7 ms·

I'm glad to see that there's deliberate movement in this direction. However, it's a little dismaying that the headline is implying that we can address climate c

by Arubis 7y ago

I'm glad to see that there's deliberate movement in this direction. However, it's a little dismaying that the headline is implying that we can address climate change by Consuming More Stuff; that's how we got into this mess in the first place.

tristanstcyr 7y ago
Why does this cause more stuff to be consumed?
- alttab 7y ago
  I think the implication is that it doesn't seem like the path taken by Bezos is to have people consume less, but to make deliveries more carbon neutral.
  - tracer4201 7y ago
    I mean - less consumption is a topic even bigger than Amazon. The US economy has consumption as its very foundation. It’s not clear what we would turn to. Step 1 is to do what you’re doing now but in a more sustainable way. Remember, our current state is we are debating whether we even ought to make change in the first place. The larger shift to less consumption overall isn’t something we can achieve in 5 years. It’s more of a marathon that’ll take 20-30 years.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- supertrope 7y ago
  Reduce reuse recycle. It’s greenest and most efficient to eliminate unneeded consumption first. Then reuse through repair, buying used, hand me downs. Then comes investing in green machinery. Finally there’s recycling to recover raw materials.
- gambiting 7y ago
  I think it's because the environmental cost of making a brand new electric van has a higher environmental cost than just driving the van you already have until it dies. Basically the world would be better off if people stopped buying new vehicles tomorrow completely, and just drove whatever they have, no matter how polluting it is - it's still better on the planet than making a new one. Of course our economy doesn't work that way and it's a completely unworkable solution for now - so replacing ICE vans with electric ones is second best solution.
  - thinkcontext 7y ago
    Well, you'd have to do the math on manufacturing emissions vs operating emissions, factoring in remaining lifetime of the ICE vans. If they are driven enough miles EVs would come out ahead over a certain period of time. Also, they could just buy no more new ICE vans and replace them with EVs when they get to their normal end of life. On top of all that, you'd also have to consider that the ICE vans would be sold into the market and not destroyed.
  - prolepunk 7y ago
    I think this argument is more true for personal vehicles that sit idle for 99% of the time -- they don't consume gas when they don't move. For commercial vehicle that spend most of their life on the road, energy savings from running a more efficient vehicle recoup the energy used in making that vehicle pretty quickly.
martythemaniak 7y ago
Climate change is not about consuming less. It is about not taking carbon from the ground and putting it in the atmosphere.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Jill_the_Pill 7y ago
  Large quantities of carbon are taken from the ground and added to the atmosphere in the manufacture, transportation, sale, use, and disposal of consumer products.
  - BlackRing 7y ago
    Which is going to happen regardless. What would you rather they consume, an internal combustion engine that spits out a deadly exhaust or an electric vehicle that uses power, presumably from a nuclear or less toxic fuel source?
    - Jommi 7y ago
      We consume more thing sthsn ever before. Surely if 100 yes ago we could consume less why could we not reduce consumption now? :)
    - Jill_the_Pill 7y ago
      >>> Which is going to happen regardless. It's not "happening," it's being done. By us. We can choose to stop.
  - martythemaniak 7y ago
    Hence, climate change is about doing these things without carbon (or only with carbon that's already in the atmosphere), rather than not doing those things at all.
noonespecial 7y ago
While I largely agree with you, decades on it seems that if the message factors down to "quick, everybody stop doing stuff", it's hard to get political traction. Every step in the right direction is a good one. Perfect is the enemy of good.
- mumblemumble 7y ago
  Unstated major premise: Buying electric vans is a step in the right direction in the first place. I'm thinking here of the lessons we've been learning recently about recycling: It would appear that we now need to come to terms with the possibility that recycling has done far more harm than good, by making it easier to justify excessive packaging waste while at the same time mostly only giving consumers the impression that what they put in the recycle bin wasn't going to waste. I could see something similar happening with electric delivery vans: Perhaps, by ostensibly greening the most consumer-visible part of the process, they can make them feel better about buying into a way of getting their consumer products that relies on a much less efficient supply chain than the one used by the system it's supplanting. Perhaps, if we dig into it, we'll discover that Amazon is being pennywise here, because properly dealing with the pounds would require rolling back the "free 2 day shipping of pretty much anything to pretty much anywhere" guarantee that underlies so much of Amazon's current business model.
  - noonespecial 7y ago
    It's possible. But even if that part is true, the large investment might spur faster growth in electrification which might then be good enough to outweigh that initial downside. Unintended consequences are hard. I'm just getting a little fatigued with the fearful "don't do anything, it might make it worse" coupled with the "stop all the everything" approach to environmentalism that seems to becoming ever more dominant. I just don't think that's going to work. Doing nothing won't help, and convincing people to do without doesn't work, so ?
    - mumblemumble 7y ago
      I wasn't really going for "don't do anything, it might make it worse" so much as calling attention to what I suspect is an act of greenwashing. As far as convincing people to do without goes, IMO the root cause of the problem is consumerism, and anything that fails to contend directly with that is bikeshedding.
gdulli 7y ago
Exactly. Obviously we can't expect Bezos to meaningfully address climate change outside the bounds of people buying as much shit as possible whether they need it or not or whether they need it delivered next day or not. But it would be nice if the overton window at least included the idea of rethinking how we consume. To the point where Bezos' plan could be considered for what it is.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Nasrudith 7y ago
To be fair proper "infastructure" (in quotes because things like farming equipment also qualifies) is the one form of consumption that actually helps - it may be worse than a "nirvana" but it is practically the only way to advance. Better is better: it is a tautology but an important one. Ironically China saw improvements in air quality by moving people from huts with fire cooking to apartments with gas or coal fired electric.
Reedx 7y ago
Well, they're not really buying more if they were going to add 100k vans to the fleet regardless? Assuming that's the case, it's just that those will be electric instead of ICE.
- ttul 7y ago
  Also, they invested in Rivian, so by purchasing 100K vans, they’re guaranteeing revenue that will undoubtedly make Rivian more successful. And, no doubt, these electric vans will be cheaper to operate over the long term - no oil changes, no engine maintenance, etc.
dimitar 7y ago
Some consumption is good, i.e. replacing and old appliance or a car with a more efficient one, or you can buy a video game on Steam rather than driving to a picnic. It is not always apparent what behaviour is the most energy-wasteful. For example airplanes emit tons of CO2, but if the same 300 people in a plane drove the same distance it could be much worse. Advanced economies have grown their GDPs, but have also reduced their emissions since about 1990. The best policies to counter climate change like carbon taxes and schemes like cap and trade, which align people's incentives to emit less, but also don't damage the potential for growth and consumption as much.
- mrpopo 7y ago
  > For example airplanes emit tons of CO2, but if the same 300 people in a plane drove the same distance it could be much worse. Technically true, however airplanes provoke a rebound effect. By making travel so efficient and fast, it makes people travel more. If airplanes didn't exist all people would simply travel less, not drive more.
  - lenova 7y ago
    And not to be pedantic, but when the above poster said "or you can buy a video game on Steam rather than driving to a picnic", that discounts the amount of times the game developers had to drive to work to create said game. As well, replacing an old appliance or car isn't a straight-forward net savings, you need to take into account the materials harvested and factories that need to be built to produce those new items.
    - gutnor 7y ago
      The average game on Steam sells 32000 copies. It takes some seriously poluting developer to offset the picnic of thousands of people. Also (pedantic but you started it), the society we currently live in is based around work. So if games weren't being developed it is more likely the developers would still travel to work.
      - 7y ago
lph 7y ago
It's unfortunate that this post links a bad CNBC summary, rather than the actual Amazon press release. There's a lot more to Amazon's announcement than just buying electric trucks: https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/amazon-co-founds-climate-pledge-setting-goal-meet-paris https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-det...
kumbel 7y ago
> headline is implying that we can address climate change by Consuming More Stuff; that's how we got into this mess in the first place. It definitely possible to address climate change by "Consuming Different Stuff" if that different stuff is produced (and transported) in ways that emit less carbon.
bryanlarsen 7y ago
> implying that we can address climate change by Consuming More Stuff We certainly can address climate change by consuming more stuff. We could spend $100 - $200 per ton of carbon to sequester all of our carbon emissions. And it wouldn't wreck our economy to do so, the costs are similar to that of the Apollo missions or the war in Iraq, not the level of commitment that WW2 was. It would approximately double the price of gas if we paid for it the rational way. Sequestration doesn't have all the secondary benefits that reduction has, like improvements in air quality, but it could be done.

by Arubis 7y ago

tristanstcyr 7y ago

Why does this cause more stuff to be consumed?

alttab 7y ago
I think the implication is that it doesn't seem like the path taken by Bezos is to have people consume less, but to make deliveries more carbon neutral.
- tracer4201 7y ago
  I mean - less consumption is a topic even bigger than Amazon. The US economy has consumption as its very foundation. It’s not clear what we would turn to. Step 1 is to do what you’re doing now but in a more sustainable way. Remember, our current state is we are debating whether we even ought to make change in the first place. The larger shift to less consumption overall isn’t something we can achieve in 5 years. It’s more of a marathon that’ll take 20-30 years.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
supertrope 7y ago
Reduce reuse recycle. It’s greenest and most efficient to eliminate unneeded consumption first. Then reuse through repair, buying used, hand me downs. Then comes investing in green machinery. Finally there’s recycling to recover raw materials.
gambiting 7y ago
I think it's because the environmental cost of making a brand new electric van has a higher environmental cost than just driving the van you already have until it dies. Basically the world would be better off if people stopped buying new vehicles tomorrow completely, and just drove whatever they have, no matter how polluting it is - it's still better on the planet than making a new one. Of course our economy doesn't work that way and it's a completely unworkable solution for now - so replacing ICE vans with electric ones is second best solution.
- thinkcontext 7y ago
  Well, you'd have to do the math on manufacturing emissions vs operating emissions, factoring in remaining lifetime of the ICE vans. If they are driven enough miles EVs would come out ahead over a certain period of time. Also, they could just buy no more new ICE vans and replace them with EVs when they get to their normal end of life. On top of all that, you'd also have to consider that the ICE vans would be sold into the market and not destroyed.
- prolepunk 7y ago
  I think this argument is more true for personal vehicles that sit idle for 99% of the time -- they don't consume gas when they don't move. For commercial vehicle that spend most of their life on the road, energy savings from running a more efficient vehicle recoup the energy used in making that vehicle pretty quickly.

martythemaniak 7y ago

Climate change is not about consuming less. It is about not taking carbon from the ground and putting it in the atmosphere.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Jill_the_Pill 7y ago
Large quantities of carbon are taken from the ground and added to the atmosphere in the manufacture, transportation, sale, use, and disposal of consumer products.
- BlackRing 7y ago
  Which is going to happen regardless. What would you rather they consume, an internal combustion engine that spits out a deadly exhaust or an electric vehicle that uses power, presumably from a nuclear or less toxic fuel source?
  - Jommi 7y ago
    We consume more thing sthsn ever before. Surely if 100 yes ago we could consume less why could we not reduce consumption now? :)
  - Jill_the_Pill 7y ago
    >>> Which is going to happen regardless. It's not "happening," it's being done. By us. We can choose to stop.
- martythemaniak 7y ago
  Hence, climate change is about doing these things without carbon (or only with carbon that's already in the atmosphere), rather than not doing those things at all.

noonespecial 7y ago

While I largely agree with you, decades on it seems that if the message factors down to "quick, everybody stop doing stuff", it's hard to get political traction. Every step in the right direction is a good one. Perfect is the enemy of good.

mumblemumble 7y ago
Unstated major premise: Buying electric vans is a step in the right direction in the first place. I'm thinking here of the lessons we've been learning recently about recycling: It would appear that we now need to come to terms with the possibility that recycling has done far more harm than good, by making it easier to justify excessive packaging waste while at the same time mostly only giving consumers the impression that what they put in the recycle bin wasn't going to waste. I could see something similar happening with electric delivery vans: Perhaps, by ostensibly greening the most consumer-visible part of the process, they can make them feel better about buying into a way of getting their consumer products that relies on a much less efficient supply chain than the one used by the system it's supplanting. Perhaps, if we dig into it, we'll discover that Amazon is being pennywise here, because properly dealing with the pounds would require rolling back the "free 2 day shipping of pretty much anything to pretty much anywhere" guarantee that underlies so much of Amazon's current business model.
- noonespecial 7y ago
  It's possible. But even if that part is true, the large investment might spur faster growth in electrification which might then be good enough to outweigh that initial downside. Unintended consequences are hard. I'm just getting a little fatigued with the fearful "don't do anything, it might make it worse" coupled with the "stop all the everything" approach to environmentalism that seems to becoming ever more dominant. I just don't think that's going to work. Doing nothing won't help, and convincing people to do without doesn't work, so ?
  - mumblemumble 7y ago
    I wasn't really going for "don't do anything, it might make it worse" so much as calling attention to what I suspect is an act of greenwashing. As far as convincing people to do without goes, IMO the root cause of the problem is consumerism, and anything that fails to contend directly with that is bikeshedding.

gdulli 7y ago

Exactly. Obviously we can't expect Bezos to meaningfully address climate change outside the bounds of people buying as much shit as possible whether they need it or not or whether they need it delivered next day or not. But it would be nice if the overton window at least included the idea of rethinking how we consume. To the point where Bezos' plan could be considered for what it is.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Nasrudith 7y ago

To be fair proper "infastructure" (in quotes because things like farming equipment also qualifies) is the one form of consumption that actually helps - it may be worse than a "nirvana" but it is practically the only way to advance. Better is better: it is a tautology but an important one. Ironically China saw improvements in air quality by moving people from huts with fire cooking to apartments with gas or coal fired electric.

Reedx 7y ago

Well, they're not really buying more if they were going to add 100k vans to the fleet regardless? Assuming that's the case, it's just that those will be electric instead of ICE.

ttul 7y ago
Also, they invested in Rivian, so by purchasing 100K vans, they’re guaranteeing revenue that will undoubtedly make Rivian more successful. And, no doubt, these electric vans will be cheaper to operate over the long term - no oil changes, no engine maintenance, etc.

dimitar 7y ago

Some consumption is good, i.e. replacing and old appliance or a car with a more efficient one, or you can buy a video game on Steam rather than driving to a picnic. It is not always apparent what behaviour is the most energy-wasteful. For example airplanes emit tons of CO2, but if the same 300 people in a plane drove the same distance it could be much worse. Advanced economies have grown their GDPs, but have also reduced their emissions since about 1990. The best policies to counter climate change like carbon taxes and schemes like cap and trade, which align people's incentives to emit less, but also don't damage the potential for growth and consumption as much.

mrpopo 7y ago
> For example airplanes emit tons of CO2, but if the same 300 people in a plane drove the same distance it could be much worse. Technically true, however airplanes provoke a rebound effect. By making travel so efficient and fast, it makes people travel more. If airplanes didn't exist all people would simply travel less, not drive more.
- lenova 7y ago
  And not to be pedantic, but when the above poster said "or you can buy a video game on Steam rather than driving to a picnic", that discounts the amount of times the game developers had to drive to work to create said game. As well, replacing an old appliance or car isn't a straight-forward net savings, you need to take into account the materials harvested and factories that need to be built to produce those new items.
  - gutnor 7y ago
    The average game on Steam sells 32000 copies. It takes some seriously poluting developer to offset the picnic of thousands of people. Also (pedantic but you started it), the society we currently live in is based around work. So if games weren't being developed it is more likely the developers would still travel to work.
    - 7y ago

lph 7y ago

It's unfortunate that this post links a bad CNBC summary, rather than the actual Amazon press release. There's a lot more to Amazon's announcement than just buying electric trucks: https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/amazon-co-founds-climate-pledge-setting-goal-meet-paris https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-det...

kumbel 7y ago

> headline is implying that we can address climate change by Consuming More Stuff; that's how we got into this mess in the first place. It definitely possible to address climate change by "Consuming Different Stuff" if that different stuff is produced (and transported) in ways that emit less carbon.

bryanlarsen 7y ago

> implying that we can address climate change by Consuming More Stuff We certainly can address climate change by consuming more stuff. We could spend $100 - $200 per ton of carbon to sequester all of our carbon emissions. And it wouldn't wreck our economy to do so, the costs are similar to that of the Apollo missions or the war in Iraq, not the level of commitment that WW2 was. It would approximately double the price of gas if we paid for it the rational way. Sequestration doesn't have all the secondary benefits that reduction has, like improvements in air quality, but it could be done.