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Yep... BP can cause a huge maritime catastrophe (deepwater horizon spill), but let's blame Johnny Average here for drinking soda by using a straw. The whole c

Yep... BP can cause a huge maritime catastrophe (deepwater horizon spill), but let's blame Johnny Average here for drinking soda by using a straw. The whole carbon footprint thing was created to shift blame from the dirty industry to inviduals - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oil-coined-carbon-footprints-to-blame-us-for-their-greed-keep-them-on-the-hook https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/23/big-oi...

gruez 4y ago
>The whole carbon footprint thing was created to shift blame from the dirty industry to inviduals you think that "the dirty industry" are just emitting carbon for the fun of it?
- TurkTurkleton 4y ago
  You think that "the dirty industry" will voluntarily work to reduce negative externalities if they aren't regulatorily required to do so and if doing so is less profitable than mounting a PR campaign to draw attention away from them would be?
- kelnos 4y ago
  They do it because it's more economical in the short term to do it, and our economic system values short term metrics more than long term. On top of that, our governments are full of cowards who won't create policies that make it more expensive to destroy the planet than to save it.
- spaetzleesser 4y ago
  "you think that "the dirty industry" are just emitting carbon for the fun of it?" Yes, for fun and profit.
  - seoaeu 4y ago
    Profit from whom? All these industries ultimately sell the resulting end products to people. This idea that Exxon Mobile is solely to blame for gasoline emissions or that a factory owner is the only one responsible for the emissions from their factory, rather than the person who purchases and uses those products is quite frankly absurd.
    - AlexandrB 4y ago
      > This idea that Exxon Mobile is solely to blame for gasoline emissions or that a factory owner is the only one responsible for the emissions from their factory, rather than the person who purchases and uses those products is quite frankly absurd. No it's not. The cost of pumping CO2 into the air should be factored into the cost of running a polluting factory. If it's not factored in, there's basically zero chance that a "clean" alternative factory will be economically competitive today. Asking everyone in the world to voluntarily spend more on goods that they're not even sure are manufactured in a cleaner way (see "greenwashing") seems like a dead end to me.
      - carapace 4y ago
        As long as there are other options, then I agree with seoaeu that the people who choose to buy polluting products and services do share the responsibility for climate change and other avoidable environmental destruction. I also agree with you we should factor in CO2 production as a cost, to take advantage of the economic system (which actually works pretty well within it's domain after all, eh?)
      - seoaeu 4y ago
        It doesn’t take a psychic to know that filling up your car with gasoline is going to cause a bunch of emissions. Or that the manufacture of a bicycle pollutes way less than a large SUV. For some reason lots of people have this idea that the path to solving climate change is for consumers to make no changes to their wasteful consumption, but somehow fix it on the backend so everything is net-zero. In reality, the only workable path must include systematic changes that result in people consuming less (along with lowering industrial emissions for the consumption that remains)
      - colinmhayes 4y ago
        It's not a company's fault that the government is unwilling to neutralize externalities. Deciding to do so when everyone else doesn't just means you will fail as consumers switch to cheaper, higher pollution alternatives.
    - spaetzleesser 4y ago
- vegetablepotpie 4y ago
  Not op, but no, they don’t do it for fun, they do it for money. Emitting carbon has negative externalities (climate change) that are not priced into the emissions, rather they are passed onto the future you and future generations. We can change this by putting a price on carbon. This will incentivize the growth of cleaner alternatives, give Joe an opportunity to not contribute to emissions, and this will affect the profits of the “dirty industry”. The “dirty industry” wants to keep profits as high as possible for as long as possible, it’s just business. Blaming average Joe on the problem is a distraction. Blaming individuals for systemic issues is fruitless. Industry knows this. The longer policy can be delayed, the longer profits can be made.
  - seoaeu 4y ago
    The people who finance those emissions are ultimately their customers. If you drive a polluting SUV or eat a ton of beef, those emissions emissions are a consequence of your decisions. The systematic issues that folk talk about abstractly are things like “too many people pick SUVs rather than commuting by subway” or “society needs to switch away from eating so much beef”. It isn’t just a matter of waltzing into a factory and turning some dials that the greedy factory owner doesn’t want to change
    - vegetablepotpie 4y ago
      Although personal responsibility is a factor for emissions, my thesis is that it’s not the primary factor. When I talk about systemic issues, I talk specifically about the distribution of personal choices people can make that lead to outcomes. Taken into context, this means that if I only have one choice for electricity provider, and my investor owned utility makes a decision to burn coal to generate electricity, there’s very little I can do to change that. If the area I live in has only single family zoning, things are so spread out that it means that most people need a car for basic human needs like going to work and getting groceries. In my city electricity and transportation represents 80% of emissions. These systems have big impacts. You can throw all the personal responsibility that you want at that and not make any meaningful changes. We don’t have to have these systems, you could empower the community to make power purchasing agreements to buy electricity on the wholesale market that would be cleaner than what the utility provides. You could pass mixed use zoning to allow developers the autonomy to build commercial/residential mid rise buildings. People could walk to a lot more stuff. We just choose not to do that. This is a matter of waltzing into your town hall, state legislature, and congress and demanding that we allow people the ability to make better choices. If people had real choices, we’d have better outcomes.
- wildrhythms 4y ago
  Carnival cruise ships alone produce 10x more pollution than all vehicles in Europe combined[1]. So yes, it is for fun. And profit. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/8bceef94-86cd-11e9-a028-86cea8523dc2 https://www.ft.com/content/8bceef94-86cd-11e9-a028-86cea8523...
  - colinmhayes 4y ago
    But if they weren't royal caribbean would.
  - gruez 4y ago
    >Carnival cruise ships alone produce 10x more pollution than all vehicles in Europe combined[1]. 1. I get the joke you're trying to make, but realistically speaking the fact that the company is in the "fun" industry, doesn't mean the company itself is being run "for fun". 2. that's at least somewhat misleading because the pollutants mentioned are pollutants that tend to be aggressively curtailed for land vehicles (because of their negative effects on local air quality), but are far less of an issue on the open sea 3. I get excusing the consumer if the good/service in question is essential and there's no pollution free alternative, but it seems weird to pin the blame on Carnival when consumers are making entirely discretionary purchases that are known to have negative environmental impacts.
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  Not fun but profit. Look at the classic beer industry... you have/had a crate full of standardized glass bottles, with metal caps and paper labels, you pay some deposit to take the crate and the bottles, you drink the beer, return the crate and the empty bottles to be washed and refilled, get back your deposit (or take a new full crate), and that's it. Yes, some energy goes for transport and washing of those bottles. Now look at soda industry.... you have 6 plastic bottles full of soda, capped with plastic, with plastic labels, wrapped in plastic (a "six pack"), set on a pallet, wrapped in more plastic, that you throw away after you drink them (or return them for recycling, and then china burns them). And in the meantime, we're discussing and banning plastic straws. And this is just a tiny thing, compared to all the poisons that are emited by large industries, especially in 3rd world countries using unregulated, dangerous chemicals (pesticides, herbicides,...) that are killing the local ecosystems, so nestle can earn 2cents extra on a box of cocoa powder.
  - gruez 4y ago
    >Look at the classic beer industry... you have/had a crate full of standardized glass bottles, with metal caps and paper labels, you pay some deposit to take the crate and the bottles, you drink the beer, return the crate and the empty bottles to be washed and refilled, get back your deposit (or take a new full crate), and that's it. I'm not sure what time period "classic" implies, but what you described hasn't been the case for years. About 12 percent of all U.S. beer was sold in returnable bottles in 1981. Since 2007, the percentage has been negligible, according to statistics kept by the Washington, D.C.-based Beer Institute. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/reusable-beer-bottles-facing-extinction/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/reusable-beer-bottles-facing-ex... >Yes, some energy goes for transport and washing of those bottles. I find it strange that you admit this is a thing, but ultimately gloss over it. What really is the TCO of plastic bottles vs glass bottles? It's tempting to conclude that reusing must be better than throwing stuff out, but given the costs associated with transporting heavy glass bottles and/or sanitizing them, it's not exactly obvious which one has overall higher costs. >(or return them for recycling, and then china burns them). There's a lot wrong with recycling today (eg. ending up in landfills because recycling is too expensive), but what you described isn't one of them. Landfill space in the US is cheap as it is. Nobody is shipping plastic half-way across the world only to incinerate them.
m0llusk 4y ago
That is false. The carbon footprint idea was designed to analyze what is going on and conceive of next steps. The argument you are making is clearly false because basic calculations show that industry and commerce have carbon footprints far larger than individuals. Also this criticism fails to take into account how people actually live. When I was in Menlo Park, California it was discovered that pool filter pumps draw lots of energy over time because they get left on and old designs are extremely inefficient. This news spread and all over town older boomers who of course lived a lifestyle with pools in their backyard had their pool filter pumps upgraded to modern designs and often changed to have them powered by solar and allowed to stop overnight. The savings from a neighborhood of rich folks converting pool filter pumps all in a short period of time was significant and now a huge constant draw from the local grid has been eliminated. There is no way that is a plot by dirty industry, just a big victory that gets overlooked because of carelessness and political projection.
- uoaei 4y ago
  The recurrent phenomenon of "pick a corner-case counterexample and act like that disproves the trend" on HN is really getting grating.
  - couchand 4y ago
    I once saw a productive argument on the internet.
daveslash 4y ago
This is a low quality comment, but it reminds me of the signage purportedly spotted at a BP Gas Station that said "You are responsible for your spills" https://thebasispoint.com/bp-gas-station-sign-you-are-responsible-for-spills-picture/ https://thebasispoint.com/bp-gas-station-sign-you-are-respon...
wolverine876 4y ago
In life, do we behave in every way like the worst person we know? If my neighbor doesn't take out their trash, that doesn't mean I shouldn't do it. In fact, it works the opposite way: We each influence others; if we don't do it, fewer around us will; if we do something good, more people around us will - we set the standards. I try to act like the best person I know (and fail often!). Consumer do emit significant amounts of carbon, and whatever someone else does, we need to reduce it. Pointing the finger at someone else and saying, 'well they do it', doesn't help climate change; it just throws around blame - generally a useless distraction in life - and adjusts our standards to the lowest denominator.
- guerrilla 4y ago
  If 90% of the problem is caused by someone else, then spending 99% of the media coverage and legislation on me is just a highly-effective diversionary tactic! Come on, now.
  - wolverine876 4y ago
    > 90% of the problem is caused by someone else Is that true? Or is it true that no factor is more than 10%, so everyone can use this rhetoric and say '90% isn't me!' Also, if you think about it, though it's a very trendy take (which you can see repeated many times on this page) - think past the trend: it's a transparent, embarrassing abdication of responsibility. As just one person, only a tiny amount of the world is impacted by me, but I still have full responsibility for it. I don't sh-t in the street and say, '99.99% isn't me'. A soldier doesn't go AWOL and say, 'only 0.0001% of the battle is me'. > 99% of the media coverage and legislation on me Is that true? And if so, is it only the things you read about, the media coverage covering things that interest their readers and not generally addressing technical regulations of power plants? There's such an attempt at a victim position - a common rhetorical tactic to disrupt progress and serious consideration of issues. Instead of pointing the finger and using rhetoric, which accomplishes nothing, what are you doing about climate change?
    - guerrilla 4y ago

gruez 4y ago

>The whole carbon footprint thing was created to shift blame from the dirty industry to inviduals you think that "the dirty industry" are just emitting carbon for the fun of it?

TurkTurkleton 4y ago
You think that "the dirty industry" will voluntarily work to reduce negative externalities if they aren't regulatorily required to do so and if doing so is less profitable than mounting a PR campaign to draw attention away from them would be?
kelnos 4y ago
They do it because it's more economical in the short term to do it, and our economic system values short term metrics more than long term. On top of that, our governments are full of cowards who won't create policies that make it more expensive to destroy the planet than to save it.
spaetzleesser 4y ago
"you think that "the dirty industry" are just emitting carbon for the fun of it?" Yes, for fun and profit.
- seoaeu 4y ago
  Profit from whom? All these industries ultimately sell the resulting end products to people. This idea that Exxon Mobile is solely to blame for gasoline emissions or that a factory owner is the only one responsible for the emissions from their factory, rather than the person who purchases and uses those products is quite frankly absurd.
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    > This idea that Exxon Mobile is solely to blame for gasoline emissions or that a factory owner is the only one responsible for the emissions from their factory, rather than the person who purchases and uses those products is quite frankly absurd. No it's not. The cost of pumping CO2 into the air should be factored into the cost of running a polluting factory. If it's not factored in, there's basically zero chance that a "clean" alternative factory will be economically competitive today. Asking everyone in the world to voluntarily spend more on goods that they're not even sure are manufactured in a cleaner way (see "greenwashing") seems like a dead end to me.
    - carapace 4y ago
      As long as there are other options, then I agree with seoaeu that the people who choose to buy polluting products and services do share the responsibility for climate change and other avoidable environmental destruction. I also agree with you we should factor in CO2 production as a cost, to take advantage of the economic system (which actually works pretty well within it's domain after all, eh?)
    - seoaeu 4y ago
      It doesn’t take a psychic to know that filling up your car with gasoline is going to cause a bunch of emissions. Or that the manufacture of a bicycle pollutes way less than a large SUV. For some reason lots of people have this idea that the path to solving climate change is for consumers to make no changes to their wasteful consumption, but somehow fix it on the backend so everything is net-zero. In reality, the only workable path must include systematic changes that result in people consuming less (along with lowering industrial emissions for the consumption that remains)
    - colinmhayes 4y ago
      It's not a company's fault that the government is unwilling to neutralize externalities. Deciding to do so when everyone else doesn't just means you will fail as consumers switch to cheaper, higher pollution alternatives.
  - spaetzleesser 4y ago
vegetablepotpie 4y ago
Not op, but no, they don’t do it for fun, they do it for money. Emitting carbon has negative externalities (climate change) that are not priced into the emissions, rather they are passed onto the future you and future generations. We can change this by putting a price on carbon. This will incentivize the growth of cleaner alternatives, give Joe an opportunity to not contribute to emissions, and this will affect the profits of the “dirty industry”. The “dirty industry” wants to keep profits as high as possible for as long as possible, it’s just business. Blaming average Joe on the problem is a distraction. Blaming individuals for systemic issues is fruitless. Industry knows this. The longer policy can be delayed, the longer profits can be made.
- seoaeu 4y ago
  The people who finance those emissions are ultimately their customers. If you drive a polluting SUV or eat a ton of beef, those emissions emissions are a consequence of your decisions. The systematic issues that folk talk about abstractly are things like “too many people pick SUVs rather than commuting by subway” or “society needs to switch away from eating so much beef”. It isn’t just a matter of waltzing into a factory and turning some dials that the greedy factory owner doesn’t want to change
  - vegetablepotpie 4y ago
    Although personal responsibility is a factor for emissions, my thesis is that it’s not the primary factor. When I talk about systemic issues, I talk specifically about the distribution of personal choices people can make that lead to outcomes. Taken into context, this means that if I only have one choice for electricity provider, and my investor owned utility makes a decision to burn coal to generate electricity, there’s very little I can do to change that. If the area I live in has only single family zoning, things are so spread out that it means that most people need a car for basic human needs like going to work and getting groceries. In my city electricity and transportation represents 80% of emissions. These systems have big impacts. You can throw all the personal responsibility that you want at that and not make any meaningful changes. We don’t have to have these systems, you could empower the community to make power purchasing agreements to buy electricity on the wholesale market that would be cleaner than what the utility provides. You could pass mixed use zoning to allow developers the autonomy to build commercial/residential mid rise buildings. People could walk to a lot more stuff. We just choose not to do that. This is a matter of waltzing into your town hall, state legislature, and congress and demanding that we allow people the ability to make better choices. If people had real choices, we’d have better outcomes.
wildrhythms 4y ago
Carnival cruise ships alone produce 10x more pollution than all vehicles in Europe combined[1]. So yes, it is for fun. And profit. [1] https://www.ft.com/content/8bceef94-86cd-11e9-a028-86cea8523dc2 https://www.ft.com/content/8bceef94-86cd-11e9-a028-86cea8523...
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  But if they weren't royal caribbean would.
- gruez 4y ago
  >Carnival cruise ships alone produce 10x more pollution than all vehicles in Europe combined[1]. 1. I get the joke you're trying to make, but realistically speaking the fact that the company is in the "fun" industry, doesn't mean the company itself is being run "for fun". 2. that's at least somewhat misleading because the pollutants mentioned are pollutants that tend to be aggressively curtailed for land vehicles (because of their negative effects on local air quality), but are far less of an issue on the open sea 3. I get excusing the consumer if the good/service in question is essential and there's no pollution free alternative, but it seems weird to pin the blame on Carnival when consumers are making entirely discretionary purchases that are known to have negative environmental impacts.
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
Not fun but profit. Look at the classic beer industry... you have/had a crate full of standardized glass bottles, with metal caps and paper labels, you pay some deposit to take the crate and the bottles, you drink the beer, return the crate and the empty bottles to be washed and refilled, get back your deposit (or take a new full crate), and that's it. Yes, some energy goes for transport and washing of those bottles. Now look at soda industry.... you have 6 plastic bottles full of soda, capped with plastic, with plastic labels, wrapped in plastic (a "six pack"), set on a pallet, wrapped in more plastic, that you throw away after you drink them (or return them for recycling, and then china burns them). And in the meantime, we're discussing and banning plastic straws. And this is just a tiny thing, compared to all the poisons that are emited by large industries, especially in 3rd world countries using unregulated, dangerous chemicals (pesticides, herbicides,...) that are killing the local ecosystems, so nestle can earn 2cents extra on a box of cocoa powder.
- gruez 4y ago
  >Look at the classic beer industry... you have/had a crate full of standardized glass bottles, with metal caps and paper labels, you pay some deposit to take the crate and the bottles, you drink the beer, return the crate and the empty bottles to be washed and refilled, get back your deposit (or take a new full crate), and that's it. I'm not sure what time period "classic" implies, but what you described hasn't been the case for years. About 12 percent of all U.S. beer was sold in returnable bottles in 1981. Since 2007, the percentage has been negligible, according to statistics kept by the Washington, D.C.-based Beer Institute. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/reusable-beer-bottles-facing-extinction/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/reusable-beer-bottles-facing-ex... >Yes, some energy goes for transport and washing of those bottles. I find it strange that you admit this is a thing, but ultimately gloss over it. What really is the TCO of plastic bottles vs glass bottles? It's tempting to conclude that reusing must be better than throwing stuff out, but given the costs associated with transporting heavy glass bottles and/or sanitizing them, it's not exactly obvious which one has overall higher costs. >(or return them for recycling, and then china burns them). There's a lot wrong with recycling today (eg. ending up in landfills because recycling is too expensive), but what you described isn't one of them. Landfill space in the US is cheap as it is. Nobody is shipping plastic half-way across the world only to incinerate them.

m0llusk 4y ago

That is false. The carbon footprint idea was designed to analyze what is going on and conceive of next steps. The argument you are making is clearly false because basic calculations show that industry and commerce have carbon footprints far larger than individuals. Also this criticism fails to take into account how people actually live. When I was in Menlo Park, California it was discovered that pool filter pumps draw lots of energy over time because they get left on and old designs are extremely inefficient. This news spread and all over town older boomers who of course lived a lifestyle with pools in their backyard had their pool filter pumps upgraded to modern designs and often changed to have them powered by solar and allowed to stop overnight. The savings from a neighborhood of rich folks converting pool filter pumps all in a short period of time was significant and now a huge constant draw from the local grid has been eliminated. There is no way that is a plot by dirty industry, just a big victory that gets overlooked because of carelessness and political projection.

uoaei 4y ago
The recurrent phenomenon of "pick a corner-case counterexample and act like that disproves the trend" on HN is really getting grating.
- couchand 4y ago
  I once saw a productive argument on the internet.

daveslash 4y ago

This is a low quality comment, but it reminds me of the signage purportedly spotted at a BP Gas Station that said "You are responsible for your spills" https://thebasispoint.com/bp-gas-station-sign-you-are-responsible-for-spills-picture/ https://thebasispoint.com/bp-gas-station-sign-you-are-respon...

wolverine876 4y ago

In life, do we behave in every way like the worst person we know? If my neighbor doesn't take out their trash, that doesn't mean I shouldn't do it. In fact, it works the opposite way: We each influence others; if we don't do it, fewer around us will; if we do something good, more people around us will - we set the standards. I try to act like the best person I know (and fail often!). Consumer do emit significant amounts of carbon, and whatever someone else does, we need to reduce it. Pointing the finger at someone else and saying, 'well they do it', doesn't help climate change; it just throws around blame - generally a useless distraction in life - and adjusts our standards to the lowest denominator.

guerrilla 4y ago
If 90% of the problem is caused by someone else, then spending 99% of the media coverage and legislation on me is just a highly-effective diversionary tactic! Come on, now.
- wolverine876 4y ago
  > 90% of the problem is caused by someone else Is that true? Or is it true that no factor is more than 10%, so everyone can use this rhetoric and say '90% isn't me!' Also, if you think about it, though it's a very trendy take (which you can see repeated many times on this page) - think past the trend: it's a transparent, embarrassing abdication of responsibility. As just one person, only a tiny amount of the world is impacted by me, but I still have full responsibility for it. I don't sh-t in the street and say, '99.99% isn't me'. A soldier doesn't go AWOL and say, 'only 0.0001% of the battle is me'. > 99% of the media coverage and legislation on me Is that true? And if so, is it only the things you read about, the media coverage covering things that interest their readers and not generally addressing technical regulations of power plants? There's such an attempt at a victim position - a common rhetorical tactic to disrupt progress and serious consideration of issues. Instead of pointing the finger and using rhetoric, which accomplishes nothing, what are you doing about climate change?
  - guerrilla 4y ago