6 ms·

I think this is not as easy a calculus as one might imagine. Heirloom furniture is in some ways less sustainable than Ikea products. I am not sure there would

I think this is not as easy a calculus as one might imagine. Heirloom furniture is in some ways less sustainable than Ikea products. I am not sure there would be enough sustainable hardwood in the world to meet demand at the scale of Ikea. People have different furniture needs than they did decades ago, and in terms of weight, logistics, material use, Ikea are quite efficient.

helmholtz 6y ago
The complication is EXACTLY why we need to be even more in panic and hair-on-fire about environmental issues. A colleague did some analyses for the life cycle emissions of refrigerants. The complexity in the process was absurd, and basically intractable without simplifications. How much indirect CO2 emissions are caused by an inefficient compressor? How much does it depend on how you generate electricity? Which country were the gaskets manufactured in? What was the process used to extract the rare earths? Everything depends on everything else and consequences are pretty unknown.
- afarrell 6y ago
  > even more in panic and hair-on-fire about environmental issues Panic is rarely useful. It might lead you to move at high and low velocity.
  - afarrell 6y ago
    that should be: high speed and low velocity.
- fastball 6y ago
  Hence why the real solution has always been: 1. Electrify everything possible 2. Shift all electricity production to renewables, massively increase power output with nuclear nuclear nuclear. 3. Carbon capture.
  - arcticbull 6y ago
    Ooh and stop mining Bitcoin
    - loceng 6y ago
      But how else will people make money than in a global, decentralized pyramid/MLM scheme?
      - WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
        s/make/lose/ But I see your point. We should make a pyramid/MLM scheme where you're promised rewards for planting trees, segregating waste, cleaning up in any potential wildlife habitats, and reducing/reusing stuff in general.
    - fastball 6y ago
      Actually, as part of "Electrify everything", it would probably be good to replace a significant chunk of the banking system with a cryptocurrency layer (maybe bitcoin, maybe not). With green energy, digital gold is a lot more green than physical gold. Bitcoin is like electric cars – not super green right in this moment when the grid is still dirty, but all it takes to make it greener is to green up the grid. Meanwhile the classical banking system: uses all forms of transport which green up slower (armored cars, planes, etc), requires crazy amounts of construction (I don't even want to guess how much cement has been used in the construction of physical banks all over the world), all those buildings use energy for AC/lighting/etc, require huge amounts of manpower to manage trust in the system (people definitely aren't green), and also need their own datacenters anyway. And I'm sure I'm forgetting some things, where as with BTC pretty much all consumption is baked into mining, which again just gets greener automatically as the grid gets greener. Nobody is running a Bitcoin mining operation off of diesel generators. If you did the math (impractical given the breadth of the existing banking system), I think you'd find Bitcoin is already far greener than the existing banking system, by a huge margin. And cryptos like Ethereum have the potential to 10x/100x/1000x that with things like PoS vs. PoW as well as the fact that Ethereum smart contracts can not only replace banking but probably other industries as well, such as title companies and various other middlemen.
- CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
  Sounds exactly like the kind of problem market economies handles very well. Main problem is figuring out how to incorporate emissions into price signals.
  - pietrovismara 6y ago
    > Sounds exactly like the kind of problem It didn't really work out so far, otherwise we wouldn't be talking about an emergency.
  - Marazan 6y ago
    Pricing negative externialities is EXACTLY the kind of thing market economies are terrible at.
    - CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
      Which was kind of my point. How can we internalize the externalities?
- KorematsuFred 6y ago
  Great example. Reminds me of Milton Friedman's "Nobody knows how to make a pencil" essay. A lot of human progress is result of human actions but not planning. Centralized planning around "climate change" would 100% be a recipe for disaster and a monumental failure about which future generations will write for 100s of years just the way we talk about slavery today. Your use of carbon makes my existence on the planet a bit risky and hence you should pay me some compensation. But how much ? That is an impossible task for anyone and not just for the centralized government systems but even for highly efficient private players looking at very small problems. This is something that even outright climate change deniers like me admit.
  - loceng 6y ago
    It comes down to you do whatever bare minimum "we" determine is necessary to do your part in this struggle, or we'll eventually go to war to hold the line if your practices unsustainablility outweigh the cost of war; arguably in globalised society you can and should use economic levers first.
- pjc50 6y ago
  Indeed - which is the argument for point-of-extraction carbon pricing. Then you don't have to calculate anything, it gets sorted out along the supply chain by individual decisions as to whether the CO2 cost is worth it compared to the available alternatives at that step.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    Until every country in the world has agreed upon doing that you still need to estimate CO2 when exporting and importing things from and to the common-carbon-price zone.
  - contravariant 6y ago
    The problem there is that most ways to add carbon pricing are against the self interest of whomever enacts it. Point-of-extraction is especially bad because it places all of the initial burden on the few places that actually extract carbon, who are probably not going to like that idea.
    - jononor 6y ago
      On the other hand, those extractors are operating on licenses issued by governments. So in principle, one could add that do their license, and they would just have to deal with it. A challenge is that the market is global, while licenses are given out by nations. So requires alignment of many nations for it not to be a competitive burden on a few producers.
      - contravariant 6y ago
        Taxes are already on the government level, I'm not sure what other hand you're referring to here. Who would a corporation even pay the money to if it isn't enacted by a government?
    - conjectures 6y ago
      I guess it depends on the 'who' in those places. It's not hard to imagine a government rather fancying getting a tax receipt from extraction companies, particularly if it is seen as green. Who would presumably lobby rather hard against it. This suggests the absence of pricing at source is to some extent a result of successful lobbying.
jacquesm 6y ago
The biggest problem is that furniture, instead of a class of objects with longevity and functionality has now become a fashion article, and IKEA is a large factor in that shift.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  I buy utility furniture at the thrift store. When I'm done with it, it goes back to the thrift store :-)
  - dagw 6y ago
    it goes back to the thrift store Last time I moved I found that thrift stores are very picky about what furniture they accept.
    - 2muchcoffeeman 6y ago
      Take care of your furniture or give it away to those in need?
      - dagw 6y ago
        give it away to those in need? Tried that as well. They took a dining table with a few scratches in it, but no charity I talked to wanted bookshelves or TV stands/media benches.
    - WalterBright 6y ago
      If I get it from the thrift store, it surely meets their criteria for donations. I'm a bit picky on what I select, too. For example, no upholstered stuff, because of possible bedbugs.
- maccard 6y ago
  Not to beat the snowflake millenial drum too hard, but my parents moved from the house they've owned since they were younger than me. They have furniture like bookcases, beds, couches, tables, much of which they offered to me. But I live in a 2 bedroom apartment that is less than 1/3 of the size of their house, so it just doesn't fit. As an example, their dining room table is wider than my living room! I can't take any of that furniture from our family home into my current home whether I want to or not, and even as a dual income household, with one working in tech, we can't afford to buy a house that would fit even half of their furniture.
bombcar 6y ago
There's a world of difference between Ikea particleboard crap and heirloom furniture - you can make quite useful and durable furniture from pine board; Ikea actually does (though they could stand to spend some time on the design, the IVAR system is BY FAR the worst storage related problem I've ever dealt with; tossed that into the fire and got Uline wire shelves instead). Moving the lifecycle of a piece of furniture from 3-5 years closer to 20 is highly worth it; even if I no longer need it I prefer to leave it on the curb for someone else than have to shove it into the trash can. And these metal shelves will last longer than I will - and can move to the garage if I no longer need them.
- 2muchcoffeeman 6y ago
  I like Ivar ...

helmholtz 6y ago

The complication is EXACTLY why we need to be even more in panic and hair-on-fire about environmental issues. A colleague did some analyses for the life cycle emissions of refrigerants. The complexity in the process was absurd, and basically intractable without simplifications. How much indirect CO2 emissions are caused by an inefficient compressor? How much does it depend on how you generate electricity? Which country were the gaskets manufactured in? What was the process used to extract the rare earths? Everything depends on everything else and consequences are pretty unknown.

afarrell 6y ago
> even more in panic and hair-on-fire about environmental issues Panic is rarely useful. It might lead you to move at high and low velocity.
- afarrell 6y ago
  that should be: high speed and low velocity.
fastball 6y ago
Hence why the real solution has always been: 1. Electrify everything possible 2. Shift all electricity production to renewables, massively increase power output with nuclear nuclear nuclear. 3. Carbon capture.
- arcticbull 6y ago
  Ooh and stop mining Bitcoin
  - loceng 6y ago
    But how else will people make money than in a global, decentralized pyramid/MLM scheme?
    - WesolyKubeczek 6y ago
      s/make/lose/ But I see your point. We should make a pyramid/MLM scheme where you're promised rewards for planting trees, segregating waste, cleaning up in any potential wildlife habitats, and reducing/reusing stuff in general.
  - fastball 6y ago
    Actually, as part of "Electrify everything", it would probably be good to replace a significant chunk of the banking system with a cryptocurrency layer (maybe bitcoin, maybe not). With green energy, digital gold is a lot more green than physical gold. Bitcoin is like electric cars – not super green right in this moment when the grid is still dirty, but all it takes to make it greener is to green up the grid. Meanwhile the classical banking system: uses all forms of transport which green up slower (armored cars, planes, etc), requires crazy amounts of construction (I don't even want to guess how much cement has been used in the construction of physical banks all over the world), all those buildings use energy for AC/lighting/etc, require huge amounts of manpower to manage trust in the system (people definitely aren't green), and also need their own datacenters anyway. And I'm sure I'm forgetting some things, where as with BTC pretty much all consumption is baked into mining, which again just gets greener automatically as the grid gets greener. Nobody is running a Bitcoin mining operation off of diesel generators. If you did the math (impractical given the breadth of the existing banking system), I think you'd find Bitcoin is already far greener than the existing banking system, by a huge margin. And cryptos like Ethereum have the potential to 10x/100x/1000x that with things like PoS vs. PoW as well as the fact that Ethereum smart contracts can not only replace banking but probably other industries as well, such as title companies and various other middlemen.
CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
Sounds exactly like the kind of problem market economies handles very well. Main problem is figuring out how to incorporate emissions into price signals.
- pietrovismara 6y ago
  > Sounds exactly like the kind of problem It didn't really work out so far, otherwise we wouldn't be talking about an emergency.
- Marazan 6y ago
  Pricing negative externialities is EXACTLY the kind of thing market economies are terrible at.
  - CuriousSkeptic 6y ago
    Which was kind of my point. How can we internalize the externalities?
KorematsuFred 6y ago
Great example. Reminds me of Milton Friedman's "Nobody knows how to make a pencil" essay. A lot of human progress is result of human actions but not planning. Centralized planning around "climate change" would 100% be a recipe for disaster and a monumental failure about which future generations will write for 100s of years just the way we talk about slavery today. Your use of carbon makes my existence on the planet a bit risky and hence you should pay me some compensation. But how much ? That is an impossible task for anyone and not just for the centralized government systems but even for highly efficient private players looking at very small problems. This is something that even outright climate change deniers like me admit.
- loceng 6y ago
  It comes down to you do whatever bare minimum "we" determine is necessary to do your part in this struggle, or we'll eventually go to war to hold the line if your practices unsustainablility outweigh the cost of war; arguably in globalised society you can and should use economic levers first.
pjc50 6y ago
Indeed - which is the argument for point-of-extraction carbon pricing. Then you don't have to calculate anything, it gets sorted out along the supply chain by individual decisions as to whether the CO2 cost is worth it compared to the available alternatives at that step.
- adrianN 6y ago
  Until every country in the world has agreed upon doing that you still need to estimate CO2 when exporting and importing things from and to the common-carbon-price zone.
- contravariant 6y ago
  The problem there is that most ways to add carbon pricing are against the self interest of whomever enacts it. Point-of-extraction is especially bad because it places all of the initial burden on the few places that actually extract carbon, who are probably not going to like that idea.
  - jononor 6y ago
    On the other hand, those extractors are operating on licenses issued by governments. So in principle, one could add that do their license, and they would just have to deal with it. A challenge is that the market is global, while licenses are given out by nations. So requires alignment of many nations for it not to be a competitive burden on a few producers.
    - contravariant 6y ago
      Taxes are already on the government level, I'm not sure what other hand you're referring to here. Who would a corporation even pay the money to if it isn't enacted by a government?
  - conjectures 6y ago
    I guess it depends on the 'who' in those places. It's not hard to imagine a government rather fancying getting a tax receipt from extraction companies, particularly if it is seen as green. Who would presumably lobby rather hard against it. This suggests the absence of pricing at source is to some extent a result of successful lobbying.

jacquesm 6y ago

The biggest problem is that furniture, instead of a class of objects with longevity and functionality has now become a fashion article, and IKEA is a large factor in that shift.

WalterBright 6y ago
I buy utility furniture at the thrift store. When I'm done with it, it goes back to the thrift store :-)
- dagw 6y ago
  it goes back to the thrift store Last time I moved I found that thrift stores are very picky about what furniture they accept.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 6y ago
    Take care of your furniture or give it away to those in need?
    - dagw 6y ago
      give it away to those in need? Tried that as well. They took a dining table with a few scratches in it, but no charity I talked to wanted bookshelves or TV stands/media benches.
  - WalterBright 6y ago
    If I get it from the thrift store, it surely meets their criteria for donations. I'm a bit picky on what I select, too. For example, no upholstered stuff, because of possible bedbugs.
maccard 6y ago
Not to beat the snowflake millenial drum too hard, but my parents moved from the house they've owned since they were younger than me. They have furniture like bookcases, beds, couches, tables, much of which they offered to me. But I live in a 2 bedroom apartment that is less than 1/3 of the size of their house, so it just doesn't fit. As an example, their dining room table is wider than my living room! I can't take any of that furniture from our family home into my current home whether I want to or not, and even as a dual income household, with one working in tech, we can't afford to buy a house that would fit even half of their furniture.

bombcar 6y ago

There's a world of difference between Ikea particleboard crap and heirloom furniture - you can make quite useful and durable furniture from pine board; Ikea actually does (though they could stand to spend some time on the design, the IVAR system is BY FAR the worst storage related problem I've ever dealt with; tossed that into the fire and got Uline wire shelves instead). Moving the lifecycle of a piece of furniture from 3-5 years closer to 20 is highly worth it; even if I no longer need it I prefer to leave it on the curb for someone else than have to shove it into the trash can. And these metal shelves will last longer than I will - and can move to the garage if I no longer need them.

2muchcoffeeman 6y ago
I like Ivar ...