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Come on, that's incredibly disingenuous. Of course it's not terrible to improve the atmosphere. But you're making it sound like all methods are equivalent; whe
by karl_gluck 11y ago
Come on, that's incredibly disingenuous.
Of course it's not terrible to improve the atmosphere. But you're making it sound like all methods are equivalent; when there are limited resources to address the problem, they need to be allocated accordingly.
It's a similar situation to water in California -- yes, everyone should cut down on consumption. But the single-family mega-mansions using as much as 90 normal residences [1] cutting 10% of their water usage has a much bigger impact than an average residence cutting 10%.
Edited:
If a billion dollars spent in the US reduces US emissions by 5%, and US emissions and emissions from these fires are equivalent, and it costs less to incentivize Indonesian / Malaysian palm oil producers to stop burning peat forest and reduce emissions by 5%, we should be doing that instead.
[1] https://www.revealnews.org/article/the-wet-prince-of-bel-air-who-is-californias-biggest-water-guzzler/ https://www.revealnews.org/article/the-wet-prince-of-bel-air...
Original before edit: If the US could spend a billion dollars to reduce our carbon emissions by 5%, or could spend a billion dollars paying Indonesia & Malaysia to stop setting palm oil on fire and reduce THEIR emissions, the results are not equivalent. The latter is 200x more effective. [the 200x was from a misreading of the article]
- mikeash 11y agoHow is it 200x more effective to reduce the emissions of Indonesia and Malaysia by 5%? These fires exceeded the emissions of the US for 26 days and otherwise the US far outweighs these countries when it comes to emissions. If the choice is 5% of ours or 5% of theirs, surely 5% of ours produces a far greater effect.
- karl_gluck 11y agoYou're right, I must have misread the original article while composing my response. This is what I was remembering: "Taken together, the impact of peat fires on global warming can be more than 200 times greater than fires on other lands."
- mikeash 11y agoIt sounds like the original article may have greatly overstated the emissions from these fires. I came in after it got fixed so I don't know.
- notahacker 11y agoI'm not sure where you've got the idea that it's 200x more efficient to achieve a 5% reduction in emissions in countries which produce lower emissions than the US for about 340 days per year.... And if you're looking at how the US could effectively use its financial clout to help the environment, funding investigations into who started illegal forest fires in upstream Kalimantan is probably going to be lower on the list than subsidising cleantech in California.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]