this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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I'm only in my thirties. I don't really think I had like..... A huge hand in all this.
Well it can't be the billionaires or the boomers, so it must be your fault.
This is what late stage capitalists actually believe
We should still try to do something, because it can become worse. So it's still an actual problem to make other people believe it's a thing...
Booillionaires.
A single cruise ship does more damage in one day than 50 people who drive a car every day of their life until they die of old age. The idea that any one average Joe has had a hand in this is a massive and intentional corporate driven fallacy to keep the public unaware of just exactly what magnitude of damage a very small percentage of people are doing to the environment.
You're good dude. It's not your fault.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-wednesday-edition-1.4277147/a-cruise-ship-s-emissions-are-the-same-as-1-million-cars-report-1.4277180
You're conflating greenhouse gas emissions with particulate pollution. Particulates damage lungs and drop temperatures, but fall out of the atmosphere within a few weeks of emission into the troposphere.
CO2 accumulates, and raises temperatures.
You don't think heavy fuel oil releases CO2? Heavy fuel oil releases a ratio of 0.85 carbon specific content by weight vs gasoline's 0.90.
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/co2-emission-fuels-d_1085.html
I get what you're saying, that heavy fuel oil is much worse for pollution, but I don't think that the difference between the carbon emission rate between heavy fuel oil and gasoline is enough for an accusation of conflation when my initial point was that a single cruise liner burns 150 metric tons of fuel in a day.
Can you visualize 150 metric tons of fuel? Cars measure their intake by gallons.
That 0.05 difference is the discrepancy between saying that's only 49 lifetimes worth of car driving vs 50.
The stats linked above are for the sulfate emissions.
What you're doing is trying to discourage action, and that's not ok here.
I mean in defense of the other person. It sounds more like the argument is trying to encourage a bigger action. Like don't just do your part, vote/participate for what actually changes things in a larger scale.
The very first sentence of the article reads "calculating CO2 emissions" and doesn't mention or convert to sulfate emissions at all. What are you even talking about?
What I'm doing is pointing out that change has to start with the most damaging factors in our society. I'm not discouraging action, I'm only revealing the scale of the contributors.
Half of the cumulative CO2 emissions since the industrial revolution have happened in your lifetime.
And how many in their voting lifetime? About 25% according to that site.
Now how many were in their country? Surely a much smaller portion.
But we're all to blame really, because we all take part in the system. The only way to escape blame is to not live. Although, to be clear, blame should not be evenly distributed here.
I dont think we are not all to blame. We are forced to be part of the system, as you mention, the only way of "escaping" the system is by not being alive. How can we be blamed for something that was imposed on us?
Are we forced to take a flight across the world and a cruise in a ginormous cruise ship every year? A lot of people do this. I totally agree that we're forced to be part of the system, but that excuse only goes so far. A lot people go way, way, way beyond what we're forced to do. Granted, we keep being told by the media and politicians mostly that it's no big deal, but even what little they say already gets a lot of people riled up. Imagine what would happen if they told the full truth and told us the true extent of the measures that were required?
I dont know about you but im 36 and ive been on 1 boat and 4 planes in my entire life. And those planes flew from the uk to france.
I think the demographic for going on cruise ships is more the people over 50. amd flights every year? Well how about private jet flights multiple times a day.
We may not be helping that much but we arent the main cause of the problem. Thats the mega rich and the corporations.
Im ot shirking responsibility but it helps to aim at the root of the problem if you want to solve it.
I actually used to fly for vacation about once a year for several years before COVID, but never taken cruise. However, my feeling now is that air travel for leisure should be banned outright worldwide because it's low hanging fruit to reduce human carbon output. This says that aviation is responsible for about 2.5% of total carbon output. Heck, ban private jets at the same time!
As much as I love to dunk on mega rich people and corporations as much anyone else, we will never handle the issue of airplane pollution if we focus only on them. There are only so many people who fly in private jets. They are vastly outnumbered by middle class people who combined take millions of flights a year. This FAA document says: "The number of passengers flown by air carriers increased by 55 percent, to 917 million in FY2022 (Section 1). This remains below the pre-pandemic (FY2019) level of 1,057.6 million passengers." That's around 1 billion passengers every year!
Unfortunately I couldn't find actual figures that compare total fuel consumption of private jets vs commercial jets in aggregate, but according to this article, 1 out of every 6 flights handled by the FAA is for a private jet, and a private jet emits at least 10x more pollutants per passenger than a commercial plane. Do you see the problem? Private jets probably carry an average of 10 passengers and commercial jets probably carry an average of 200 passengers (both of these are complete guesstimates). 10 passengers x 1 flight x 10x pollutants (total: 100 pollutant units) vs 100 passengers x 5 flights vs 1x pollutants (total: 500 pollutant units). In other words, just going by these completely thrown together numbers, it would appear that commercial flights produce at least 5x more carbon in total as private flights, and I feel that I was very conservative in my estimates. I suspect that commercial airlines produce much more than 5x the pollutants of private jets in total.
Bro, did you really just decide to erase my comments and ban me instead of engaging with me? Just like I'm sure you'll erase this one once you realize there's nothing stopping me from commenting from other instances.
I won't, because it's not worth my time. I only came back here to say that you're a coward, and pushing your head in the sand doesn't solve anything.
Have fun banning the people who you don't agree with.