8 ms·

As an individual I'm happy to make sacrifices for the greater good, and this is an example of why we should not accept the narrative that consumers bear the bru

As an individual I'm happy to make sacrifices for the greater good, and this is an example of why we should not accept the narrative that consumers bear the brunt of reducing emissions. Maybe California should do a few more of these flights before finding something else to ban?

bravo22 7y ago
Per the article, most of the sites were landfills, dairy farms, and natural gas facilities. All of those are directly controlled by consumer demand.
- schnable 7y ago
  That's true, but perhaps the emissions can be mitigated in a targeted way beyond just reducing demand.
  - bravo22 7y ago
    Not really possible. Ultimately it is human demand that is driving climate change. Even if you have a magical technology that cuts all emissions today by 25% -- which would be truly magic -- you only need a 25% growth* in population to offset that and put us back to square one. At the current rate of 1.2% that's only ~18 years.
    - kube-system 7y ago
      The comment you replied to said 'mitigated', not 'solved'. Emissions controls already have, and still can, make enormous impacts on many consumer devices. Given that emission controls are a whole lot easier to implement than eliminating a huge portion of the world's population, I'd say it's a more realistic goal to pursue.
      - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
        I wouldn't claim it's difficult per se, we've done it before. But I do suggest people advocating it join the front of the queue.
    - lodi 7y ago
      (Just because this is hn...) You'd need a 33% growth in population to offset a 25% reduction in pollution, 100% growth to offset a 50% reduction, and so on.
- ip26 7y ago
  It's not all landfills, it's a small collection of landfills. And if they aren't fixed, even if everybody went zero waste today, those landfills would still be emitting large amounts of methane. Proper landfill design & operation ensures the landfill is aerated, which keeps decomposition primarily aerobic which produces little methane. A poorly designed or operated landfill with little aeration will switch to aerobic metabolism, which is what produces large quantities of methane.
  - avar 7y ago
    > even if everybody went zero waste today, those landfills would still be emitting large amounts of methane. If everyone went zero waste then nothing would be added to the landfill, and its methane production would taper out to nothing as a result.
    - Cactus2018 7y ago
      > Formation of methane and CO2 commences about six months after depositing the landfill material. The evolution of gas reaches a maximum at about 20 years, then declines over the course of decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landfill_gas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landfill_gas From the top charts for image search "landfill gas chart", suggests methane(CH4) vents heavily for 3-5 years, then a long taper.
    - Iv 7y ago
      If every reseller proposed a discounted "no packaging" option, people would produce less waste. If providing such an option was mandatory or even just incentivized, more resellers would propose it. Consumers do have some power, but they are not the only ones and we should demand an effort from all parts of society there. On the other hand, I doubt it is plastic waste that produce methane, an organic byproduct. Maybe food wastes are at fault. In which case your enemy is not overpackaging and may actually be your (temporary) ally
  - bravo22 7y ago
    I agree that it can be reduced, my point was that it is directly tied to consumer demand and human activity. It will still be a none-zero number after reduction. No business is out there emitting methane for shits and giggles. As I said elsewhere in this post, you can cut emission but population growth offsets all the benefits. You cannot address climate change without drastic long term reduction in human activity/population.
- kleer001 7y ago
  influenced by consumer demand and legislation, controlled explicitly by their owners
- dwaltrip 7y ago
  They can also be directly affected by regulations. Unless you know a way of robustly managing severe negative externalities without regulation?
  - TaylorAlexander 7y ago
    Regulation is one way of doing it. It has also been suggested that worker owned and managed businesses would more naturally self regulate to meet the needs of the community. Having a few highly privileged people at the top of the company to make decisions means that they have different interests from most of us (very high profit opportunity and a much wealthier way of life that would insulate them from pollution). So it has been suggested that if you stop making companies with a privileged minority at the top, you’d eliminate a lot of anti social behavior.
- billsmithaustin 7y ago
  I think it would be more precise to say they are influenced by consumer demand. Consumers consume from landfills, dairy farms, and natural gas facilities, but they do not control them. It is true that as a consumer, I can try to regulate my demand to reflect how I feel about those facilities' emissions. At the time time, saying that consumers control those facilities seems to imply that the owners and operators bear no responsiblity for their emissions and are not empowered to change them.
  - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
    I do hope they are consuming from landfills, otherwise you might have more pressing issues ^ ^
- vkou 7y ago
  As a consumer, I don't get to pick which landfill my crap goes to. And even if I did, it would be one of fifty million micro-decisions that I, quite frankly don't have the time to make, or have the knowledge to make well. Instead, the industry should make these decisions for me. It already does, by deciding which products to build, and how. Set tariffs, taxes, penalties, and let producers figure out how to most optimally make money in that environment. That's their core expertise - it's not my core expertise. We don't expect consumers to be medical experts. We have doctors for that. Why should we expect consumers to also be experts in the long tail of 'various ways that producers screw up our environment'?
- ClumsyPilot 7y ago
  This is demonstrably false, please stop perpetuating it. CO2 emissions are 90% down to tragedy of the commons. I can have the exactly same lifestyle in Saudi, in USA and in France, yet per capita emissions in France are 3 times lower than those in USA, and 5 times lower than in Saudi. People in Saudi do not have 5 times better lives. In fact a huge chunk of the population is an underclass, some work as slaves on construction sites. Competent management and regulation matters, a lot.
  - ZeroGravitas 7y ago
    You can see similar factors of difference in carbon intensity between US States. Generally the ones I'd want to live in are doing much better. In Australia, when they briefly brought in a carbon tax, a dairy that complained before it was introduced, started capturing their methane and using it for power and installed solar. They ended up thinking it was a good thing just as it was repealed.
  - mytailorisrich 7y ago
    France emits close to zero for electricity production but nevertheless the "American way of life" in itself is a major cause of the huge footprint the US have per capita. It's not only emissions but consumptions of all resources in general.
  - khawkins 7y ago
    41% of US emissions come from the power industry while in France, where nuclear power is widespread, it's only 13% from power. But very rarely do I hear calls from people who care about this stuff call for switching the nation's energy to nuclear. https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/us-co2-emissions/ https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/us-co2-emissions... https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/france-co2-emissions/ https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/france-co2-emiss...
    - 205guy 7y ago
      Here we go with the nuclear debate again. Frankly, I'm against how the US/UK handle nuclear as a decentralized, privatized business. If we could have the French model for nuclear (and I know it's not perfect either), I'd be much more in favor. Also French high speed rail, let them take over and give us TGVs. Of course this doesn't work for the US, because French nuclear (and HSR) depend on their dirigiste government--which has totally different assumptions about distribution of political power. Edited to add: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirigisme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirigisme with the following quote: "...marked by volontarisme, the belief that difficulties (e.g. postwar devastation, lack of natural resources) could be overcome through willpower and ingenuity. For instance, following the 1973 energy crisis, the saying "In France we don't have oil, but we have ideas" was coined. Volontarisme emphasized modernization, resulting in a variety of ambitious state plans. Examples of this trend include the extensive use of nuclear energy (close to 80% of French electrical consumption), the Minitel, an early online system for the masses, and the TGV, a high-speed rail network."
- pfranz 7y ago
  For example, "urban" water use in California accounts for 8-11%. I believe "urban" is both residential and industrial use combined. However, most of the pressure seems to be in reducing residential use--the goal during the last drought was to reduce residential use by 25%...which would account for at most 2% of the water consumed. Approaches included things like not giving you water at a restaurant unless you asked for it. Of course all water use (like pollution) is driven by consumer demand, but the point is a lot of effort seems to be spent on silly things that have little impact when there are much easier targets. Caveat: the water situation is a lot more complex than I laid it out here. https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/ https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/
- robbrown451 7y ago
  This is basic tragedy of the commons (or "n-person prisoners' dilemma"). If I consume 50% less dairy products, for instance, it will cause a noticeable negative impact on my life. The impact it will have on the environment will not be at all noticeable. (and it wouldn't be noticeable if it were multiplied by tens of thousands) It isn't realistic to expect change by relying on consumers to negatively impact themselves for some unmeasurable positive. On the other hand, it is not at all unrealistic to have those same consumers vote for regulation. The amount it increases the cost of dairy products would likely be outweighed by the positive impact on the environment. It works because the impact of action on themselves, both negative and positive, are divided up by all the people.
- AngryData 7y ago
  Landfills can be capped and farmed for methane, dairy farms can also be capped and farmed for methane, usually to fuel the farm itself as I have personally seen done, and natural gas facilities could capture a lot of their emissions if they were willing to spend a few extra pennies. Those are all solved problems, but we let profits dictate which technologies we utilize.
lukifer 7y ago
I only recently learned the history of "anti-littering" marketing campaigns [0], conceived to push responsibility for waste onto consumers rather than producers, who were switching from metals and glass to much cheaper (but no longer reusable) plastics. Whatever individuals can do to reduce inefficiency and carbon footprint is surely a good thing; but it's no replacement for systems thinking, and applying incentives on the production side (IMO, best accomplished by setting a price on externalities, through Pigovian taxes and dividends [1]). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_America_Beautiful#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_America_Beautiful#History [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax
- jws 7y ago
  There is a narrative developing about the anti-littering marketing campaigns which I think tries to paint it as a cynical ploy by businesses. Just to frame things as someone alive at the time in one part of America… single serving glass bottles were not returned to the store, they had no deposit. They were thrown away. Beer cans had no deposit. They were thrown away. (Steel soda cans weren't a thing, they stayed in bottles until aluminum came around) Fast-food cups were waxed paper. Straws were paper. The lids were plastic. Companies were up front about controlling littering, using their brand loyalty to achieve it. McDonalds even had a "we don't like to see our name thrown around like this" campaign showing a clearly branded paper bag in a ditch. Most roadside litter was steel beer cans, glass bottles (many broken), paper wrappers and bags. Any picnic area would have beer can pull tabs all over the place. It was actually an effort to retrain people to put the tab into the can so it eventually got thrown away instead of just tossing it where the barefoot children played. Coors introduced a special beer top which had a big hole and a little hole to jab your fingers through so there wouldn't be a beer tab to deal with! Eventually the aluminum lid with no loose parts was developed, but that was a decade after the anti littering campaigns. It's taken half a century, but now most people don't chuck garbage out their car windows. Some people do. Some areas of the country are much worse than others. If you think littering isn't a thing, then it probably isn't where you live. But, there are areas where the roadside ditches are still full of fresh litter.
  - 7y ago
tyrust 7y ago
>Maybe California should do a few more of these flights before finding something else to ban? I don't see why these two can't be done in parallel.

bravo22 7y ago

Per the article, most of the sites were landfills, dairy farms, and natural gas facilities. All of those are directly controlled by consumer demand.

schnable 7y ago
That's true, but perhaps the emissions can be mitigated in a targeted way beyond just reducing demand.
- bravo22 7y ago
  Not really possible. Ultimately it is human demand that is driving climate change. Even if you have a magical technology that cuts all emissions today by 25% -- which would be truly magic -- you only need a 25% growth* in population to offset that and put us back to square one. At the current rate of 1.2% that's only ~18 years.
  - kube-system 7y ago
    The comment you replied to said 'mitigated', not 'solved'. Emissions controls already have, and still can, make enormous impacts on many consumer devices. Given that emission controls are a whole lot easier to implement than eliminating a huge portion of the world's population, I'd say it's a more realistic goal to pursue.
    - ClumsyPilot 7y ago
      I wouldn't claim it's difficult per se, we've done it before. But I do suggest people advocating it join the front of the queue.
  - lodi 7y ago
    (Just because this is hn...) You'd need a 33% growth in population to offset a 25% reduction in pollution, 100% growth to offset a 50% reduction, and so on.
ip26 7y ago
It's not all landfills, it's a small collection of landfills. And if they aren't fixed, even if everybody went zero waste today, those landfills would still be emitting large amounts of methane. Proper landfill design & operation ensures the landfill is aerated, which keeps decomposition primarily aerobic which produces little methane. A poorly designed or operated landfill with little aeration will switch to aerobic metabolism, which is what produces large quantities of methane.
- avar 7y ago
  > even if everybody went zero waste today, those landfills would still be emitting large amounts of methane. If everyone went zero waste then nothing would be added to the landfill, and its methane production would taper out to nothing as a result.
  - Cactus2018 7y ago
    > Formation of methane and CO2 commences about six months after depositing the landfill material. The evolution of gas reaches a maximum at about 20 years, then declines over the course of decades. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landfill_gas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landfill_gas From the top charts for image search "landfill gas chart", suggests methane(CH4) vents heavily for 3-5 years, then a long taper.
  - Iv 7y ago
    If every reseller proposed a discounted "no packaging" option, people would produce less waste. If providing such an option was mandatory or even just incentivized, more resellers would propose it. Consumers do have some power, but they are not the only ones and we should demand an effort from all parts of society there. On the other hand, I doubt it is plastic waste that produce methane, an organic byproduct. Maybe food wastes are at fault. In which case your enemy is not overpackaging and may actually be your (temporary) ally
- bravo22 7y ago
  I agree that it can be reduced, my point was that it is directly tied to consumer demand and human activity. It will still be a none-zero number after reduction. No business is out there emitting methane for shits and giggles. As I said elsewhere in this post, you can cut emission but population growth offsets all the benefits. You cannot address climate change without drastic long term reduction in human activity/population.
kleer001 7y ago
influenced by consumer demand and legislation, controlled explicitly by their owners
dwaltrip 7y ago
They can also be directly affected by regulations. Unless you know a way of robustly managing severe negative externalities without regulation?
- TaylorAlexander 7y ago
  Regulation is one way of doing it. It has also been suggested that worker owned and managed businesses would more naturally self regulate to meet the needs of the community. Having a few highly privileged people at the top of the company to make decisions means that they have different interests from most of us (very high profit opportunity and a much wealthier way of life that would insulate them from pollution). So it has been suggested that if you stop making companies with a privileged minority at the top, you’d eliminate a lot of anti social behavior.
billsmithaustin 7y ago
I think it would be more precise to say they are influenced by consumer demand. Consumers consume from landfills, dairy farms, and natural gas facilities, but they do not control them. It is true that as a consumer, I can try to regulate my demand to reflect how I feel about those facilities' emissions. At the time time, saying that consumers control those facilities seems to imply that the owners and operators bear no responsiblity for their emissions and are not empowered to change them.
- ClumsyPilot 7y ago
  I do hope they are consuming from landfills, otherwise you might have more pressing issues ^ ^
vkou 7y ago
As a consumer, I don't get to pick which landfill my crap goes to. And even if I did, it would be one of fifty million micro-decisions that I, quite frankly don't have the time to make, or have the knowledge to make well. Instead, the industry should make these decisions for me. It already does, by deciding which products to build, and how. Set tariffs, taxes, penalties, and let producers figure out how to most optimally make money in that environment. That's their core expertise - it's not my core expertise. We don't expect consumers to be medical experts. We have doctors for that. Why should we expect consumers to also be experts in the long tail of 'various ways that producers screw up our environment'?
ClumsyPilot 7y ago
This is demonstrably false, please stop perpetuating it. CO2 emissions are 90% down to tragedy of the commons. I can have the exactly same lifestyle in Saudi, in USA and in France, yet per capita emissions in France are 3 times lower than those in USA, and 5 times lower than in Saudi. People in Saudi do not have 5 times better lives. In fact a huge chunk of the population is an underclass, some work as slaves on construction sites. Competent management and regulation matters, a lot.
- ZeroGravitas 7y ago
  You can see similar factors of difference in carbon intensity between US States. Generally the ones I'd want to live in are doing much better. In Australia, when they briefly brought in a carbon tax, a dairy that complained before it was introduced, started capturing their methane and using it for power and installed solar. They ended up thinking it was a good thing just as it was repealed.
- mytailorisrich 7y ago
  France emits close to zero for electricity production but nevertheless the "American way of life" in itself is a major cause of the huge footprint the US have per capita. It's not only emissions but consumptions of all resources in general.
- khawkins 7y ago
  41% of US emissions come from the power industry while in France, where nuclear power is widespread, it's only 13% from power. But very rarely do I hear calls from people who care about this stuff call for switching the nation's energy to nuclear. https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/us-co2-emissions/ https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/us-co2-emissions... https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/france-co2-emissions/ https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/france-co2-emiss...
  - 205guy 7y ago
    Here we go with the nuclear debate again. Frankly, I'm against how the US/UK handle nuclear as a decentralized, privatized business. If we could have the French model for nuclear (and I know it's not perfect either), I'd be much more in favor. Also French high speed rail, let them take over and give us TGVs. Of course this doesn't work for the US, because French nuclear (and HSR) depend on their dirigiste government--which has totally different assumptions about distribution of political power. Edited to add: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirigisme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirigisme with the following quote: "...marked by volontarisme, the belief that difficulties (e.g. postwar devastation, lack of natural resources) could be overcome through willpower and ingenuity. For instance, following the 1973 energy crisis, the saying "In France we don't have oil, but we have ideas" was coined. Volontarisme emphasized modernization, resulting in a variety of ambitious state plans. Examples of this trend include the extensive use of nuclear energy (close to 80% of French electrical consumption), the Minitel, an early online system for the masses, and the TGV, a high-speed rail network."
pfranz 7y ago
For example, "urban" water use in California accounts for 8-11%. I believe "urban" is both residential and industrial use combined. However, most of the pressure seems to be in reducing residential use--the goal during the last drought was to reduce residential use by 25%...which would account for at most 2% of the water consumed. Approaches included things like not giving you water at a restaurant unless you asked for it. Of course all water use (like pollution) is driven by consumer demand, but the point is a lot of effort seems to be spent on silly things that have little impact when there are much easier targets. Caveat: the water situation is a lot more complex than I laid it out here. https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/ https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/
robbrown451 7y ago
This is basic tragedy of the commons (or "n-person prisoners' dilemma"). If I consume 50% less dairy products, for instance, it will cause a noticeable negative impact on my life. The impact it will have on the environment will not be at all noticeable. (and it wouldn't be noticeable if it were multiplied by tens of thousands) It isn't realistic to expect change by relying on consumers to negatively impact themselves for some unmeasurable positive. On the other hand, it is not at all unrealistic to have those same consumers vote for regulation. The amount it increases the cost of dairy products would likely be outweighed by the positive impact on the environment. It works because the impact of action on themselves, both negative and positive, are divided up by all the people.
AngryData 7y ago
Landfills can be capped and farmed for methane, dairy farms can also be capped and farmed for methane, usually to fuel the farm itself as I have personally seen done, and natural gas facilities could capture a lot of their emissions if they were willing to spend a few extra pennies. Those are all solved problems, but we let profits dictate which technologies we utilize.

lukifer 7y ago

I only recently learned the history of "anti-littering" marketing campaigns [0], conceived to push responsibility for waste onto consumers rather than producers, who were switching from metals and glass to much cheaper (but no longer reusable) plastics. Whatever individuals can do to reduce inefficiency and carbon footprint is surely a good thing; but it's no replacement for systems thinking, and applying incentives on the production side (IMO, best accomplished by setting a price on externalities, through Pigovian taxes and dividends [1]). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_America_Beautiful#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_America_Beautiful#History [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax

jws 7y ago
There is a narrative developing about the anti-littering marketing campaigns which I think tries to paint it as a cynical ploy by businesses. Just to frame things as someone alive at the time in one part of America… single serving glass bottles were not returned to the store, they had no deposit. They were thrown away. Beer cans had no deposit. They were thrown away. (Steel soda cans weren't a thing, they stayed in bottles until aluminum came around) Fast-food cups were waxed paper. Straws were paper. The lids were plastic. Companies were up front about controlling littering, using their brand loyalty to achieve it. McDonalds even had a "we don't like to see our name thrown around like this" campaign showing a clearly branded paper bag in a ditch. Most roadside litter was steel beer cans, glass bottles (many broken), paper wrappers and bags. Any picnic area would have beer can pull tabs all over the place. It was actually an effort to retrain people to put the tab into the can so it eventually got thrown away instead of just tossing it where the barefoot children played. Coors introduced a special beer top which had a big hole and a little hole to jab your fingers through so there wouldn't be a beer tab to deal with! Eventually the aluminum lid with no loose parts was developed, but that was a decade after the anti littering campaigns. It's taken half a century, but now most people don't chuck garbage out their car windows. Some people do. Some areas of the country are much worse than others. If you think littering isn't a thing, then it probably isn't where you live. But, there are areas where the roadside ditches are still full of fresh litter.
- 7y ago

tyrust 7y ago

>Maybe California should do a few more of these flights before finding something else to ban? I don't see why these two can't be done in parallel.