How do you justify your desire for travel & leisure with going green?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don’t give a Skip to My Lou about faddish, en vogue theatre about the environment. So when I hoist my hefty frame onto a First Class flight to the Islands to eat steak and lobster on the beach, taking Chevy Suburbans for every road interval, I feel not the slightest pang of guilt or hypocrisy.

We all need a code. I live by mine.

This comment made me feel a bit sick to my stomach.

It's clearly satire.

Nope. Wasn’t satire at all. (I’m the PP who wrote it.)

You green types are all so tiresome. Nothing you do matters. Literally nothing. You can recycle till Kingdom come, put your little compost thing on the kitchen island, get dual EVs for the driveway, and seriously cut back on red meat. Get yourself a stainless steel water bottle and carry it everywhere. Leave your f$cking thermostat at 79 all summer. Then you can get every one of your friends and family to do the same, then every single American family. And it won’t move the needle the slightest little bit.

It’s all a show.

Inelegantly stated, but this is right.

[Anonymous]

I don't need to justify to anyone, I just travel around the world.

[Anonymous]

We only fly for vacation once per year. This year, I do feel a little guilty about it.

[Anonymous]

Booking flights for this year as we speak. Life is too short to worry what the ideological freak over. They remind me of the medieval era doomsday cults. This time the religion is progressives. Remarkably similar mindset. You see it with the DEI and systematic racism and trans rights cults (no surprise there is a huge overlap among all these).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Because my overall footprint is still less than most. I drive an economical vehicle, and not even that much. Heat is set to 64 in winter, 77 in summer (little cooler at night). Small home, not a lot of land, do not have a consumerist mentality and don't buy junk stuff that isn't needed. Will keep the same phone for 5+ years.

Who constitutes “most”? Certainly it the worldwide most. Probably not the American most.

OP, here’s what I would basically say. We have a net worth of $4M in our early 40s. Most people of our means, in our area, live in 8k sf houses, but we squeeze into 4K sf. We only own two cars, neither is a Suburban, and one is a hybrid. Most of our vacations are driving destinations, and many of them are cruises, which we’re sharing with thousands of other passengers.

All of this is true. I, of course, would never bother to say any of it, because it’s a futile justification. You can not burn fossil fuels and explain it away by saying that someone else burns more. So I just shrug. If we need to decarbonize, we’ll do it with nuclear when people are ready for for that. Everything else is smoke and mirrors.

You are doing much more than most high-net worth folks to restrain your consumption, but a 4000 sf house is huge by the standards that existed just a generation ago, and massive in comparison to most of the world. Somehow, we need to reverse course, and scale back our home sizes. IMO, a 2000 sf house is fine for a household with 4 or 5 members.

NP. I agree about the house size but have you tried finding a newer sfh that is 2,000 sqft? It’s almost impossible. There are newer 4,000+ builds and older, smaller, energy inefficient homes and not much in between. In this area the lots are simply too expensive to build smaller homes.

[Anonymous]

Because I'm here to live my life.

It's the most utter nonsense to pretend caring about environment and still live in modern times. Unless you go live in a tree house in the woods, you ARE most definitely contributing to the pollution that is the reality of evolution. Is it good? Of course not but that's reality.

Instead of wasting effort to figure out how to do it less - cause in the grand scheme of things you aren't that important- we should collectively live out lives while trying to figure out a Plan B to live when everything we know will be ruined.

In other words, instead of trying to help save the world which at this point us impossible and not realistic, let's accept we are at point if. I return and figure out what we will do when we have to all pay the price. Solutions are better than wasted efforts.

In the meantime, just live.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Because I'm here to live my life.

It's the most utter nonsense to pretend caring about environment and still live in modern times. Unless you go live in a tree house in the woods, you ARE most definitely contributing to the pollution that is the reality of evolution. Is it good? Of course not but that's reality.

Instead of wasting effort to figure out how to do it less - cause in the grand scheme of things you aren't that important- we should collectively live out lives while trying to figure out a Plan B to live when everything we know will be ruined.

In other words, instead of trying to help save the world which at this point us impossible and not realistic, let's accept we are at point if. I return and figure out what we will do when we have to all pay the price. Solutions are better than wasted efforts.

In the meantime, just live.

Ah yes, the old "I'm just gonna do whatever I feel like b/c I don't care" argument. "Don't worry about screwing things up for our kids, 'cause they'll figure out a way to deal with the diminished enjoyability of life on this planet."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Because I'm here to live my life.

It's the most utter nonsense to pretend caring about environment and still live in modern times. Unless you go live in a tree house in the woods, you ARE most definitely contributing to the pollution that is the reality of evolution. Is it good? Of course not but that's reality.

Instead of wasting effort to figure out how to do it less - cause in the grand scheme of things you aren't that important- we should collectively live out lives while trying to figure out a Plan B to live when everything we know will be ruined.

In other words, instead of trying to help save the world which at this point us impossible and not realistic, let's accept we are at point if. I return and figure out what we will do when we have to all pay the price. Solutions are better than wasted efforts.

In the meantime, just live.

Typical selfish American. Just because you wear it openly doesn't mean you're not a selfish, entitled douche.

[Anonymous]

They try to justify how their travel is ok because they're offsetting by doing x, y, z - BS. You don't even want to pay for seats together on the plane so I don't believe you're buying a more expensive ticket to offset the carbon either.

So, not only are you a hypocrite, you're liars.

[Anonymous]

Everyone who feels guilty about their footprint should go live naturally in a forest and not in civilization. Oh wait, but then you will ruin nature by chopping down wood to make a house. There's no way to escape impacting the earth. We are too many people on earth. Better find alternatives to how we clean up our act when we live our lives but impossible to stop living our lives doing what we do.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Everyone who feels guilty about their footprint should go live naturally in a forest and not in civilization. Oh wait, but then you will ruin nature by chopping down wood to make a house. There's no way to escape impacting the earth. We are too many people on earth. Better find alternatives to how we clean up our act when we live our lives but impossible to stop living our lives doing what we do.

You sound like that guy in Thank You for Smoking who had all the arguments lined up for why smoking is good for you. It's not.

[Anonymous]

Honestly, I stopped worrying when I had the epiphany that the earth will be fine. The earth doesn’t care whether it’s a few degrees warmer or there’s more natural disasters. It’s the people that will care. The earth won’t be destroyed. People will be. So if I’m going to be punished either way, I may as well enjoy exploring the world while I can. Staying at home isn’t going to change the trajectory of anything.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Honestly, I stopped worrying when I had the epiphany that the earth will be fine. The earth doesn’t care whether it’s a few degrees warmer or there’s more natural disasters. It’s the people that will care. The earth won’t be destroyed. People will be. So if I’m going to be punished either way, I may as well enjoy exploring the world while I can. Staying at home isn’t going to change the trajectory of anything.

"A few degrees" is the best-case scenario. A more likely scenario is that we will gradually extract all fossil fuels from the ground and burn it all. This will send atmospheric CO2 from its current level of 420 parts per million (ppm) to about 2000 ppm. With this level of CO2, it isn't just a few degrees of warming. It is a minimum of 10F. Much of the earth will be uninhabitable to humans, and aggregate crop yields and fish harvests could plummet.

However, changing our lifestyles most certainly can change the trajectory of climate change. I've reduced my CO2 footprint by 50%, and it hasn't sent me back into the dark ages. I do live very compactly, but I haven't lost any happiness or as a result of the changes I've made. I think most UMC Americans would find that they can still have a satisfying life without emitting 15 tons of CO2 per person per year.

Of course, cutting CO2 by 50% is simply going to slow down the rate of warming, rather than stop it. But this will buy us valuable time in which technology can continue to improve our renewable energy capabilities. And perhaps society will gradually come full circle with respect to nuclear power, resulting in a future energy mix of solar, wind and nuclear.

[Anonymous]

You know in 10,000 years, all the mammals alive now will be extinct anyway. That’s what history shows us.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You know in 10,000 years, all the mammals alive now will be extinct anyway. That’s what history shows us.

Evolution and extinction generally operate on slow time scales. Mammals have been on the planet for over 100 million years. Homo sapiens have existed for at least a quarter of a million years. But global warming is accelerating extinction rates. I think we (humans) are still masters of our own fate -- we can bend the future in a favorable direction if we choose to. I've made the choice to try (by reducing my emissions). To simply give up -- and accept severe global warming as inevitable -- is too depressing.