That's in the range of 10x the CO2 an average human will produce in their lifetime. If you could find a way to get 20 people to cut their emissions in half, or 200 people to reduce it by 5%, or 1000 people by 1%, you could balance out your CO2 ledger :)

Or, if you still work in the industry and can find a way to make the shipping routes more efficient, or prevent future mistakes like that, you could make it into the green and achieve CO2 karmic heaven!

(Controversial comment warning) one way to save more than your lifetime’s worth of CO2 is to not have children. By not having children, you’re not just saving the CO2 output of the child itself, but the entire lineage that could have resulted from that single child.

Obviously this advice is not good advice for anyone who wants to have children :)

I don’t necessarily disagree with you per se, but I do think these “EV-lite” type analyses are too broad: environmentally conscious people may be more likely to have children who are environmentally conscious, work on climate engineering, &c.

That’s not to say that we should encourage them specifically to have children either; just that children represent potential in a way that the number of bunker-fuel cargo ships does not.

Even the most environmentally conscious person in an industrialized nation will emit massive amounts of CO2 in their lifetime, provided of course that nobody invents a "quick fix" for CO2 emissions in their lifetime. Of course in theory the child could be that person to invent that quick fix, but the expected value is still that the child will contribute to a lot of CO2 emissions.

The point is that "will emit massive amounts of CO2" isn't a complex enough metric: if that's how we're calculating EV (which I disagree with in the first place), then it would be perfectly appropriate for me to go around killing truck drivers and suburbanites.

It doesn't matter. Climate change is happening. It doesn't matter what we do as individuals, the system can't be changed from individual action and it can't be changed via collective action as that would require full cooperation.

There is no practical way we can achieve the goal of survival through reduction of CO2 emissions. It's a farce because we'll never get all parties to agree.

The only path forward is to hope we have some very clever science and engineering that can help us survive this disaster.

> There is no practical way we can achieve the goal of survival through reduction of CO2 emissions. It's a farce

It's a farce because it's already too late for emissions reductions to cut it. We need to pull carbon out of the atmosphere or, as you say, engineer other solutions.

But a robust solution is not going to be limited to the physical/material domain. Societies are malleable and so are people. We need to design ourselves and our activities into a vibrant planetary ecology, not throw up our hands and try to patch around historically contingent circumstances

As Octavia Butler put it, God is change, and change is not to be reacted to, but to be shaped

The earth is on a trajectory for <2.5C just based on current technology and policies. The technology and policy path we're on (including developed but not yet implemented tech and policy) is likely to limit warming to <2C, but 1.5C is nigh-on unachievable. Assuming we don't hit any runaway conditions (which is an unknown unknown that we probably won't realize until we're already there)...the vast majority of the world will be just fine. And if governments can get their heads out of their behinds and pass marginally sensible immigration reform, the people who are displaced can move to locations where there are massive demographic bombs going off (most of the west) to stabilize their workforces.

I’ve thought about this. I think it really depends on whether we need more climate-minded voters in the future. If we do then those susceptible to this message are exactly the wrong ones to hear it.

We need climate-minded voters now, not years in the future. In fact, even now is too late really: we needed them 40 or 50 years ago!

I’m here!

yes, take away the single greatest potential joy people can have in their lives. Great plan for humanity, chief.

You can always adopt?

I’m gay, and I don’t feel like the single greatest potential joy has been taken from me.

There are ways to have children without creating your own.

Children are a potential source of great joy. Saying they are the single greatest source is hyperbolic and frankly offensive in some ways.

It's also not great advice for humanity. Better to have a CO2 high future than no future at all.

They might be the same future though.

Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think any (serious) high CO2 predictions involve the extinction of our species, but rather extensive displacement as a changing climate changes zones of habitability on our planet.

We're currently running a simulation to refute or confirm your assumption. Check back in some 150-200 years to see if your assumption was true.

Will do

If the human population reduced to 100m - still substantial - it's not technically extinction. But it's still essentially the end of our world and society. The people who died won't take solace in humanity not dying out.

Could we come back from it? Hard to say.

Murder is even more effective.

In you had to murder someone, could you please target a billionaire? One who loves to take their private jet out on many 50 minute flights, if possible...

I would hope and assume that the community rules of HN don’t look kindly upon advocating the murder of any specific individuals.

That aside, I think it’s naive to assume that your proposed action would have a relevant outcome. Any successor is going to need to travel between facilities just as much — if not moreso — as they are brought up to speed and need to have ongoing meetings with executives and managers across a dozen locations.

Not to mention the travel involved in post-death matters of funerals, media coverage, high profile criminal investigations, and so on. And of course the wealth of one person then gets inherited by perhaps a dozen people, any of whom might live a more lavish (i.e. carbon intensive) lifestyle when they inherit even a small fraction of such enormous wealth.

Quite frankly I don’t see how your proposal has any chance of being remotely carbon positive.

vote for Genghis Khan of the Green Party!

That's true. It's also an entirely different tragedy of the commons. If nobody has children, we are going to be screwed when our generation is too old to work.

Overheated flooding Greenhouse with a bunch of geriatric seniors bitching at each other and pointing fingers and with no one able to actually get up and do anything sounds about right.

If nobody has children, then it won't matter if there is more or less CO2 in the air. Environmental quality doesn't have inherent moral worth. The moral worth is in the impact it has on people in the world. Nothing at all matters any more if there are no people.

To optimize, you should aim to kill as many people as possible. Bonus points for killing children of wealthy individuals, since they have the highest potential for future CO2 usage.

The real lifeprotip is always in the comments

A less deadly alternative is destroying society and industry. Cavemen have a pretty good climate footprint.

there is nothing controversial about pointing out the connection between having kids and CO2 output, the controversy begins when telling people which way they should decide.

Well, following that logic, one should also commit suicide. I hope no one is logical enough to do that.

The planet will be fine, co2 is plant food, they are literaly starving for it.

If anything, we will not have enought humans around with our birth rate.

Technology is getting cleaner and cleaner each year: ev, solar panels, etc.

Look into Tony Seba for the energy revolution And joan Lomberg about what are our most important problems and solutions

I think we should put far less energy on climate change and more on our human problems: war, famine, poverty, corruption, etc.

One alternative is to add a couple of free condom machines to a couple of local bars. haha

So avoiding the birth of 10 humans makes up for it? Doesn’t sound like that much.

You just have to keep working and do a better job from that point on.

If you make fewer mistakes than the person who replaced you if you quit, you will make up for your mistake eventually.

You can plant 8500 trees. Various entities do it for as little as $1 per tree (e.g. https://onetreeplanted.org/). If that stops you sleeping that's possibly affordable.

Which would be dead or a worthless monoculture that killed a healthy ecosystem in a few years, right?

Quite a few of them got at it intelligently, and actually restore healthy ecosystems destroyed by the burning and grazing that was once practiced.

For an example https://www.mossy.earth/projects/restoring-aspen

Fortunately, this planet has abundant land and sea life that will absorb and fix that carbon dioxide for you, liberating highly reactive oxygen in the process. No problem - the amount of carbon used is proportional to the amount of carbon available. All available evidence shows that CO2 lags global temperature rises, rather than leading it. Science IS real, and it says carbon is NOT a pollutant.

You should have no guilt over this (although efficiency is always to be aimed for). And carbon is probably the least objectionable byproduct of burning the bunker oil that fuels ships - you can't make anything that heavy burn cleanly without insane combustion temperatures.

Hate to be that guy but surely this is a (citation needed) scenario. Especially because google sez you're wrong.

Oh, wouldn't it be nice if that were true...

Sure there is. I'm assuming you also routed cargo ships more efficiently in your job which prevented extra CO2 from being released. You can't pull the CO2 back in, but you can still prevent future CO2 from going out.

That’s a sunk cost. You can’t change the past and it shouldn’t affect your future decisions.

Plus someone in your position doing a great job could probably save a ton of carbon from hitting the atmosphere.

>There is literally nothing I could possibly do that could come even close to making up for that...

I can say from personal experience this is not true! You can help fix other people's mistakes! I was an energy engineer for a while.

You'd be amazed just how much low-lying fruit there is in terms of energy waste. I was also GOOD at this job. Instead of doing the brainless measures, I would really dig and do a lot of modeling and data mining and stuff to figure out truly optimal solutions. My fee + cost of measures were easily covered within 1-year of savings, and yet it was an incredibly difficult sell to get people to want to spend the money.

But... I had one client, for whom I had to sign an NDA, that single-handedly blew all the others out of the water. They had been emitting LARGE (like, think ~1 ton/month) quantities of sulfur hexafluoride for years. Sulfur hexafluoride, if you don't know is 23,500 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. This had been going on for YEARS.

Our three-man team came in and was able to find all the leaks with some really nice thermal cameras so they could replace the failed seals and parts.

Sorry for going off-topic, but would you mind sharing a bit more about this business? The domain sounds really interesting to me. My e-mail is also in my profile if that's better.

I would love to learn more about this too!

Could you make your business free if you “don’t” find anything to fix, and then you charge a percentage of the benefit they receive? So if you save them 1 million, then you charge them $250k or some such percent

Yes you can do that, and some companies actually go a step further and pay for the upgrades themselves and become like a pseudo-utility (See ESCO's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_service_company) where people pay them what they were paying, and the company reaps the benefits of the savings, but it actually gets really complex. Energy prices rise, and the clients needs change, they might sell their building, (who actually owns the equipment?) and it doesn't necessarily create correct incentives. It also delays payment by minimum a year, and it's a lot of additional hassle. (How do you handle disputes for unusual situations like them buying new equipment they didn't tell you about, etc. etc.)

In one sense it may never, but in another sense it will. In that other sense, you know a mistake to avoid and perhaps can enlighten those around you not to make the same sense. Accidents happen, but you make up for them by making sure those accidents don't happen again or are very likely to be repeated.