Although destroying the environment for a PR win can quickly turn into a PR loss when someone on twitter calculates how many polar bears this will kill...

That is a textbook case of buzzkill.

Being a buzzkill doesn't make it less true, though. I'm disappointed to see the parent comment being downvoted.

It's pedantic buzz killery, which is boring and lame.

Are we going to... not fly planes any more? Drive cars? Deliver cargo? Take trips to visit family in another town/state/country?

"Hey Tim, how was the weekend?"

"Great. I drove down to Portland to see my mom after her surgery, she's doing gr--"

"You decided to spend your weekend destroying the environment?!"

It may be true, but I would expect this sort of waste is a drop in the bucket -- drop in the swimming pool, even -- compared to all the waste going on over the rest of the planet during the same time period.

That's not to say we shouldn't avoid waste, but this flight was a pretty momentous occasion (final delivery flight of a 747), and I think it's appropriate to mark that occasion in some unique manner. Burning a bunch of extra jet fuel doesn't seem all that inappropriate, especially considering the total amount of jet fuel burned in a given day.

There's just really no need for such buzzkillery.

> drop in the swimming pool

That's pretty close. It could be a good chance to educate people, perhaps, without turning it into a buzzkill. "This plane burned 27 tons of fuel for that pretty pattern in the sky, but if that sounds like a lot of fuel just wait until you find out that planes burn a million tons every day!"

A single plane has less of an ability to "Destro The Environment" than a Single Politician.

While that's true that no individual action matters, it's also true that our individual actions taken as a whole has an impact on the world, and because of that, we must treat individual actions as though they had the impact of collective actions.

Collective individuals have simply no way of affecting the environment in any major way simply by collective behavior change. The only thing that will change things is positive policies that encourage good behavior through positive methods.

For example by making electric vehicles attractive Tesla did more for the environment than possibly any single company ever by causing the shift to EVs in the general populace’s psyche.

Alternatively by doing things like banning plastic straws you instead get malicious compliance and dislike for the policies. That will never change things in a positive direction in the long term.

In that case we are basically fucked. Nobody is going to be elected on a platform of banning things that are fun.

All human action is individual human action. It got us into this problem, and is the only thing thay will fix it.

Individuals who can do things that will change the behavior of others through positive reinforcement can change things or by going to work at a company that was started with one of those efforts in mind. For example one of the biggest impact things an individual could do right now for climate change is to figure out a way to make a concrete that’s cheaper than concrete but not made in the method that releases CO2 and start a business out of it.

My only point was about _collective_ behavior change that is often advertised as a way to stop climate change that is advertised by many. I think that’s completely pointless and impossible. For example I do nothing to conserve anything in my day to day actions other than not wasting money or time. So if you can make CO2 reduction possibly simply by saving money and time then it’ll happen automatically.

Also I’m not so pessimistic about the current direction as you. We’re headed for a 3 degrees C change in temperature which isn’t going to have the most disastrous impacts that could have happened. There’s still also a lot of emerging tech that could play out and reduce those predictions further.

Well polar bears are not affected first off, and secondly the amount of CO2 is basically nothing compared to even the daily world CO2 production.