I’m impressed at how many people coalesce to the same suggestions to save space: simple clothes, layers, etc.
However, I’m surprised at how casually he mentionned how much he has travelled, by flight almost exclusively. I’m assuming from the lack of other plug than Type A, he stayed in America where trains are not a great option — but still. I’d expect that to come with some comment about carbon footprint.
Vitalik's one of the founders of Ethereum, so I'd guess that "minimizing carbon footprint" isn't one of his primary goals.
(Yes, yes, proof-of-stake, claimed to finally be launching later this year. That's been "coming soon" for so many years that I'll believe it when it actually happens.)
Minimalism as expressed on the web is mostly a well-off consumerist thing, oddly enough. It's largely about selling nice (or at least "premium-mediocre") stuff to people with money. Natural that it's tied up with expensive travel, too—that's the aspiration hook that gets people who really don't need the stuff to bust out the ol' credit card.
The products he seems to recommend look like knockoffs and incredibly cheap. But often if something breaks while you are abroad you pay 2-3x the price to replace it. And even then the replacement might be of horrible quality too but you're desperate and suck it up.
I don't know about the US, but in the EU, aviation only contributes 3% (that is not a typo. Three percent) of the total greenhouse gas emissions (measured just before corona--so there was a shitload of aviation going on).
The major greenhouse gas emitters are electricity production (30% - mostly gas generators!), road transport (20%), industry (20%). Source: European Environment Agency
So I wouldn't worry much about the climate impact of flying.
Aviation contributes to 3% of EU emissions because most Europeans don't take 360 flights in 9 years, whereas they do use electricity, cars/busses, and products of industry.
It's a lot more of your personal CO2 budget if you're one of the persons doing the flying. Probably the majority if you're doing intercontinental flights every year.
Still, if that's an easier segment than the others to reduce in absolute terms (and without the expenditure just hopping to another column) it shouldn't be off the table.
If one is somewhat flexible then flying really isn't expensive in Europe too. Just checked Google Flights, and starting from Vienna it would cost 29€ to either Rome or London, 50€ to Malta and ~60€ to some Greek places, return flight inclusive.
Safe 20€ a month, which is possible for a huge chunk of the population (easily > 80%), and you can do four to eight of those flights a year and that's just the lower end of the estimation, most still just don't flight that much here, and it's IMO really not an income question.
It's more like an ecological footprint and also time question as flying adds an ineligible overhead one can often outrun by using the good train networks, well maybe apart from Germany where privatization really killed a lot of networks and quality during the last decades, plus I can get to a nice nature area within an hour easily, so why bother travelling as long to the airport to only then endure their security theater.
The climate doesn't care who benefits from emissions, only how much is emitted.
Air travel is much harder to do without fossil fuels than ground transport or electrical generation, and is essential to civilization on the basis of cargo alone. It's simply not an efficient target for change right now.
Some air travel may be essential to civilization, most of it isn't. We don't really have a way to determine which is which on a societal level. The best we can do is price in the externalities (and deal with income disparity, but that's an orthogonal issue).
Air travel itself is essential, it's one of the defining abilities of the modern world and can't just be shut off. It would be corrosive to try and separate the essential from the frivolous, I agree with that.
I favor carbon taxes that dig an industries grave for it: such as taxing coal to build nuclear, wind, solar. That's not feasible with air travel yet, which leaves a consumption tax, those are regressive.
You can tax air travel to encourage travel by other means where applicable, or alternatives for work trips, or local tourism, or slow tourism, all kinds of things. Air travel itself may be defining and I don't envision getting rid of it; but the weekend trip to Vegas or Mallorca or Delhi is a defining feature of the present that is not sustainable in the future.
Taxing dirty electricity generation is regressive taxation, too; like I said, it's an original issue. A first step would be to pay out all the generated carbon taxes on a per capita basis.
> You can tax air travel to encourage travel by other means where applicable.
This would never happen in America because it would require Americans addressing their views on transit and addressing their pitiful consumer rail or even consumer bus industries.
How much cargo actually goes by air? Last I knew boats (ships) were the vast, vast majority of cargo transport, followed by trains, then trucks, with planes coming a distant last.
This says nothing about the importance of the cargo which is transported by plane. Given the much higher expense, we would expect this cargo to be more important, not less.
As a singular factor, cutting down on carbon emissions that are caused via flying is a better leverage point than many other interventions to slowing climate change precisely because the consumption is so high per user. For road transport, industry, and electricity production, those provide benefit for orders of magnitude more people, and individual actors' choices have less impact.
It is probably wiser to judge based on emissions per user.
Because average person in EU flies just under once per year, while traveling by car maybe few times a week. That flight (well, cargo too) generates that 3% of emissions.
Maybe I need to get myself a more progressive social circle, but the number of people around me who non-performatively care about their carbon footprint when travelling (and back the concern with actions, not words) is very very low.
I don't think I've ever heard someone mention their carbon footprint ever in real life. Only on an internet message board would someone be surprised that a blog post didn't mention it.
Quite a bubble. But I also think it's very performative which is why it doesn't show up in day to day convo. For example, even the HNer wanted to see a feel-good aside about saving the environment or at least some sort of atonement for their sins.
It's one of those things where we don't have any central entity to blame, so we look for small payoffs by holding random individuals to the flame.
In fact, becoming an ascetic would probably be counter-productive. I think a large benefit of publicly caring about the environment is the signaling. You show that (a) it matters (b) it's doable (c) it doesn't ruin your life. Then other people start to believe they can also do it. If you do let it ruin your life, that will serve to dissuade rather than persuade.
> I’m impressed at how many people coalesce to the same suggestions to save space: simple clothes, layers, etc.
Buying toiletries locally can mean paying 2-3x the price in your home country. You actually save money by bringing more. For example, in the US the last time I checked I could buy a pack of floss for $0.99. In LATAM it's at least $3. The solution is to bring ~20 packs of floss.
It's also one more thing to do. If you can trivially bring things with you, you've managed to avoid finding the appropriate store, finding what you're looking for among possibly unfamiliar brands, and potentially very different languages.
At least for me, walking into a grocery store that feels totally alien is part of the fun of traveling. It's a neat way to see some of the more blatant cultural differences, while also accomplishing a task.
Yes, but in general I prefer I don't have errands I need to run. Other than picking up wine or whatever :-) I'm certainly fine with going into stores but I prefer to start out with some base-level stuff even if it adds a few pounds.
The author mentions traveling to multiple continents in his post. Do you expect him to use a train/ferry everywhere? That would be incredibly slow and unfeasible in some situations. OTOH, you can fly everywhere. Not everyone deeply cares about their carbon footprint when by far the largest amount of CO2 generated is industrial.
> Not everyone deeply cares about their carbon footprint when by far the largest amount of CO2 generated is industrial.
Industry makes stuff that consumers demand, either directly or indirectly. It’s a bit of a meme to suggest that global warming is all down to companies emitting co2 just for lols. Of course, industry is sometime dirty because it’s cheaper, but it’s putting one’s head in the sand to pretend that consumers have no bearing on what companies do.
This is not to say that the blame lays solely with consumers. People are acting rationally — they want to go on holiday and can afford it; what’s stopping them? The issue is one of regulation. If emitting actually had a cost (well, a cost now, to the emitter, rather than to the whole planet at some later date) people would make better decisions.
I did not suggest companies emit CO2 for lols -- it is quite obvious they are responding in an optimized way (for them) to consumer demands, since that is what a company is.
But the onus to change is on the companies, and since they won't change themselves, it falls on the government. However, taxing the emitter will lead to companies passing on the cost to the consumer, which, while lowering the emissions, would end up locking away a large number of luxuries (air travel, different kinds of food like meat, etc.) from lower-middle class people. It is very easy to say "increase taxes!" when you have enough disposable income to be able to afford these luxuries anyway. I personally do not want to go back a hundred years where meat is rare luxury and the farthest one travels is to the nearest country, once a decade.
Given the stuff he's collected, he appears to be traveling all over the world. You can't take a train across oceans. I don't know why Europeans seem to want to derail every discussion of anything into "why can't the world be more like Europe," but have you looked at an equal area map of the whole globe lately? (https://www.esri.com/about/newsroom/wp-content/uploads/2019/...). The overwhelming majority of the world is not Europe. Vitalik is Canadian. All of continental Europe seems to fit roughly east of the Hudson Bay when shoved into Canada. Some other person in this comment string is talking about how easy it is to get around all the major cities in Spain by train. That's great. Spain is 2/3 the size of Texas. Getting around North America isn't nearly the same. Presumably, Vitalik flies more than he uses trains because he has a finite lifespan and wants to devote more of his time living as a nomad to being where he is going rather than in the act of getting there.
As for carbon footprint, I'm not going to comment on the moral quality of his choices, but the dude founded a cryptocurrency. Once you've done that, I don't think much else you can do short of also founding an oil company is going to make your carbon footprint worse than it already is.
Amtrak appears to have excellent destination service, and they offer full-service circle tours, too, taking you to some of the most amazing sights in America.
I haven't ridden Amtrak in years but folks I've talked to who have hated it. Trains here aren't at all comparable to the service that's available in Europe. Stations aren't conveniently located and schedules are spotty and make weird stops.
Amtrak is a federal monopoly, created to take the failing passenger railroads off the hands of the freight carriers. It has succeeded in doing little more than that.
I say this as a person who loves trains, especially French ones. But, as a pragmatist, I admit that our interstate road system and omnipresent airlines (crossing states which are themselves larger than European countries) make a lot of train travel less desirable in America than it is overseas.
> I’d expect that to come with some comment about carbon footprint.
What would you expect him to say? Apologise in some way? Spin a tale of "carbon compensation", the indulgence [1] of this non-theistic religion?
I find it refreshing to hear people speak without constantly genuflecting towards The Current Issue. That does not mean I always (or even usually) agree but I prefer for people to be honest instead of hypocrites when it comes to their 'sins'.
Is it just me or has the disdain/venom in how people discuss the notion that they have moral responsibility to anyone other than themselves increased in recent years?
Where is the venom? As to disdain there is a core of truth which is easily explained by the large number of people who - though social media or otherwise - portray their affluent jet-setting life styles with a little bit of green-wash that just does not fit well with the current discourse which centres around the reduction of consumption and energy use. If you choose to fly around the world while simultaneously trying to convey your dedication to the "climate cause" you should expect to be chastised for it. If you just fly around the world without adding indulgences you will still be chastised but at least you're more honest about the fact that you simply care more about your own convenience.
Not just you. Selfish ME ME ME is the current zeitgeist. Heavily sponsored by today's robber barons who are taking the obvious action to deflect attention from their corporate empires towards identity politics.
In Japan they use plug Type A, and most of SEAsia they have these plugs where you can put either type A, C or F in. Type A to Type C/F is a tiny piece not worth mentioning anyway.
I only take long distance trains for fun. Flying is way more convenient at all other times. Show up 45 minutes before the domestic flight and get there at least 5 times faster.
Maybe in the US. In Europe high speed train tends to be more convenient.
I live in Madrid and I can travel to any major city in the country by train in less than 3 hours. I don't have to show up early. I depart from the city centre. I arrive at the city centre. 500% more convenient and (mostly) cheaper.
However, I’m surprised at how casually he mentionned how much he has travelled, by flight almost exclusively. I’m assuming from the lack of other plug than Type A, he stayed in America where trains are not a great option — but still. I’d expect that to come with some comment about carbon footprint.
Am I out of sync with the times?