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Private transport is also one of the biggest sources of greenhouse gas emissions. Reducing daily commute seems like a good way to improve our carbon footprint.

• Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  One of many, though; I'm really getting my hackles up with corporations making end users responsible for things like plastic, industrial farming and co2 emissions. Yes they're a part of the equation, but there's much bigger impact to be made if they work from the top down. Mind you, there are things like that going on (at least in my neck of the woods), with things like subsidies to consumers for going to battery powered cars and installing solar panels, and subsidies to e.g. energy producers for building wind farms out at sea.
  • read_if_gay_ 5y ago
    > there's much bigger impact to be made if they work from the top down Exactly. Germany banning plastic straws while simultaneously funding a new natural gas pipeline feels very much like they just want it to seem like things are improving.
    • TeMPOraL 5y ago
      Public consciousness seems to lack the ability to prioritize issues. Disposable plastics are a problem first and foremost because they cause proliferation of microplastics in the biosphere. This is an issue, but it's not an important issue right now. It's likely harmful to biosphere and to us in the long run - but as of today, there's no noticeable harm being done that can be tied to microplastics, which suggests any negative effects are weak. Climate change, on the other hand, is a civilization-ending threat. We keep burning more fossil fuels, and it's quite likely our grandchildren will get to starve to death. Preventing this should be our absolute top priority. Microplastics can wait. It's like trying to administer first aid to an accident victim who has a nasty skin cut on their arm, and a leg that got cut off below the knee. Yes, that skin cut is painful and it needs treating to prevent infection, but it can wait - the first priority is to deal with the leg, before the victim bleeds out.
      • read_if_gay_ 5y ago
        > Public consciousness seems to lack the ability to prioritize issues. Things that everybody is going to notice first-hand have an outsized impact on public consciousness. When combined with democracy, this has nasty consequences. For politicians banning plastic straws is a no-brainer: easy to ban, no real impact on anything, and everyone is going to notice it and feel like something is happening. Same for plastic grocery bags and cutlery. Do it and maybe you'll grab some of those Green votes, same play as the Energiewende. Meanwhile if you make industry even just .1% more efficient the impact is larger by orders of magnitude but nobody is going to notice, first-hand, right now. So it's pointless when you only care about votes. Which is sadly a main feature of democracy.
        • galangalalgol 5y ago
          Do you have any better alternatives to a democracy?
          • TeMPOraL 5y ago
            There doesn't seem to be any good one. GP described what's a clear systemic failure inherent in the current implementation of the system. This doesn't mean we have to throw the system away - figuring out how to mitigate this problem would work too. On this, I don't have any solid ideas. In a way, it's a marketing problem: maybe there's a way to make people more receptive to reality than to feel-good but ultimately meaningless actions? I sometimes wonder if governments shouldn't have an official propaganda department, with an official website, explaining in layman's terms the reasoning behind various laws being introduced. You'd go to a page for plastic straws ban, and see the government's official word on why it was drafted, what problem it's meant to solve, how it attempts that, and how they track the results. Of course, everyone would have a field day debunking every single article from a million different angles, but at least it would serve to anchor the discussion. And it would be a place for a smarter politicians/parties to explain why increasing efficiency of some industry by 0.01% is a huge win by the current administration - hopefully leading to more such actions in the future. There's a thin line between giving clear explanations and patronizing the citizens, but I think governments need to start walking it - as it is, politics is way too complicated for regular people to follow in any meaningful sense, other than repeating soundbites.
    • thiago_fm 5y ago
      Natural gas is great. It doesn't generate as much pollution as one might think. Other than fully clean energy like hydro and solar, it is one of the best.
      • paulmd 5y ago
        it doesn't generate much in terms of particulate emissions (eg it's not dirty like diesel) but it's quite bad in terms of greenhouse effects. the natural gas pipeline network leaks a relatively large amount of the gas that transits it (it's on the order of several percent per year) and because it's such a distributed problem it's not economical for companies to fix it purely on a cost-savings basis. And natural gas (methane) is an extremely potent greenhouse gas - it is #2, behind only carbon dioxide in overall impact on the atmosphere, and something around 100x as potent as CO2 over a 100 year lifespan. https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/06/the-us-natural-gas-industry-leaking-way-more-methane-than-ever-before.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/06/the-us-natural-gas-industry-... new studies suggest the leak rate is around 2.3%, which is about twice as high as previously predicted - and at 3% you have offset all the benefits compared to coal generation. Again, obviously that's still better in terms of particulate emissions/acid rain, but you wouldn't be doing any less global warming. So it is still significantly bad in terms of greenhouse effect, not nearly the panacea the fossil-fuel industry would like to present it as. (and conversely - the fact that it's such a distributed problem makes it difficult/expensive to clean up. you can capture CO2 and particulates from a point source - it's expensive and it sucks but you can do it. But you can't stop 2 million miles of pipes from leaking a little bit at every fitting.) the only saving grace is that methane does oxidize relatively quickly, on the order of tens of years, whereas CO2 is pretty much there forever. but if we're still pumping out more natural gas into the atmosphere 10 years later, that's not really the fix people think it is. Again, it's 100x more potent over a 100 year lifespan than CO2, the "long term" picture isn't all that rosy either.
        • paulmd 5y ago
          slight addendum to the above - I should have said "not dirty like fossil-diesel". I'd like to make the point that synthetic diesels like biodiesel are extremely clean in terms of particulates and is in fact one of the more interesting "bio-fuels" (although of course there are always problems with any approach that puts food in direct competition with fuel for feedstocks).
    • throwaway2037 5y ago
      I'm confused by the second part <<funding a new natural gas pipeline>>. I assume you are talking about Nord Stream 2. Switching from brown coal to natural gas can reduce carbon footprint by about 50%. This is a good stepping stone to reduce the huge amount of brown coal that Germany uses for power. Also, the reduction in NOx and SOx is huge by switching from brown coal to natural gas. Another big win for public health. Do I misunderstand your point? Germany has limited places to harvest wind (North Sea) and limited solar resources. How else can they reduce their carbon footprint? I guess they can build massive solar arrays in Libya and then build the world's largest long-range DC power line to Munich? (No joke: Singapore might do this with Australia.)
      • read_if_gay_ 5y ago
        It seems you argue it’s a stepping stone, then you argue there’s no other way. Both of these can’t be true. But if you ask me, the long term answer is nuclear. I know it’s controversial but many of the issues are blown out of proportion.
        • daddylongstroke 5y ago
          I would argue, that when you take a holistic view of the complete environment, including the soils and subsoils where our food largely comes from, the only long term answer you're left with is to de-civilize and go back to hand tools, local living, and animal transport for the rare times it's needed.
  • TeMPOraL 5y ago
    > I'm really getting my hackles up with corporations making end users responsible for things like plastic, industrial farming and co2 emissions. Me too, but GP has an argument along these lines here. Commute is a big, and often deciding factor, in private car ownership. Get rid of it, and most drivers will lose the major reason for owning a car. Expand the delivery systems for day-to-day stuff like groceries, and another big reason - buying in bulk - goes away. While people living in sparsely populated areas will still need their cars, the dwellers of large cities with serviceable public transport infrastructure might be more inclined to get rid of their cars, and just rent one for an occasional out-of-town errand. In this way, normalizing work from home creates top-down pressure for reducing the number of private cars in use.
    • dahfizz 5y ago
      > Get rid of it, and most drivers will lose the major reason for owning a car. I think this is backwards. We saw during the pandemic a mass exodus from cities. Once people could work from home, they decided they didn't want to live in a city anymore. Once you remove the burden of commuting, suburban / rural life becomes _even more_ attractive, increasing the need for cars.
      • afavour 5y ago
        > Once people could work from home, they decided they didn't want to live in a city anymore. IMO it’s too early to claim that. People left the city during the pandemic because there was no point paying the premium to live in a city when all its amenities are closed. As cities open back up we might see a lot of people return. Anecdotally, I know a bunch of early career folks in their 20s that moved back in with their parents during the pandemic to save cash. That most certainly isn’t their long term plan. I don’t doubt that a good number of folks won’t return to the city once this is over. But I wonder if that’s just an acceleration of moves they would have already made in the next 5 years or so, rather than something indicative of the death of cities.
        • timr 5y ago
          I agree. As for most things, the internet narrative exaggerates reality. New York is already quickly coming back to normal -- certainly slower than before, but offices aren't open yet. Once they open, the intangible benefits of being in the office will re-appear, and result in the same cultural forces that have led to cities for ~all of human civilization. People who are betting against urban life are basically making a bet against human nature based on short-term trends.
• technotony 5y ago
  Depends where you live and if you have to heat or cool your house to work from home. Homes are much more inefficient to moderate temperature than offices. That may or may not offset the benefit from commuting, and even less so if done on public transport with lower emissions.
  • ls15 5y ago
    That only applies if the home is empty when people are at the office. If my family stays at home while I commute, then there are emissions from commuting, heating the home and heating the office.
    • TeMPOraL 5y ago
      Not even then - nobody likes to return to a very cold home after a day at the office. It'll take advances in insulation to become much more widespread before a meaningful amount of people starts shutting off heating when away. That means first tearing down and rebuilding a lot of buildings, because you can't just bolt this kind of insulation tech onto an old construction.
      • heavyset_go 5y ago
        > Not even then - nobody likes to return to a very cold home after a day at the office. I'm also not going to let my pets freeze or bake while no one is home.
• nextlevelwizard 5y ago
  After spending all day inside my box I need a ride to clear my head anyway
• londons_explore 5y ago
  The way to reduce carbon footprint is to put a zero on the price of gasoline, diesel, natural gas and all other forms of carbon-based fuel. A 900% tax should do just fine. Just nobody is brave enough to do it, because it would be political suicide. Even if you gave the money back to the people in the form of tax breaks and social programmes, it would still be political suicide.
  • eplanit 5y ago
    900% of 0 = 0.
    • Aditya_Garg 5y ago
      By put a 0, OP means add a zero (3.95 -> 39.5). Not make gas free.
  • twobitshifter 5y ago
    I don’t know - a carbon tax and telling everyone they’re required to come to the office just seems like it’s punishing workers even more. For many people transit it’s not available or odd fossil fueled powered. WFH should be preferred over a carbon tax on commuting - eliminating the consumption altogether is far better than sending tax money to the government and hoping that people change behaviors based on pricing.
    • londons_explore 5y ago
      A 900% tax would make workers tell their employers that they demand to work from home, get a big pay rise, or go on strike...
  • coryfklein 5y ago
    It's not just political suicide, it's a game theoretical non-optimal play because any one country doing this only hurts themselves while not actually solving climate change. It only works if you have some large number of the top emitters agree to cap all together.