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I've stopped flying to conferences for climate change reasons
- mrweasel 7y ago>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.
- ubercow13 7y agoComputers 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?
- rgblambda 7y agoOne 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.
- shubhamjain 7y agoComputers 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]. [1]: https://mobile.twitter.com/shubhamjainco/status/1102449512537251845 https://mobile.twitter.com/shubhamjainco/status/110244951253...
- mrpopo 7y ago> A plane despite transporting hundreds of passengers is less efficient than a fully occupied car. 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.
- dan-robertson 7y agoComparing 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.
- michaelt 7y agoA round trip from New York to Paris is ~7300 miles. 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.
- magduf 7y ago>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).
- pessimizer 7y agoThe 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.
- magduf 7y agoWell 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?
- SkyBelow 7y agoDepends 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.
- rwallace 7y agoIt seems wildly improbable. Where did that number come from? I don't believe it's anywhere near that high.
- edent 7y agoNext 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. (I'll be attending https://opensourceawards.org/ https://opensourceawards.org/ - come say hi!)
- Aromasin 7y agoIf this if is the UK train service your experience can vary drastically though, depending on if you can get a seat or not...
- davidarkemp2 7y agoIf 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.
- tialaramex 7y agoOne 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.
- elektor 7y agoA 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.
- chapium 7y agoThis is why I imagined 3d telepresence taking off. People like to explore the space around them, even if its just an illusion.
- ycgeu 7y ago>Tech Conferences have Codes of Conduct thanks to the brave and good work of certain people. So you know what kind of person this is.
- AndyMcConachie 7y agoWhat's your point?
- xlkk 7y agoPoint nicely illustrated by the fact that the reeducation squad flagged the post within minutes. But their salaries depend on suppressing opposing viewpoints.
- EliRivers 7y agoThe kind of person who tells us that conferences have codes of conduct. You pointing that out isn't remotely useful, but at least you're joining in.
- passiveincomelg 7y agoThe kind kind?
- JeremyBanks 7y agoSo we know what kind of person you are
- therealmarv 7y agoTrying 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.
- passiveincomelg 7y agoYes, 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.
- dagw 7y agoYou make it sound like fun is a bad thing
- tobltobs 7y agoIf your "fun" requires you to produce tons of CO2 then maybe yes it is.
- chrisan 7y agoBesides meeting new people/networking, what does one get from attending a conference physically that cannot be obtained remotely?
- lr4444lr 7y agoHotel bar soap.
- roter 7y agoOr just leave the soap. Many hotels recycle it through the Global Soap Project [0] and Clean the World [1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derreck_Kayongo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derreck_Kayongo [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_the_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_the_World
- tlarkworthy 7y agoIf I use the soap I am also recycling it, and probably more effeciently than a distribution network can.
- x38iq84n 7y agoEssentially a vacation to a new destination paid by grant money. And the hotel bar soap.
- ocschwar 7y agoBoy am I looking forward to going to Dayton for Rust Belt Rust. The bar soap better be awesome.
- odiroot 7y agoI can immerse myself more in presentations when I'm physically there. YT is not the same. I can also grab the speaker and ask them some questions. Also going to some new interesting places.
- klyrs 7y ago
- hycaria 7y agoWhy this title ? 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.
- n-exploit 7y agoMaybe not exactly what you're looking for, but there are some resources here. https://chooose.today/ https://chooose.today/
- hycaria 7y agoThat 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.
- hokkos 7y agoThe 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_credit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_credit
- glitchc 7y agoFor 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.
- 7y ago
- Account123481-x 7y agogood for you! thanks for sharing!
- cagenut 7y agoI'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. Can they "pivot to video"? Do they feel ethically obligated to try?
- jsty 7y agoConsidering 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).
- rjmunro 7y agoI'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.
- acdha 7y agoOffsetting 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.
- icebraining 7y agoYou 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.
- tombert 7y agoThis 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.
- magduf 7y agoIf 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.
- grayed-down 7y agoThen 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.
- latinio4trump 7y agoGood for you. I will continue to fly / drive
- kmbriedis 7y agoAnd your nickname says everything
- algaeontoast 7y agoGreat, so the seat you would've purchased will either just be empty or sold to the next highest bidder. Congratulations on your baseless moral superiority, you've made basically zero impact!
- fourier_mode 7y agoWell, no. If the demand is less, this would trigger low number of flights flying. Basic supply and demand logic in a free market.
- algaeontoast 7y agoBy 1 person, led alone the entire conference... 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.
- Retra 7y agoAnd how do you change 1 person into many, if not by making public arguments?
- algaeontoast 7y agoI'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.
- habosa 7y agoI 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.
- bduerst 7y agoConferences 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.
- ido 7y agoThat’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+.
- pas 7y agoCould 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...?
- deleted 7y ago
- fourier_mode 7y agoFinally 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.
- Retra 7y agoYou 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.
- fourier_mode 7y agoYeah, that sounds reasonable.
- draw_down 7y agoThis 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.
- robomartin 7y agoAnd 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.
- MagnumOpus 7y ago> reduction of atmospheric CO2 concentration of 100 ppm 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?
- dmitriid 7y ago> 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. [1] https://twitter.com/JoanieLemercier/status/1111334848399052800 https://twitter.com/JoanieLemercier/status/11113348483990528...
- pessimizer 7y agoYou'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.
- perfunctory 7y agoDo you fly to conferences annually? How many? one conference per year - 23.9% two to four conferences per year - 47.8% Five plus conferences per year - 16.4%
- sharpneli 7y agoBy 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.
- perfunctory 7y ago> We should focus on reducing the big CO2 emission sources instead of these. To be honest I don't know how I personally can focus on big CO2 sources. But I know how to stop flying.
- sharpneli 7y agoYou 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.
- fela 7y agoI 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.
- jdietrich 7y agoI think you've got your numbers badly wrong. 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.
- perfunctory 7y agoI didn't participate in the survey but I've stopped flying to conferences for climate change reasons as well.
- Proven 7y agoClimatists still fly to climate change conferences. Some in private airplanes. See, it's not that bad!
- alex_duf 7y ago>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!
- schwank 7y agoAWS is already powered over 50% by renewable energy.
- alex_duf 7y agoThat's 50% short of what I'd expect a tech company to achieve
- hokkos 7y agoWho 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,” https://energy.stanford.edu/news/100-renewables-doesn-t-equal-zero-carbon-energy-and-difference-growing 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).
- pjkundert 7y agoIf 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.
- forgotmypw 7y agoIt 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.
- js8 7y agoA 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.
- idlewords 7y agoWe're at the point where the only way to have a real impact on warming is large, global changes in the industrial economy. To pretend that anyone's individual behavior matters only obscures this already difficult-to-discuss issue even further. Aviation is not a significant contributor to global warming (at most 4.9% of the impact according to the ICCC), and if everyone stopped traveling to conferences tomorrow, I suspect it would have a minimal impact on airline schedules. I get that people want to have a sense of agency, but framing the problem as a question of individual choice is counterproductive.
- perfunctory 7y agoIt's obvious that we need large radical changes in the industrial economy. However, individual behaviour is not inconsequential. It's an important factor, if not a prerequisite, in economy transition. We live in a democracy after all. We need to show our leaders that we care. > Aviation is not a significant contributor to global warming Nothing is. There is no low hanging fruit here. Any given industry has at most X% of impact. We need lots and lots of adjustments across the board. Including in aviation. > but framing the problem as a question of individual choice is counterproductive. It's not either/or. We need both. We need every help we can get.
- TearsInTheRain 7y agoIt would be helpful if we could frame this debate using numbers. What percent of the average american's carbon footprint is variable vs fixed?
- badatshipping 7y agoAm I alone in fundamentally not believing in the power of individual action when it comes to stuff like climate change, recycling, voting? People always say that if everyone thought that way then nothing would get done, but that doesn’t change the fact that my individual contribution is worthless. I think the way to get society-wide change is for the government to either mandate or incentivize it at a systemic level. This “what can I do as an individual to make change” stuff seems like either virtue signalling or irrationally directed anxiety.
- maze-le 7y agoNo you are not. Issues that are bigger for one human/group to tackle effectively are the reason we have invented political processes and systems in the first place (laws, governance, taxes, regulations). We should use the tools we have, and not offload the task of confronting climate change to the individual. The individual is not suited for this task, as there are too many of them, that will do absolutely nothing unless forced to. That doesn't mean that a single human can't change anything. Every single action, that reduces CO2 emissions (or sequesters already emitted CO2) is a step forward. But it will be too little, too late and the only effective course of action would be legislative in nature.
- tzs 7y ago> I think the way to get society-wide change is for the government to either mandate or incentivize it at a systemic level. The only way that will happen is if people like you vote in a government that will do that. Not voting because your vote by itself has an infinitesimal effect on the outcome is like a smoker who ignores the health risks and keeps chain smoking because each individual cigarette only has a negligible chance of causing lung cancer, and thus concludes that smoking is not actually dangerous.
- badatshipping 7y agoYou are right that large-scale things happen as the cumulative effect of many small things, but the difference is that in your example the smoker is responsible for all of those cigarettes, whereas I only get one single vote. Incidentally, I do vote; I just don't do so thinking my individual vote matters. It matters that lots of people all vote, but this reinforces my original point that some kind of structural incentive or policy is needed to get lots of people to all do something.
- janpot 7y agoI love how conferences and tech communities these days emphasise the importance of inclusion of every individual. I wish they would put as much effort in creating eco-friendly environments. I attended a conference two weeks ago, and the amount of plastic I had to go through in order to just have lunch was embarrassing.
- sequoia 7y ago> Second, I want us all to make a Climate Code of Conduct. Some thoughts: 1. Climate Code would be a second code for most conferences. Would it be the last, or should we anticipate conferences in 2022 needing 4 or 5 or 6 codes addressing various issues? 2. Will attendees be required to affirm & agree with the climate code (as they’re asked to follow the typical CoC)? If so, what do you do with people who disagree that conferences tracking their “food-miles” is of critical importance to averting climate catastrophe? 3. These codes of conduct will presumably dictate where resources and effort should be allocated to combat climate change. These resources are limited, meaning if you put resources towards tracking food-miles, you’re not putting them towards something else. Who will decide how to allocate these limited resources to achieve maximal ROI in terms of combatting climate change? Will it be a global team of PhD climate and political scientists, or a bunch of unqualified randos on a google doc? If the latter, how can anyone reasonably expect such a group to come up with a sensible plan? Assuming imminent climate catastrophe, it would seem the consequences of misallocation of resources would be dire. I understand that people feel very passionately about this subject and see this as an end-of-the-world, holy crusade sort of subject. However, treating things as holy crusades will typically lead to bad results, such as virtue signalling taking the place of meaningful work & alienating people who don’t hold the same opinion. Let’s think carefully before we add another layer of moral bureaucracy to our professional community.
- eruci 7y agoThe number of people traveling to conferences is tiny compared to the number of people who travel for lesser reasons, like vacations or soccer matches. Hence, it makes no difference. I love going to conferences and don't feel guilty about anything.
- avocado111 7y agoOffsetting flights does not work. Of course, it is nice to protect woodland and jungles. But you just can't plant so many trees that it could replace a single, hour-long flight. When a tree grows, it extracts some CO2 from the atmoaphere and stores it in its biomass. When it dies, this CO2 goes back into the atmosphere. When we use fuel for flying, we release hundreds of kilograms of CO2 into the atmosphere (for a short flight of a single person!), which have been stored over the course of hundreds of millions of years. A tiny bit of a tree that you plant today might become fossilized, but even if that happens it will only store an incredibly small amount of the carbon that is consumed. It is quantitatively completely impossible to undo that by planting trees. The only solution is, if at all possible, to stop flying, and use other means of transport, like electrical trains and buses. We can't have both mass air transportation and an alive planet.
- Jommi 7y agoCan you explain more about this? Any sources?