're talking about business or first class to get that space), but you don't feel the need for it as much because it's only that useful on long-haul flights. There's no such thing, usually, as a train that goes the same route as a 14-hour plane flight: such a train would have to somehow cross an ocean.
That's why I added the word "usually" in there. Try taking a train to Australia or Japan (from outside those countries), between the Americas and Europe or Asia, etc.
Generally anything separated by water should fly, but even just going across the continent I think flying wins out; eg why train from shanghai to Urumqi for 2-3 days when you can just fly for 5 or 6 hours?
Yeah, that's the point I was trying to make before with my first sentence. A 5-6 hour flight isn't that hard to do in a seat; you don't need a sleeper for that. But a 2-3 day trip on a train isn't something you want to do in a regular upright seat.
Depends on how long the trip to/from the airport is. Railway stations tend to be in city centers.
Edit: also, you can get stuff done on your notebook in the train, but often times not on a plane b/c of the excessive check-in, gating, boarding, security, customs ceremony
There is no such thing as a 1.5h flight. With security, traffic to and from the airport, "allow extra time for <x>", and actual airtime, you're looking at 4h door to door for pretty much the shortest travel distance that it makes sense to fly (LA to SF or DC to NY). The train compares much more favorably when you factor everything in.
Some of those things don't apply outside america. E.g. in europe or japan congestion-free public transport to the airport exists and internal flights have very low security overhead.
On the other hand those places also have high speed rail.
This is a popular sentiment, but didn't ring true for me as a frequent traveler. I've been taking regular 1h45m flights in the past few months, so I added up my actual travel time for those trips. It did take 4h15m when everything was included... but the part that was unique to air travel (arriving earlier at airport, security) only added up to 40 minutes.
It's true that a 1.5h flight would take me 4h, but most of that extra time is universal to all travel. An equivalent 1h30m train ride would take me 3h20m. Not that much more favorable.
Don't know about UK, but in Germany trains are obscenely expensive, especially when you compare them to low-cost airlines. There is nothing like "low-cost railway" so far, and I doubt there ever will be.
In Bavaria, they're dirt cheap, at least for the regional trains. For 25 Euros cash, you can go anywhere in Bavaria all you want, for 24 hours, in as many trips as you want. Of course, this doesn't really compete with airlines, as this is for inter-city trips within the state, and no two cities in Bavaria are that far apart.
But to say there's no "low-cost railway" is plainly false. Bavaria has probably one of the best train systems in the entire world, and it's not expensive by any means.
Same here, I've been to Brussels quite often (for FOSDEM) and the difference is:
- flying: 120 EUR from Munich, getting up at 4-5, arriving at 9
- train: have to go the day before, have an additional night in the hotel (70 EUR) and THEN the train is more expensive than flying anyway. Maybe not so important if the company pays, but still not fun to argue (depending on the company).
How low cost do you want low cost to be, and how annoying are you prepared for it to be? I just picked (fairly arbitrarily) Monday 19th August, and although Expedia does offer a GBP18 Ryanair flight SXF - BRU you have to accept an 0620 departure time to get that, and of course no checked baggage and you need to include costs of getting to/from the airport. Given the need to arrive at least 1h before departure I would personally not even consider 0620 dep, and all the other flights Expedia suggests cost 90 quid or more. For the train loco2.com has one-way tickets Berlin Hbf -> Bruxelles-Midi from GBP63.50 at reasonable times.
As an American, I can only dream of having convenient train fares of about USD$80 to go between somewhat-distant cities. Berlin to Brussels for GPB63.50 (about $80 right now) sounds downright cheap to me.
Except in very high-demand seasons/routes, Amtrak is pretty affordable. I routinely see 200-mile one-way tickets on my usual route for $30. I took my sister's kid on a fun 35-mile train ride for like $8 total.
I've done Chicago -> Oakland via Amtrak for less than $200... It's brutal in coach. But I've done the same route in a private sleeper room, with 6 or 7 restaurant-quality meals included, for less than $500. It's basically a 60-hour-long well-catered scenic landscape tour of America. (But the on-board WiFi and your ability to 4G tether is basically worthless between Denver -> SLC, and between SLC -> Reno :-)
Sometimes you get a group of loud people around celebrating something, like soccer cup or getting married (especially in the connections with Regionals). Also last year there were often delays and problems in the connections between Mannheim or Frankfurt; I wouldn’t just call someone’s comment rubbish.
While you're technically right, the MUC-BRU flight is 90% businesspeople in suits on the smallest regular plane I've ever used, I can't imaging TXL-BRU being different.
I.e. the chance of it having a school class in it is like winning the lottery ;)
25€ is not dirt cheap, unless you're planning on taking 4+ trips on a single day. In Belgium, a prepaid ticket for 10 rides, each from/to any station in the country, costs just 75€ (valid for one year).
I've looked for fares like that and never see them at convenient times. At 4AM 3 months from now, sure. That's not convenient.
I tried planning out a weekend trip from DC (where I live) to NYC on Amtrak, and I couldn't make it work. The goal was to travel to NYC without flying, and without having to take time off from work (I work normal 9-5ish, flex hours). The only way to get fares cheaper than by airline is to take the train at 5AM or so. But the train station is downtown; I can't get downtown in time to catch the train by Metro (subway), because the Metro doesn't run that early. So I'd have to take a Lyft/Uber, which is expensive. If I go at a more convenient hour, the rates shoot way up, so it's more expensive than flying.
Sure, I could take a day or two off from work, but that defeats the point. If I wanted to travel between Frankfurt and Munich on a weekend without taking time off from work, or between Tokyo and Osaka, I could do it more cheaply and easily than DC-NYC.
Also pretty pointless in terms of business travel:
I've hardly ever had any customers not in Munich or in the Nuremberg (area) that weren't so far away from the station that you'd need a taxi, so you can drive anyway. Especially for conferences. Usually Munich or Nuremberg.
The regular Deutsche Bahn prices are very expensive but the special prices are often rather cheap. A further 25% less for BahnCard 25 owners. I take a lot of cheap train rides that way.
My problem with economic solutions like carbon tax is that as it alleviates the carbon footprint, it reinforces economic inequality. Mobility will become something reserved to the rich people again.
I hope we will find a better one, e.g. online conferences or putting a tax specifically on business travel on behalf of medium to large sized companies.
Technically mobility is limited to the rich right now - all of us are "environmentally rich," blissfully jetting about in environment-destroying airplanes while enjoying a relatively clean Earth.
Our offspring will be Earth-poor, suffering the consequences of our frivolous "spending."
In my mind a carbon tax is a wealth transfer from the present to the future. I think it's a good solution because we aren't exacting fair price for our activities. I read a great book once in which future generations sued the shoes off their elders for not paying fair price for their climate-changing activities.
Wealth inequality should be addressed. We shouldn't hamstring other solutions just because it also is a problem - we can work on them in parallel. I appreciate you bringing it up though, it is a good thing to be aware of.
To offset the CO2 on a US-to-Europe round trip flight would add around $500 per ticket. As the efficiency of airplanes and CO2 concentrators improve, that should drop.
That seems reasonable to me and while it will make flying to Europe too expensive for some, it wouldn't make traveling to Europe something only the rich can afford.
For a typical family flying from middle America to Orlando, it would probably mean one less day at Disney.
The Tyndall Travel Tracker has a fairly simple carbon calculator (https://travel.tyndall.ac.uk/); with respect to offsetting there is an ongoing debate currently about how best to achieve this. It is thought that offsetting carbon alone is quite a grey area at present (e.g., trees planted today will offset over 25 years but the damage is done in the now, also many offsetting schemes are...scammy) - we are currently discussing strategies to offset with more than carbon, including development activities as well as biodiversity protection; the problems can be quite linked.
My personal hope is to liaise with some of the best researchers in the world regarding offsetting and have an approved offsetting scheme, which can be applied anywhere, that updates based on the current best understanding; we would then bring this capability into a newly built travel tracker (it's closer to a prototype atm).
Please let me know if this is something you'd find interesting.
Those are fake feel good offset, it price a Paris-NYC round trip with 2.2 tCO2eq at 52€, but the only serious future project of durable carbon capture that I know price it at 600$ the tCO2eq, this would be a 1320$ offset.
It's not business travel that's the problem, it's burning fuel that's the problem. If the 1% are the only people who can fly, that's a lot less fuel being burned. Heavily taxing 10% of fliers (who can easily afford it) is a no-op when it comes to reducing the buring of fuel. Now you have exactly the same amount of fuel being burned, and a tax yielding revenue that if anything motivates the recipients of that tax to encourage more flying.
If you massively raise prices for everyone to fly, less fuel gets burned, and the people burning the fuel are paying into a pool that ideally would be used to alleviate inequality on any other front.
If you want to tax the rich, just tax the rich based on them being rich; don't greenwash it.
> If the 1% are the only people who can fly, that's a lot less fuel being burned.
I agree. The question is who are these 1% of people. Carbon tax means that they are the richest 1%. I hope our society has enough imagination to consider other options.
I haven't heard of any carbon offset program that results in only the richest 1% being able to fly.
Targeting airlines might be the wrong place. Perhaps the fuel vendors are the ones that should bear the cost of removing all of the CO2 that's going to end up in the air from every bit of fuel they sell.
What if these taxes were weighed disproportionately? If you are broke you don’t get taxed at all, but if you net 1k a day then you just got a $50 carbon tax added to your fare.
Might also be progressive on the flight frequency as well. Like first flight in year is cheap, second one is more expensive etc., and also progressive on the income. So that everyone gets approximately the same amount of flights they can afford in a year.
So you have a moral question: Is it more important that you save a few euros, or that future generations and people in poor countries (who, let's be honest, will bear the brunt of climate change) will suffer?
No, that's not the moral question I have. I personally have a choice between a few (about a hundred normally) euros and a little emissions. The society as a whole has a choice between a lot of euros and a lot of emissions. And also reducing people's mobility, where rich people are affected the least.
However, if you want to go Hamburg-Munich on an ICE (better than flying imo IF (!) everything works) and you do not have purchased a "BahnCard" and you do not book far in advance then it is very expensive.
2nd class ICE ride on that track in 2 weeks is 153€, flex, one way. For that money you get a return flight.
If you can be 100% sure to make it to one exact train you can go for ca. 50€. [1] Risk of failing to catch that train is pretty high though.
I made that a lot in Germany and it is worth if you value also the quality of the travel.
There are regular offers between capitals and big cities across countries, travels I did from Stuttgart: Stuttgart-Paris 40€, Copenhagen-Stuttgart 80€ (the train got in a Ferry and then the travel continued until Hamburg!), Stuttgart Amsterdam 80€. Sometimes traveling to far places like Spain must go over Paris, and each country has their own train network with more or less adaptation.
The quality of the public train got worse in Germany during the last 10 years and it is not an infrastructure thought to be run as a business with profits, but it is still one of the best transportation services for long distance.
The only problems with the train is visiting remote areas where it is necessary doing to or three train changes, which increases the chance of delays.
A laudable decision and one that I think needs to be encouraged on a university level.
However, I’ve found that human face-to-face interaction is more productive vs email/Skype and wonder if there’s potential missed opportunities if we were to completely forego in-person conferences.
Trying to "Youtube" rewatch talks for most of them. I think conferences can be very unproductive and sometimes are more like a "fun" event than a necessity.
Yes, good conferences are fun. Fun and human connections are important for a healthy community. Hybrids could work; Live stream the talks and gather locally to watch them together.
There is still a big difference between attending a talk in person and watching it on screen. From AV issues (can you see their laser pointer) to the option of easily asking a question afterwards. Plus, many scientific conferences have poster sessions which are rarely accessible remotely.
And don't underestimate how important meeting new people and networking is! I would say that's probably my biggest motivation for going to conferences these days.
Huge difference. Attending talks in person is akin to reading paperback, while watching a video is akin to a Kindle. It can be difficult to block out time on your computer and give undivided attention to a video.
>Huge difference. Attending talks in person is akin to reading paperback, while watching a video is akin to a Kindle. It can be difficult to block out time on your computer and give undivided attention to a video.
Given that I actively prefer reading on a screen, I'm genuinely not sure if this is an apt comparison. My e-books have infinitely large margins for annotation, instant excerpting and customisable formatting. YouTube videos can be paused while I Google something, rewound if I've missed something and played on fast-forward if the speaker is needlessly slow.
Isn't that the idea behind (academic) conferences? Bringing together everyone in a field to meet new people/network, and also learn from talks and poster sessions is the motivation. There is something I've found fundamentally different in being able to spend time with professors or graduate students "trapped" at a conference poster session than reaching out across time zones via an email->potential phone call. The ability to see tons of different research, ask stupid questions, and bounce ideas off of people in real time without any other distractions means that, to me, they usually are much more productive than I expected them to be.
Also, low number of respondents and considering the survey went through his own twitter with a Climate Code idea, probably very biaised sample.
However, I'd totally favour a company with a flight offsetting policy. Can anyone point me some?
Though I agree face to face is definitely a different experience. My point is maybe crossing oceans is not mandatory to learn from one another. A while ago people didn't had the choice, yet they were able to do much in all science.
That looks and reads bad. I don't even get the point of the initiative :( Not what I'm looking for at all it seems. I just want company names that actively discourage/limit flying their employees.
The goal of this project is to destruct carbon credits (tradable certificate or permit representing the right to emit one tonne of carbon), it won't at all capture or even offset CO2 emission, it will only slightly raise the price of carbon credit. It is a totally misleading for the website to say that it will reduce your carbon footprint.
For these reasons, I limit myself to North American conferences. I derive a great deal from conferences; the face to face interactions and asking questions during question period are crucial to understanding the limits of the presented work (and not particularly apparent at all in the final paper). But, travel, esp. overseas, is time-consuming and expensive. The acceptable trade-off personally seems to be self-imposed geographical restriction.
People still crossed the oceans, they just took a bit longer. Nowadays you can still take a trip on a freight ship, but it'll take about 10-15 days to cross the Atlantic (EU-US).
Maybe once Starlink launches, one could treat it as a remote office. Definitively more comfortable than working through a red-eye.
Yeah, sometimes scientists moved to another lab overseas, but rarely on a whim, and for longer periods. Still, there are so many people around, surely there must be some that can challenge our thoughts or enrich our network without having to fly planes.
I've been thinking about putting together something like a "global warming for devops" or a "climate capacity planning" talk for velocity where the final slide is: cancel velocity.
That is, of course, over-simplifying, but O'reilly's conferences line of business is an interesting example of a non-energy company who's business model is existentially threatened by a meaningful response to climate change.
Internet debate artists will endlessly get caught up in the false-binary of banning international flights or not, but functionally, from O'reilly's perspective, there's no meaningful difference between an outright ban and an order-of-magnitude price increase. Either way the conference business craters.
Considering half the reason for those conferences is networking, perhaps a 'regional' / distributed conference model would work - you could still choose to attend an in-place event for all the networking benefits (albeit with a smaller group of people), but have all the talks live-streamed to theatres in each location (and online for those who don't care about the networking).
I'm not convinced by offsetting. It's better to not cause the emissions in the first place, rather than pay someone else to reduce their emissions in exchange later. You can't know that they won't have reduced their emissions anyway.
Certainly taking the train to a conference is better than flying, if that's the choice you have. Concentrating on conferences local to you is a good idea. Attending remotely sort of works, but it's really not the same as being there. It's better if you are with other people at your end, watching together.
Offsetting is good because it starts the process of getting people to think of it as a cost until we get a true carbon tax. You don't need to ban plans, just getting people to save money by taking the train is a net win over what we've been doing for decades.
You could offset by paying to actually take carbon from the atmosphere, rather than just not producing more. Climeworks can do it for $600/ton, and will probably drop quite a bit. If they get to $100/ton, flying Lisbon → Brussels would still be cheaper than taking a train.
This is probably an unpopular opinion amongst liberals like myself, but I personally think the idea that the "average joe" is going to be able to change their lifestyle and solve climate-change to be somewhat of a pipe-dream. If you want to live in an ecologically more-sustainable way (using renewable energy, becoming a vegetarian, avoiding disposables, etc), that's great! I honestly encourage that, and it's probably a good thing, I won't try and stop you.
However, I think it's unreasonable to expect everyone to do that on their own. For every person doing an ecologically responsible thing (taking trains instead of planes, taking public transit instead of driving, etc), there is just such a huge magnitude of people doing the "wrong" thing to cancel it out, largely because that (from a short-term-pragmatic-standpoint, the "wrong" thing is better) or at least cheaper. If you value your time at all, flying across the country is cheaper, meat is readibly available and inexpensive (and typically taste good), and driving to work is substantially easier than biking.
I don't know anything about ecology so I'll admit that I might regret writing this entire comment in a year, but it seems to me that the only way we're going to make a dent in climate change is to a) create technology that provides an experience that is competitive with the dirty version of something (electric cars could be a good example), or b) to start artificially taxing things that are really hurting the environment. If we started charging an extra dollar-per-gallon tax on gasoline, it would probably discourage people from driving as much, and put more economic incentive on point a).
I can commend someone not flying to conferences anymore, but I am afraid to say that I dont have the same self-discipline.
If you want people to make ecological choices, you have to do it at higher levels instead of expecting individuals to change their lifestyles.
So instead of continuing to widen roads, we need to build more trains, and change municipal development processes so that cities are made denser.
Instead of having short-hop air travel, we need to fund high-speed rail.
And yes, taxing things to change consumption patterns is a big part of this. Slap a big tax on gasoline/diesel and jet fuel and use that to fund HSR, for instance.
Then get yourself elected to a national level office and get to work. Usually an idealist's first set of budget or appropriation meetings is enough to cure them. It sure worked for me.
The average American produced 16.5 tonnes of CO2e in 2014. The average Briton produced 6.5 tonnes. British people do not live in medieval squalor, nor do they all live in bedsits in central London and travel everywhere by tube.
The only thing stopping American politicians from vastly reducing CO2 emissions is the will of the electorate. The top-down political solution actually comes from the bottom-up - by persuading people to vote for candidates who support decarbonisation. You only have one president, but he was chosen for office by 62,979,636 voters.
Well we could start by not building in the suburbs any more, and instead building more densely (this is done with zoning regulations), and raising fuel taxes as well.
Urban/Suburban infill development is a terrific idea. It's being accomplished at a far faster clip than a lot of people realize, but there could be better incentives at the federal level (US).
Fuel taxes are pretty high already. Increasing them will hurt a lot of people very badly.
Umm, what? American fuel taxes are pretty cheap. Fuel is almost half the price here than anywhere in Europe, largely due to Europe's higher taxes on fuel.
It's actually becoming a problem; our fuel taxes haven't risen as much as inflation, and our road infrastructure is funded largely by fuel taxes.
Fuel taxes are high enough for America. It's not fair to compare the US and the EU. The EU has an extra trillion or so per year to spend on swanky infrastructure and entitlements since it doesn't have to outlay much for its own defense.
Tighten the CAFE standards until something other than the Ford F-150 is the world's bestselling passenger vehicle.
Get rid of coal. Take some of the ~$6bn/yr that you currently spend subsidising the fossil fuel industries and deliver a package of job-creating tax credits in Wyoming and West Virginia.
Do whatever it takes to remove minimum lot sizes, single-use zoning and minimum parking requirements from zoning laws. I'm sure that the Supreme Court could be persuaded to change their mind on Euclid vs Ambler. Maybe people would drive less and walk more if suburbs weren't legally required to be unwalkable.
Reallocate some of the ~$20bn/yr you spend on agricultural subsidies to disincentivise cattle feedlot operations and incentivise soil sequestration.
Impose gradually escalating taxes on road and domestic aviation fuel and spend the revenues on mass transit infrastructure. Offer low-income citizens a rebate.
Seriously, I agree with your end goal in the reduction of man-made CO2 emissions. I even agree, in spirit, with items 3 and 4 above. What I don't agree with is the sudden dismantling of industries and punitive taxation.
I believe CO2 emissions will be cut as man's technologies and economies gradually evolve. I also believe that the Earths weather operates wholly independently of man's industrial activity at this time.
Plenty of other countries have already done it. There's literally nothing stopping Americans from following suit if Americans decide that it's the right thing to do.
>I believe CO2 emissions will be cut as man's technologies and economies gradually evolve.
If the IPCC are right, that'll be far too late. They say we need ambitious action now. They could be wrong, but is that a gamble we want to take? Is it worth risking a disaster-movie scenario so that we can keep driving big trucks and prop up some industries with no future anyway? If the IPCC are right and we do nothing, how will we explain it to our grandchildren? "Sorry kids, we ruined your lives because we thought that 99.9% of scientists were wrong?". "Sorry kids, we ruined your lives because we couldn't be bothered getting the bus?". Is that how we want to be remembered?
No, I disagree with the rebate thing. For one thing, low-income citizens don't need to be flying domestically (if they are, they're not "low income"). And a lot of low-income citizens are living car-based lifestyles that are frankly luxurious compared to poor people in other nations, and is costing society a lot. These people need to move to denser cities and take public transit. The only thing I'd support is subsidies to help them relocate from their rural homes to places where they don't need cars and can get jobs.
A rebate was a key part of getting Canada's recent carbon tax through parliament. The standard arguments against pricing carbon are "it'll kill jobs", "it'll kill industry" or "it's just another tax on hard-working families". I think that any effective green policy agenda has to have a lot of direct and obvious quid-pro-quos to address these concerns. It's not ideal in a narrowly rational sense, but it's politically expedient.
Some climate-related policies are going to be inherently painful, so we should seek wherever possible to mitigate that pain, spread it around equitably or ration it out over time. Getting people to transition to more sustainable lifestyles is obviously the goal, but uprooting a bunch of low-income workers has terrible optics and burns political capital that could be better used elsewhere. You're aiming for diffuse costs and concentrated benefits.
The calculus is slightly weird in the US due to what I will politely describe as a unique political culture, but you can frame a lot of it in American political grammar. Call it the "war on weather" or something, appeal to the self-image of America as the world's moral leadership, sell it as every citizen's patriotic duty and use the term "common sense" a lot. Emphasise how it'll build a long-term economic advantage over China. If you think immigration is bad now, just wait until half of South America becomes uninhabitable. If we pass this R&D bill, we'll have a monopoly on this technology in the future. Green policies are eminently achievable in the US political landscape, but they need to be thoroughly decoupled from liberal rhetoric.
Yeah! And don't forget Shepard Fairey for the visuals. I hope you're incorporated because you could make a fortune in the agitprop business. Just sell the people what they never knew they needed.
Airlines should be required to offset their CO2 emissions. Dr. David Keith has designed a machine that can pull CO2 out of the air for something like $200 / metric ton.
In this time where it appears that the vast majority of civilization is paying almost no attention to climate change, one of the best tools that a person has in their arsenal is to reduce their own pollution, because it aids in building the necessary political will to do _something_.
If we don't, you know that those who politically oppose us will simply call us hypocrites: Russia doesn't use careful logic, and even though pointing out hypocrisy a logical fallacy, most leaders, both government and business, will continue to use it, because maintaining power always feels like the right way forward.
Basically we have to practice conspicuous ethics because there will always be someone saying it's useless behind you, even people who understand that climate change is real.
And even then, it might be a wash. We have to hope for a global "oh-shit" moment in the next few years if we are to have any hope of handling climate change. It doesn't mean that I won't be conspicuous and hope to help create like-minded individuals.
This is demonstrably untrue. Catalytic converters were protected somewhat by the "ruling class", now they're standard in every car. That's an example that took me about 1/10th of a second to think of, but there are lots of them.
I'm hardly this big advocate for a capitalism, but your statements seem a bit reductionist.
>For every person doing an ecologically responsible thing (taking trains instead of planes, taking public transit instead of driving, etc), there is just such a huge magnitude of people doing the "wrong" thing to cancel it out, largely because that (from a short-term-pragmatic-standpoint, the "wrong" thing is better) or at least cheaper. If you value your time at all, flying across the country is cheaper, meat is readily available and inexpensive (and typically taste good), and driving to work is substantially easier than biking.
It only takes a small percentage of the population to make a systematic change[0], I hope for humanity we are reaching a tipping point on this. People living their life in the correct way is spreading awareness and they are putting their money where their mouth is. These people and the youth climate strike may be our last chance. Also, the environment is the number one issue for the democratic party in the 2020 election.
But, I do agree eventually these people making these changes will have to drive government agendas and the real mass changes will have to happen that way.
I should backpedal a bit and reemphasize; please do not stop doing good things for the environment by any means. The more sustainably you can live your life, especially if you can demonstrate a way to do it fairly easily, the more of a proof-of-concept you become, which can help put pressures on governments.
I mean, I don't own a car, am mostly vegetarian (I eat fish occasionally), and take public transit nearly everywhere, so it's not like I don't try and do my part (though I do fly a lot, so that probably cancels out all my savings).
Part of the problem with writing comments like this is that I do think some of the the issues causing climate-change to become a problem are due to a specific political party, and HN typically gets a bit flag-heavy whenever you start getting into overt politics.
The data from the article you provided talks about violent and non-violent protests and the numbers required for it. If 11,445,000 people were to storm the White House I imagine that would indeed have quite the effect. I don't see how it's related to not flying planes or not eating meat to effect climate change.
The airlines wouldn't ground flights, they might just adjust their models for purchasing fuel. In most cases they'd just sell the tickets to non-software engineers who actually value their time (basic supply and demand logic).
Maybe we should move to a model where all software conferences are scheduled with an associated Amtrak ticket. Then companies will just have to forgo years of collective productivity as all employees waste a week of their lives sitting on a train.
I'm sure the airlines will be more than able to sell an empty seat to 1 or n+1 normal people, in your absence or the absence of an equally environmentally distraught software engineer.
I work in a role (Developer Relations) that involves a lot of conferences. Business travel, especially to conferences, has to be one of the biggest wastes of money and resources in corporate America today.
People spend thousands to go to a conference and the stated benefit is to hear a few talks that are definitely recorded and to have a handful of useful conversations.
Let's be honest: many people at conferences just see them as a way to have the company pay for you to get out of the office and go on a semi-vacation. I know I've gone to things with that mindset before.
Don't get me wrong it's not the events that are the issue, it's how far we travel to them. I'm sure 90% of the benefit could be had by going to local meetups and watching the big conferences online.
Conferences don't exist for the majority of the people who attend them. They're a sales tool for converting B2B decision makers, usually C- or VP-level, for which the acquisition cost helps justify the conference expenditures. This is from all sides, whether hosting or sponsoring the conference.
Developers and 'practitioners' are typically background noise to the main purpose, unless of course they have influence on the decision makers.
That’s the real answer. Even as a mere self employed consultant I’ve been to conferences where I’ve gotten deals worth many time the cost of attending (e.g. spend $2k to land a $120k contract).
This is even truer in the scale of the really big players closing deals in the millions+.
Could you elaborate on this a bit please? How, when, which sector, is this specific to that sector/field of IT, how hard it is, who are the usual suspects, what's the success rate, do you have to pre-arrange meetings, book a room where you showcase your whatever...?
Why? The only way to replicate it is basically "do good work and network". I'm not going to be able to give you any secret sauce (because there is none, not because I don't want to).
Quite often it's not the deals that are made in conferences but the relationships (the "network" part). You hang out with a lot of people in the same industry as you, you get to know & be known by them.
And invariably when you know dozens/hundreds of people in the same field somebody usually needs some work done & is more likely to give that work to somebody they met in person vs someone anonymous off of the internet.
The "do good work" part is where you turn this into a snowball & get recommended around.
Thank you for saying this, before I had a chance to. And to add to it - many companies also make vendor purchase decisions for tools/technologies not on a strategic vendor analysis, but on which ones they see at conferences.
I've heard this at times but maybe I'm visiting the wrong (right?) kind of events, I've seen mostly people excited to talk about the subject of the conference, or related subjects or meet new people. But I have to say I'm more used to community-run events, smaller events or barcamps - not stuff like excessively large conference frequented mostly by enterprise people who seem a tad less excited .. Java One comes to mind from what I heard...
So yeah, networking plays such a big part that I really prefer to meet people from all over the world (or at least all over Europe) once per year and not from the same pool of ~1000-5000 in my area.
Meetups are usually a lot better for avoiding sales-related phenomena. And they are pretty topical, so you are almost sure to find a few good talks, they are not too long, and very much open ended, so if you bump into someone interesting you don't have to choose between skipping many talks or continue talking.
Most meetups here are 20-50 people (only DevOps Munich usually breaks 100 afaik) so that's not the type of event I meant - but barcamps with up to ~300 are still conference-like without the downsides, imho :)
For me (a nearly full time open source developer) the more technical conferences are a way to stay inspired, resolve /dissipate conflicts and try to figure out hard plans. I've yet to find anything that comes close, especially with people otherwise distributed across all timezones. And yes, I find the hallway track more important than the talks.
None of that is served by local meetups / watching talks online.
The clearest benefit of conferences for developers is networking and the "hallway tracks" -- the emergent discussions that arise after talks. The social processes of these are hard to replicate online. The asynchronous nature of online text chat, perhaps the most apt widely-deployed alternative, already lessens the urgency and spontaneity of the discussion. There are people who don't take advantage of the opportunities to insert themselves into emergent conversations, and unless their presence alone is a positive signal for the company, they're largely wasting their company's money.
The clearest benefit of conferences for sponsors is the potential lead between frontline-but-backoffice workers who work on a particular topic to the decision-makers behind them who can influence purchasing. Being present at conferences fosters passing familiarity of developers with the product, which helps conversations that occur between those developers and their bosses later: the emails from the higher-ups that ask "what do you think about Product?", and the off-the-cuff gut assessments that follow. Irrespective of the developer's initial reaction, name recognition of the product sticks around and often makes it to later rounds of evaluation and assessment.
Absolutely! 'LobbyCon' (colloquial name for any 'Con discussions in hallways or lobbies) is a thing. I can't really get anything like that online, regardless the platform. The closest, which is a longshot, has been IRC.
Sure, you can attend talks... However "magical" things happen when you get people with different skills all talking as equals. It's the opposite of mob mentality, where each person in a group adds to the collective intelligence and power to see further.
And yes, I just got back from Circle City Con in which I gave a talk about "SigInt for the masses: Building and Using a Signals Intelligence Platform for Less than $150". For me, it was a 1hr drive. But still, watching a video or making one online != in person.
Anecdotally it seems to me that not only is most business travel wasteful, but the people who do it the most are the most wasteful (e.g. a junior dev won't make a trip unless it's really needed where an exec won't think twice). Thus the people who fly the most use are the most thoughtless about it, and certainly at their level the cost of air travel is an insufficient reason to modify behavior. It seems like a progressive carbon tax would be good: a light load on the poor schmuck who flies with great deliberation once a year, whereas the private-jet C-exec should have to pay such an large amount in carbon tax (more than a linear function of CO2) that it causes them to actually sit up and take notice.
Let's be honest: many people at conferences just see them as a way to have the company pay for you to get out of the office and go on a semi-vacation.
You're saying that like it's a bad thing. I find that these "semi-vacations" do a lot to recharge my batteries, which is very helpful to my productivity in the long run.
I'm sure 90% of the benefit could be had by going to local meetups and watching the big conferences online.
I would say more like 50 percent. The other 50 percent comes in the form of (vitally important) F2F interactions. Which are why, time and time again -- remote interactions are found to be "just not the same" as in-person interactions.
> You're saying that like it's a bad thing. I find that these "semi-vacations" do a lot to recharge my batteries, which is very helpful to my productivity in the long run.
Nothing's wrong with semi-vacations. But we might as well be open about it and provide an actual vacation and do it in a less carbon intensive way.
Let's say if a company instead of paying for a conference, just gave you a few days off and cash in hand. How would you spend it?
Finally I see some discussion which I always kept thinking about. My political preference is leftward, but the point which the right wing believers raise about the left-leaning leaders speaking about climate change is not completely invalid, as personally they do not lead a minimalistic lifestyle.
And this begs the question about their sincerity about what they are proposing about climate change, do they actually mean it or do they just want to appease their political base.
You can advocate for a policy without adopting it in your personal life. Especially if changing your personal life would have insignificant impact when compared to a policy.
People can do whatever they like on their own. We elect politicians to establish our public policy, not their personal policy.
This is a nice angle! I don’t believe the ostensible reason but it works quite nicely. Conferences these days don’t feel super friendly so good to keep in mind.
And yet reality is that if we completely eliminated the ENTIRE transportation industry world wide —land, sea and air, effectively destroying civilization as we know it—- a reduction of atmospheric CO2 concentration of 100 ppm will require somewhere in the order of 50,000 to 100,000 years.
Talking about non-solutions might feel emotionally satisfying, yet it does nothing at all to really address the problem. Worse yet, it pulls the conversation away from real solutions.
> Getting near net zero increase would be sufficient to avoid an extinction event.
--- start quote [1] ---
This is the largest, dirtiest coal mine in Europe.
It's responsible for 100 Million Tons of CO2 emissions per year.
That's 3168 kg of CO2 per second.
--- end quote ---
I will be flying to Barcelona from Stockholm in June. Some sites show me the three-hour flight will cost 616kg of CO2. Is it per person? I don't know. Let's assume per person (even though I'm pretty sure it's for the entire flight).
In that same time that mine will have released 60×60×3.5×3168 = almost 40 million kg of CO2. Enough for every single person on that flight to take over 200 such flights to be anywhere on the same level of CO2 emmissions.
You're also using the coal mine, just not directly. This is like justifying your personal waste based on the fact that a neighborhood of 10,000 people collectively wastes 10,000 times as much, and you also live in that neighborhood.
> Some sites show me the three-hour flight will cost 616kg of CO2. Is it per person? I don't know. Let's assume per person (even though I'm pretty sure it's for the entire flight).
It is per person, going by plane takes roughly as much as going by car if it is over land. Stockholm to Barcelona is according to Google 2788 km. Typical car takes 1.2 litre per 10km, so the whole trip would be around 300 litres of petrol. 1 litre of petrol is around 2.4 kg CO2, so over 700 kg CO2 for the entire trip.
The reality is that there is no one single industry where reductions will be sufficient. We need lots of reductions across the board. Including in transportation.
No. This is wrong and it is not supported by data.
If humanity and all of our stuff evaporated from this planet it would take 50,000 to 75,000 years for atmospheric CO2 to drop by 100ppm.
These are all non-solutions. Even if we become extinct and all of our technology, buildings and power-plants rot away and dissolve, you are still looking at tens of thousands of years.
None of these things, individually or collectively are better than humanity not being on this planet. Which means they can’t possibly produce results any faster than that.
Everything is the real problem. If we eliminated everything but transportation, we'd still be screwed. Transportation, agriculture, manufacturing, domestic energy use - we have to fix it all to stand any hope of mitigating the worst effects of climate change. We can fix it all, but that requires concerted effort.
Transportation is the biggest single source of emissions in the US, so it is entirely reasonable to make it a high-priority target.
I continue to see that this issue is dominated by ideology and brainwashing.
I have an open question that nobody has answered yet:
If all of humanity evaporated from this planet tomorrow, it would take 50,000 to 75,000 years for atmospheric CO2 to drop by 100ppm.
We know this to a high degree of certainty because of ice core atmospheric data going back 800,000 years. In other words, way before any of our technology even existed.
So, the natural “no humans anywhere” rate of change is in the order of 100ppm per 50,000 years.
Now the question:
How does your <insert any idea you care to test here> msnage to improve on this rate of change a thousand-fold when it is but a rounding error when compared to the planet without humanity at all?
Simple example: Convert the entire world to the most optimal forms of renewable energy!
OK, if all of humanity LEFT THE PLANET and we took ALL OF OUR TECHNOLOGY WITH US, it would take 50,000 to 75,000 years for a useful change in atmospheric CO2.
This renewable energy shift is an insignificant change when compared to a planet empty of us and our crap. Which means that, if there’s a reduction of atmospheric CO2 at all it can’t possibly happen any faster than 100ppm per ~50,000 years.
Anyone claiming otherwise needs to explain the magical methods they will use to violate the laws of physics as we know them.
BTW, to whoever made the comment: I don’t have to know the solution to a problem in order to recognize the problem as well as to identify non-solutions. I don’t know how to make humans breathe under water, but I can tell that eating more fish is not a solution.
You see impact of up to 75k years from your and my emissions. Essentially any pollution you and I cause can be considered permanent from a human time perspective. If we were to stop emitting today, it's not certain where equilibrium would settle, nor what tipping points will pass as temperatures increase.
You conclude there's no point bothering and to keep doing near permanent damage? Just keep on shitting in the pool until it's unusable? This is concluding there's no point investing in a pension.
Personally, I conclude we need to reach carbon neutral as soon as possible - to stop making the problem worse. Very simply put 100ppm is going to be better for humanity and other species than 150ppm or 200ppm etc, so stop as soon as possible. To not pass the irreparable tipping points, to stop adding fuel to the fire.
Not as soon as convenient, or as soon as affordable, but as possible. Mobilise countries as though on a war footing: rationing - of flying, of petrol, of food, of consumer goods and clothing, quotas, enforcement, require industries to stop producing some thing and produce something else instead. ALL of these were done in WW2, and no laws of physics were broken. Now consider human population growth, so probably add child rationing too.
Personally I don't see that mobilisation happening soon. Based upon the pathetic progress over the last 30 or 40 years I think it almost inevitable - the market can't solve it. Very probably not in my lifetime, as humanity will probably need to be much closer to a clear abyss of impending disaster. I do think it the inheritance my children can very likely look forward to, and a society that's much less free and may have far less opportunity. Because their parent's and grandparent's generations couldn't be arsed.
Nevertheless two easy first steps toward stop making the problem worse are carbon neutral electricity generation, and reducing flying. No magic or disingenuous claims.
You misunderstood. I am not at all against humanity becoming far better about not destroying the environment. Not at all. What rattles me are the fantastic assertions being made in the name of "saving the planet". The entire thing has become a religion (both deniers and zealots). And EVERYONE is making money off this thing.
I want us to have a look at the real science behind this problem and have an honest discussion about how to deal with it.
For example, there is no way to dispute that a planet earth without humanity has a natural atmospheric CO2 reduction rate of about 100ppm per 50,000 years (the range goes as far as 100/75,000).
This is, to repeat myself, indisputable. In order to challenge this assertion someone would have to prove that the 800,000 years of atmospheric composition data is flawed in some way. And they would have to prove how ice core atmospheric composition testing is flawed.
When I started to read on this subject I found this data. As an engineer, my first inclination was to seek information on both the accuracy and percentage error in these tests. I read papers and articles on the subject of atmospheric composition testing using ice core sample. I went at it skeptical as can be, convinced the errors had to be huge. Well, I ended-up discovering I was wrong. The techniques, methodology and data are extremely accurate and reliable.
Which means the conversation HAS to start there:
100 ppm/50,000 years, or
0.002 ppm/year, or
2 ppm/thousand years
These are scary numbers because of what they mean: If we are going to claim to be able to do better than 2 ppm in a THOUSAND years we have a HUGE burden of proof to pass. We have to explain how it is that we are going to affect planetary scale changes at a rate massively quicker than the planet has historically managed on its own. And that, I am afraid, might very well be in the realm of magic, not science.
This is why we already know that supplanting all power generation across the entire planet with the most optimal forms of renewable energy generation (in other words, imagine the most fantastically good forms of renewables and that's what we install) we won't fix the problem. Not only will atmospheric CO2 concentration not come down, it would continue to increase forever.
In other words: Anything we do that is less than all of humanity evaporating from this planet is but a rounding error in this problem. Even if humanity evaporates, that means we go back to a decrease of 2 ppm/1,000 years --AT BEST.
I am not trying to be negative. I am trying to be a realist about this. Destroying entire economies for sake of what has become religious belief is wrong and pointless.
Take this 2050 goal some are talking about. OK. Perfect. We know that atmospheric CO2 accumulation has been happening at about 2 ppm per year. Yeah, that's on us. Maybe not all of it, after all, this was happening before humanity existed on this planet. Let's just say we are in for 50% of that, or 1 ppm per year.
OK, then. We want to flatten the curve by 2050. What does that mean exactly? Do we want to negate our contribution only or do we want to negate our contribution as well as the natural rate?
In the first case we are talking about: 1 ppm/yr * 31 years = 31 ppm
In the second instance the number is doubled: 2 ppm/yr * 31 years = 61 ppm
Let's take the lower number: We want to "take back" 31 ppm in, well, 31 years
What's the annual rate of change? 1 ppm per year
OK, let's get rid of all of humanity and everything we ever built on this planet. An alien species helps us by teleporting everything into space by next Monday. Gone.
What's the natural rate of CO2 reduction then? 0.002 ppm per year
Oops.
We need to chip away at a minimum of 31 ppm during the next 31 years and even if humanity evaporates from this planet all we can get out of the deal is 0.062 ppm? That is the MAXIMUM we'll get without an single human on this plane...
BTW, I should add that we also have a reliable number for the "no humans on earth" atmospheric CO2 rate of accumulation: It's about 100 ppm in about 10,000 years. In other words, on average, natural atmospheric CO2 concentration has risen at a rate five times faster than the natural "no humans" CO2 decrease rate of change.
That means 0.01 ppm per year (10 ppm per thousand years). This also frames the conversation with regards to what our contribution might actually be.
The challenge, of course, is that we are not going to erase humanity from the planet. Which means there will be some base number for the additional contribution to atmospheric CO2 accumulation no matter what we do.
In other words, it's 0.01 ppm/yr ONLY if we evaporate from the planet. With us on this blue marble the "new normal" is far higher than that, and unlikely to ever approach the "no humans on earth" rate.
This issue can be reasoned down to a few fundamental conclusions without engaging in anything more than simple analysis of the scale and timelines of the effects we are concerned with.
By looking at the EU CO2 spot prices we can get a quick glimpse on how much does the plane ticket matter compared to things like using Coal as power.
A plane ticket from Finland to Japan would go from ~1000€ into 1020€ if it would pay the same CO2 emission prices as coal power pays. So basically nothing.
We should focus on reducing the big CO2 emission sources instead of these. But it is understandable why people do things like this. They are really easy way to signal one cares about the environment, even though they are basically meaningless as the same person enjoys bit lower electricity prices due to cheap coal that pumps way more CO2 than the flights ever would.
You could reduce your electricity use. Just drop consumption by 10% and you already more than offset any flying you do. Or try to get solars and enjoy.
I don't think this is true unless you have a ridiculously high electricity bill. When I checked, one intercontinental retour flight was roughly equivalent to my yearly electricity bill, in terms of CO2 emissions. I have to admit I'm not sure how to reconcile this with CO2 credit prices, but I'm quite sure it's not really possible to offset the CO2 emissions of a intercontinental flight with 20 euro, that would mean that a minor tax on flights would make them practically carbon neutral, this is definitely not the case.
Here in the UK, the average household used 4,648kWh of electricity in 2010. The industry average in 2008 was 527g CO2e/kWh, giving average emissions from electricity use of 2449kg per household. The above figures are falling rapidly due to efficiency and decarbonisation.
A round-trip from LHR to JFK produces about 1800kg CO2e.
Reducing my electricity consumption by 10% would just barely offset the carbon emissions of a short haul trip within Europe. A frequent air traveller could easily produce an extra 10 tonnes a year without really noticing.
Stop eating industrial grown food. Stop whipping your ass with soft toilet paper. Stop consuming plastic. Stop ordering stuff from Amazon. Stop living in the modern world
The co2.myclimate.org website shows 1.6t CO2 emitted with an offset cost of 38€ for a flight from Finland to Japan[0].
For example, according to the Carbon Footprint Factsheet published on the UoM website[1], beef is only 6.61 pounds (~= 3kg) CO2 per serving (4oz ~= 0.12kg). You'd have to eat a lot of meat to produce an amount of CO2 comparable to that caused by a single flight.
Newer cars in EU are emitting around 110g CO2/km[3], so the Helsinki-Okinawa trip would result in an 8157km*110g/1000 ~= 900kg of CO2. Still less than a flight. However, according to Wikipedia[4], the flight CO2 emissions in EU are at ~100g/km per passenger which contradicts the co2.myclimate.org calculator unless the global efficiency figures are much worse than EU. Flights also emit nitrogen oxides which have a stronger effect at higher altitudes.
A carbon tax enforced by the governments would be the most effective measure[2] AFAIK.
I based mine on the wikipedia numbers. But regardless even 38€ is peanuts.
I also agree that carbon tax, or universally applied emission markets, would be the best. Coal power would be absolutely hammered as people prefer eating meat and flying instead of marginally cheaper elecricity.
>I may be wrong about this (please correct) but I think over 10% of the world's carbon budget is spent on running computers. It's everyone's fault and we all need to fix this. Don't just blame bitcoin miners.
On that topic AWS really need to beef up its game!
Who cares ? I just want 100% low CO2 energy. If they just buy the same quantity of renewable energy credit that they used, it is misleading because it does not cover their usage around the clock.
“Just purchasing more solar energy in a grid that already has lots of solar generation will not result in zero emissions,”
“To guarantee 100 percent emissions reductions from renewable energy, power consumption needs to be matched with renewable generation on an hourly basis,”
If your collaboration with your technical peers produces so little incremental value that you don't foresee your lifetime output displacing other products/services of lower value and/or greater environmental cost -- then don't travel.
Otherwise, travel as much as you can, while it increases your output.
It would be nice to see conferences adopt some kind of "bring your own bowl, spoon, and/or cup policy, so that each day does not result in a couple of plastic plates and cups being manufactured, used once, and trashed.
A little OT but the connection will be apparent at the end.
I had this interesting idea of "economic entropy". In analogy with statistical physics, a macrostate is what and how much is produced by the economy (consumable commodities), and a microstate is how it is produced (all the intermediate supply chains). So to one macrostate can correspond a large number of microstates, logarithm of number of which is the entropy of the macrostate.
Now assume we have two completely independent (not involved in trade) economies, and each of these is in some macrostate and with the corresponding entropy. And we enable the trade. Then over time, we might end up in the same macrostate (they together still produce exactly the same amount of goods), but now the entropy of the entire system is much higher, because there is much more possibilities of how the supply chain works (they are not confined into one of the two previous economies).
Now imagine that for some reason, cost of travel and transportation is really economically negligible. Then microstates with long path of transport for products correspond to same macrostates as those with short path of transport for products. Even more, they will be statistically favored, since global economy has high entropy.
In practice, the high entropy state looks like: You have several multinational companies with sites in the same city, and their executives fly around the world to convince other executives of multinationals to buy their products (be part of their supply chain). The corresponding low entropy state would be that each city has its own set of companies, which all together form a single supply chain.
The point is, historically, we came from low entropy state into a high entropy state, and we are now screwed. We know the low entropy state would be more efficient, but we have no idea how to get there. But getting there would greatly reduce transportation, which is one of the biggest contributors to CO2 emissions.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 281 ms ] threadThis part seem much more important, compared to trying to offset plane travel by buying carbon credits.
[1]: https://mobile.twitter.com/shubhamjainco/status/110244951253...
And according to these numbers, a plane is more efficient than a car with 2 occupants. Average vehicle occupancy varies around 1.5 people.
It doesn't make the plane a better way to travel, of course. It just shows that individual cars need to be proscribed just as much as airplanes.
Flying e.g. 6k miles is reasonably easy to do in a year. I think it is easy to not think about the impact as it all happens in a few gos.
Driving 6k miles takes a long time and would be felt more acutely. It is easier to switch to cleaner forms of energy for this travel and one may be more inclined to reduce this energy usage as it is also a huge time sink.
A commute of 40 miles per day is ~9600 miles per year.
I'd wager there are more people who commute 30 minutes each way by car than there are who go on an annual holiday to Europe :)
Of course, reducing either would be a good thing.
That's a somewhat short commute by modern American standards too.
Honestly, we'd all be better off if we stopped driving to work and made our cities denser and used trains to get around, had more/better train service between nearby cities, and then took annual holidays in Europe on Airbus A380 aircraft that were configured with only economy seating (700+ passengers per plane).
If we're making great efforts to even slow down the acceleration of greenhouse gas emissions, I find it odd to come up with ways to rationalize emitting 2-3x the result of a very long commute. Especially when the endpoint is a programming/software conference.
On the train I can work all the way, stretch my legs when I want, use WiFi / 4G, and bring as many liquids as I like. The environmental benefits are a bonus on top.
I wish more of Europe was accessible directly via Eurostar from London, but I'm quite happy with Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam for now.
(I'll be attending https://opensourceawards.org/ - come say hi!)
If you hate reservations or are too disorganised to book one for a busy train, but also dislike being disturbed by someone who does have a reservation and wants you to move, most train operators have some rule about which parts of their trains aren't reserved, you can find that out and then travel in the unreservable part of the train. Finding a seat there won't be any easier, but you won't be asked to move later.
It is interesting how trains are offering better services even as planes suck more over time. Ten years ago knowing where to find power sockets in the Standard class 444 series (next to the cab at the far end from First class) made the difference between charging devices and going without, now almost every train has power sockets and/or USB, free WiFi (not _good_ WiFi, you won't be streaming video - but it'll let you check email and read Hacker News) and air conditioning.
There are other suffixes, but they relate to the layout of seating in a carriage and apparently almost all trains have "airline" style according to the nomenclature of whoever decides these things.
It used to be really easy. Reserved seats had a paper ticket stuck in the back. Virgin trains switched to a small LED display on the edge of the luggage rack. Rather than have a single word like "Vacant" it has a scrolling message. As do reserved seats. So you have to peer at every single display as the text slowly scrolls past to figure out where you can sit. I don't know if this is gross incompetence or part of their ongoing efforts to discourage unbooked travel.
Paper tickets can't be updated and so in some cases they reflect no longer accurate information. This is especially misleading for long distance services where many reservations may happen after the service departs from its origin.
No affiliation, just been using it to help plan all sorts of travel since I stopped flying in 2011 (although I have to say the best way to travel long distance in Europe is by bicycle, if you can make the time).
I would ride the trainmore if it were quicker and a 4-5 hour flight or 18 hour drive didnt take 40 hours on a train.
That's an experience I'm generally willing to pay extra for vs flying, but unfortunately in America the opportunities to take advantage of trains are lacking if you live outside the Northeast Corridor, as I now do.
Sleepers are appreciated on planes enough that they charge a lot for them (a 12+ hour long haul in business class is mostly sleep, in economy it’s watch whatever movie you can find).
Beijing to Western Europe via Moscow could technically be done by train. The first leg is 8 hours which should count as a long haul.
Isn't it worth comparing not only the financial cost, but the ethical one and the environmental impact of decisions?
Edit: also, you can get stuff done on your notebook in the train, but often times not on a plane b/c of the excessive check-in, gating, boarding, security, customs ceremony
On the other hand those places also have high speed rail.
It's true that a 1.5h flight would take me 4h, but most of that extra time is universal to all travel. An equivalent 1h30m train ride would take me 3h20m. Not that much more favorable.
But to say there's no "low-cost railway" is plainly false. Bavaria has probably one of the best train systems in the entire world, and it's not expensive by any means.
If I just want to travel in the same Bundesland where I am, there are plenty of cheap options, that's true.
- flying: 120 EUR from Munich, getting up at 4-5, arriving at 9
- train: have to go the day before, have an additional night in the hotel (70 EUR) and THEN the train is more expensive than flying anyway. Maybe not so important if the company pays, but still not fun to argue (depending on the company).
I've done Chicago -> Oakland via Amtrak for less than $200... It's brutal in coach. But I've done the same route in a private sleeper room, with 6 or 7 restaurant-quality meals included, for less than $500. It's basically a 60-hour-long well-catered scenic landscape tour of America. (But the on-board WiFi and your ability to 4G tether is basically worthless between Denver -> SLC, and between SLC -> Reno :-)
I.e. the chance of it having a school class in it is like winning the lottery ;)
The 75 Euro deal sounds really cheap too.
I tried planning out a weekend trip from DC (where I live) to NYC on Amtrak, and I couldn't make it work. The goal was to travel to NYC without flying, and without having to take time off from work (I work normal 9-5ish, flex hours). The only way to get fares cheaper than by airline is to take the train at 5AM or so. But the train station is downtown; I can't get downtown in time to catch the train by Metro (subway), because the Metro doesn't run that early. So I'd have to take a Lyft/Uber, which is expensive. If I go at a more convenient hour, the rates shoot way up, so it's more expensive than flying.
Sure, I could take a day or two off from work, but that defeats the point. If I wanted to travel between Frankfurt and Munich on a weekend without taking time off from work, or between Tokyo and Osaka, I could do it more cheaply and easily than DC-NYC.
I've hardly ever had any customers not in Munich or in the Nuremberg (area) that weren't so far away from the station that you'd need a taxi, so you can drive anyway. Especially for conferences. Usually Munich or Nuremberg.
https://ps.bahn.de/preissuche/preissuche/psc_angebotssuche.r...
I hope we will find a better one, e.g. online conferences or putting a tax specifically on business travel on behalf of medium to large sized companies.
Our offspring will be Earth-poor, suffering the consequences of our frivolous "spending."
In my mind a carbon tax is a wealth transfer from the present to the future. I think it's a good solution because we aren't exacting fair price for our activities. I read a great book once in which future generations sued the shoes off their elders for not paying fair price for their climate-changing activities.
Wealth inequality should be addressed. We shouldn't hamstring other solutions just because it also is a problem - we can work on them in parallel. I appreciate you bringing it up though, it is a good thing to be aware of.
That seems reasonable to me and while it will make flying to Europe too expensive for some, it wouldn't make traveling to Europe something only the rich can afford.
For a typical family flying from middle America to Orlando, it would probably mean one less day at Disney.
My personal hope is to liaise with some of the best researchers in the world regarding offsetting and have an approved offsetting scheme, which can be applied anywhere, that updates based on the current best understanding; we would then bring this capability into a newly built travel tracker (it's closer to a prototype atm).
Please let me know if this is something you'd find interesting.
My comment was based on the cost to directly pull CO2 out of the air at industrial quantities, not indirect methods like planting trees.
https://co2.myclimate.org/en/flight_calculators/new
https://www.clevel.co.uk/flight-carbon-calculator/
https://trees.org/carboncalculator/
https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2018/06/team-provides-firs...
If you massively raise prices for everyone to fly, less fuel gets burned, and the people burning the fuel are paying into a pool that ideally would be used to alleviate inequality on any other front.
If you want to tax the rich, just tax the rich based on them being rich; don't greenwash it.
I agree. The question is who are these 1% of people. Carbon tax means that they are the richest 1%. I hope our society has enough imagination to consider other options.
Targeting airlines might be the wrong place. Perhaps the fuel vendors are the ones that should bear the cost of removing all of the CO2 that's going to end up in the air from every bit of fuel they sell.
https://www.flixtrain.com/
However, if you want to go Hamburg-Munich on an ICE (better than flying imo IF (!) everything works) and you do not have purchased a "BahnCard" and you do not book far in advance then it is very expensive.
2nd class ICE ride on that track in 2 weeks is 153€, flex, one way. For that money you get a return flight.
If you can be 100% sure to make it to one exact train you can go for ca. 50€. [1] Risk of failing to catch that train is pretty high though.
[1] https://reiseauskunft.bahn.de/bin/query.exe/dn?revia=yes&exi...
The flexible plane ticket is probably 3-10x the price, depending on the airline.
There are regular offers between capitals and big cities across countries, travels I did from Stuttgart: Stuttgart-Paris 40€, Copenhagen-Stuttgart 80€ (the train got in a Ferry and then the travel continued until Hamburg!), Stuttgart Amsterdam 80€. Sometimes traveling to far places like Spain must go over Paris, and each country has their own train network with more or less adaptation.
The quality of the public train got worse in Germany during the last 10 years and it is not an infrastructure thought to be run as a business with profits, but it is still one of the best transportation services for long distance.
The only problems with the train is visiting remote areas where it is necessary doing to or three train changes, which increases the chance of delays.
However, I’ve found that human face-to-face interaction is more productive vs email/Skype and wonder if there’s potential missed opportunities if we were to completely forego in-person conferences.
So you know what kind of person this is.
But their salaries depend on suppressing opposing viewpoints.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derreck_Kayongo
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_the_World
The bar soap better be awesome.
Also going to some new interesting places.
And don't underestimate how important meeting new people and networking is! I would say that's probably my biggest motivation for going to conferences these days.
Given that I actively prefer reading on a screen, I'm genuinely not sure if this is an apt comparison. My e-books have infinitely large margins for annotation, instant excerpting and customisable formatting. YouTube videos can be paused while I Google something, rewound if I've missed something and played on fast-forward if the speaker is needlessly slow.
Also, low number of respondents and considering the survey went through his own twitter with a Climate Code idea, probably very biaised sample.
However, I'd totally favour a company with a flight offsetting policy. Can anyone point me some?
Though I agree face to face is definitely a different experience. My point is maybe crossing oceans is not mandatory to learn from one another. A while ago people didn't had the choice, yet they were able to do much in all science.
https://chooose.today/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_credit
Maybe once Starlink launches, one could treat it as a remote office. Definitively more comfortable than working through a red-eye.
That is, of course, over-simplifying, but O'reilly's conferences line of business is an interesting example of a non-energy company who's business model is existentially threatened by a meaningful response to climate change.
Internet debate artists will endlessly get caught up in the false-binary of banning international flights or not, but functionally, from O'reilly's perspective, there's no meaningful difference between an outright ban and an order-of-magnitude price increase. Either way the conference business craters.
Can they "pivot to video"?
Do they feel ethically obligated to try?
Certainly taking the train to a conference is better than flying, if that's the choice you have. Concentrating on conferences local to you is a good idea. Attending remotely sort of works, but it's really not the same as being there. It's better if you are with other people at your end, watching together.
However, I think it's unreasonable to expect everyone to do that on their own. For every person doing an ecologically responsible thing (taking trains instead of planes, taking public transit instead of driving, etc), there is just such a huge magnitude of people doing the "wrong" thing to cancel it out, largely because that (from a short-term-pragmatic-standpoint, the "wrong" thing is better) or at least cheaper. If you value your time at all, flying across the country is cheaper, meat is readibly available and inexpensive (and typically taste good), and driving to work is substantially easier than biking.
I don't know anything about ecology so I'll admit that I might regret writing this entire comment in a year, but it seems to me that the only way we're going to make a dent in climate change is to a) create technology that provides an experience that is competitive with the dirty version of something (electric cars could be a good example), or b) to start artificially taxing things that are really hurting the environment. If we started charging an extra dollar-per-gallon tax on gasoline, it would probably discourage people from driving as much, and put more economic incentive on point a).
I can commend someone not flying to conferences anymore, but I am afraid to say that I dont have the same self-discipline.
So instead of continuing to widen roads, we need to build more trains, and change municipal development processes so that cities are made denser.
Instead of having short-hop air travel, we need to fund high-speed rail.
And yes, taxing things to change consumption patterns is a big part of this. Slap a big tax on gasoline/diesel and jet fuel and use that to fund HSR, for instance.
The only thing stopping American politicians from vastly reducing CO2 emissions is the will of the electorate. The top-down political solution actually comes from the bottom-up - by persuading people to vote for candidates who support decarbonisation. You only have one president, but he was chosen for office by 62,979,636 voters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
Fuel taxes are pretty high already. Increasing them will hurt a lot of people very badly.
It's actually becoming a problem; our fuel taxes haven't risen as much as inflation, and our road infrastructure is funded largely by fuel taxes.
Get rid of coal. Take some of the ~$6bn/yr that you currently spend subsidising the fossil fuel industries and deliver a package of job-creating tax credits in Wyoming and West Virginia.
Do whatever it takes to remove minimum lot sizes, single-use zoning and minimum parking requirements from zoning laws. I'm sure that the Supreme Court could be persuaded to change their mind on Euclid vs Ambler. Maybe people would drive less and walk more if suburbs weren't legally required to be unwalkable.
Reallocate some of the ~$20bn/yr you spend on agricultural subsidies to disincentivise cattle feedlot operations and incentivise soil sequestration.
Impose gradually escalating taxes on road and domestic aviation fuel and spend the revenues on mass transit infrastructure. Offer low-income citizens a rebate.
Seriously, I agree with your end goal in the reduction of man-made CO2 emissions. I even agree, in spirit, with items 3 and 4 above. What I don't agree with is the sudden dismantling of industries and punitive taxation.
I believe CO2 emissions will be cut as man's technologies and economies gradually evolve. I also believe that the Earths weather operates wholly independently of man's industrial activity at this time.
Plenty of other countries have already done it. There's literally nothing stopping Americans from following suit if Americans decide that it's the right thing to do.
>I believe CO2 emissions will be cut as man's technologies and economies gradually evolve.
If the IPCC are right, that'll be far too late. They say we need ambitious action now. They could be wrong, but is that a gamble we want to take? Is it worth risking a disaster-movie scenario so that we can keep driving big trucks and prop up some industries with no future anyway? If the IPCC are right and we do nothing, how will we explain it to our grandchildren? "Sorry kids, we ruined your lives because we thought that 99.9% of scientists were wrong?". "Sorry kids, we ruined your lives because we couldn't be bothered getting the bus?". Is that how we want to be remembered?
All the other ideas are fantastic.
How dare you dismiss the problems and stresses of an impoverished life no matter where an individual lives.
And how dare you suggest that individuals be compelled or coerced by authority to relocate to a place not of their choosing.
Some climate-related policies are going to be inherently painful, so we should seek wherever possible to mitigate that pain, spread it around equitably or ration it out over time. Getting people to transition to more sustainable lifestyles is obviously the goal, but uprooting a bunch of low-income workers has terrible optics and burns political capital that could be better used elsewhere. You're aiming for diffuse costs and concentrated benefits.
The calculus is slightly weird in the US due to what I will politely describe as a unique political culture, but you can frame a lot of it in American political grammar. Call it the "war on weather" or something, appeal to the self-image of America as the world's moral leadership, sell it as every citizen's patriotic duty and use the term "common sense" a lot. Emphasise how it'll build a long-term economic advantage over China. If you think immigration is bad now, just wait until half of South America becomes uninhabitable. If we pass this R&D bill, we'll have a monopoly on this technology in the future. Green policies are eminently achievable in the US political landscape, but they need to be thoroughly decoupled from liberal rhetoric.
https://globalnews.ca/news/5202108/carbon-tax-canada-2019-re...
If we don't, you know that those who politically oppose us will simply call us hypocrites: Russia doesn't use careful logic, and even though pointing out hypocrisy a logical fallacy, most leaders, both government and business, will continue to use it, because maintaining power always feels like the right way forward.
Basically we have to practice conspicuous ethics because there will always be someone saying it's useless behind you, even people who understand that climate change is real.
And even then, it might be a wash. We have to hope for a global "oh-shit" moment in the next few years if we are to have any hope of handling climate change. It doesn't mean that I won't be conspicuous and hope to help create like-minded individuals.
Otherwise it's just the prison dilemma game and tragedy of the commons.
I'm hardly this big advocate for a capitalism, but your statements seem a bit reductionist.
It only takes a small percentage of the population to make a systematic change[0], I hope for humanity we are reaching a tipping point on this. People living their life in the correct way is spreading awareness and they are putting their money where their mouth is. These people and the youth climate strike may be our last chance. Also, the environment is the number one issue for the democratic party in the 2020 election. But, I do agree eventually these people making these changes will have to drive government agendas and the real mass changes will have to happen that way.
[0]http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190513-it-only-takes-35-of...
I mean, I don't own a car, am mostly vegetarian (I eat fish occasionally), and take public transit nearly everywhere, so it's not like I don't try and do my part (though I do fly a lot, so that probably cancels out all my savings).
Part of the problem with writing comments like this is that I do think some of the the issues causing climate-change to become a problem are due to a specific political party, and HN typically gets a bit flag-heavy whenever you start getting into overt politics.
Congratulations on your baseless moral superiority, you've made basically zero impact!
The airlines wouldn't ground flights, they might just adjust their models for purchasing fuel. In most cases they'd just sell the tickets to non-software engineers who actually value their time (basic supply and demand logic).
Maybe we should move to a model where all software conferences are scheduled with an associated Amtrak ticket. Then companies will just have to forgo years of collective productivity as all employees waste a week of their lives sitting on a train.
The cognitive dissonance here is deafening.
People spend thousands to go to a conference and the stated benefit is to hear a few talks that are definitely recorded and to have a handful of useful conversations.
Let's be honest: many people at conferences just see them as a way to have the company pay for you to get out of the office and go on a semi-vacation. I know I've gone to things with that mindset before.
Don't get me wrong it's not the events that are the issue, it's how far we travel to them. I'm sure 90% of the benefit could be had by going to local meetups and watching the big conferences online.
Developers and 'practitioners' are typically background noise to the main purpose, unless of course they have influence on the decision makers.
This is even truer in the scale of the really big players closing deals in the millions+.
And invariably when you know dozens/hundreds of people in the same field somebody usually needs some work done & is more likely to give that work to somebody they met in person vs someone anonymous off of the internet.
The "do good work" part is where you turn this into a snowball & get recommended around.
So yeah, networking plays such a big part that I really prefer to meet people from all over the world (or at least all over Europe) once per year and not from the same pool of ~1000-5000 in my area.
None of that is served by local meetups / watching talks online.
The clearest benefit of conferences for sponsors is the potential lead between frontline-but-backoffice workers who work on a particular topic to the decision-makers behind them who can influence purchasing. Being present at conferences fosters passing familiarity of developers with the product, which helps conversations that occur between those developers and their bosses later: the emails from the higher-ups that ask "what do you think about Product?", and the off-the-cuff gut assessments that follow. Irrespective of the developer's initial reaction, name recognition of the product sticks around and often makes it to later rounds of evaluation and assessment.
Sure, you can attend talks... However "magical" things happen when you get people with different skills all talking as equals. It's the opposite of mob mentality, where each person in a group adds to the collective intelligence and power to see further.
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And yes, I just got back from Circle City Con in which I gave a talk about "SigInt for the masses: Building and Using a Signals Intelligence Platform for Less than $150". For me, it was a 1hr drive. But still, watching a video or making one online != in person.
My talk is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyq6_IZ-2fE
My repo (including scripts, printables, presentation) is here: https://gitlab.com/crankylinuxuser/siginttablet
I agree that developer conferences may be wasteful, but don't paint non-conference travel with that brush.
You're saying that like it's a bad thing. I find that these "semi-vacations" do a lot to recharge my batteries, which is very helpful to my productivity in the long run.
I'm sure 90% of the benefit could be had by going to local meetups and watching the big conferences online.
I would say more like 50 percent. The other 50 percent comes in the form of (vitally important) F2F interactions. Which are why, time and time again -- remote interactions are found to be "just not the same" as in-person interactions.
Nothing's wrong with semi-vacations. But we might as well be open about it and provide an actual vacation and do it in a less carbon intensive way.
Let's say if a company instead of paying for a conference, just gave you a few days off and cash in hand. How would you spend it?
To be honest, at least once a year I'd probably go to a technical conference.
And this begs the question about their sincerity about what they are proposing about climate change, do they actually mean it or do they just want to appease their political base.
People can do whatever they like on their own. We elect politicians to establish our public policy, not their personal policy.
Talking about non-solutions might feel emotionally satisfying, yet it does nothing at all to really address the problem. Worse yet, it pulls the conversation away from real solutions.
Shifting the goalpost? Getting near net zero increase would be sufficient to avoid an extinction event.
> pulls the conversation away from real solutions
Do you have a real solution? If not, why badmouth something constructive just because it is not constructive enough? If yes, why don't you post it?
--- start quote [1] ---
This is the largest, dirtiest coal mine in Europe. It's responsible for 100 Million Tons of CO2 emissions per year.
That's 3168 kg of CO2 per second.
--- end quote ---
I will be flying to Barcelona from Stockholm in June. Some sites show me the three-hour flight will cost 616kg of CO2. Is it per person? I don't know. Let's assume per person (even though I'm pretty sure it's for the entire flight).
In that same time that mine will have released 60×60×3.5×3168 = almost 40 million kg of CO2. Enough for every single person on that flight to take over 200 such flights to be anywhere on the same level of CO2 emmissions.
[1] https://twitter.com/JoanieLemercier/status/11113348483990528...
It is per person, going by plane takes roughly as much as going by car if it is over land. Stockholm to Barcelona is according to Google 2788 km. Typical car takes 1.2 litre per 10km, so the whole trip would be around 300 litres of petrol. 1 litre of petrol is around 2.4 kg CO2, so over 700 kg CO2 for the entire trip.
A typical car takes 4-5 people. A typical plane takes 200-400 people. So 700 kg for the entire trip wouldn't be per person.
If humanity and all of our stuff evaporated from this planet it would take 50,000 to 75,000 years for atmospheric CO2 to drop by 100ppm.
These are all non-solutions. Even if we become extinct and all of our technology, buildings and power-plants rot away and dissolve, you are still looking at tens of thousands of years.
None of these things, individually or collectively are better than humanity not being on this planet. Which means they can’t possibly produce results any faster than that.
Transportation is the biggest single source of emissions in the US, so it is entirely reasonable to make it a high-priority target.
https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
I have an open question that nobody has answered yet:
If all of humanity evaporated from this planet tomorrow, it would take 50,000 to 75,000 years for atmospheric CO2 to drop by 100ppm.
We know this to a high degree of certainty because of ice core atmospheric data going back 800,000 years. In other words, way before any of our technology even existed.
So, the natural “no humans anywhere” rate of change is in the order of 100ppm per 50,000 years.
Now the question:
How does your <insert any idea you care to test here> msnage to improve on this rate of change a thousand-fold when it is but a rounding error when compared to the planet without humanity at all?
Simple example: Convert the entire world to the most optimal forms of renewable energy!
OK, if all of humanity LEFT THE PLANET and we took ALL OF OUR TECHNOLOGY WITH US, it would take 50,000 to 75,000 years for a useful change in atmospheric CO2.
This renewable energy shift is an insignificant change when compared to a planet empty of us and our crap. Which means that, if there’s a reduction of atmospheric CO2 at all it can’t possibly happen any faster than 100ppm per ~50,000 years.
Anyone claiming otherwise needs to explain the magical methods they will use to violate the laws of physics as we know them.
BTW, to whoever made the comment: I don’t have to know the solution to a problem in order to recognize the problem as well as to identify non-solutions. I don’t know how to make humans breathe under water, but I can tell that eating more fish is not a solution.
You see impact of up to 75k years from your and my emissions. Essentially any pollution you and I cause can be considered permanent from a human time perspective. If we were to stop emitting today, it's not certain where equilibrium would settle, nor what tipping points will pass as temperatures increase.
You conclude there's no point bothering and to keep doing near permanent damage? Just keep on shitting in the pool until it's unusable? This is concluding there's no point investing in a pension.
Personally, I conclude we need to reach carbon neutral as soon as possible - to stop making the problem worse. Very simply put 100ppm is going to be better for humanity and other species than 150ppm or 200ppm etc, so stop as soon as possible. To not pass the irreparable tipping points, to stop adding fuel to the fire.
Not as soon as convenient, or as soon as affordable, but as possible. Mobilise countries as though on a war footing: rationing - of flying, of petrol, of food, of consumer goods and clothing, quotas, enforcement, require industries to stop producing some thing and produce something else instead. ALL of these were done in WW2, and no laws of physics were broken. Now consider human population growth, so probably add child rationing too.
Personally I don't see that mobilisation happening soon. Based upon the pathetic progress over the last 30 or 40 years I think it almost inevitable - the market can't solve it. Very probably not in my lifetime, as humanity will probably need to be much closer to a clear abyss of impending disaster. I do think it the inheritance my children can very likely look forward to, and a society that's much less free and may have far less opportunity. Because their parent's and grandparent's generations couldn't be arsed.
Nevertheless two easy first steps toward stop making the problem worse are carbon neutral electricity generation, and reducing flying. No magic or disingenuous claims.
I want us to have a look at the real science behind this problem and have an honest discussion about how to deal with it.
For example, there is no way to dispute that a planet earth without humanity has a natural atmospheric CO2 reduction rate of about 100ppm per 50,000 years (the range goes as far as 100/75,000).
This is, to repeat myself, indisputable. In order to challenge this assertion someone would have to prove that the 800,000 years of atmospheric composition data is flawed in some way. And they would have to prove how ice core atmospheric composition testing is flawed.
When I started to read on this subject I found this data. As an engineer, my first inclination was to seek information on both the accuracy and percentage error in these tests. I read papers and articles on the subject of atmospheric composition testing using ice core sample. I went at it skeptical as can be, convinced the errors had to be huge. Well, I ended-up discovering I was wrong. The techniques, methodology and data are extremely accurate and reliable.
Which means the conversation HAS to start there:
100 ppm/50,000 years, or 0.002 ppm/year, or 2 ppm/thousand years
These are scary numbers because of what they mean: If we are going to claim to be able to do better than 2 ppm in a THOUSAND years we have a HUGE burden of proof to pass. We have to explain how it is that we are going to affect planetary scale changes at a rate massively quicker than the planet has historically managed on its own. And that, I am afraid, might very well be in the realm of magic, not science.
This is why we already know that supplanting all power generation across the entire planet with the most optimal forms of renewable energy generation (in other words, imagine the most fantastically good forms of renewables and that's what we install) we won't fix the problem. Not only will atmospheric CO2 concentration not come down, it would continue to increase forever.
In other words: Anything we do that is less than all of humanity evaporating from this planet is but a rounding error in this problem. Even if humanity evaporates, that means we go back to a decrease of 2 ppm/1,000 years --AT BEST.
I am not trying to be negative. I am trying to be a realist about this. Destroying entire economies for sake of what has become religious belief is wrong and pointless.
Take this 2050 goal some are talking about. OK. Perfect. We know that atmospheric CO2 accumulation has been happening at about 2 ppm per year. Yeah, that's on us. Maybe not all of it, after all, this was happening before humanity existed on this planet. Let's just say we are in for 50% of that, or 1 ppm per year.
OK, then. We want to flatten the curve by 2050. What does that mean exactly? Do we want to negate our contribution only or do we want to negate our contribution as well as the natural rate?
In the first case we are talking about: 1 ppm/yr * 31 years = 31 ppm In the second instance the number is doubled: 2 ppm/yr * 31 years = 61 ppm
Let's take the lower number: We want to "take back" 31 ppm in, well, 31 years
What's the annual rate of change? 1 ppm per year
OK, let's get rid of all of humanity and everything we ever built on this planet. An alien species helps us by teleporting everything into space by next Monday. Gone.
What's the natural rate of CO2 reduction then? 0.002 ppm per year
Oops.
We need to chip away at a minimum of 31 ppm during the next 31 years and even if humanity evaporates from this planet all we can get out of the deal is 0.062 ppm? That is the MAXIMUM we'll get without an single human on this plane...
That means 0.01 ppm per year (10 ppm per thousand years). This also frames the conversation with regards to what our contribution might actually be.
The challenge, of course, is that we are not going to erase humanity from the planet. Which means there will be some base number for the additional contribution to atmospheric CO2 accumulation no matter what we do.
In other words, it's 0.01 ppm/yr ONLY if we evaporate from the planet. With us on this blue marble the "new normal" is far higher than that, and unlikely to ever approach the "no humans on earth" rate.
This issue can be reasoned down to a few fundamental conclusions without engaging in anything more than simple analysis of the scale and timelines of the effects we are concerned with.
one conference per year - 23.9%
two to four conferences per year - 47.8%
Five plus conferences per year - 16.4%
A plane ticket from Finland to Japan would go from ~1000€ into 1020€ if it would pay the same CO2 emission prices as coal power pays. So basically nothing.
We should focus on reducing the big CO2 emission sources instead of these. But it is understandable why people do things like this. They are really easy way to signal one cares about the environment, even though they are basically meaningless as the same person enjoys bit lower electricity prices due to cheap coal that pumps way more CO2 than the flights ever would.
To be honest I don't know how I personally can focus on big CO2 sources. But I know how to stop flying.
Here in the UK, the average household used 4,648kWh of electricity in 2010. The industry average in 2008 was 527g CO2e/kWh, giving average emissions from electricity use of 2449kg per household. The above figures are falling rapidly due to efficiency and decarbonisation.
A round-trip from LHR to JFK produces about 1800kg CO2e.
Reducing my electricity consumption by 10% would just barely offset the carbon emissions of a short haul trip within Europe. A frequent air traveller could easily produce an extra 10 tonnes a year without really noticing.
For example, according to the Carbon Footprint Factsheet published on the UoM website[1], beef is only 6.61 pounds (~= 3kg) CO2 per serving (4oz ~= 0.12kg). You'd have to eat a lot of meat to produce an amount of CO2 comparable to that caused by a single flight.
Newer cars in EU are emitting around 110g CO2/km[3], so the Helsinki-Okinawa trip would result in an 8157km*110g/1000 ~= 900kg of CO2. Still less than a flight. However, according to Wikipedia[4], the flight CO2 emissions in EU are at ~100g/km per passenger which contradicts the co2.myclimate.org calculator unless the global efficiency figures are much worse than EU. Flights also emit nitrogen oxides which have a stronger effect at higher altitudes.
A carbon tax enforced by the governments would be the most effective measure[2] AFAIK.
[0]: https://co2.myclimate.org/en/portfolios?calculation_id=19789...
[1]: http://css.umich.edu/factsheets/carbon-footprint-factsheet
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/faq_carbonpricing
[3]: https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/transport/vehicles/cars_...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviati...
I also agree that carbon tax, or universally applied emission markets, would be the best. Coal power would be absolutely hammered as people prefer eating meat and flying instead of marginally cheaper elecricity.
On that topic AWS really need to beef up its game!
“Just purchasing more solar energy in a grid that already has lots of solar generation will not result in zero emissions,”
“To guarantee 100 percent emissions reductions from renewable energy, power consumption needs to be matched with renewable generation on an hourly basis,”
https://energy.stanford.edu/news/100-renewables-doesn-t-equa...
At one point they will have to stop with "renewable" and accept nuclear and the low carbon label (on an hourly or minute basis).
Otherwise, travel as much as you can, while it increases your output.
I had this interesting idea of "economic entropy". In analogy with statistical physics, a macrostate is what and how much is produced by the economy (consumable commodities), and a microstate is how it is produced (all the intermediate supply chains). So to one macrostate can correspond a large number of microstates, logarithm of number of which is the entropy of the macrostate.
Now assume we have two completely independent (not involved in trade) economies, and each of these is in some macrostate and with the corresponding entropy. And we enable the trade. Then over time, we might end up in the same macrostate (they together still produce exactly the same amount of goods), but now the entropy of the entire system is much higher, because there is much more possibilities of how the supply chain works (they are not confined into one of the two previous economies).
Now imagine that for some reason, cost of travel and transportation is really economically negligible. Then microstates with long path of transport for products correspond to same macrostates as those with short path of transport for products. Even more, they will be statistically favored, since global economy has high entropy.
In practice, the high entropy state looks like: You have several multinational companies with sites in the same city, and their executives fly around the world to convince other executives of multinationals to buy their products (be part of their supply chain). The corresponding low entropy state would be that each city has its own set of companies, which all together form a single supply chain.
The point is, historically, we came from low entropy state into a high entropy state, and we are now screwed. We know the low entropy state would be more efficient, but we have no idea how to get there. But getting there would greatly reduce transportation, which is one of the biggest contributors to CO2 emissions.