do you know anyone in this affluent area that has altered their lifestyle to reduce CO2 emissions?

Anonymous
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:In North Arlington, my wife and I feel like we are completely alone in our efforts to reduce CO2 emissions. We have just one car that we use sparingly, and we use bicycles for our local errands. We keep our thermostat at 65F in the winter (and wear sweaters) and 79F in the summer, using ceiling fans to make the bedrooms more comfortable. We greatly limit our international and domestic travel. We eat mostly vegetarian meals, and we never eat beef.

All of our neighbors have multiple large SUVs, and many neighbors have knocked their 2000 square foot houses down and replaced them with 5000 square foot homes. Some neighbors with 5000 square foot homes have only 1 child, so they don't truly need a huge living space. Many neighbors drive to work in their SUV without any other passengers to accompany them. They go on multiple international vacations a year (lots of CO2 per flight). Huge amounts of garbage are generated each week and placed on the curb, presumably to make way for yet more stuff that they are buying for their homes -- stuff that will probably end up on the curbside, destined for the landfill, a year or two down the road.

I've posted my frustrations in the "car and transport" section of this forum, only to be told by other posters that I'm jealous of my neighbor's SUVs and large homes. Despite a high level of education among DCUM posters, most don't appear concerned about the consequences of their consumerism, and can't even conceive of a high-income family exercising some restraint.

We are, in fact, a high net worth family, but we are striving to reduce our carbon footprint. We feel completely alone, like strangers in a foreign country. I'm curious if anybody else here feels the same way.



OP, you are taking so many positive steps and should be applauded for them but until you do more than just "limit" your domestic and internatinal air travel (esp the international) you are doing far more harm to the environment than all the good you are doing put together. It is just the facts.


And this is the thing that is so annoying about posts like the OP.

OP's family has decided that they'll limit but not give up travel, including flights. They live in a SFH in North Arlington, even though they have just one kid. I'm sure there are other things that aren't mentioned that aren't the environmental ideal. So, OP has drawn a line for things that he (assuming here) and his family will do, and won't do. That's fine, and something everyone should do. But then he writes this passive aggressive screed ("I feel so alone in my fight against climate change! Where are all the other like minded souls? Woe is me!") that is, when you get down to it, just criticizing others for drawing that line in a different place than he did. Anything less than his efforts are insufficient, and shows that others just don't care. But there's no recognition that the line that *he* drew is completely arbitrary, and there are tradeoffs that he has refused to make because they are necessary, or would make his life too uncomfortable. He's fine with his choices, but other choices are bad!

Short version, OP is a passive aggressive, sanctimonious hypocrite, but the most irritating thing about him is the complete lack of self-awareness.


OP here. A couple of responses to your post. First, I haven't taken a flight for a vacation in 5 years. Prior to that, I flew a great deal, but I altered my habits after calculating my CO2 footprint and waking up to the consequences of my behavior. Second, my wife has an elderly parent in another country. She visits her mother once every 2 to 3 years. That is the total extent of my family's air travels. Nothing else. Our airline CO2 amounts to about 10% of our household's annual emissions.

In regard to our single family home -- if we sell this home (where we have lived for 10 years), the lot will be used to build a McMansion. So selling the house won't lower CO2 emissions, but rather increase them. Second, our average monthly power consumption is about 375 KWH, or 12KWH per day. This is about the same level of consumption that we had when we lived in a condo 15 years ago. Our monthly gas consumption is about 50 therms. As far as I can tell, this is quite low. We achieve these low numbers by being extremely conservative with heating and cooling, and we don't have a large screen TV (in fact, we don't have a TV at all).

We have compared our household's per capita CO2 emissions against various metrics. This past year, our per capita emissions were about one-third of the national average. Of course, even this isn't good enough -- net zero will require even deeper cuts.

I think "self-awareness" on this issue involves (1) calculating your CO2 footprint, (2) comparing it to various benchmarks to develop a sense of how your emissions stack up to the emissions of others, (3) figuring out what you can do to push your CO2 emissions down, and (4) implementing your emissions cuts. We have gone through this process, leading to large reduction in our footprint.


Like I said, you have drawn a line based on what is comfortable for you. Great.

Please spare us the rationalizations about the house. All of your posts (even this one) are all about your own personal CO2 footprint, and how you can push that down. But suddenly, with respect to the house, it isn't about your own personal output anymore, but what happens to the house *after* you sell it, when it is definitionally not about your own output, but someone else's. It's now about the aggregate effect. It's a convenient shift in the analytical framework that gets you to the result you want. Also, if you were *really* serious, you could sell the house to someone who won't tear it down, even going so far as to use restrictive covenants to ensure that. You won't do that, of course, because it's a significant monetary hit. (And to be clear, I'm not suggesting you should do that - I'm just demonstrating that your "it would be counterproductive to sell the house" is both analytically flawed and incorrect - it's just too much of a burden for you to contemplate.)

At the end of the day, you are acting in a way that makes you feel good. That is, as I posted earlier, very important. And you've received a bunch of plaudits from anonymous strangers, which no doubt makes you feel good too. So congrats, I guess.


OP here. For the record, we don't feel good about our CO2 situation. I'd like to emit zero CO2, and I feel guilty knowing that I don't, and that the CO2 I've emitted will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.

In regard to selling the house to somebody who won't tear it down -- please explain to me what that would accomplish, assuming I could find such a buyer? Would the nation's aggregate CO2 emissions go down as a result? How?

I'm trying to understand your logic. Are you assuming that the new buyer would use the heating/AC even more sparingly than what we are already doing? I think that is highly unlikely.



Good grief. At the risk of further encouraging this nonsense, your focus has been your family's CO2 output. What happens with the house is irrelevant. You could move to a condo or apartment and reduce, even if only slightly, your output even further.

But I think we've finally hit on the issue. It's this:

For the record, we don't feel good about our CO2 situation. I'd like to emit zero CO2, and I feel guilty knowing that I don't, and that the CO2 I've emitted will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.


This is a peculiar blend of narcissism and anxiety, where you have centered yourself in a global crisis and let it drive your actions, to the point of feeling guilt for actions the impact of which any rational person will tell you are so infinitesimally small that they don't deserve any thought.

I have been pretty snarky with you up till this point, but all that aside, I mean sincerely that you might benefit from some therapy to address this anxiety.


NP--Wow, you are seriously full of yourself. And not nice in how you try to make sure everyone knows how smart you think you are. And incorrect, to boot.


What, precisely, am I incorrect about?
Anonymous
Anonymous wrote:I also believe in history - the ice has been receding for thousands of years. Most of the U.S. was buried in ice. One OCD individual cannot stop it. That my dear is delusional IMO.


By your logic, the action of any individual is pointless if it runs contrary to the actions of most other members of society.

If one believes in this bleak logic, then any social change is impossible. Society is simply frozen in place.

I don't share your bleak view.
Anonymous
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:In North Arlington, my wife and I feel like we are completely alone in our efforts to reduce CO2 emissions. We have just one car that we use sparingly, and we use bicycles for our local errands. We keep our thermostat at 65F in the winter (and wear sweaters) and 79F in the summer, using ceiling fans to make the bedrooms more comfortable. We greatly limit our international and domestic travel. We eat mostly vegetarian meals, and we never eat beef.

All of our neighbors have multiple large SUVs, and many neighbors have knocked their 2000 square foot houses down and replaced them with 5000 square foot homes. Some neighbors with 5000 square foot homes have only 1 child, so they don't truly need a huge living space. Many neighbors drive to work in their SUV without any other passengers to accompany them. They go on multiple international vacations a year (lots of CO2 per flight). Huge amounts of garbage are generated each week and placed on the curb, presumably to make way for yet more stuff that they are buying for their homes -- stuff that will probably end up on the curbside, destined for the landfill, a year or two down the road.

I've posted my frustrations in the "car and transport" section of this forum, only to be told by other posters that I'm jealous of my neighbor's SUVs and large homes. Despite a high level of education among DCUM posters, most don't appear concerned about the consequences of their consumerism, and can't even conceive of a high-income family exercising some restraint.

We are, in fact, a high net worth family, but we are striving to reduce our carbon footprint. We feel completely alone, like strangers in a foreign country. I'm curious if anybody else here feels the same way.



OP, you are taking so many positive steps and should be applauded for them but until you do more than just "limit" your domestic and internatinal air travel (esp the international) you are doing far more harm to the environment than all the good you are doing put together. It is just the facts.


And this is the thing that is so annoying about posts like the OP.

OP's family has decided that they'll limit but not give up travel, including flights. They live in a SFH in North Arlington, even though they have just one kid. I'm sure there are other things that aren't mentioned that aren't the environmental ideal. So, OP has drawn a line for things that he (assuming here) and his family will do, and won't do. That's fine, and something everyone should do. But then he writes this passive aggressive screed ("I feel so alone in my fight against climate change! Where are all the other like minded souls? Woe is me!") that is, when you get down to it, just criticizing others for drawing that line in a different place than he did. Anything less than his efforts are insufficient, and shows that others just don't care. But there's no recognition that the line that *he* drew is completely arbitrary, and there are tradeoffs that he has refused to make because they are necessary, or would make his life too uncomfortable. He's fine with his choices, but other choices are bad!

Short version, OP is a passive aggressive, sanctimonious hypocrite, but the most irritating thing about him is the complete lack of self-awareness.


OP here. A couple of responses to your post. First, I haven't taken a flight for a vacation in 5 years. Prior to that, I flew a great deal, but I altered my habits after calculating my CO2 footprint and waking up to the consequences of my behavior. Second, my wife has an elderly parent in another country. She visits her mother once every 2 to 3 years. That is the total extent of my family's air travels. Nothing else. Our airline CO2 amounts to about 10% of our household's annual emissions.

In regard to our single family home -- if we sell this home (where we have lived for 10 years), the lot will be used to build a McMansion. So selling the house won't lower CO2 emissions, but rather increase them. Second, our average monthly power consumption is about 375 KWH, or 12KWH per day. This is about the same level of consumption that we had when we lived in a condo 15 years ago. Our monthly gas consumption is about 50 therms. As far as I can tell, this is quite low. We achieve these low numbers by being extremely conservative with heating and cooling, and we don't have a large screen TV (in fact, we don't have a TV at all).

We have compared our household's per capita CO2 emissions against various metrics. This past year, our per capita emissions were about one-third of the national average. Of course, even this isn't good enough -- net zero will require even deeper cuts.

I think "self-awareness" on this issue involves (1) calculating your CO2 footprint, (2) comparing it to various benchmarks to develop a sense of how your emissions stack up to the emissions of others, (3) figuring out what you can do to push your CO2 emissions down, and (4) implementing your emissions cuts. We have gone through this process, leading to large reduction in our footprint.


Like I said, you have drawn a line based on what is comfortable for you. Great.

Please spare us the rationalizations about the house. All of your posts (even this one) are all about your own personal CO2 footprint, and how you can push that down. But suddenly, with respect to the house, it isn't about your own personal output anymore, but what happens to the house *after* you sell it, when it is definitionally not about your own output, but someone else's. It's now about the aggregate effect. It's a convenient shift in the analytical framework that gets you to the result you want. Also, if you were *really* serious, you could sell the house to someone who won't tear it down, even going so far as to use restrictive covenants to ensure that. You won't do that, of course, because it's a significant monetary hit. (And to be clear, I'm not suggesting you should do that - I'm just demonstrating that your "it would be counterproductive to sell the house" is both analytically flawed and incorrect - it's just too much of a burden for you to contemplate.)

At the end of the day, you are acting in a way that makes you feel good. That is, as I posted earlier, very important. And you've received a bunch of plaudits from anonymous strangers, which no doubt makes you feel good too. So congrats, I guess.


OP here. For the record, we don't feel good about our CO2 situation. I'd like to emit zero CO2, and I feel guilty knowing that I don't, and that the CO2 I've emitted will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.

In regard to selling the house to somebody who won't tear it down -- please explain to me what that would accomplish, assuming I could find such a buyer? Would the nation's aggregate CO2 emissions go down as a result? How?

I'm trying to understand your logic. Are you assuming that the new buyer would use the heating/AC even more sparingly than what we are already doing? I think that is highly unlikely.



Good grief. At the risk of further encouraging this nonsense, your focus has been your family's CO2 output. What happens with the house is irrelevant. You could move to a condo or apartment and reduce, even if only slightly, your output even further.

But I think we've finally hit on the issue. It's this:

For the record, we don't feel good about our CO2 situation. I'd like to emit zero CO2, and I feel guilty knowing that I don't, and that the CO2 I've emitted will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.


This is a peculiar blend of narcissism and anxiety, where you have centered yourself in a global crisis and let it drive your actions, to the point of feeling guilt for actions the impact of which any rational person will tell you are so infinitesimally small that they don't deserve any thought.

I have been pretty snarky with you up till this point, but all that aside, I mean sincerely that you might benefit from some therapy to address this anxiety.


NP--Wow, you are seriously full of yourself. And not nice in how you try to make sure everyone knows how smart you think you are. And incorrect, to boot.


What, precisely, am I incorrect about?


Your most important error is mistaking abusiveness for snark. There was nothing in the posts you've been responding to that merited the nasty tone you've been taking.

You're also mistaken about individual efforts not being worth consideration. Our collective decision-making is what creates the reality we live in. If fewer people buy tickets on airplanes, fewer flights will be scheduled in the future. If fewer people buy beef, then fewer cattle will be raised in the future. Etc. It matters.

I do agree with your point about not selling the house, though, although not the way in which you expressed your thoughts.
Anonymous
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:In North Arlington, my wife and I feel like we are completely alone in our efforts to reduce CO2 emissions. We have just one car that we use sparingly, and we use bicycles for our local errands. We keep our thermostat at 65F in the winter (and wear sweaters) and 79F in the summer, using ceiling fans to make the bedrooms more comfortable. We greatly limit our international and domestic travel. We eat mostly vegetarian meals, and we never eat beef.

All of our neighbors have multiple large SUVs, and many neighbors have knocked their 2000 square foot houses down and replaced them with 5000 square foot homes. Some neighbors with 5000 square foot homes have only 1 child, so they don't truly need a huge living space. Many neighbors drive to work in their SUV without any other passengers to accompany them. They go on multiple international vacations a year (lots of CO2 per flight). Huge amounts of garbage are generated each week and placed on the curb, presumably to make way for yet more stuff that they are buying for their homes -- stuff that will probably end up on the curbside, destined for the landfill, a year or two down the road.

I've posted my frustrations in the "car and transport" section of this forum, only to be told by other posters that I'm jealous of my neighbor's SUVs and large homes. Despite a high level of education among DCUM posters, most don't appear concerned about the consequences of their consumerism, and can't even conceive of a high-income family exercising some restraint.

We are, in fact, a high net worth family, but we are striving to reduce our carbon footprint. We feel completely alone, like strangers in a foreign country. I'm curious if anybody else here feels the same way.



OP, you are taking so many positive steps and should be applauded for them but until you do more than just "limit" your domestic and internatinal air travel (esp the international) you are doing far more harm to the environment than all the good you are doing put together. It is just the facts.


And this is the thing that is so annoying about posts like the OP.

OP's family has decided that they'll limit but not give up travel, including flights. They live in a SFH in North Arlington, even though they have just one kid. I'm sure there are other things that aren't mentioned that aren't the environmental ideal. So, OP has drawn a line for things that he (assuming here) and his family will do, and won't do. That's fine, and something everyone should do. But then he writes this passive aggressive screed ("I feel so alone in my fight against climate change! Where are all the other like minded souls? Woe is me!") that is, when you get down to it, just criticizing others for drawing that line in a different place than he did. Anything less than his efforts are insufficient, and shows that others just don't care. But there's no recognition that the line that *he* drew is completely arbitrary, and there are tradeoffs that he has refused to make because they are necessary, or would make his life too uncomfortable. He's fine with his choices, but other choices are bad!

Short version, OP is a passive aggressive, sanctimonious hypocrite, but the most irritating thing about him is the complete lack of self-awareness.


OP here. A couple of responses to your post. First, I haven't taken a flight for a vacation in 5 years. Prior to that, I flew a great deal, but I altered my habits after calculating my CO2 footprint and waking up to the consequences of my behavior. Second, my wife has an elderly parent in another country. She visits her mother once every 2 to 3 years. That is the total extent of my family's air travels. Nothing else. Our airline CO2 amounts to about 10% of our household's annual emissions.

In regard to our single family home -- if we sell this home (where we have lived for 10 years), the lot will be used to build a McMansion. So selling the house won't lower CO2 emissions, but rather increase them. Second, our average monthly power consumption is about 375 KWH, or 12KWH per day. This is about the same level of consumption that we had when we lived in a condo 15 years ago. Our monthly gas consumption is about 50 therms. As far as I can tell, this is quite low. We achieve these low numbers by being extremely conservative with heating and cooling, and we don't have a large screen TV (in fact, we don't have a TV at all).

We have compared our household's per capita CO2 emissions against various metrics. This past year, our per capita emissions were about one-third of the national average. Of course, even this isn't good enough -- net zero will require even deeper cuts.

I think "self-awareness" on this issue involves (1) calculating your CO2 footprint, (2) comparing it to various benchmarks to develop a sense of how your emissions stack up to the emissions of others, (3) figuring out what you can do to push your CO2 emissions down, and (4) implementing your emissions cuts. We have gone through this process, leading to large reduction in our footprint.


Like I said, you have drawn a line based on what is comfortable for you. Great.

Please spare us the rationalizations about the house. All of your posts (even this one) are all about your own personal CO2 footprint, and how you can push that down. But suddenly, with respect to the house, it isn't about your own personal output anymore, but what happens to the house *after* you sell it, when it is definitionally not about your own output, but someone else's. It's now about the aggregate effect. It's a convenient shift in the analytical framework that gets you to the result you want. Also, if you were *really* serious, you could sell the house to someone who won't tear it down, even going so far as to use restrictive covenants to ensure that. You won't do that, of course, because it's a significant monetary hit. (And to be clear, I'm not suggesting you should do that - I'm just demonstrating that your "it would be counterproductive to sell the house" is both analytically flawed and incorrect - it's just too much of a burden for you to contemplate.)

At the end of the day, you are acting in a way that makes you feel good. That is, as I posted earlier, very important. And you've received a bunch of plaudits from anonymous strangers, which no doubt makes you feel good too. So congrats, I guess.


OP here. For the record, we don't feel good about our CO2 situation. I'd like to emit zero CO2, and I feel guilty knowing that I don't, and that the CO2 I've emitted will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.

In regard to selling the house to somebody who won't tear it down -- please explain to me what that would accomplish, assuming I could find such a buyer? Would the nation's aggregate CO2 emissions go down as a result? How?

I'm trying to understand your logic. Are you assuming that the new buyer would use the heating/AC even more sparingly than what we are already doing? I think that is highly unlikely.



Good grief. At the risk of further encouraging this nonsense, your focus has been your family's CO2 output. What happens with the house is irrelevant. You could move to a condo or apartment and reduce, even if only slightly, your output even further.

But I think we've finally hit on the issue. It's this:

For the record, we don't feel good about our CO2 situation. I'd like to emit zero CO2, and I feel guilty knowing that I don't, and that the CO2 I've emitted will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.


This is a peculiar blend of narcissism and anxiety, where you have centered yourself in a global crisis and let it drive your actions, to the point of feeling guilt for actions the impact of which any rational person will tell you are so infinitesimally small that they don't deserve any thought.

I have been pretty snarky with you up till this point, but all that aside, I mean sincerely that you might benefit from some therapy to address this anxiety.


OP here. I study climate change as part of my job. The anxiety I feel for the future is common among people who are close to this issue and recognize its seriousness. One our present trajectory, atmospheric CO2 may eventually exceed 2000 ppm. This could cause major disruptions to our food and water supplies and could perhaps threaten our survival as a species, and also threaten the survival of many other species. So yes, I take this issue seriously, and I am willing to cut my own CO2 emissions recognizing, of course, that I am but one human among 8 billion. But there is no other way forward at the moment. If one believes the science of climate change, as I do, it is illogical to wait for the government to take action. One can get started now by making voluntary modifications to one's own lifestyle. If many individuals take action, then these individual-level actions can indeed add up to make a difference on a global scale.

In regard to whether an individual should buy/sell their house in an effort to reduce CO2 emissions --- when you sell an asset, you are handing that asset over to a new owner, and you must therefore consider the future actions of that new owner when considering the effects of the sale on CO2. Suppose, for the sake of simplicity, that a condo owner and a SFH owner agree to swap ownership. Suppose that in each property the thermostat is always fixed at 72F regardless of who is the owner. Thus, swapping ownership has no impact on aggregate CO2 emissions, although it is likely that the condo will emit CO2 at a lower rate than the SFH. A negative scenario arises if the new SFH owner finds a way to tamper with the thermostat, thereby raising emissions. In this scenario, swapping ownership leads to an increase in aggregate emissions.

An even simpler example to help make this idea as easy as possible for you: suppose I own a large 5000 square foot house that is sitting in a field on top of an undeveloped oil reservoir. As long as I live in the house, I have no intention of developing the reservoir, but my house, unfortunately, has a large carbon footprint. I can sell my house and move to a condo, which, by your logic, will reduce in a reducing in CO2 emissions. But the sale of my land leaves it exposes to the whims of a new owner who might decide to develop the oil field, thereby causing a massive release of CO2. Get it now?



This is exactly why I am unable to be affected by your hysteria. It’s group think.

The experts told us all sorts of things about Covid. If I had listened to the experts or the smartest guys in the room here in DC, I would have mostly ruined the last 3 years of my life and the life of my kids. I would have been wearing cloth masks outdoors in July, not attending parties, multiple boosters, my kids doing zoom school for years etc. All to still end up catching Covid anyway.

I didn’t listen to the hysteria or the “experts”. It didn’t really make sense to me knowing what we learned from the first cruise ships with sick passengers. I’m a healthy adult without any self-inflicted preexisting conditions. We hauled ass to Florida and lived our best lives. Our kids attended schools, we attended parties, rarely wore masks, ate our just as frequently as before Covid, still went on trips etc. we lived life to its fullest. Of course if we were sick, we stayed home. We ended up catching Covid during omicron like everyone else. We ended up in the same place as the people who gave up years of their life.

Anonymous
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:In North Arlington, my wife and I feel like we are completely alone in our efforts to reduce CO2 emissions. We have just one car that we use sparingly, and we use bicycles for our local errands. We keep our thermostat at 65F in the winter (and wear sweaters) and 79F in the summer, using ceiling fans to make the bedrooms more comfortable. We greatly limit our international and domestic travel. We eat mostly vegetarian meals, and we never eat beef.

All of our neighbors have multiple large SUVs, and many neighbors have knocked their 2000 square foot houses down and replaced them with 5000 square foot homes. Some neighbors with 5000 square foot homes have only 1 child, so they don't truly need a huge living space. Many neighbors drive to work in their SUV without any other passengers to accompany them. They go on multiple international vacations a year (lots of CO2 per flight). Huge amounts of garbage are generated each week and placed on the curb, presumably to make way for yet more stuff that they are buying for their homes -- stuff that will probably end up on the curbside, destined for the landfill, a year or two down the road.

I've posted my frustrations in the "car and transport" section of this forum, only to be told by other posters that I'm jealous of my neighbor's SUVs and large homes. Despite a high level of education among DCUM posters, most don't appear concerned about the consequences of their consumerism, and can't even conceive of a high-income family exercising some restraint.

We are, in fact, a high net worth family, but we are striving to reduce our carbon footprint. We feel completely alone, like strangers in a foreign country. I'm curious if anybody else here feels the same way.



OP, you are taking so many positive steps and should be applauded for them but until you do more than just "limit" your domestic and internatinal air travel (esp the international) you are doing far more harm to the environment than all the good you are doing put together. It is just the facts.


And this is the thing that is so annoying about posts like the OP.

OP's family has decided that they'll limit but not give up travel, including flights. They live in a SFH in North Arlington, even though they have just one kid. I'm sure there are other things that aren't mentioned that aren't the environmental ideal. So, OP has drawn a line for things that he (assuming here) and his family will do, and won't do. That's fine, and something everyone should do. But then he writes this passive aggressive screed ("I feel so alone in my fight against climate change! Where are all the other like minded souls? Woe is me!") that is, when you get down to it, just criticizing others for drawing that line in a different place than he did. Anything less than his efforts are insufficient, and shows that others just don't care. But there's no recognition that the line that *he* drew is completely arbitrary, and there are tradeoffs that he has refused to make because they are necessary, or would make his life too uncomfortable. He's fine with his choices, but other choices are bad!

Short version, OP is a passive aggressive, sanctimonious hypocrite, but the most irritating thing about him is the complete lack of self-awareness.


OP here. A couple of responses to your post. First, I haven't taken a flight for a vacation in 5 years. Prior to that, I flew a great deal, but I altered my habits after calculating my CO2 footprint and waking up to the consequences of my behavior. Second, my wife has an elderly parent in another country. She visits her mother once every 2 to 3 years. That is the total extent of my family's air travels. Nothing else. Our airline CO2 amounts to about 10% of our household's annual emissions.

In regard to our single family home -- if we sell this home (where we have lived for 10 years), the lot will be used to build a McMansion. So selling the house won't lower CO2 emissions, but rather increase them. Second, our average monthly power consumption is about 375 KWH, or 12KWH per day. This is about the same level of consumption that we had when we lived in a condo 15 years ago. Our monthly gas consumption is about 50 therms. As far as I can tell, this is quite low. We achieve these low numbers by being extremely conservative with heating and cooling, and we don't have a large screen TV (in fact, we don't have a TV at all).

We have compared our household's per capita CO2 emissions against various metrics. This past year, our per capita emissions were about one-third of the national average. Of course, even this isn't good enough -- net zero will require even deeper cuts.

I think "self-awareness" on this issue involves (1) calculating your CO2 footprint, (2) comparing it to various benchmarks to develop a sense of how your emissions stack up to the emissions of others, (3) figuring out what you can do to push your CO2 emissions down, and (4) implementing your emissions cuts. We have gone through this process, leading to large reduction in our footprint.


Like I said, you have drawn a line based on what is comfortable for you. Great.

Please spare us the rationalizations about the house. All of your posts (even this one) are all about your own personal CO2 footprint, and how you can push that down. But suddenly, with respect to the house, it isn't about your own personal output anymore, but what happens to the house *after* you sell it, when it is definitionally not about your own output, but someone else's. It's now about the aggregate effect. It's a convenient shift in the analytical framework that gets you to the result you want. Also, if you were *really* serious, you could sell the house to someone who won't tear it down, even going so far as to use restrictive covenants to ensure that. You won't do that, of course, because it's a significant monetary hit. (And to be clear, I'm not suggesting you should do that - I'm just demonstrating that your "it would be counterproductive to sell the house" is both analytically flawed and incorrect - it's just too much of a burden for you to contemplate.)

At the end of the day, you are acting in a way that makes you feel good. That is, as I posted earlier, very important. And you've received a bunch of plaudits from anonymous strangers, which no doubt makes you feel good too. So congrats, I guess.


OP here. For the record, we don't feel good about our CO2 situation. I'd like to emit zero CO2, and I feel guilty knowing that I don't, and that the CO2 I've emitted will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.

In regard to selling the house to somebody who won't tear it down -- please explain to me what that would accomplish, assuming I could find such a buyer? Would the nation's aggregate CO2 emissions go down as a result? How?

I'm trying to understand your logic. Are you assuming that the new buyer would use the heating/AC even more sparingly than what we are already doing? I think that is highly unlikely.



Good grief. At the risk of further encouraging this nonsense, your focus has been your family's CO2 output. What happens with the house is irrelevant. You could move to a condo or apartment and reduce, even if only slightly, your output even further.

But I think we've finally hit on the issue. It's this:

For the record, we don't feel good about our CO2 situation. I'd like to emit zero CO2, and I feel guilty knowing that I don't, and that the CO2 I've emitted will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.


This is a peculiar blend of narcissism and anxiety, where you have centered yourself in a global crisis and let it drive your actions, to the point of feeling guilt for actions the impact of which any rational person will tell you are so infinitesimally small that they don't deserve any thought.

I have been pretty snarky with you up till this point, but all that aside, I mean sincerely that you might benefit from some therapy to address this anxiety.


NP--Wow, you are seriously full of yourself. And not nice in how you try to make sure everyone knows how smart you think you are. And incorrect, to boot.


What, precisely, am I incorrect about?


Your most important error is mistaking abusiveness for snark. There was nothing in the posts you've been responding to that merited the nasty tone you've been taking.

You're also mistaken about individual efforts not being worth consideration. Our collective decision-making is what creates the reality we live in. If fewer people buy tickets on airplanes, fewer flights will be scheduled in the future. If fewer people buy beef, then fewer cattle will be raised in the future. Etc. It matters.

I do agree with your point about not selling the house, though, although not the way in which you expressed your thoughts.


It simply isn’t possible to solve climate change by changing human behavior. It’s like the Covid lockdowns. It won’t make any difference.

There needs to be a solution like carbon capture or whatever is a solution that doesn’t require every single country in the world to limit air travel, humans not to use cars, no AC etc.
Anonymous
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:In North Arlington, my wife and I feel like we are completely alone in our efforts to reduce CO2 emissions. We have just one car that we use sparingly, and we use bicycles for our local errands. We keep our thermostat at 65F in the winter (and wear sweaters) and 79F in the summer, using ceiling fans to make the bedrooms more comfortable. We greatly limit our international and domestic travel. We eat mostly vegetarian meals, and we never eat beef.

All of our neighbors have multiple large SUVs, and many neighbors have knocked their 2000 square foot houses down and replaced them with 5000 square foot homes. Some neighbors with 5000 square foot homes have only 1 child, so they don't truly need a huge living space. Many neighbors drive to work in their SUV without any other passengers to accompany them. They go on multiple international vacations a year (lots of CO2 per flight). Huge amounts of garbage are generated each week and placed on the curb, presumably to make way for yet more stuff that they are buying for their homes -- stuff that will probably end up on the curbside, destined for the landfill, a year or two down the road.

I've posted my frustrations in the "car and transport" section of this forum, only to be told by other posters that I'm jealous of my neighbor's SUVs and large homes. Despite a high level of education among DCUM posters, most don't appear concerned about the consequences of their consumerism, and can't even conceive of a high-income family exercising some restraint.

We are, in fact, a high net worth family, but we are striving to reduce our carbon footprint. We feel completely alone, like strangers in a foreign country. I'm curious if anybody else here feels the same way.



OP, you are taking so many positive steps and should be applauded for them but until you do more than just "limit" your domestic and internatinal air travel (esp the international) you are doing far more harm to the environment than all the good you are doing put together. It is just the facts.


And this is the thing that is so annoying about posts like the OP.

OP's family has decided that they'll limit but not give up travel, including flights. They live in a SFH in North Arlington, even though they have just one kid. I'm sure there are other things that aren't mentioned that aren't the environmental ideal. So, OP has drawn a line for things that he (assuming here) and his family will do, and won't do. That's fine, and something everyone should do. But then he writes this passive aggressive screed ("I feel so alone in my fight against climate change! Where are all the other like minded souls? Woe is me!") that is, when you get down to it, just criticizing others for drawing that line in a different place than he did. Anything less than his efforts are insufficient, and shows that others just don't care. But there's no recognition that the line that *he* drew is completely arbitrary, and there are tradeoffs that he has refused to make because they are necessary, or would make his life too uncomfortable. He's fine with his choices, but other choices are bad!

Short version, OP is a passive aggressive, sanctimonious hypocrite, but the most irritating thing about him is the complete lack of self-awareness.


OP here. A couple of responses to your post. First, I haven't taken a flight for a vacation in 5 years. Prior to that, I flew a great deal, but I altered my habits after calculating my CO2 footprint and waking up to the consequences of my behavior. Second, my wife has an elderly parent in another country. She visits her mother once every 2 to 3 years. That is the total extent of my family's air travels. Nothing else. Our airline CO2 amounts to about 10% of our household's annual emissions.

In regard to our single family home -- if we sell this home (where we have lived for 10 years), the lot will be used to build a McMansion. So selling the house won't lower CO2 emissions, but rather increase them. Second, our average monthly power consumption is about 375 KWH, or 12KWH per day. This is about the same level of consumption that we had when we lived in a condo 15 years ago. Our monthly gas consumption is about 50 therms. As far as I can tell, this is quite low. We achieve these low numbers by being extremely conservative with heating and cooling, and we don't have a large screen TV (in fact, we don't have a TV at all).

We have compared our household's per capita CO2 emissions against various metrics. This past year, our per capita emissions were about one-third of the national average. Of course, even this isn't good enough -- net zero will require even deeper cuts.

I think "self-awareness" on this issue involves (1) calculating your CO2 footprint, (2) comparing it to various benchmarks to develop a sense of how your emissions stack up to the emissions of others, (3) figuring out what you can do to push your CO2 emissions down, and (4) implementing your emissions cuts. We have gone through this process, leading to large reduction in our footprint.


Like I said, you have drawn a line based on what is comfortable for you. Great.

Please spare us the rationalizations about the house. All of your posts (even this one) are all about your own personal CO2 footprint, and how you can push that down. But suddenly, with respect to the house, it isn't about your own personal output anymore, but what happens to the house *after* you sell it, when it is definitionally not about your own output, but someone else's. It's now about the aggregate effect. It's a convenient shift in the analytical framework that gets you to the result you want. Also, if you were *really* serious, you could sell the house to someone who won't tear it down, even going so far as to use restrictive covenants to ensure that. You won't do that, of course, because it's a significant monetary hit. (And to be clear, I'm not suggesting you should do that - I'm just demonstrating that your "it would be counterproductive to sell the house" is both analytically flawed and incorrect - it's just too much of a burden for you to contemplate.)

At the end of the day, you are acting in a way that makes you feel good. That is, as I posted earlier, very important. And you've received a bunch of plaudits from anonymous strangers, which no doubt makes you feel good too. So congrats, I guess.


OP here. For the record, we don't feel good about our CO2 situation. I'd like to emit zero CO2, and I feel guilty knowing that I don't, and that the CO2 I've emitted will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.

In regard to selling the house to somebody who won't tear it down -- please explain to me what that would accomplish, assuming I could find such a buyer? Would the nation's aggregate CO2 emissions go down as a result? How?

I'm trying to understand your logic. Are you assuming that the new buyer would use the heating/AC even more sparingly than what we are already doing? I think that is highly unlikely.



Good grief. At the risk of further encouraging this nonsense, your focus has been your family's CO2 output. What happens with the house is irrelevant. You could move to a condo or apartment and reduce, even if only slightly, your output even further.

But I think we've finally hit on the issue. It's this:

For the record, we don't feel good about our CO2 situation. I'd like to emit zero CO2, and I feel guilty knowing that I don't, and that the CO2 I've emitted will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.


This is a peculiar blend of narcissism and anxiety, where you have centered yourself in a global crisis and let it drive your actions, to the point of feeling guilt for actions the impact of which any rational person will tell you are so infinitesimally small that they don't deserve any thought.

I have been pretty snarky with you up till this point, but all that aside, I mean sincerely that you might benefit from some therapy to address this anxiety.


OP here. I study climate change as part of my job. The anxiety I feel for the future is common among people who are close to this issue and recognize its seriousness. One our present trajectory, atmospheric CO2 may eventually exceed 2000 ppm. This could cause major disruptions to our food and water supplies and could perhaps threaten our survival as a species, and also threaten the survival of many other species. So yes, I take this issue seriously, and I am willing to cut my own CO2 emissions recognizing, of course, that I am but one human among 8 billion. But there is no other way forward at the moment. If one believes the science of climate change, as I do, it is illogical to wait for the government to take action. One can get started now by making voluntary modifications to one's own lifestyle. If many individuals take action, then these individual-level actions can indeed add up to make a difference on a global scale.

In regard to whether an individual should buy/sell their house in an effort to reduce CO2 emissions --- when you sell an asset, you are handing that asset over to a new owner, and you must therefore consider the future actions of that new owner when considering the effects of the sale on CO2. Suppose, for the sake of simplicity, that a condo owner and a SFH owner agree to swap ownership. Suppose that in each property the thermostat is always fixed at 72F regardless of who is the owner. Thus, swapping ownership has no impact on aggregate CO2 emissions, although it is likely that the condo will emit CO2 at a lower rate than the SFH. A negative scenario arises if the new SFH owner finds a way to tamper with the thermostat, thereby raising emissions. In this scenario, swapping ownership leads to an increase in aggregate emissions.

An even simpler example to help make this idea as easy as possible for you: suppose I own a large 5000 square foot house that is sitting in a field on top of an undeveloped oil reservoir. As long as I live in the house, I have no intention of developing the reservoir, but my house, unfortunately, has a large carbon footprint. I can sell my house and move to a condo, which, by your logic, will reduce in a reducing in CO2 emissions. But the sale of my land leaves it exposes to the whims of a new owner who might decide to develop the oil field, thereby causing a massive release of CO2. Get it now?



This is exactly why I am unable to be affected by your hysteria. It’s group think.

The experts told us all sorts of things about Covid. If I had listened to the experts or the smartest guys in the room here in DC, I would have mostly ruined the last 3 years of my life and the life of my kids. I would have been wearing cloth masks outdoors in July, not attending parties, multiple boosters, my kids doing zoom school for years etc. All to still end up catching Covid anyway.

I didn’t listen to the hysteria or the “experts”. It didn’t really make sense to me knowing what we learned from the first cruise ships with sick passengers. I’m a healthy adult without any self-inflicted preexisting conditions. We hauled ass to Florida and lived our best lives. Our kids attended schools, we attended parties, rarely wore masks, ate our just as frequently as before Covid, still went on trips etc. we lived life to its fullest. Of course if we were sick, we stayed home. We ended up catching Covid during omicron like everyone else. We ended up in the same place as the people who gave up years of their life.



Masks aren't just for protecting yourself. Who knows how many people you infected while asymptomatically contagious? You ended up in the same place you would have been, but how many others didn't because of you?
Anonymous
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:In North Arlington, my wife and I feel like we are completely alone in our efforts to reduce CO2 emissions. We have just one car that we use sparingly, and we use bicycles for our local errands. We keep our thermostat at 65F in the winter (and wear sweaters) and 79F in the summer, using ceiling fans to make the bedrooms more comfortable. We greatly limit our international and domestic travel. We eat mostly vegetarian meals, and we never eat beef.

All of our neighbors have multiple large SUVs, and many neighbors have knocked their 2000 square foot houses down and replaced them with 5000 square foot homes. Some neighbors with 5000 square foot homes have only 1 child, so they don't truly need a huge living space. Many neighbors drive to work in their SUV without any other passengers to accompany them. They go on multiple international vacations a year (lots of CO2 per flight). Huge amounts of garbage are generated each week and placed on the curb, presumably to make way for yet more stuff that they are buying for their homes -- stuff that will probably end up on the curbside, destined for the landfill, a year or two down the road.

I've posted my frustrations in the "car and transport" section of this forum, only to be told by other posters that I'm jealous of my neighbor's SUVs and large homes. Despite a high level of education among DCUM posters, most don't appear concerned about the consequences of their consumerism, and can't even conceive of a high-income family exercising some restraint.

We are, in fact, a high net worth family, but we are striving to reduce our carbon footprint. We feel completely alone, like strangers in a foreign country. I'm curious if anybody else here feels the same way.



OP, you are taking so many positive steps and should be applauded for them but until you do more than just "limit" your domestic and internatinal air travel (esp the international) you are doing far more harm to the environment than all the good you are doing put together. It is just the facts.


And this is the thing that is so annoying about posts like the OP.

OP's family has decided that they'll limit but not give up travel, including flights. They live in a SFH in North Arlington, even though they have just one kid. I'm sure there are other things that aren't mentioned that aren't the environmental ideal. So, OP has drawn a line for things that he (assuming here) and his family will do, and won't do. That's fine, and something everyone should do. But then he writes this passive aggressive screed ("I feel so alone in my fight against climate change! Where are all the other like minded souls? Woe is me!") that is, when you get down to it, just criticizing others for drawing that line in a different place than he did. Anything less than his efforts are insufficient, and shows that others just don't care. But there's no recognition that the line that *he* drew is completely arbitrary, and there are tradeoffs that he has refused to make because they are necessary, or would make his life too uncomfortable. He's fine with his choices, but other choices are bad!

Short version, OP is a passive aggressive, sanctimonious hypocrite, but the most irritating thing about him is the complete lack of self-awareness.


OP here. A couple of responses to your post. First, I haven't taken a flight for a vacation in 5 years. Prior to that, I flew a great deal, but I altered my habits after calculating my CO2 footprint and waking up to the consequences of my behavior. Second, my wife has an elderly parent in another country. She visits her mother once every 2 to 3 years. That is the total extent of my family's air travels. Nothing else. Our airline CO2 amounts to about 10% of our household's annual emissions.

In regard to our single family home -- if we sell this home (where we have lived for 10 years), the lot will be used to build a McMansion. So selling the house won't lower CO2 emissions, but rather increase them. Second, our average monthly power consumption is about 375 KWH, or 12KWH per day. This is about the same level of consumption that we had when we lived in a condo 15 years ago. Our monthly gas consumption is about 50 therms. As far as I can tell, this is quite low. We achieve these low numbers by being extremely conservative with heating and cooling, and we don't have a large screen TV (in fact, we don't have a TV at all).

We have compared our household's per capita CO2 emissions against various metrics. This past year, our per capita emissions were about one-third of the national average. Of course, even this isn't good enough -- net zero will require even deeper cuts.

I think "self-awareness" on this issue involves (1) calculating your CO2 footprint, (2) comparing it to various benchmarks to develop a sense of how your emissions stack up to the emissions of others, (3) figuring out what you can do to push your CO2 emissions down, and (4) implementing your emissions cuts. We have gone through this process, leading to large reduction in our footprint.


Like I said, you have drawn a line based on what is comfortable for you. Great.

Please spare us the rationalizations about the house. All of your posts (even this one) are all about your own personal CO2 footprint, and how you can push that down. But suddenly, with respect to the house, it isn't about your own personal output anymore, but what happens to the house *after* you sell it, when it is definitionally not about your own output, but someone else's. It's now about the aggregate effect. It's a convenient shift in the analytical framework that gets you to the result you want. Also, if you were *really* serious, you could sell the house to someone who won't tear it down, even going so far as to use restrictive covenants to ensure that. You won't do that, of course, because it's a significant monetary hit. (And to be clear, I'm not suggesting you should do that - I'm just demonstrating that your "it would be counterproductive to sell the house" is both analytically flawed and incorrect - it's just too much of a burden for you to contemplate.)

At the end of the day, you are acting in a way that makes you feel good. That is, as I posted earlier, very important. And you've received a bunch of plaudits from anonymous strangers, which no doubt makes you feel good too. So congrats, I guess.


OP here. For the record, we don't feel good about our CO2 situation. I'd like to emit zero CO2, and I feel guilty knowing that I don't, and that the CO2 I've emitted will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.

In regard to selling the house to somebody who won't tear it down -- please explain to me what that would accomplish, assuming I could find such a buyer? Would the nation's aggregate CO2 emissions go down as a result? How?

I'm trying to understand your logic. Are you assuming that the new buyer would use the heating/AC even more sparingly than what we are already doing? I think that is highly unlikely.



Good grief. At the risk of further encouraging this nonsense, your focus has been your family's CO2 output. What happens with the house is irrelevant. You could move to a condo or apartment and reduce, even if only slightly, your output even further.

But I think we've finally hit on the issue. It's this:

For the record, we don't feel good about our CO2 situation. I'd like to emit zero CO2, and I feel guilty knowing that I don't, and that the CO2 I've emitted will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.


This is a peculiar blend of narcissism and anxiety, where you have centered yourself in a global crisis and let it drive your actions, to the point of feeling guilt for actions the impact of which any rational person will tell you are so infinitesimally small that they don't deserve any thought.

I have been pretty snarky with you up till this point, but all that aside, I mean sincerely that you might benefit from some therapy to address this anxiety.


OP here. I study climate change as part of my job. The anxiety I feel for the future is common among people who are close to this issue and recognize its seriousness. One our present trajectory, atmospheric CO2 may eventually exceed 2000 ppm. This could cause major disruptions to our food and water supplies and could perhaps threaten our survival as a species, and also threaten the survival of many other species. So yes, I take this issue seriously, and I am willing to cut my own CO2 emissions recognizing, of course, that I am but one human among 8 billion. But there is no other way forward at the moment. If one believes the science of climate change, as I do, it is illogical to wait for the government to take action. One can get started now by making voluntary modifications to one's own lifestyle. If many individuals take action, then these individual-level actions can indeed add up to make a difference on a global scale.

In regard to whether an individual should buy/sell their house in an effort to reduce CO2 emissions --- when you sell an asset, you are handing that asset over to a new owner, and you must therefore consider the future actions of that new owner when considering the effects of the sale on CO2. Suppose, for the sake of simplicity, that a condo owner and a SFH owner agree to swap ownership. Suppose that in each property the thermostat is always fixed at 72F regardless of who is the owner. Thus, swapping ownership has no impact on aggregate CO2 emissions, although it is likely that the condo will emit CO2 at a lower rate than the SFH. A negative scenario arises if the new SFH owner finds a way to tamper with the thermostat, thereby raising emissions. In this scenario, swapping ownership leads to an increase in aggregate emissions.

An even simpler example to help make this idea as easy as possible for you: suppose I own a large 5000 square foot house that is sitting in a field on top of an undeveloped oil reservoir. As long as I live in the house, I have no intention of developing the reservoir, but my house, unfortunately, has a large carbon footprint. I can sell my house and move to a condo, which, by your logic, will reduce in a reducing in CO2 emissions. But the sale of my land leaves it exposes to the whims of a new owner who might decide to develop the oil field, thereby causing a massive release of CO2. Get it now?



This is exactly why I am unable to be affected by your hysteria. It’s group think.

The experts told us all sorts of things about Covid. If I had listened to the experts or the smartest guys in the room here in DC, I would have mostly ruined the last 3 years of my life and the life of my kids. I would have been wearing cloth masks outdoors in July, not attending parties, multiple boosters, my kids doing zoom school for years etc. All to still end up catching Covid anyway.

I didn’t listen to the hysteria or the “experts”. It didn’t really make sense to me knowing what we learned from the first cruise ships with sick passengers. I’m a healthy adult without any self-inflicted preexisting conditions. We hauled ass to Florida and lived our best lives. Our kids attended schools, we attended parties, rarely wore masks, ate our just as frequently as before Covid, still went on trips etc. we lived life to its fullest. Of course if we were sick, we stayed home. We ended up catching Covid during omicron like everyone else. We ended up in the same place as the people who gave up years of their life.



Masks aren't just for protecting yourself. Who knows how many people you infected while asymptomatically contagious? You ended up in the same place you would have been, but how many others didn't because of you?


Lmao. Yes I was absolutely asymptomatically sick -as in NOT SICK- with Covid for years and if I’d worn a mask other people wouldn’t have caught it. Do you even hear yourself? How can you even have lived through the last few years and still think we should have all stayed home and then worn masks?

Gosh if only the terrible Floridians had done what everyone in New York did and then we wouldn’t have all ended up catching Covid. Oh wait…
Anonymous
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:In North Arlington, my wife and I feel like we are completely alone in our efforts to reduce CO2 emissions. We have just one car that we use sparingly, and we use bicycles for our local errands. We keep our thermostat at 65F in the winter (and wear sweaters) and 79F in the summer, using ceiling fans to make the bedrooms more comfortable. We greatly limit our international and domestic travel. We eat mostly vegetarian meals, and we never eat beef.

All of our neighbors have multiple large SUVs, and many neighbors have knocked their 2000 square foot houses down and replaced them with 5000 square foot homes. Some neighbors with 5000 square foot homes have only 1 child, so they don't truly need a huge living space. Many neighbors drive to work in their SUV without any other passengers to accompany them. They go on multiple international vacations a year (lots of CO2 per flight). Huge amounts of garbage are generated each week and placed on the curb, presumably to make way for yet more stuff that they are buying for their homes -- stuff that will probably end up on the curbside, destined for the landfill, a year or two down the road.

I've posted my frustrations in the "car and transport" section of this forum, only to be told by other posters that I'm jealous of my neighbor's SUVs and large homes. Despite a high level of education among DCUM posters, most don't appear concerned about the consequences of their consumerism, and can't even conceive of a high-income family exercising some restraint.

We are, in fact, a high net worth family, but we are striving to reduce our carbon footprint. We feel completely alone, like strangers in a foreign country. I'm curious if anybody else here feels the same way.



OP, you are taking so many positive steps and should be applauded for them but until you do more than just "limit" your domestic and internatinal air travel (esp the international) you are doing far more harm to the environment than all the good you are doing put together. It is just the facts.


And this is the thing that is so annoying about posts like the OP.

OP's family has decided that they'll limit but not give up travel, including flights. They live in a SFH in North Arlington, even though they have just one kid. I'm sure there are other things that aren't mentioned that aren't the environmental ideal. So, OP has drawn a line for things that he (assuming here) and his family will do, and won't do. That's fine, and something everyone should do. But then he writes this passive aggressive screed ("I feel so alone in my fight against climate change! Where are all the other like minded souls? Woe is me!") that is, when you get down to it, just criticizing others for drawing that line in a different place than he did. Anything less than his efforts are insufficient, and shows that others just don't care. But there's no recognition that the line that *he* drew is completely arbitrary, and there are tradeoffs that he has refused to make because they are necessary, or would make his life too uncomfortable. He's fine with his choices, but other choices are bad!

Short version, OP is a passive aggressive, sanctimonious hypocrite, but the most irritating thing about him is the complete lack of self-awareness.


OP here. A couple of responses to your post. First, I haven't taken a flight for a vacation in 5 years. Prior to that, I flew a great deal, but I altered my habits after calculating my CO2 footprint and waking up to the consequences of my behavior. Second, my wife has an elderly parent in another country. She visits her mother once every 2 to 3 years. That is the total extent of my family's air travels. Nothing else. Our airline CO2 amounts to about 10% of our household's annual emissions.

In regard to our single family home -- if we sell this home (where we have lived for 10 years), the lot will be used to build a McMansion. So selling the house won't lower CO2 emissions, but rather increase them. Second, our average monthly power consumption is about 375 KWH, or 12KWH per day. This is about the same level of consumption that we had when we lived in a condo 15 years ago. Our monthly gas consumption is about 50 therms. As far as I can tell, this is quite low. We achieve these low numbers by being extremely conservative with heating and cooling, and we don't have a large screen TV (in fact, we don't have a TV at all).

We have compared our household's per capita CO2 emissions against various metrics. This past year, our per capita emissions were about one-third of the national average. Of course, even this isn't good enough -- net zero will require even deeper cuts.

I think "self-awareness" on this issue involves (1) calculating your CO2 footprint, (2) comparing it to various benchmarks to develop a sense of how your emissions stack up to the emissions of others, (3) figuring out what you can do to push your CO2 emissions down, and (4) implementing your emissions cuts. We have gone through this process, leading to large reduction in our footprint.


Like I said, you have drawn a line based on what is comfortable for you. Great.

Please spare us the rationalizations about the house. All of your posts (even this one) are all about your own personal CO2 footprint, and how you can push that down. But suddenly, with respect to the house, it isn't about your own personal output anymore, but what happens to the house *after* you sell it, when it is definitionally not about your own output, but someone else's. It's now about the aggregate effect. It's a convenient shift in the analytical framework that gets you to the result you want. Also, if you were *really* serious, you could sell the house to someone who won't tear it down, even going so far as to use restrictive covenants to ensure that. You won't do that, of course, because it's a significant monetary hit. (And to be clear, I'm not suggesting you should do that - I'm just demonstrating that your "it would be counterproductive to sell the house" is both analytically flawed and incorrect - it's just too much of a burden for you to contemplate.)

At the end of the day, you are acting in a way that makes you feel good. That is, as I posted earlier, very important. And you've received a bunch of plaudits from anonymous strangers, which no doubt makes you feel good too. So congrats, I guess.


OP here. For the record, we don't feel good about our CO2 situation. I'd like to emit zero CO2, and I feel guilty knowing that I don't, and that the CO2 I've emitted will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.

In regard to selling the house to somebody who won't tear it down -- please explain to me what that would accomplish, assuming I could find such a buyer? Would the nation's aggregate CO2 emissions go down as a result? How?

I'm trying to understand your logic. Are you assuming that the new buyer would use the heating/AC even more sparingly than what we are already doing? I think that is highly unlikely.



Good grief. At the risk of further encouraging this nonsense, your focus has been your family's CO2 output. What happens with the house is irrelevant. You could move to a condo or apartment and reduce, even if only slightly, your output even further.

But I think we've finally hit on the issue. It's this:

For the record, we don't feel good about our CO2 situation. I'd like to emit zero CO2, and I feel guilty knowing that I don't, and that the CO2 I've emitted will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.


This is a peculiar blend of narcissism and anxiety, where you have centered yourself in a global crisis and let it drive your actions, to the point of feeling guilt for actions the impact of which any rational person will tell you are so infinitesimally small that they don't deserve any thought.

I have been pretty snarky with you up till this point, but all that aside, I mean sincerely that you might benefit from some therapy to address this anxiety.


OP here. I study climate change as part of my job. The anxiety I feel for the future is common among people who are close to this issue and recognize its seriousness. One our present trajectory, atmospheric CO2 may eventually exceed 2000 ppm. This could cause major disruptions to our food and water supplies and could perhaps threaten our survival as a species, and also threaten the survival of many other species. So yes, I take this issue seriously, and I am willing to cut my own CO2 emissions recognizing, of course, that I am but one human among 8 billion. But there is no other way forward at the moment. If one believes the science of climate change, as I do, it is illogical to wait for the government to take action. One can get started now by making voluntary modifications to one's own lifestyle. If many individuals take action, then these individual-level actions can indeed add up to make a difference on a global scale.

In regard to whether an individual should buy/sell their house in an effort to reduce CO2 emissions --- when you sell an asset, you are handing that asset over to a new owner, and you must therefore consider the future actions of that new owner when considering the effects of the sale on CO2. Suppose, for the sake of simplicity, that a condo owner and a SFH owner agree to swap ownership. Suppose that in each property the thermostat is always fixed at 72F regardless of who is the owner. Thus, swapping ownership has no impact on aggregate CO2 emissions, although it is likely that the condo will emit CO2 at a lower rate than the SFH. A negative scenario arises if the new SFH owner finds a way to tamper with the thermostat, thereby raising emissions. In this scenario, swapping ownership leads to an increase in aggregate emissions.

An even simpler example to help make this idea as easy as possible for you: suppose I own a large 5000 square foot house that is sitting in a field on top of an undeveloped oil reservoir. As long as I live in the house, I have no intention of developing the reservoir, but my house, unfortunately, has a large carbon footprint. I can sell my house and move to a condo, which, by your logic, will reduce in a reducing in CO2 emissions. But the sale of my land leaves it exposes to the whims of a new owner who might decide to develop the oil field, thereby causing a massive release of CO2. Get it now?



This is exactly why I am unable to be affected by your hysteria. It’s group think.

The experts told us all sorts of things about Covid. If I had listened to the experts or the smartest guys in the room here in DC, I would have mostly ruined the last 3 years of my life and the life of my kids. I would have been wearing cloth masks outdoors in July, not attending parties, multiple boosters, my kids doing zoom school for years etc. All to still end up catching Covid anyway.

I didn’t listen to the hysteria or the “experts”. It didn’t really make sense to me knowing what we learned from the first cruise ships with sick passengers. I’m a healthy adult without any self-inflicted preexisting conditions. We hauled ass to Florida and lived our best lives. Our kids attended schools, we attended parties, rarely wore masks, ate our just as frequently as before Covid, still went on trips etc. we lived life to its fullest. Of course if we were sick, we stayed home. We ended up catching Covid during omicron like everyone else. We ended up in the same place as the people who gave up years of their life.



Masks aren't just for protecting yourself. Who knows how many people you infected while asymptomatically contagious? You ended up in the same place you would have been, but how many others didn't because of you?


Hope you’re still wearing your mask. After all - who knows how many people you could affect while asymptomatic, right? If you think we should have worn masks in 2020 then you should still be wearing a mask and for the flu, RSV etc.

We were all misled about masking and masking did not keep Covid from spreading.
Anonymous
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:In North Arlington, my wife and I feel like we are completely alone in our efforts to reduce CO2 emissions. We have just one car that we use sparingly, and we use bicycles for our local errands. We keep our thermostat at 65F in the winter (and wear sweaters) and 79F in the summer, using ceiling fans to make the bedrooms more comfortable. We greatly limit our international and domestic travel. We eat mostly vegetarian meals, and we never eat beef.

All of our neighbors have multiple large SUVs, and many neighbors have knocked their 2000 square foot houses down and replaced them with 5000 square foot homes. Some neighbors with 5000 square foot homes have only 1 child, so they don't truly need a huge living space. Many neighbors drive to work in their SUV without any other passengers to accompany them. They go on multiple international vacations a year (lots of CO2 per flight). Huge amounts of garbage are generated each week and placed on the curb, presumably to make way for yet more stuff that they are buying for their homes -- stuff that will probably end up on the curbside, destined for the landfill, a year or two down the road.

I've posted my frustrations in the "car and transport" section of this forum, only to be told by other posters that I'm jealous of my neighbor's SUVs and large homes. Despite a high level of education among DCUM posters, most don't appear concerned about the consequences of their consumerism, and can't even conceive of a high-income family exercising some restraint.

We are, in fact, a high net worth family, but we are striving to reduce our carbon footprint. We feel completely alone, like strangers in a foreign country. I'm curious if anybody else here feels the same way.



OP, you are taking so many positive steps and should be applauded for them but until you do more than just "limit" your domestic and internatinal air travel (esp the international) you are doing far more harm to the environment than all the good you are doing put together. It is just the facts.


And this is the thing that is so annoying about posts like the OP.

OP's family has decided that they'll limit but not give up travel, including flights. They live in a SFH in North Arlington, even though they have just one kid. I'm sure there are other things that aren't mentioned that aren't the environmental ideal. So, OP has drawn a line for things that he (assuming here) and his family will do, and won't do. That's fine, and something everyone should do. But then he writes this passive aggressive screed ("I feel so alone in my fight against climate change! Where are all the other like minded souls? Woe is me!") that is, when you get down to it, just criticizing others for drawing that line in a different place than he did. Anything less than his efforts are insufficient, and shows that others just don't care. But there's no recognition that the line that *he* drew is completely arbitrary, and there are tradeoffs that he has refused to make because they are necessary, or would make his life too uncomfortable. He's fine with his choices, but other choices are bad!

Short version, OP is a passive aggressive, sanctimonious hypocrite, but the most irritating thing about him is the complete lack of self-awareness.


OP here. A couple of responses to your post. First, I haven't taken a flight for a vacation in 5 years. Prior to that, I flew a great deal, but I altered my habits after calculating my CO2 footprint and waking up to the consequences of my behavior. Second, my wife has an elderly parent in another country. She visits her mother once every 2 to 3 years. That is the total extent of my family's air travels. Nothing else. Our airline CO2 amounts to about 10% of our household's annual emissions.

In regard to our single family home -- if we sell this home (where we have lived for 10 years), the lot will be used to build a McMansion. So selling the house won't lower CO2 emissions, but rather increase them. Second, our average monthly power consumption is about 375 KWH, or 12KWH per day. This is about the same level of consumption that we had when we lived in a condo 15 years ago. Our monthly gas consumption is about 50 therms. As far as I can tell, this is quite low. We achieve these low numbers by being extremely conservative with heating and cooling, and we don't have a large screen TV (in fact, we don't have a TV at all).

We have compared our household's per capita CO2 emissions against various metrics. This past year, our per capita emissions were about one-third of the national average. Of course, even this isn't good enough -- net zero will require even deeper cuts.

I think "self-awareness" on this issue involves (1) calculating your CO2 footprint, (2) comparing it to various benchmarks to develop a sense of how your emissions stack up to the emissions of others, (3) figuring out what you can do to push your CO2 emissions down, and (4) implementing your emissions cuts. We have gone through this process, leading to large reduction in our footprint.


Like I said, you have drawn a line based on what is comfortable for you. Great.

Please spare us the rationalizations about the house. All of your posts (even this one) are all about your own personal CO2 footprint, and how you can push that down. But suddenly, with respect to the house, it isn't about your own personal output anymore, but what happens to the house *after* you sell it, when it is definitionally not about your own output, but someone else's. It's now about the aggregate effect. It's a convenient shift in the analytical framework that gets you to the result you want. Also, if you were *really* serious, you could sell the house to someone who won't tear it down, even going so far as to use restrictive covenants to ensure that. You won't do that, of course, because it's a significant monetary hit. (And to be clear, I'm not suggesting you should do that - I'm just demonstrating that your "it would be counterproductive to sell the house" is both analytically flawed and incorrect - it's just too much of a burden for you to contemplate.)

At the end of the day, you are acting in a way that makes you feel good. That is, as I posted earlier, very important. And you've received a bunch of plaudits from anonymous strangers, which no doubt makes you feel good too. So congrats, I guess.


OP here. For the record, we don't feel good about our CO2 situation. I'd like to emit zero CO2, and I feel guilty knowing that I don't, and that the CO2 I've emitted will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.

In regard to selling the house to somebody who won't tear it down -- please explain to me what that would accomplish, assuming I could find such a buyer? Would the nation's aggregate CO2 emissions go down as a result? How?

I'm trying to understand your logic. Are you assuming that the new buyer would use the heating/AC even more sparingly than what we are already doing? I think that is highly unlikely.



Good grief. At the risk of further encouraging this nonsense, your focus has been your family's CO2 output. What happens with the house is irrelevant. You could move to a condo or apartment and reduce, even if only slightly, your output even further.

But I think we've finally hit on the issue. It's this:

For the record, we don't feel good about our CO2 situation. I'd like to emit zero CO2, and I feel guilty knowing that I don't, and that the CO2 I've emitted will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.


This is a peculiar blend of narcissism and anxiety, where you have centered yourself in a global crisis and let it drive your actions, to the point of feeling guilt for actions the impact of which any rational person will tell you are so infinitesimally small that they don't deserve any thought.

I have been pretty snarky with you up till this point, but all that aside, I mean sincerely that you might benefit from some therapy to address this anxiety.


OP here. I study climate change as part of my job. The anxiety I feel for the future is common among people who are close to this issue and recognize its seriousness. One our present trajectory, atmospheric CO2 may eventually exceed 2000 ppm. This could cause major disruptions to our food and water supplies and could perhaps threaten our survival as a species, and also threaten the survival of many other species. So yes, I take this issue seriously, and I am willing to cut my own CO2 emissions recognizing, of course, that I am but one human among 8 billion. But there is no other way forward at the moment. If one believes the science of climate change, as I do, it is illogical to wait for the government to take action. One can get started now by making voluntary modifications to one's own lifestyle. If many individuals take action, then these individual-level actions can indeed add up to make a difference on a global scale.

In regard to whether an individual should buy/sell their house in an effort to reduce CO2 emissions --- when you sell an asset, you are handing that asset over to a new owner, and you must therefore consider the future actions of that new owner when considering the effects of the sale on CO2. Suppose, for the sake of simplicity, that a condo owner and a SFH owner agree to swap ownership. Suppose that in each property the thermostat is always fixed at 72F regardless of who is the owner. Thus, swapping ownership has no impact on aggregate CO2 emissions, although it is likely that the condo will emit CO2 at a lower rate than the SFH. A negative scenario arises if the new SFH owner finds a way to tamper with the thermostat, thereby raising emissions. In this scenario, swapping ownership leads to an increase in aggregate emissions.

An even simpler example to help make this idea as easy as possible for you: suppose I own a large 5000 square foot house that is sitting in a field on top of an undeveloped oil reservoir. As long as I live in the house, I have no intention of developing the reservoir, but my house, unfortunately, has a large carbon footprint. I can sell my house and move to a condo, which, by your logic, will reduce in a reducing in CO2 emissions. But the sale of my land leaves it exposes to the whims of a new owner who might decide to develop the oil field, thereby causing a massive release of CO2. Get it now?



This is exactly why I am unable to be affected by your hysteria. It’s group think.

The experts told us all sorts of things about Covid. If I had listened to the experts or the smartest guys in the room here in DC, I would have mostly ruined the last 3 years of my life and the life of my kids. I would have been wearing cloth masks outdoors in July, not attending parties, multiple boosters, my kids doing zoom school for years etc. All to still end up catching Covid anyway.

I didn’t listen to the hysteria or the “experts”. It didn’t really make sense to me knowing what we learned from the first cruise ships with sick passengers. I’m a healthy adult without any self-inflicted preexisting conditions. We hauled ass to Florida and lived our best lives. Our kids attended schools, we attended parties, rarely wore masks, ate our just as frequently as before Covid, still went on trips etc. we lived life to its fullest. Of course if we were sick, we stayed home. We ended up catching Covid during omicron like everyone else. We ended up in the same place as the people who gave up years of their life.



Masks aren't just for protecting yourself. Who knows how many people you infected while asymptomatically contagious? You ended up in the same place you would have been, but how many others didn't because of you?


Hope you’re still wearing your mask. After all - who knows how many people you could affect while asymptomatic, right? If you think we should have worn masks in 2020 then you should still be wearing a mask and for the flu, RSV etc.

We were all misled about masking and masking did not keep Covid from spreading.


Yes, I do wear my mask when in crowded places. We were not misled, although I do think the reaction was stronger than it needed to be in the beginning because they didn't have enough information and wanted to be cautious. Masking has absolutely saved many, many people from death or the misery of long covid.
Anonymous
This is exactly why I am unable to be affected by your hysteria. It’s group think.


The relationship between CO2 and global warming has been understood for a long time, and one doesn't need to look forward -- via projection models -- to understand that warming is happening. Instead, one can look backwards in time at data gathered over the last 60 years by tens of thousands of weather stations operated in many different countries. Using data from these stations, one can quantify recent warming trends.

With respect to forward projections, keep in mind that there are many different modeling groups, in many different countries, that work independently, and which have constructed their own models. So I disagree that the modeling is affected by "group think". Very few (if any) of these models have a favorable outlook for the future. In general, their predictions are alarming, and suggest an urgent need to limit our GHG emissions.

One can also study other planets in our solar system to gain insight into the relationship between CO2 (and other gases) and atmospheric temperature, and we can test our understanding of atmospheric physics by checking how closely our prediction for a planet's average temperature matches the actually observed temperature (as measured by visiting probes). Predicted temperatures closely match actual temperatures.
Anonymous
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:In North Arlington, my wife and I feel like we are completely alone in our efforts to reduce CO2 emissions. We have just one car that we use sparingly, and we use bicycles for our local errands. We keep our thermostat at 65F in the winter (and wear sweaters) and 79F in the summer, using ceiling fans to make the bedrooms more comfortable. We greatly limit our international and domestic travel. We eat mostly vegetarian meals, and we never eat beef.

All of our neighbors have multiple large SUVs, and many neighbors have knocked their 2000 square foot houses down and replaced them with 5000 square foot homes. Some neighbors with 5000 square foot homes have only 1 child, so they don't truly need a huge living space. Many neighbors drive to work in their SUV without any other passengers to accompany them. They go on multiple international vacations a year (lots of CO2 per flight). Huge amounts of garbage are generated each week and placed on the curb, presumably to make way for yet more stuff that they are buying for their homes -- stuff that will probably end up on the curbside, destined for the landfill, a year or two down the road.

I've posted my frustrations in the "car and transport" section of this forum, only to be told by other posters that I'm jealous of my neighbor's SUVs and large homes. Despite a high level of education among DCUM posters, most don't appear concerned about the consequences of their consumerism, and can't even conceive of a high-income family exercising some restraint.

We are, in fact, a high net worth family, but we are striving to reduce our carbon footprint. We feel completely alone, like strangers in a foreign country. I'm curious if anybody else here feels the same way.



OP, you are taking so many positive steps and should be applauded for them but until you do more than just "limit" your domestic and internatinal air travel (esp the international) you are doing far more harm to the environment than all the good you are doing put together. It is just the facts.


And this is the thing that is so annoying about posts like the OP.

OP's family has decided that they'll limit but not give up travel, including flights. They live in a SFH in North Arlington, even though they have just one kid. I'm sure there are other things that aren't mentioned that aren't the environmental ideal. So, OP has drawn a line for things that he (assuming here) and his family will do, and won't do. That's fine, and something everyone should do. But then he writes this passive aggressive screed ("I feel so alone in my fight against climate change! Where are all the other like minded souls? Woe is me!") that is, when you get down to it, just criticizing others for drawing that line in a different place than he did. Anything less than his efforts are insufficient, and shows that others just don't care. But there's no recognition that the line that *he* drew is completely arbitrary, and there are tradeoffs that he has refused to make because they are necessary, or would make his life too uncomfortable. He's fine with his choices, but other choices are bad!

Short version, OP is a passive aggressive, sanctimonious hypocrite, but the most irritating thing about him is the complete lack of self-awareness.


OP here. A couple of responses to your post. First, I haven't taken a flight for a vacation in 5 years. Prior to that, I flew a great deal, but I altered my habits after calculating my CO2 footprint and waking up to the consequences of my behavior. Second, my wife has an elderly parent in another country. She visits her mother once every 2 to 3 years. That is the total extent of my family's air travels. Nothing else. Our airline CO2 amounts to about 10% of our household's annual emissions.

In regard to our single family home -- if we sell this home (where we have lived for 10 years), the lot will be used to build a McMansion. So selling the house won't lower CO2 emissions, but rather increase them. Second, our average monthly power consumption is about 375 KWH, or 12KWH per day. This is about the same level of consumption that we had when we lived in a condo 15 years ago. Our monthly gas consumption is about 50 therms. As far as I can tell, this is quite low. We achieve these low numbers by being extremely conservative with heating and cooling, and we don't have a large screen TV (in fact, we don't have a TV at all).

We have compared our household's per capita CO2 emissions against various metrics. This past year, our per capita emissions were about one-third of the national average. Of course, even this isn't good enough -- net zero will require even deeper cuts.

I think "self-awareness" on this issue involves (1) calculating your CO2 footprint, (2) comparing it to various benchmarks to develop a sense of how your emissions stack up to the emissions of others, (3) figuring out what you can do to push your CO2 emissions down, and (4) implementing your emissions cuts. We have gone through this process, leading to large reduction in our footprint.


Like I said, you have drawn a line based on what is comfortable for you. Great.

Please spare us the rationalizations about the house. All of your posts (even this one) are all about your own personal CO2 footprint, and how you can push that down. But suddenly, with respect to the house, it isn't about your own personal output anymore, but what happens to the house *after* you sell it, when it is definitionally not about your own output, but someone else's. It's now about the aggregate effect. It's a convenient shift in the analytical framework that gets you to the result you want. Also, if you were *really* serious, you could sell the house to someone who won't tear it down, even going so far as to use restrictive covenants to ensure that. You won't do that, of course, because it's a significant monetary hit. (And to be clear, I'm not suggesting you should do that - I'm just demonstrating that your "it would be counterproductive to sell the house" is both analytically flawed and incorrect - it's just too much of a burden for you to contemplate.)

At the end of the day, you are acting in a way that makes you feel good. That is, as I posted earlier, very important. And you've received a bunch of plaudits from anonymous strangers, which no doubt makes you feel good too. So congrats, I guess.


OP here. For the record, we don't feel good about our CO2 situation. I'd like to emit zero CO2, and I feel guilty knowing that I don't, and that the CO2 I've emitted will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.

In regard to selling the house to somebody who won't tear it down -- please explain to me what that would accomplish, assuming I could find such a buyer? Would the nation's aggregate CO2 emissions go down as a result? How?

I'm trying to understand your logic. Are you assuming that the new buyer would use the heating/AC even more sparingly than what we are already doing? I think that is highly unlikely.



Good grief. At the risk of further encouraging this nonsense, your focus has been your family's CO2 output. What happens with the house is irrelevant. You could move to a condo or apartment and reduce, even if only slightly, your output even further.

But I think we've finally hit on the issue. It's this:

For the record, we don't feel good about our CO2 situation. I'd like to emit zero CO2, and I feel guilty knowing that I don't, and that the CO2 I've emitted will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.


This is a peculiar blend of narcissism and anxiety, where you have centered yourself in a global crisis and let it drive your actions, to the point of feeling guilt for actions the impact of which any rational person will tell you are so infinitesimally small that they don't deserve any thought.

I have been pretty snarky with you up till this point, but all that aside, I mean sincerely that you might benefit from some therapy to address this anxiety.


OP here. I study climate change as part of my job. The anxiety I feel for the future is common among people who are close to this issue and recognize its seriousness. One our present trajectory, atmospheric CO2 may eventually exceed 2000 ppm. This could cause major disruptions to our food and water supplies and could perhaps threaten our survival as a species, and also threaten the survival of many other species. So yes, I take this issue seriously, and I am willing to cut my own CO2 emissions recognizing, of course, that I am but one human among 8 billion. But there is no other way forward at the moment. If one believes the science of climate change, as I do, it is illogical to wait for the government to take action. One can get started now by making voluntary modifications to one's own lifestyle. If many individuals take action, then these individual-level actions can indeed add up to make a difference on a global scale.

In regard to whether an individual should buy/sell their house in an effort to reduce CO2 emissions --- when you sell an asset, you are handing that asset over to a new owner, and you must therefore consider the future actions of that new owner when considering the effects of the sale on CO2. Suppose, for the sake of simplicity, that a condo owner and a SFH owner agree to swap ownership. Suppose that in each property the thermostat is always fixed at 72F regardless of who is the owner. Thus, swapping ownership has no impact on aggregate CO2 emissions, although it is likely that the condo will emit CO2 at a lower rate than the SFH. A negative scenario arises if the new SFH owner finds a way to tamper with the thermostat, thereby raising emissions. In this scenario, swapping ownership leads to an increase in aggregate emissions.

An even simpler example to help make this idea as easy as possible for you: suppose I own a large 5000 square foot house that is sitting in a field on top of an undeveloped oil reservoir. As long as I live in the house, I have no intention of developing the reservoir, but my house, unfortunately, has a large carbon footprint. I can sell my house and move to a condo, which, by your logic, will reduce in a reducing in CO2 emissions. But the sale of my land leaves it exposes to the whims of a new owner who might decide to develop the oil field, thereby causing a massive release of CO2. Get it now?



This is exactly why I am unable to be affected by your hysteria. It’s group think.

The experts told us all sorts of things about Covid. If I had listened to the experts or the smartest guys in the room here in DC, I would have mostly ruined the last 3 years of my life and the life of my kids. I would have been wearing cloth masks outdoors in July, not attending parties, multiple boosters, my kids doing zoom school for years etc. All to still end up catching Covid anyway.

I didn’t listen to the hysteria or the “experts”. It didn’t really make sense to me knowing what we learned from the first cruise ships with sick passengers. I’m a healthy adult without any self-inflicted preexisting conditions. We hauled ass to Florida and lived our best lives. Our kids attended schools, we attended parties, rarely wore masks, ate our just as frequently as before Covid, still went on trips etc. we lived life to its fullest. Of course if we were sick, we stayed home. We ended up catching Covid during omicron like everyone else. We ended up in the same place as the people who gave up years of their life.



Masks aren't just for protecting yourself. Who knows how many people you infected while asymptomatically contagious? You ended up in the same place you would have been, but how many others didn't because of you?


Lmao. Yes I was absolutely asymptomatically sick -as in NOT SICK- with Covid for years and if I’d worn a mask other people wouldn’t have caught it. Do you even hear yourself? How can you even have lived through the last few years and still think we should have all stayed home and then worn masks?

Gosh if only the terrible Floridians had done what everyone in New York did and then we wouldn’t have all ended up catching Covid. Oh wait…


You can be asymptomatic AND sick. A friend of mine didn't know she was infected (without knowing, because she had no symptoms), didn't wear a mask while visiting her father, and he ended up in the hospital after catching it almost certainly from her because he has no interaction with anyone else. He now has ongoing issues he didn't have before getting covid. Many, many others have had similar experiences because of ignorant people like you who think you know it all.

Oh, and I never said everyone should have stayed home. We went out with increasing frequency as it became apparent what the risks were, but we make sure to protect others as best we can, especially those with weaker immune systems.
Anonymous
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:In North Arlington, my wife and I feel like we are completely alone in our efforts to reduce CO2 emissions. We have just one car that we use sparingly, and we use bicycles for our local errands. We keep our thermostat at 65F in the winter (and wear sweaters) and 79F in the summer, using ceiling fans to make the bedrooms more comfortable. We greatly limit our international and domestic travel. We eat mostly vegetarian meals, and we never eat beef.

All of our neighbors have multiple large SUVs, and many neighbors have knocked their 2000 square foot houses down and replaced them with 5000 square foot homes. Some neighbors with 5000 square foot homes have only 1 child, so they don't truly need a huge living space. Many neighbors drive to work in their SUV without any other passengers to accompany them. They go on multiple international vacations a year (lots of CO2 per flight). Huge amounts of garbage are generated each week and placed on the curb, presumably to make way for yet more stuff that they are buying for their homes -- stuff that will probably end up on the curbside, destined for the landfill, a year or two down the road.

I've posted my frustrations in the "car and transport" section of this forum, only to be told by other posters that I'm jealous of my neighbor's SUVs and large homes. Despite a high level of education among DCUM posters, most don't appear concerned about the consequences of their consumerism, and can't even conceive of a high-income family exercising some restraint.

We are, in fact, a high net worth family, but we are striving to reduce our carbon footprint. We feel completely alone, like strangers in a foreign country. I'm curious if anybody else here feels the same way.



OP, you are taking so many positive steps and should be applauded for them but until you do more than just "limit" your domestic and internatinal air travel (esp the international) you are doing far more harm to the environment than all the good you are doing put together. It is just the facts.


And this is the thing that is so annoying about posts like the OP.

OP's family has decided that they'll limit but not give up travel, including flights. They live in a SFH in North Arlington, even though they have just one kid. I'm sure there are other things that aren't mentioned that aren't the environmental ideal. So, OP has drawn a line for things that he (assuming here) and his family will do, and won't do. That's fine, and something everyone should do. But then he writes this passive aggressive screed ("I feel so alone in my fight against climate change! Where are all the other like minded souls? Woe is me!") that is, when you get down to it, just criticizing others for drawing that line in a different place than he did. Anything less than his efforts are insufficient, and shows that others just don't care. But there's no recognition that the line that *he* drew is completely arbitrary, and there are tradeoffs that he has refused to make because they are necessary, or would make his life too uncomfortable. He's fine with his choices, but other choices are bad!

Short version, OP is a passive aggressive, sanctimonious hypocrite, but the most irritating thing about him is the complete lack of self-awareness.


OP here. A couple of responses to your post. First, I haven't taken a flight for a vacation in 5 years. Prior to that, I flew a great deal, but I altered my habits after calculating my CO2 footprint and waking up to the consequences of my behavior. Second, my wife has an elderly parent in another country. She visits her mother once every 2 to 3 years. That is the total extent of my family's air travels. Nothing else. Our airline CO2 amounts to about 10% of our household's annual emissions.

In regard to our single family home -- if we sell this home (where we have lived for 10 years), the lot will be used to build a McMansion. So selling the house won't lower CO2 emissions, but rather increase them. Second, our average monthly power consumption is about 375 KWH, or 12KWH per day. This is about the same level of consumption that we had when we lived in a condo 15 years ago. Our monthly gas consumption is about 50 therms. As far as I can tell, this is quite low. We achieve these low numbers by being extremely conservative with heating and cooling, and we don't have a large screen TV (in fact, we don't have a TV at all).

We have compared our household's per capita CO2 emissions against various metrics. This past year, our per capita emissions were about one-third of the national average. Of course, even this isn't good enough -- net zero will require even deeper cuts.

I think "self-awareness" on this issue involves (1) calculating your CO2 footprint, (2) comparing it to various benchmarks to develop a sense of how your emissions stack up to the emissions of others, (3) figuring out what you can do to push your CO2 emissions down, and (4) implementing your emissions cuts. We have gone through this process, leading to large reduction in our footprint.


Like I said, you have drawn a line based on what is comfortable for you. Great.

Please spare us the rationalizations about the house. All of your posts (even this one) are all about your own personal CO2 footprint, and how you can push that down. But suddenly, with respect to the house, it isn't about your own personal output anymore, but what happens to the house *after* you sell it, when it is definitionally not about your own output, but someone else's. It's now about the aggregate effect. It's a convenient shift in the analytical framework that gets you to the result you want. Also, if you were *really* serious, you could sell the house to someone who won't tear it down, even going so far as to use restrictive covenants to ensure that. You won't do that, of course, because it's a significant monetary hit. (And to be clear, I'm not suggesting you should do that - I'm just demonstrating that your "it would be counterproductive to sell the house" is both analytically flawed and incorrect - it's just too much of a burden for you to contemplate.)

At the end of the day, you are acting in a way that makes you feel good. That is, as I posted earlier, very important. And you've received a bunch of plaudits from anonymous strangers, which no doubt makes you feel good too. So congrats, I guess.


OP here. For the record, we don't feel good about our CO2 situation. I'd like to emit zero CO2, and I feel guilty knowing that I don't, and that the CO2 I've emitted will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.

In regard to selling the house to somebody who won't tear it down -- please explain to me what that would accomplish, assuming I could find such a buyer? Would the nation's aggregate CO2 emissions go down as a result? How?

I'm trying to understand your logic. Are you assuming that the new buyer would use the heating/AC even more sparingly than what we are already doing? I think that is highly unlikely.



Good grief. At the risk of further encouraging this nonsense, your focus has been your family's CO2 output. What happens with the house is irrelevant. You could move to a condo or apartment and reduce, even if only slightly, your output even further.

But I think we've finally hit on the issue. It's this:

For the record, we don't feel good about our CO2 situation. I'd like to emit zero CO2, and I feel guilty knowing that I don't, and that the CO2 I've emitted will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years.


This is a peculiar blend of narcissism and anxiety, where you have centered yourself in a global crisis and let it drive your actions, to the point of feeling guilt for actions the impact of which any rational person will tell you are so infinitesimally small that they don't deserve any thought.

I have been pretty snarky with you up till this point, but all that aside, I mean sincerely that you might benefit from some therapy to address this anxiety.


OP here. I study climate change as part of my job. The anxiety I feel for the future is common among people who are close to this issue and recognize its seriousness. One our present trajectory, atmospheric CO2 may eventually exceed 2000 ppm. This could cause major disruptions to our food and water supplies and could perhaps threaten our survival as a species, and also threaten the survival of many other species. So yes, I take this issue seriously, and I am willing to cut my own CO2 emissions recognizing, of course, that I am but one human among 8 billion. But there is no other way forward at the moment. If one believes the science of climate change, as I do, it is illogical to wait for the government to take action. One can get started now by making voluntary modifications to one's own lifestyle. If many individuals take action, then these individual-level actions can indeed add up to make a difference on a global scale.

In regard to whether an individual should buy/sell their house in an effort to reduce CO2 emissions --- when you sell an asset, you are handing that asset over to a new owner, and you must therefore consider the future actions of that new owner when considering the effects of the sale on CO2. Suppose, for the sake of simplicity, that a condo owner and a SFH owner agree to swap ownership. Suppose that in each property the thermostat is always fixed at 72F regardless of who is the owner. Thus, swapping ownership has no impact on aggregate CO2 emissions, although it is likely that the condo will emit CO2 at a lower rate than the SFH. A negative scenario arises if the new SFH owner finds a way to tamper with the thermostat, thereby raising emissions. In this scenario, swapping ownership leads to an increase in aggregate emissions.

An even simpler example to help make this idea as easy as possible for you: suppose I own a large 5000 square foot house that is sitting in a field on top of an undeveloped oil reservoir. As long as I live in the house, I have no intention of developing the reservoir, but my house, unfortunately, has a large carbon footprint. I can sell my house and move to a condo, which, by your logic, will reduce in a reducing in CO2 emissions. But the sale of my land leaves it exposes to the whims of a new owner who might decide to develop the oil field, thereby causing a massive release of CO2. Get it now?



This is exactly why I am unable to be affected by your hysteria. It’s group think.

The experts told us all sorts of things about Covid. If I had listened to the experts or the smartest guys in the room here in DC, I would have mostly ruined the last 3 years of my life and the life of my kids. I would have been wearing cloth masks outdoors in July, not attending parties, multiple boosters, my kids doing zoom school for years etc. All to still end up catching Covid anyway.

I didn’t listen to the hysteria or the “experts”. It didn’t really make sense to me knowing what we learned from the first cruise ships with sick passengers. I’m a healthy adult without any self-inflicted preexisting conditions. We hauled ass to Florida and lived our best lives. Our kids attended schools, we attended parties, rarely wore masks, ate our just as frequently as before Covid, still went on trips etc. we lived life to its fullest. Of course if we were sick, we stayed home. We ended up catching Covid during omicron like everyone else. We ended up in the same place as the people who gave up years of their life.



Masks aren't just for protecting yourself. Who knows how many people you infected while asymptomatically contagious? You ended up in the same place you would have been, but how many others didn't because of you?


Lmao. Yes I was absolutely asymptomatically sick -as in NOT SICK- with Covid for years and if I’d worn a mask other people wouldn’t have caught it. Do you even hear yourself? How can you even have lived through the last few years and still think we should have all stayed home and then worn masks?

Gosh if only the terrible Floridians had done what everyone in New York did and then we wouldn’t have all ended up catching Covid. Oh wait…


Seriously? You've lived through the past few years and don't know you can have covid and not know it because you have no symptoms? Ask ANY physician about that opinion.
Anonymous
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:Honestly, I know a lot of people who tried, and lots without cars (myself included) or who have a car they use sparingly (we live in the city proper though).

But the "limit travel" is, in my experience where the UMC folks step off. They're not willing to sacrifice that, and at the end of the day, any other changes you're making, basically everything on your list, is dwarfed by two or three round trip cross-country/european plane trips.


Amen. Zero UMC people I know are willing to change their travel. But they all preach about plug in vehicles and composting. It’s exhausting.


I’ve told my husband that I won’t take another cruise. We took one when we didn’t know how polluting they are. He wants to take the kids to see the glaciers, and I’ve said he can do that by himself. Other than that, it’s hard. All of our family lives far away, and in different locations. We usually travel to see them. Giving up travel means hurting important relationships. They’re travelers and will come to us if we don’t go to them, so there’s no savings there.

We were learning about vegetarian food before we developed food allergies. We had fewer kids than we wanted. We buy used items or look for high quality. If I buy a couch, I expect to own it in forty years. We wfh and live in less than 3,000 sqft. We filled our home compost bin, but we don’t have time to garden, so it’s just sitting. We signed up for renewable energy. It never fells like it’s enough. I really wish we could have agreed on a smaller house, but it was hard enough to even get something, so I caved.
Anonymous
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:see! you said the anxiety you feel. =OCD


Suppose a bus filled with passengers is headed rapidly towards a cliff, and is gaining speed rather than slowing down.

If a passenger is alarmed by the situation, is it your contention that the passenger needs therapy?



suppose 1 minute later, 1 year later, 1 decade later the bus passengers are all fine as before. Then my contention would be that it was a delusion or paranoia.


The time periods you list above -- 1 minute, 1 year, 1 decade -- are quite short relative to the time scale across which climate change is playing out.

Even though climate change is "slow" moving when compared to many other aspects of our lives, that doesn't imply that we are safe, and it doesn't imply that the bus will not go flying off the cliff.

In the video below, Carl Sagan does a good job of explaining the time scale of human-induced global warming to Congress, and explaining why action is needed ASAP to prevent disaster:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wp-WiNXH6hI

This video was made in 1985, and, unfortunately, we are still on the same dangerous trajectory with respect to CO2 emissions.



Anonymous
Anonymous wrote:

I have been pretty snarky with you up till this point, but all that aside, I mean sincerely that you might benefit from some therapy to address this anxiety.


Therapy is the answer for OP, who is not only uncomfortable with themselves but acting out towards other people.
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