Comment by lxgr
4 years ago
Note that you're the one bringing the "carbon footprint" concept into this conversation, not me.
> How much could you reduce your carbon footprint if you didn’t use HN? Google?
Again, I don't really subscribe to the idea of carbon footprints, but for the sake of the argument: Insignificantly little, compared to the emissions caused by the flights I take.
> Silly questions aren’t they?
Absolutely.
The first reply to this sub thread asked me about my “carbon footprint”.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34494390
From just a brief Google search, 500,000 people are in the air at any given time.
When my wife an I fly we are
0.0004% of all of the people in the air. Is that percentage “significant”?
Yes, but I‘m not the same person that mentioned your carbon footprint.
My point is, carbon footprint or not, that buying flight tickets and airplanes flying are in a causal relationship, which you seem to be denying, which in turn I find absurd.
You are responsible (again, no moral judgement or carbon footprint shaming implied; again, I fly too, and not too infrequently) for the consequences your actions, and dilution of responsibility seems like an extremely immature way of dealing with that.
Buying a flight ticket isn‘t the same thing as chartering a private jet, but it‘s also not the same thing as riding a bike around the block in terms of energy and resource expenditure. What we do about all of these things is a question completely secondary to the discussion at hand.
And if you didn’t ride a bike and walked everywhere you would save the resources required to make the bike.
Are you not also “diluting” the responsibility by not taking into account all of the energy you use by being on your computer? By being on the internet?
At what point does it become silly? Or do you set the bar right above “the things I don’t do”?
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