4 ms·

This is the age old false dichotomy between personal use (minuscule percentage of green house gasses) versus agricultural/commercial use (the actual elephant in

This is the age old false dichotomy between personal use (minuscule percentage of green house gasses) versus agricultural/commercial use (the actual elephant in the room).

D13Fd 4y ago
“Minuscule” or not, it doesn’t matter. Every molecule of CO2 & other greenhouse gases avoided now is worth dozens or hundreds or more that we’ll have to recapture via carbon capture in the future if we want to prevent a climate disaster.
- seibelj 4y ago
  The amount of carbon a gas stove emits, like plastic straws, plastic bags, and all manner of bans the eco-activists are forcing on society, is so infinitesimally small compared to the airplanes the same activists and politicians use to jet around the country. It's completely laughable and totally absurd. I'm so utterly tired of virtue signaling in all aspects of society. We put insane amounts of effort into things that do nothing, then ignore all of the huge issues because those issues are hard and don't fit into a neat tweet.
  - ryukafalz 4y ago
    Okay, now how much carbon does the entire gas infrastructure used to pipe that gas around emit, and the gas used to heat homes? Because as long as people are going to specifically demand gas stoves, all that infrastructure still has to exist, and gas heating is going to be attractive because the gas hookup is already there. The fossil fuel industry specifically uses gas stoves as a gateway to push people towards using more gas (see the old “cooking with gas” campaign for example). This is about countering that messaging. (And besides, we know more about the health impacts of gas stove use now too; there are more direct health reasons you’d want to avoid them in addition to the climate impacts.) https://www.npr.org/2021/10/07/1015460605/gas-stove-emissions-climate-change-health-effects https://www.npr.org/2021/10/07/1015460605/gas-stove-emission...
    - seibelj 4y ago
      We already have the infrastructure and it works great. How about solve the planes and container ships then we can work our way down to the things that barely matter?
      - wolverine876 4y ago
        > things that barely matter Can you support the claim that they barely matter? From what I've seen, consumers produce a significant amount of GHG. Why not solve both now? There's no reason to wait for someone else to do something, and many solutions take time to develop and implement.
      - ryukafalz 4y ago
        > The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that in 2019, methane emissions from natural gas and petroleum systems and from abandoned oil and natural gas wells were the source of about 29% of total U.S. methane emissions and about 3% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Source: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/natural-gas-and-the-environment.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/natural-gas-... Sounds like it matters to me, especially considering methane is a particularly potent greenhouse gas.
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    > infinitesimally ... completely ... totally ... utterly ... insane Words like that are an attempt to add impact, but they don't change the underlying facts and argument. Can you back up these claims? Paraphrasing Mark Twain, 'replace all your adverbs and adjectives with 'damn', and then edit for a family-friendly newspaper.'
    - seibelj 4y ago
      > Eco-Cycle is unable to provide any data to back up this number, telling Reason that it was relying on the research of one Milo Cress. Cress—whose Be Straw Free Campaign is hosted on Eco-Cycle's website—tells Reason that he arrived at the 500 million straws a day figure from phone surveys he conducted of straw manufacturers in 2011, when he was just 9 years old. > Cress, who is now 16, says that the National Restaurant Association has endorsed his estimates in private correspondence. This may well be true, but the only references to the 500 million figure on the association's website again point back to the work done by Cress. https://reason.com/2018/01/25/california-bill-would-criminalize-restau/ https://reason.com/2018/01/25/california-bill-would-criminal...
      - wolverine876 4y ago
        The publication Reason isn't usually considered the most credible source. I'll just leave the claims as 'unfounded', which is fine.
        seibelj 4y ago
        Ah yes, when the news disagrees with your worldview attack the source. The article is well-researched with plenty of links, but your response is expected.
        wolverine876 4y ago
        You can say that, but Reason is still not generally seen as credible. If we ignore credibility, we can say and on the Interet we can find support for anything.
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  Imagine a some shady company building a dam, and due to their shitty practices the dam failed, there's a huge flood destroying whole cities, and you're blaming the person above you, because he pissed in the water. Yes, technically every mililiter of liquid matters, but we all know who the real culprit is, and shifting the blame to someone who likes good food, instead of the major puluters is a bad thing to do.
- erellsworth 4y ago
- incrudible 4y ago
  Eliminating an entire stratum of cooking culture in exchange for miniscule savings in CO2 seems like a terrible deal to make.
jcranberry 4y ago
A quick google tells me household consumption contributes to 72% of GHG emissions: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es803496a https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es803496a
- vkou 4y ago
  This is a pointless game of accounting, that distracts from the issue at hand. As long as producers aren't taxed for emissions, consumers can't pick lower-emission producers.
  - jcranberry 4y ago
    We should be approaching the problem from all avenues, so I agree. But this campaign that ordinary people shouldn't arsed to do anything because it won't make a difference is absurd.
    - vkou 4y ago
      I can't be arsed to do it, not because it won't make a difference, but because I have no ability to know that an alleged lower-carbon product is actually lower-carbon, and not just marketing bullshit and accounting trickery. Encoding it in cost is the only metric that the manufacturer won't be able to game. It's the only honest, guaranteed signal for any product. Making purchasing decisions based on it is the whole point of market economies. Tax carbon at the same cost as it takes to pull it out of the air[1], and consumers will start buying low-carbon alternatives. [1] You should also probably take that money, and actually pull it out of the air, though.
      - jcranberry 4y ago
        Most likely there are trustworthy certifications which you can look for depending on the product. But I agree it isn't always easy. You can also participate in the used/2nd hand market. That makes a bigger difference than people often account for. Otherwise there's changing to clean energy providers for your home, switching to electric vehicles, and eating less beef and dairy. But I'm still all for the carbon tax.
olivermarks 4y ago
ag, comm plus plus military use
tootie 4y ago
Which leads to the next unavoidable step which is sharp reductions in meat consumption.
tomtheelder 4y ago
Commercial and residential GHG emissions are significant. Yes we should absolutely be doing more to curb emissions from ag/industry, but we shouldn't pretend that it's not also worth addressing restaurants and homes.

This is the age old false dichotomy between personal use (minuscule percentage of green house gasses) versus agricultural/commercial use (the actual elephant in the room).

D13Fd 4y ago

“Minuscule” or not, it doesn’t matter. Every molecule of CO2 & other greenhouse gases avoided now is worth dozens or hundreds or more that we’ll have to recapture via carbon capture in the future if we want to prevent a climate disaster.

seibelj 4y ago
The amount of carbon a gas stove emits, like plastic straws, plastic bags, and all manner of bans the eco-activists are forcing on society, is so infinitesimally small compared to the airplanes the same activists and politicians use to jet around the country. It's completely laughable and totally absurd. I'm so utterly tired of virtue signaling in all aspects of society. We put insane amounts of effort into things that do nothing, then ignore all of the huge issues because those issues are hard and don't fit into a neat tweet.
- ryukafalz 4y ago
  Okay, now how much carbon does the entire gas infrastructure used to pipe that gas around emit, and the gas used to heat homes? Because as long as people are going to specifically demand gas stoves, all that infrastructure still has to exist, and gas heating is going to be attractive because the gas hookup is already there. The fossil fuel industry specifically uses gas stoves as a gateway to push people towards using more gas (see the old “cooking with gas” campaign for example). This is about countering that messaging. (And besides, we know more about the health impacts of gas stove use now too; there are more direct health reasons you’d want to avoid them in addition to the climate impacts.) https://www.npr.org/2021/10/07/1015460605/gas-stove-emissions-climate-change-health-effects https://www.npr.org/2021/10/07/1015460605/gas-stove-emission...
  - seibelj 4y ago
    We already have the infrastructure and it works great. How about solve the planes and container ships then we can work our way down to the things that barely matter?
    - wolverine876 4y ago
      > things that barely matter Can you support the claim that they barely matter? From what I've seen, consumers produce a significant amount of GHG. Why not solve both now? There's no reason to wait for someone else to do something, and many solutions take time to develop and implement.
    - ryukafalz 4y ago
      > The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that in 2019, methane emissions from natural gas and petroleum systems and from abandoned oil and natural gas wells were the source of about 29% of total U.S. methane emissions and about 3% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Source: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/natural-gas-and-the-environment.php https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/natural-gas/natural-gas-... Sounds like it matters to me, especially considering methane is a particularly potent greenhouse gas.
- wolverine876 4y ago
  > infinitesimally ... completely ... totally ... utterly ... insane Words like that are an attempt to add impact, but they don't change the underlying facts and argument. Can you back up these claims? Paraphrasing Mark Twain, 'replace all your adverbs and adjectives with 'damn', and then edit for a family-friendly newspaper.'
  - seibelj 4y ago
    > Eco-Cycle is unable to provide any data to back up this number, telling Reason that it was relying on the research of one Milo Cress. Cress—whose Be Straw Free Campaign is hosted on Eco-Cycle's website—tells Reason that he arrived at the 500 million straws a day figure from phone surveys he conducted of straw manufacturers in 2011, when he was just 9 years old. > Cress, who is now 16, says that the National Restaurant Association has endorsed his estimates in private correspondence. This may well be true, but the only references to the 500 million figure on the association's website again point back to the work done by Cress. https://reason.com/2018/01/25/california-bill-would-criminalize-restau/ https://reason.com/2018/01/25/california-bill-would-criminal...
    - wolverine876 4y ago
      The publication Reason isn't usually considered the most credible source. I'll just leave the claims as 'unfounded', which is fine.
      - seibelj 4y ago
        Ah yes, when the news disagrees with your worldview attack the source. The article is well-researched with plenty of links, but your response is expected.
        wolverine876 4y ago
        You can say that, but Reason is still not generally seen as credible. If we ignore credibility, we can say and on the Interet we can find support for anything.
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
Imagine a some shady company building a dam, and due to their shitty practices the dam failed, there's a huge flood destroying whole cities, and you're blaming the person above you, because he pissed in the water. Yes, technically every mililiter of liquid matters, but we all know who the real culprit is, and shifting the blame to someone who likes good food, instead of the major puluters is a bad thing to do.
erellsworth 4y ago
incrudible 4y ago
Eliminating an entire stratum of cooking culture in exchange for miniscule savings in CO2 seems like a terrible deal to make.

jcranberry 4y ago

A quick google tells me household consumption contributes to 72% of GHG emissions: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es803496a https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es803496a

vkou 4y ago
This is a pointless game of accounting, that distracts from the issue at hand. As long as producers aren't taxed for emissions, consumers can't pick lower-emission producers.
- jcranberry 4y ago
  We should be approaching the problem from all avenues, so I agree. But this campaign that ordinary people shouldn't arsed to do anything because it won't make a difference is absurd.
  - vkou 4y ago
    I can't be arsed to do it, not because it won't make a difference, but because I have no ability to know that an alleged lower-carbon product is actually lower-carbon, and not just marketing bullshit and accounting trickery. Encoding it in cost is the only metric that the manufacturer won't be able to game. It's the only honest, guaranteed signal for any product. Making purchasing decisions based on it is the whole point of market economies. Tax carbon at the same cost as it takes to pull it out of the air[1], and consumers will start buying low-carbon alternatives. [1] You should also probably take that money, and actually pull it out of the air, though.
    - jcranberry 4y ago
      Most likely there are trustworthy certifications which you can look for depending on the product. But I agree it isn't always easy. You can also participate in the used/2nd hand market. That makes a bigger difference than people often account for. Otherwise there's changing to clean energy providers for your home, switching to electric vehicles, and eating less beef and dairy. But I'm still all for the carbon tax.

olivermarks 4y ago

ag, comm plus plus military use

tootie 4y ago

Which leads to the next unavoidable step which is sharp reductions in meat consumption.

tomtheelder 4y ago

Commercial and residential GHG emissions are significant. Yes we should absolutely be doing more to curb emissions from ag/industry, but we shouldn't pretend that it's not also worth addressing restaurants and homes.