This is one of my longtime issues — the hypocrisy of those who purport to care deeply about carbon footprints yet enthusiastically imprint their feet all over the world and encourage (and even pressure) others to do the same.
I like to see how the NYT deals with this subject — the NYT, with all its concern-mongering about climate change and all its travel articles and ads and its need to serve the emotions and vanities of its readers. What are we having today? A little shame, spiced with humorous self-deprecation, along with the usual self-esteem boosting about our progressivism and our love of the good life?
For this article, the author is by Andy Newman. Let's read:
[T]hese are morally bewildering times. Something that seemed like pure escape and adventure has become double-edged, harmful, the epitome of selfish consumption. Going someplace far away, we now know, is the biggest single action a private citizen can take to worsen climate change. One seat on a flight from New York to Los Angeles effectively adds months worth of human-generated carbon emissions to the atmosphere. And yet we fly more and more....What's morally bewildering? If you believe what the consensus of climate scientists and the proponents of the Green New Deal are telling us, you should never travel. Everything else is morally wrong. If you are bewildered, you're just bewildered about whether you — as opposed to those other people — want to center your life on morality.
Newman confronts the reader with a number: your ride on a 2,500-mile flight releases enough carbon emissions to melt 32 square feet of Arctic summer sea ice cover. His own little family vacation, he figures, melted 90 square feet of Arctic ice.
When I did that calculation, I pictured myself standing on a pickup-truck-sized sheet of ice as it broke apart and plunged me into frigid waters. A polar bear glared hungrily at me.There it is, as I predicted — A little shame, spiced with humorous self-deprecation.
When you go on vacation and wonder, Are we having fun yet?, remember Newman's visualization.
Newman quotes a professor — a philosophy professor, relying on climatology reports — "The average American causes through his/her greenhouse gas emissions the serious suffering and/or deaths of two future people." If you can, visualize those "future people" glaring at you. (You won't see the NYT article that invites you to think about abortion with a visualization of "future people" with faces that reflect what you are inflicting upon them. The glaring polar bear face is about as intense as the visualizations get. )
On to the subject of cruises. They're even worse than jet planes! 3 or 4 times as much carbon (plus some serious pollution from sulfur oxides). Then there's driving, which is the best option, environmentally, but, as Newman puts it: "most long trips are out of practical driving range." Here's an idea: Don't go on a long trip! I thought we were talking about the equivalent of WWII. You know, WWII really interfered with European vacations (though many Americans did get a European trip out of it).
There's a lot of material about carbon offsets that I won't try to summarize. The short answer is: You're kidding yourself if you think you can buy your way out of your carbon sins. "Offsets... encourage a break-even mind-set when what’s needed to avert disaster is to slash fossil-fuel consumption immediately."
How does Newman bring this thing in for a landing? He's still taking his family to Greece and Paris this summer. His reasoning is pathetically emotional: "We’re going because last year we canceled vacation to come home and watch our dog die. We’re going because the New York City public high school application process was an ordeal." Why not rent a car and drive your spouse and teenager to a state park in upstate New York? You can hike and sleep in tents.
Mostly we’re going because of things we saw last time we were there. The tiny beach at the base of the towering cliff. The playground where the little children played past midnight while their parents and grandparents sat chatting. Chubby partridges pecking around the ruined temple of Poseidon.So you've already gone, but you want to re-see what you've seen, because somehow the way they do it in Europe is more to your taste. I'm sure there's a tiny beach with a towering cliff at one of those state parks I linked to.
Before we go, we will buy enough offsets to capture the annual methane emanations of a dozen cows — that’s several times what is needed to balance out the carbon effects of our flights. May they help keep a polar bear afloat.See?! He ends with the polar bear, the beast that's so cute in your imagination and in the delightful illustration that accompanies this essay in the NYT. Newman presents himself as the model for the NYT reader's miniature moral reasoning. You mean well, you'll buy an indulgence, and you have such exquisite taste. Chubby partridges pecking around the ruined temple of Poseidon. Can't you just walk through Central Park and be fully aware of the pigeons?
(My use of the words "fully aware" is a deliberate reference to my favorite passage in my favorite movie, which I quoted in 2013 in a post titled "If you really care about global warming, stop all unnecessary travel.")
पोस्ट्स
१८४ टिप्पण्या:
If they were serious about this, they'd wear fart collectors as they graze at the cruise buffet.
Square feet? Shouldn't that be cubic feet?
Ask Al Gore about his house.
On our way to Glacier National Park on Sunday. Then drive around Montana and Idaho in a pollutionmobile for a few days.
Gorgeous area and we want to see it before all the other douchebags spoil it with their carbon footprints.
Screw global whatsit. I ain't buying it. Gonna enjoy ourselves as long as God gives us breath.
John Henry
Send the UN home and wire them up.
Works for me.
Anything to reinforce your strong aversion to travel. Right?
I'm just thinking over 20 years of hand-wringing articles in the NY Times and have to ask: Isn't reading the NY Times a fraught choice? I honestly don't know how those people get out of bed in the morning.
It's even worse if you take a long trip to see ruins.
It's worse than even the Profits will reveal. Whereas carbon[dioxide] is a minority enhancer, water vapor is a well established "greenhouse" gas. The end of the world is nigh with every breath we take. Our aspirations produce perspiration that is consciously destroying our beloved Gaia, and the population who deserve to enjoy Her bounty.
"Square feet? Shouldn't that be cubic feet?"
It's the human perspective: how much of the surface is covered. That's all you get in your visualization as you picture yourself standing on a melting floe, in proximity to an unhappy bear. Who knows how thick the ice is?
"If you really care about global warming, stop all unnecessary travel."
All those serious, concerned people who migrate by private jet to Switzerland twice a year to wring their hands over climate change and eat exotic cheeses know all their travel is necessary because Mother Nature has a fever only their selfless love can cure.
What's morally bewildering?
What's morally bewildering is that something might be immoral, even though they want to do it
Keep in mind, these are the deep thinkers who conclude that homosexuality can't be immoral, because the way they are must be the way God wanted them to be, and therefore God must want them to act on whatever urges they have.
Per rhhardin: It's even worse if you take a long trip to see ruins.
:-D
If you believe what the consensus of climate scientists and the proponents of the Green New Deal are telling us, you should never travel. Everything else is morally wrong.
If you believe whole heartedly that human beings bring only destruction to the good and pure Earth, technically speaking the most moral thing to do would be to kill yourself. Further, you should visit genocide upon your fellow humans. If you believe that humans by their very nature are inherently destructive creatures, and the Earth and all other living things upon it are inherently good, what other course of action is there?
It's worse than even the Profits will reveal.
I see what you've done there.
the most moral thing to do would be to kill yourself
In a universal frame, the ethical choice is to self-abort... or in euphemistic terms: sequester for a carbon-free economy.
"What's morally bewildering? If you believe what the consensus of climate scientists and the proponents of the Green New Deal are telling us, you should never travel. "
Unless you're like them and have your own private jet!
Do polar bears emit methane?
Does he realize that polar bear population has quintupled during this error of global whatsit? From about 5m in 1975 to @25m today.
Hey, NYT reporter, take your bullshit somewhere else. We're full up today. You like Europe? Great, stay there and leave us normal people alone.
Maybe this summer your cat will die and you will save all that carbon.
And why do you even have pets if you care about the environment? Your dog is polluting the Hell out of the Earth. It polluted in life. It continues to pollute in death, giving off CO2 as it moulders in the grave.
Dogs, Cats And Climate Change: What's Your Pet's Carbon Pawprint?
Jeff McMahon
Dogs and cats are responsible for a quarter of the greenhouse gas emissions caused by animal agriculture, according a new study out Wednesday, which adds up to a whopping 64 million tons of carbon-dioxide equivalent emitted in the production of their food.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2017/08/02/whats-your-dogs-carbon-pawprint/#2aa8ab8813a6
John Henry
"the Profits will reveal."
I see what you've done there.
It was inspired by a well-established homonym.
And OPM To travel.
He says he's bewildered but I say he's ambivalent.
A long article to convince me not to take the advice or instructions from this guy on travel choices. Were he serious about this carbon effect on climate he would be writing articles explaining how we can stop the hyper growth of carbon emissions in places like China and India rather than the nickel and dime savings of eschewing air travel from Boston to LA.
We, my wife and I, are going to Italy this fall. We won't be purchasing any carbon offsets. I guess that makes us deniers.
Ah chubby partridges--that's the ticket. Of course he could go to London and see the wood pigeons flying. They're sort of like a Central Park pigeon on steroids.
Blogger n.n said...
It's worse than even the Profits will reveal.
Is that like "The Law and the Profits"?
For the Parkinson fans here.
John Henry
"Anything to reinforce your strong aversion to travel. Right?"
Yes, the people who have a taste for travel need not stop and think about the things that people who don't like travel would put in their path. They're such delightful positive people, running all over the world with their high spirits and love of life. Everyone who talks about morality ought to be understood as merely enforcing the rules that want to follow anyway.
I certainly confess that part of what's on my mind here is not environmentalism, but the endless pressuring of people to travel and the portrayal of travel as the very best way to enjoy life.
But I don't have an aversion to travel. I have the idea that better than nothing is a high standard. And therefore I choose nothing almost all the time. I'm not going to go on a cruise, and I'm not going to go shuffling around somewhere with a giant crowd no matter how great the place would be if you could see it under good conditions. There's so much bad travel. I'd rather go to a state park or walk around my own town.
This story reminds me of my in-laws who are all-in on the Climate Change religion.
They are so concerned about the shrinking polar ice cap that they took a cruise on an icebreaker up to the North Pole a few years ago.
Crazy eh?
"The average American causes through his/her greenhouse gas emissions the serious suffering and/or deaths of two future people."
I would think the pro-choice progressives would see that as a feature rather than a bug.
Are there really partridges pecking around the ruined temple of Poseidon? I'd have expected pigeons.
I am continually struck by the fecklessness of the AGW religion. It is so typical of religious practice in general in the feeble "Western" world. Evil is never taken seriously, especially one's support of it, and adherents are expected to feel bad and yet have no real obligation to confront the evil they support. What a bunch of wimps!
Blogger stevew said...
stop the hyper growth of carbon emissions in places like China and India
At least China is doing something about it. They are commissioning 2-3 nuclear plants per year for the foreseeable future.
John Henry
"If you are bewildered, you're just bewildered about whether you — as opposed to those other people — want to center your life on morality."
Alternatively, you're bewildered about whether you actually believe this whole CAGW business, or whether you just see it as a way to be fashionably left-wing, rail against capitalism, and show your superiority to the rubes in fly-over country who would like to see some actual evidence beyond mathematical models goosed up with dubious feedback terms.
Yes, I know that the climate changes. It has been changing since forever. That is not the same thing. And there are more cute polar bears now than there have been since 1950. Just sayin'.
[T]hese are morally bewildering times. Something that seemed like pure escape and adventure has become double-edged, harmful, the epitome of selfish consumption. Going someplace far away, we now know, is the biggest single action a private citizen can take to worsen climate change. One seat on a flight from New York to Los Angeles effectively adds months worth of human-generated carbon emissions to the atmosphere. And yet we fly more and more
Fortunately, I am totally unconflicted here. I flew back to the US on Sunday for a couple meetings this week, and I am flying back out Friday.
I admit it. I'm a monster.
Another problem is that whole economies now depend on tourism for their economic survival.
Hawaii used to be a diverse mecca of tropical fruit and sugar. Now sugarcane and pineapple are almost completely gone from the islands.
If you fly to Hawaii for some fresh Hawaiian pineapple, your pineapple might not be local. I might be from the Philippines or somewhere where cheaper labor allows the growth and harvesting.
I go well out of my way to avoid crowds. Right now I'm at Denali National Park in Alaska where there are quite a few people but up to now I've had the highways and campgrounds pretty much to myself and only the wildlife and awesome scenery to keep me company. After I am blessed to see the mountain I'll be off again tomorrow to solitude.
I cannot afford to travel much anymore. I stay home.
Do I get a green Nobel prize?
Western environmentalism isn't about saving the environment, it's about enabling affluent white liberals to continue their environmentally destructive lives guilt free.
What's morally bewildering? If you believe what the consensus of climate scientists and the proponents of the Green New Deal are telling us, you should never travel.
Better than that, leave the cities. Stop living in climate-controlled buildings where the windows don't open and you need an elevator to reach the 17th floor. Turn off your computer, stop watching your ridiculously-sized flat screen TV. End your addiction to scrolling through news stories on your phone, which then needs to be recharged.
Move to the Midwest. Live off the land. Make your own clothes and your own soap. Churn butter for exercise.
Live the values you espouse.
And do it before your people gain control of the government and force everyone else to do so.
How does one quantify the death of a future person? Mr. Newman is dangerously close to a right-to-life position.
Am I the only one who notices Mr. Newman's name and want to add a "What? Me Worry?" memo to his offsets?
We only have 12 years left; lots of places to visit.
Althouse might enjoy this one:
Why I don’t ‘believe’ in ‘science’
Let's see what's flying out there right now
Using NYT rules, this guy isn’t bewildered, he’s a goddamned Denier! Otherwise the decision is easy, right? Wait. You don’t think this whole article is a thumb sucking smokescreen so that the NYT can continue to sell advertising to travel industries and run their “how to travel the planet like these rich folk” articles, do you? Hmmm. That foul scent might be the omnipresent stench of Liberal hypocrisy!
"The average American causes through his/her greenhouse gas emissions the serious suffering and/or deaths of two future people."
It seems to me that IF he was really concerned about the deaths of "future people"......he would be also anti abortion.
Abortion is currently killing "future people".
Abortion is currently killing "future people".
In a constitutional context: "our Posterity".
The future people killed actually are people killed in the future.
To quote one of my favorite Bible verses " Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?"
I'm happy I have 12 more years to Live Free or Die.
Elon Musk should have solved this problem before solving space travel.
Climate Scientist is imprecise terminology. It’s use is a “tell”
They's just very stupid, self-centered twits.
There's that idiotic "Consensus of Climate Scientists" again.
Althouse, science is NEVER based on consensus. Einstein himself famously said it would take only one person to prove him wrong.
ALL "climate change" theory is based on computer models. NONE is based on empirical experiment. Mann's hockey stick has been debunked as a fraud, and not even the IPCC uses it any more.
You should get yourself over to www.climatedepot.comor www.wattsupwiththat.com to see the matter covered every which way.
Climate Depot is written for laymen, while WUWT often dives very deep into the science.
As of today WUWT has 389,305,954 hits, which indicates how many people take the time to see the issues debated:
* climate changes all the time, and has done so since the Earth was formed. The Earth has been much warmer, and much colder, and CO2 concentrations have been much larger in the past than today.
*when we came out of the Little Ice Age in the early 19th century, CO2 concentrations were about 180ppm. At 150 ppm plants would not have enough food for photosynthesis. They would die, and we and all animal life would die too. The current CO2 increase to 400ppm is very good for plants; forestation on the Earth has increased by about 10% in the past 20 years.
* there are no mass extinctions going on: the UN report claiming otherwise is a scientific MESS. Ask yourself: if another degree Celsius (a 0.037% change) is going to kill off plant and animal life, why didn't the LAST 1.8 degree change since the end of the Little Ice Age kill them already?
*there's been no significant atmospheric warming for 20 years, while CO2 concentrations have risen 30%, which indicates that CO2 is not a driver of "climate change"
* oceans are not becoming acidic, nor are they heating. Ocean CO2 concs reflect a highly-buffered system: every animal with a skeleton absorbs it. Their skeletons sink to the ocean bottom. (which is why the White Cliffs of Dover are white.)
* The Great Barrier Reef and other coral is not dying due to climate change
* Seas are rising by 1mm-3mm a year. That's about an inch every ten years. That increase is not accelerating. It's been that way for hundreds of years.
* there are no increases in unusual weather events. We have very good data for the US going back to the 1880's. We're the only country to have such extensive data. This year's tornadoes are being caused by cold-air windshear due to the persistence of polar air at high altitudes; last year we had no tornadoes.
* hurricanes are NOT increasing, either in frequency or intensity. On a year-to-year basis they've been declining.
The Arctic Ice is not melting; Antarctic ice is increasing. Their seasonal variations are well within historical norms.
There is so much wrong with warmista dogma, which hides a thirst for power and control and uses the public's general lack of scientific knowledge to create fear and panic. You would be wise not to buy into it.
Belief in "Climate change" is not a moral imperative.
Far as I can tell, the biggest footprint is provided by all those AOC millennials who order their clothes, goods and dinner online - each delivered by separate trucks and each individually wrapped in cardboard and plastic.
Anyway, we'll soon have electric planes and they'll fly us safely anywh.....
"I'll start worrying about climate change when the people who tell me I should worry about climate change start acting like they worry about climate change." - Glenn Reynolds.
John henry said...At least China is doing something about it. They are commissioning 2-3 nuclear plants per year for the foreseeable future.
This. If people are truly concerned about the effects of anthropogenic climate change, they should be strongly advocating for the construction of new (Gen IV) nuclear power plants in as many places as reasonably possible.
They also should be advocating for things that encourage technological inovation and advancement, in particular a strong economy. They should stop constantly trying to hamstring economic growth with idiotic regulations and taxes. They should stop advocating for new expensive, massive government programs that will do nothing but put an excessive burden on the economy. They should stop giving grifters and idiots with destructive ideas so much coverage and attention.
In short, if these people really care about the enviroment and gloab warming they should be doing pretty much the exact opposite of what they've been doing for the past several decades.
These NewYorkers are crazy, miserable and confused. They live in a dirty, bustling international city yet spend their time worrying (on the pages of the NYT) about some abstract notion of their carbon footprint?
Why don't they move to upstate NY? Lotta green grass and space out there.......
Funny how the left always purports to care about the poor yet their solutions always benefit the rich. If we follow Newman's method, more poor and middle class will need to stay home since they can't afford the carbon credits to justify their travel. This will make it less crowded so the wealthy can more comfortably enjoy their vacations.
"The average American causes through his/her greenhouse gas emissions the serious suffering and/or deaths of two future people." The author didn't say how many people had their lives extended because of greenhouse gas emissions from American-made technology, never mind whether that's a fair trade off.
"If you believe what the consensus of climate scientists and the proponents of the Green New Deal are telling us"
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts." Feynman
I think Feynman used the word "ignorance" very deliberately.
Eureka. The solution is knowing that the unmeasurable heat from trace CO2 is a good antidote to the Global Cooling that is actually going on. . It’s the Sun, stupid.
When people start talking about global warming, I now ask them to explain what caused Ice Age and then what caused all that ice to melt. Since no one, so far, can explain this to me the conversation is over.
I am not planning on going to Europe or Asia this year. I will sell my travel offsets for $100 each. Luggage offset will be an additional $25.
ohn henry said...At least China is doing something about it. They are commissioning 2-3 nuclear plants per year for the foreseeable future.
*************
China isn't doing anything tocut carbon dioxide emissions. Far from it:
http://www.mining.com/chinese-companies-build-700-coal-plants-outside-china/
"Chinese companies will build nearly half of [new coal generation]. Specifically, that means 700 new coal plants, with most to be built in China, and about a fifth outside the country, according to figures provided by Urgewald and reported by the New York Times:
Overall, 1,600 coal plants are planned or under construction in 62 countries, said Urgewald, which uses data from the Global Coal Plant Tracker portal.
*** The new plants would expand the world's coal-fired power capacity by 43 per cent.***
The fleet of new coal plants would make it virtually impossible to meet the goals set in the Paris climate accord. Electricity generated from fossil fuels such as coal is the biggest single contributor globally to the rise in carbon emissions, which scientists agree is causing the earth's temperatures to rise.
Shanghai Electric Group, one of the country's largest electrical equipment makers, has announced plans to build coal power plants in Egypt, Pakistan and Iran with a total capacity of 6,285MW – almost 10 times the 660MW of coal power it has planned in China."
We should only travel around the world in solar powered pods...
If a scientist strays from the climate "consensus", they are labeled "denialist" and banned from appearing on some media..and risking their research funding.
Offsets are sucker plays. The man is probably lying about buying them, but if he did, he a fucking idiot.
The future people killed actually are people killed in the future.
The future people are merely potentialities. They only exist in our imagination or that of a philosophy professor. They are probable but not real
Babies in utero exist now. Babies that are being born which evidently the Dems think can still be aborted/killed are presently existing people who have the potential to grow up to be future adults.
How can One be concerned about future people when they are so careless and callous about current people? If they want to have less population by culling the herd today....how can you care about the fate of future people who don't exist yet? You are killing the future
@Althouse, no, it should be cubic feet. Elementary common sense tells us that it takes more energy to melt one square foot of ice a quarter inch thick versus a square foot of sea ice a foot thick. This is significant because the polar ice cap averages ten to twelve feet thick, with some ridges at least 65 feet thick.
I assume Newman is bullshitting because (1) hardly any liberal bothers to get facts before bloviating about global warming, or climate change as they call it these days, and (2) he writes for the Times.
The people one meets when traveling are people with shared interests. I've made wonderful friends while exploring the country in my RV and we sometimes meet up unexpectedly, like when a couple I met who were hosting at a state park in Alabama turned up at the same Alaska park I visited in 2015. And they also spend winters in AZ. It's sometimes awkward being solo when most still travel in pairs but some of my best women friends are solo RVers. We share so much in common by virtue of that distinction that it's almost automatic.
You don't have to debunk the climate "science" to know it's a hoax. You need only look at the proposed solutions, which is are just the proposed solutions to EVERY problem the left sees: more money and power for the government (and its cronies), less money, less freedom for everyone else, and a priceless sense of self-righteousness for the True Believers.
If lefties want to reduce their carbon footprint and still travel, might I suggest they scale Mt. Everest, sans any training. Visit the top of the world and become an ice cube.
Guy said a chunk the size of a truck right? Cubic measure.
If AGW is what the believers claim, it's too late to do anything anyway. All the hard science guys I knew on campus wanted us to nuke up, AGW or not.
Last year, wife and I drove about 4700 miles in two separate road trips; this year we're booked for a our first (and likely only) luxury trip--a European river cruise on a well-known line.
Narr
Sorry, future beings!
90 square feet? Pish tosh!! The REAL and proper measurement would be in cubic feet.
"What's morally bewildering?"
What's morally bewildering is the idea that he is actually supposed to do good at a cost to himself, rather than just screw over other people.
You won't see the NYT article that invites you to think about abortion with a visualization of "future people" with faces that reflect what you are inflicting upon them. The glaring polar bear face is about as intense as the visualizations get.
I believe the correct term here is "sick burn!"
The wife and I recently returned to the US from five years living in Spain. During our stay there, we visited 24 countries and over 125 cities/towns/villages and took two cruises. We had a blast and we're going to do it all again in a few years. We travel with a clear conscience because we always offset our travel by privately funding abortions in sub-Saharan Africa. That type of offset does double duty because it allows us to prevent 500 or so people from exhaling forever and saves the landscape from deforestation caused by poor people looking for cooking fuel. Which reminds me, we usually plant a couple of trees, too, just in case one of the a intended abortees slipped under the radar. This summer we're trying an entirely new offset scheme. We're going polar bear hunting in Alaska in the hope our efforts will prevent the bears we harvest from starving and also leave more habitat for the bears that we might have missed. We also count as part of our offset the travel that Althouse didn't take during the year, so we've got that going for us too. Which is nice.
"If you believe what the consensus of climate scientists and the proponents of the Green New Deal are telling us, you should never travel. Everything else is morally wrong."
And you shouldn't eat fruits imported from Chile, or any foods that have travelled a great distance. Nor should you buy manufactured products that travelled a long way, or which require a great deal of energy to manufacture, or which use non-renewable materials.
And surely you could use less electricity. Which (if your home is heated and/or cooled) probably means really, really small, and (because heat is lost or gained from exterior surfaces) just an apartment (a room?) within an immense building. Better yet, couldn't you live in some sort of dormitory with bunks stacked vertically (as on a warship)?
Truly, there is no end of guilt, for you if you can't reduce your consumption of non-renewables to zero (and you can't, unless you're prepared to live like a wild animal in a remote wilderness) you are going to spend much of your life fretting about and regretting every little thing you consume.
How much energy went into that package of granola? Was the grain planted and harvested by fossil-fueld equipment? Can you afford to use the smallest possible LED bulb, or must you make do with only natural light? If you can't heat with wood harvested in a sustainable way (from trees felled, trimmed and cut with hand saws and transported to your home by animals fed on locally grown foods) then low low can you stand to keep the thermostat?
And if you step on a crack you'll break your mom's back (sorry, mom). Did it ever occur to the New York Times et al that you'd just go crazy if you took all this scolding seriously? Or (more likely) you'd rebel and just ignore all of it?
Besides, that plane is going to fly anyway (with or without you). And it might fly with an empty seat anyway, so what's the harm? Now isn't that better? Far better, just ditch the guilt and do what you like.
"When I did that calculation..."
Please show your work. I think you did it wrong. There are a few things you failed to take into consideration.
@Althouse, no, it should be cubic feet.
No. Click thru to the paper. They measure area of sea-ice extent vs [supposed] CO2 emissions. The ice thickness is "whatever".
The classic combination of "do as I say, not as I do" and virtue signaling (yes, I am well educated *and* well traveled, bro).
My solution -- just use up all the fossil fuels so we're forced to use alternatives! Or cut back on fossil fuels, but be comfortable with high performance energy solutions like "nucular", something that can work 24/7 with or without wind or sunlight or giant dams, but doesn't create Molecules of U.S. Freedom.
I have a simple test for knowing whether climate change is a genuinely serious problem worthy of societal attention: Are elites willing to a) cease travel and b) endorse nuclear power? Until then it's all fake and phony.
OT: Racist leftwing elitist comedy police. At your service.
"When I did that calculation..."
Please show your work.
He did: online calculator + sea-ice paper.
whenever I hear of someone offsetting their carbon footprint I try to offset their offsets. It feels good to run the dryer on high, empty or run my leafblower with extra oil in the gas to get a nice blue cloud. Sometimes I eat partially cooked kidney beans...you want methane, oh yeah.
"You're kidding yourself if you think you can buy your way out of your carbon sins."
The ultimate supernova of hypocrisy is when climate alarmists fly to a place like the Galapagos islands and then take a cruise ship to tour them.
If they actually gave a crap, they would spend the money for the trip on the carbon offsets AND stay home.
If they did that, I would still think they are mistaken that there is a crisis, but at least I would respect their opinion. I think what they really want is to travel, do what they like and have fun--all guilt free because they will have banned such unnecessary things for all of us peons.
Mostly we’re going because of things we saw last time we were there.
You're going because you don't believe the scaremongering you're pushing any more than we do.
These are the same people who think we should be eating maggots in order to alleviate the problem of cow farts. Why would I listen to them?
"32 / The square feet of Arctic summer sea ice cover that one passenger’s share of emissions melts on a 2,500-mile flight."
According to the alarmists, I am "anti-Science" for questioning this line of "reasoning." I'm pretty sure there's an even less scientific way to present the risks of CO2 buildup at present trends, but off the top of my head I can't think of one.
As Robert G. Brown wrote, back when he was arguing about climate change in blog comments, "This is such a horrendous abuse of statistics that it is difficult to know how to begin to address it. One simply wishes to bitch-slap whoever it was...."
I can't believe nobody quoted Glenn Reynolds:
"I'll believe there's a climate crisis, when the people telling me there's a crisis start acting as though there's a crisis"
"What's morally bewildering is that something might be immoral, even though they want to do it
"Keep in mind, these are the deep thinkers who conclude that homosexuality can't be immoral, because the way they are must be the way God wanted them to be, and therefore God must want them to act on whatever urges they have."
Well, the one thing may be harmful, while the other thing is harmless. (God has nothing to do with anything, given that god is a fiction.)
I should have added lawfare:
Whatever Happened to Michael Mann's Defamation Suit (2018 edition)
> @Althouse, no, it should be cubic feet.
> No. Click thru to the paper. They measure
> area of sea-ice extent vs [supposed] CO2
> emissions. The ice thickness is "whatever".
Then, as is the case for most figures thrown around by the climate alarmists, it's just meaningless nonsense.
Saving the world from global warming, NYT reporters will report world news in their basement. After all, one can report fake news anywhere, anytime.
The Drill SGT: I can't believe nobody quoted Glenn Reynolds:
Rae did, an hour ago, but they didn't use the word "crisis".
Tags: abortion, airplanes, analogies, bears, empathy, global warming, hypocrisy, morality, nyt, shame, ships, travel, WWII, CLOWN WORLD
Robert Cook said...
"What's morally bewildering is that something might be immoral, even though they want to do it
"Keep in mind, these are the deep thinkers who conclude that homosexuality can't be immoral, because the way they are must be the way God wanted them to be, and therefore God must want them to act on whatever urges they have."
Well, the one thing may be harmful, while the other thing is harmless.
How many hemophiliacs died from AIDS? How many IV drug users? How many perfectly innocent people caught AIDS from blood transfusions?
All those people were killed by homosexuality. They were killed by a politically powerful gay lobby that kept public health officials from shutting down gay bath houses, and enforcing strict quarantine and contract tracking on anyone who got AIDS.
Then there's the violence that's been done to the US Constitution in the name of "gay rights."
Homosexuality is many things. "Harmless" is not one of them.
If they really cared about CO2 and believed it was an imminent crisis, they'd be pushing for a massive crash program in nuclear power generation, worldwide.
Because that is the only realistic plan that could possibly do the thing they'd need if they were serious.
(Alternatively, they're "serious", but so deluded they can't take the actual possible solution seriously, because of radiopohobia and endless wishful thinking about solar panels and windmills.
But being "serious" in the real world means accepting physics and reality.)
we will buy enough offsets to capture the annual methane emanations of a dozen cows — that’s several times what is needed to balance out the carbon effects of our flights.
Do you think he would mind publishing the receipt for those carbon offsets HE SAYS he is going to buy?
Cruise ships worse than a jet airplane? That doesn't sound right to me.
It's astonishingly cheap to send tons of material by cargo container across the oceans.
It costs less than $250 for the shipment of a container load to a major port on the
opposite side of the world. (The cargo vessels don't care what it weighs, they charge
by volume.)
So a standard shipping container is 40 feet by 8 feet by 8.5 feet and it can carry up to
29 tons.
Now let's assume that out of the $250 charged, one-third, or $83, goes to pay for the energy needed to move this halfway around the world.
So at $3 per gallon that's 28 gallons of gasoline. Now cargo ships burn a different kind
of fuel than gasoline, but it's roughly the same amount of energy and probably cheaper. So let's change that to the equivalent of 41 gallons of gasoline.
At 30 miles per gallon a compact car can carry you 1230 miles.
But how far is it on the ocean? I found sea-distances.org and from Baltimore, MD to Perth, Australia is 13,000 miles.
Wow! My intuition was right. This quick ballpark estimate shows that for the same amount of energy one can transport four people by car 1230 miles or 53 tons 13,000 miles by ship!
Clearly moving things with a ship is by many multiples the least expensive way to move
something a long distance from an energy perspective.
Now to complete this exercise I should estimate the energy cost of moving something by
jet plane from Baltimore to Perth. But I'll be lazy and just guess that you can probably
you can move a can of soda from Baltimore to Perth via jet plane with 41 gallons of gas.
Or in other way to look at it, it's probably something like a third of all the energy an
ordinary American (that doesn't take vacations on jet planes) would consume in a year for
one flight to Australia and back.
So getting back to the cruise ship. How can a New York Times writer get it so wrong?
Well it's likely the case that the author never does math checks and more to the point
doesn't approve of cruise ships and that therefore the statement just sounded like something that should be true.
Oh one other significant fact, it takes 48 days for a cargo ship to move a container from
Baltimore to Perth. With a jet plane its less than a day.
So if we are talking about moving people, we have to consider the food they will eat on
the journey. But 53 tons of food would supply how many people for 48 days?
Environmentalists have been wishing and hoping for global catastrophe for decades, but they keep being disappointed. Their feeble efforts to nudge civilization into collapse are simply laughable.
"These NewYorkers are crazy, miserable and confused. They live in a dirty, bustling international city yet spend their time worrying (on the pages of the NYT) about some abstract notion of their carbon footprint?
"Why don't they move to upstate NY? Lotta green grass and space out there...."
There's no culture up there.
(I've lived in NYC for 38 years and I love Love LOVE it! I miss some of its dank, scuzzy vibe from years back, and I really miss all the bookstores, magazine shops, record stores, and small movie theaters showing foreign films, art films, old Hollywood films, etc, but I still love the heck out of this city! When I move, it will be of necessity and not by choice. I would live here until the end, if I could.)
Is it global warming, climate change or pure bollocks? https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/the-stunning-statistical-fraud-behind-the-global-warming-scare/?sfns=xmwa
We could ask an honest warmist: https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/interview-hans-von-storch-on-problems-with-climate-change-models-a-906721.html
Alternatively, we could join the leftmediaswine and cancel our vacations. 😂
The only alarmist who hasn't been a complete hypocrite is Ed Begley Jr..
"capture the annual methane emanations of a dozen cows"
And what, pray tell, is done with these captured methane emanations?
I'm a complete skeptic denier of the whole carbon nonsense, but I don't find the hypocrisy charge so compelling. Yes, the people who jet off to climate change conferences in Switzerland on OPM are obnoxious, but it's reasonable to believe that one person's sacrifice isn't going to make a difference, only coordinated collective sacrifice, such as would result from a carbon tax, is effective. Again, I don't want a carbon tax, I think it's all BS, but I'd rather focus on the science, or lack thereof, than on hypocrisy charges.
Cruise ships worse than a jet airplane? That doesn't sound right to me.
Let's do a little math. Cruise ships use about 80,000 gallons of fuel per day and carry around 3,000 passengers on average. Per capita fuel use on a 5 day cruise would then be 80,000 x 5 ÷ 3,000. 133 gallons per person.
A Boeing 747 uses 5 gallons of fuel per mile and carries around 400 passengers. New York - Athens is 5,000 miles, so a round trip flight would be 5 x 10,000 ÷ 400. 125 gallons per person.
So...about the same.
The author may take solace in knowing that 90 square feet of two-dimensional ice would not support his body weight, so he'd plunge into the frigid waters under the polar bear's hungry glare even if the whole family stayed home.
From the comments at the NYT: "The New York Times should publish articles like this every week in its Travel section. The kind of travel it encourages, not least in its 52 places in 52 weeks feature, is already directly contributing to the deaths and political violence recorded in its news sections."
say "Yes!" if you are a ProgLibDem to your own nonsense
-stay home- dont travel!
-pay more taxes!
-dont reproduce!
-give up your guns!
-etc.
Laws should be enacted and enforced by and for ProgLibDems only--
this will show who the true believers are vs virtue signalers
but it's reasonable to believe that one person's sacrifice isn't going to make a difference, only coordinated collective sacrifice, such as would result from a carbon tax, is effective
So you believe that those who preach, but are unwilling to be role models and make sacrifices, will at some time in the future be willing to make sacrifices?
Or is it more likely they will continue to live a lavish lifestyle while purchasing indulgences even as the rest of us sacrifice?
Please don’t travel. I have a lot of places I want to see and it’s nicer when it’s less crowded.
"Cruise ships worse than a jet airplane? That doesn't sound right to me. Let's do a little math......
So...about the same."
Not at all the same when you take into account the drink packages.
"From the comments at the NYT:...The kind of travel it encourages, not least in its 52 places in 52 weeks feature, is already directly contributing to the deaths and political violence recorded in its news sections."
There is no higher authority than the comments section of the NYT. I don't even know why anyone wastes the time to read their articles.
The "just living my life" AOC opined “Living in the world as it is isn’t an argument against working towards a better future.”
The good news is revealed here. The governments know the whole CO2 hoax cannot hurt anybody. All they want is loot. Nobody dies except from poverty that will kill off the poor 90% leaving a pure earth for the elite NYT readers.
Fabulous take down of yet another insipid NYT screed. My only sibling and I embody this conflict: I am the homebody/local road tripper, she is the "gotta run off to Europe to make it a real vacation". Which one of us is the professor of grievance studies in CA? Can ya guess?
What strikes me is how "high maintenance" travelling types are. Very tough to amuse them. They need complex, exotic things to be entertained. Being easily amused - easier to FIND amusement.
If you are bewildered, you're just bewildered about whether you — as opposed to those other people — want to center your life on morality.
No.
This is about integrity.
These people don't believe a single thing they say.
This is all about gaining power over fossil fuels and telling people what to do. It has nothing to do with the environment.
(then she became transfixed by her 1st encounter with a dimming light switch)
https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/the-stunning-statistical-fraud-behind-the-global-warming-scare/
To summarize that article, the only reason that we have Global Warming right now is Our Taxes At Work. NOAA routinely cooks the books, fudging global temperature data in order to show that it is warmer now, and cooler in the past. Except that it isn’t. The raw data don’t show global warming, just NOAA’s interpolations of the raw temperature data that does.
Reminds me a bit of my college chemistry class. I never was much good in lab. Not really that good with my hands, except for typing. But decently good with numbers. I fairly quickly discovered how to dry lab my chemistry labs. It helped that I had my own (massive) CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics (bought a newer copy almost 20 years later for my patent practice). I would run things in reverse, starting with the expected results, and fudging things a little to hide what I was doing. Good enough for a low A, but not so good that the TA got suspicious.
This very much looks what NOAA has been doing for the last several decades. AGW has been good to the agency during that time. Made it a lot of money. So, they are heavily invested in the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory. Heavily. Accepting the models that show CAGW as accurate, it is not surprising that they manage to turn raw data that fails to show long term warming into long term warming.
Automatic_Wing said, "Let's do a little math. Cruise ships use about 80,000 gallons of fuel per day and carry around 3,000 passengers on average. Per capita fuel use on a 5 day cruise would then be 80,000 x 5 ÷ 3,000. 133 gallons per person.
A Boeing 747 uses 5 gallons of fuel per mile and carries around 400 passengers. New York - Athens is 5,000 miles, so a round trip flight would be 5 x 10,000 ÷ 400. 125 gallons per person.
So...about the same."
No, it's not the same. Since it would take a cruise ship the better part of a month to get from New York to Athens one-way, it would by your figures take considerably more energy to move from New York to Athens by cruise ship than by plane.
The question is why? What is special about the cruise ship that it consumes so much energy?
Looking again at the ballpark calculation I made above, it still looks right to me.
So let's compare:
28 tons shipped 13,000 miles for 41 gallons via cargo ship (ballpark estimate given earlier)
one person Baltimore to Perth, Australia (48 days) at 26.6 gallons per day per person (according to Automatic_Wing) would be 1277 gallons per person
one person Baltimore to Perth, Australia (11600 miles) at 80 miles per gallon per person (according to Automatic_Wing) via Boeing 747 would be 145 gallons per person per trip
So condensing it even more:
cargo ship: 41 gallons for 28 tons
cruise ship: 1277 gallons for one person
Boeing 744: 145 gallons for one person
I suspect a math error. Someone has made a mistake.
"Cruise ships worse than a jet airplane? That doesn't sound right to me. Let's do a little math.....
'There are cruise ships and cruise ships.
Pathetic, but this is no longer about climate change, this is their new religion (because they have no traditional religion) and virtue signaling. They are not serious and should not be taken as such.
I just finished Tucker Carlson's "Ship of Fools". He talks about the virtue signaling that is now going on with the Sierra Club for example. Once you've pretty much cleaned up the rivers and forced industry to be much better citizens, what do you do to keep you 6-7 figure salaries flowing? Why you move on to racism, immigration, climate change (because climate change is so amorphous that you can virtue signal forever).
But you can not be bothered to clean up the streets of san francisco from human feces, or pick up trash, or defer air travel or multi-million dollar homes. That is so beneath your higher purpose now.
Fakers, liars and con-men all.
I've never been the type of person who likes to travel. I like seeing interesting places, but you can find those near to where you live. The travelling part, I hate. It's important to a lot of people. I joined a dating service about 20 years ago and so many of the women put the need for travel in their profiles as a requirement in a relationship. Also, it's just my experience, but the people I personally know who travel the most seem to be more liberal and the people I personally know who like to stay close to home seem to be more conservative.
" I thought we were talking about the equivalent of WWII. You know, WWII really interfered with European vacations (though many Americans did get a European trip out of it)."
So my wife and I have been watching Foyle's War. A detective story based in a small town in Britain during WWII.
They were raffling off an onion. An ONION.
These people are so far from serious and until THEY get serious they can kiss my ass.
"Only that traveling is good which reveals to me the value of home and enables me to enjoy it better." — Thoreau
PM said: Far as I can tell, the biggest footprint is provided by all those AOC millennials who order their clothes, goods and dinner online - each delivered by separate trucks and each individually wrapped in cardboard and plastic.
*************
Here in Seattle, home of many environmentalists and climate activists, our thrift stores are inundated with donations whenever Marie Kondo is in the news. They have to stop taking donations - so much stuff at once they can't even deal with it. What that tells me is that the good people of this area have much carbon tied up in too much shit they don't need. So much extra shit, even the thrift store system can't handle it if too many people decide to purge at the same time.
If you have an adventurous side, traveling solo to another country with a different language can be loads of fun. Domestic travel not as much.
If the NYT was really serious about AGW, they'd stop publishing a dead-tree edition. Think of all the trees that would save, all the water that goes into producing the news print and the ink used. Plus all of the electricity required to run the presses and gasoline used to send the fish-wrappers out to their customers.
Stop the the madness of publishing, it's for the children's future!
"I'm a complete skeptic denier of the whole carbon nonsense, but I don't find the hypocrisy charge so compelling."
It depends on the claim that's asserted. If someone says that we're not sure of the effects of rapid increases of released carbon, so we would be wise to keep tabs on it, then personal steps aren't needed. If, though, signing up for drastic action is presented a moral imperative, then the proponent has certify to him- or herself as personally worthy of providing leadership on the matter.
Lucky for us we can leave such manias to the maniaticos.
The world is ours, and we shall go where we will as it suits us.
We shall shortly burn much fuel.
AA: I certainly confess that part of what's on my mind here is not environmentalism, but the endless pressuring of people to travel and the portrayal of travel as the very best way to enjoy life.
People are "pressured" to travel in exactly the same way they are "pressured" to buy any other consumer commodity. (I.e., outside of the pathologically easily-bullied, not pressured at all.) Some people use travel to status-signal or conform to convention in the same way they use any other consumer item or activity. So? Why would you expect otherwise? Why the bug up your butt about this particular activity? "Bad travel"? Lol. "Good" travel is one size fits all?
I find things like cruise ships or Disney World or waiting in line to climb the Eiffel Tower downright repellent, but I'm pretty sure most of the people who partake thereof do so because they enjoy them. I'm pretty sure they don't sit around coming up with rationalizations for why the kind of travel I prefer is "bad" travel, either.
“Again, I don't want a carbon tax, I think it's all BS, but I'd rather focus on the science, or lack thereof, than on hypocrisy charges.”
The problem is that the science just isn’t there. The underlying data doesn’t support the CAGW theory (which is why our govt, via NOAA, fudges them to support their theory). It is easy at the Bill Nye level - CO2 is a greenhouse gas. But it gets extraordinarily complex after that. CO2 is a fairly weak greenhouse gas. Far weaker than, for example, water vapor. To get any decent amount of CO2 caused global warming, feedback is required, esp involving (esp gaseous) H2O. Except that H2O is esp hard to model in this regard. For example, it is one of the few substances that can be in gaseous, liquid, and solid form at temperatures on a planet on which we, as a species, can easily survive. Moreover, the amount of H2O in the atmosphere of this planet varies immensely, maybe 1000x around the globe. (Because of the molecule’s asymmetry, it also has many more energy states than CO2). Then you have the problem that in high enough concentrations in the atmosphere, it forms clouds, but not all clouds are alike. Different cloud types, densities, and elevations, have different properties, affecting how much energy they reflect back into space and/or retain. H2O in its gaseous state isn’t the only complication. Maybe 70% of the surface of this planet is covered by liquid H2O (and some of that by solid H2O). Our oceans are immense heat sinks. But they don’t operate consistently - for example El Niño/La Niña apparently turn out statistically to have more effect on global temperatures than do atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
We are probably generations away from empirically determining the second, third, etc order feedback effects of increased CO2 on global temperatures. Just not enough computing power, and the mechanisms are far from being completely understood. So, mathematical models are utilized to guestimate the effects of CO2. Except that the models don’t, yet, come very close at either forecasting, or hindcasting. And not surprisingly, they almost invariably overestimate future temperatures and underestimate previous temperatures. In short, they are more likely to reflect hoped for reality, than actual reality.
Is it science? Much of it is, if you define science as developing a hypothesis, then testing the hypothesis against the real world. Not the fudging of temperature data by government agencies, like NOAA, as appears routine. That is propaganda, not science.
What bothers me are all the scientific illiterates that call people who question the CAGW orthodoxy “science deniers”. How many of them, from AlGore through AOC, understand what science actually is, and that science isn’t done by consensus? I would suggest few, because so many of them have never taken and passed even a single college level hard science class.
I am puzzled. I did a search for "747 fuel consumption" and the first hit was a Ty Joseph (pilot) on Quora who claimed:
Boeing 747-8I/F: 10144 L/hr (2680 gal/hr), 929 km/hr @ 32,000 feet
Then doing some calculation, that amounts to:
18670 km baltimore to perth: 20.1 hours or 53,870 gallons of jet fuel
assume 400 passengers on 747: 134 gallons of jet fuel per passenger for Baltimore to Perth
which is in line with what Automatic_Wing wrote about the energy cost of a jet plane.
But wait a second, 134 gallons of jet fuel! Double that for a round trip. Is that really that much energy?
How much energy does a typical American consume per year (skipping travel on jet planes)?
I'll guess the typical urban commuter about a major city consumes about 2 gallons per working day, or 520 gallons per year. Then add on another 80 gallons for travel other than work. Now we are at 600 gallons per year.
So one trip to Australia would be 45% of the gas budget per year (from an energy perspective) for this imaginary American.
That is a lot. But the problem with this calculation is that it looks only at gas consumption. There are a lot of other ways we consume energy. Like heating your house in the winter. Or the energy consumed to make the food we eat. Or the clothes we wear.
What would the total energy budget be for an average American?
“Again, I don't want a carbon tax, I think it's all BS...”
Of course, it is BS. You know that it is BS because:
- Proponents almost never support nuclear power
- CO2 sequestering and remediation is never considered, despite the very real possibility that it would be far cheaper
- Rarely considered is that maybe, just maybe, increased atmospheric CO2 combined with higher global temperatures might just be better for humans. That has historically been the case. Plants, overall, grow better. Less disease. More food. And in extreme cases, huge swaths of Russia/Siberia, Canada, and maybe even Alaska would likely ultimately be opened up for farming, as the freeze line moved north.
Gahrie:
So you believe that those who preach, but are unwilling to be role models and make sacrifices, will at some time in the future be willing to make sacrifices?
I think they are misguided, but would genuinely support a carbon tax that results in reduced travel and fuel usage in general.
Bruce Hayden:
The problem is that the science just isn’t there.
In case it wasn't clear, that was my point. Calling out hypocrisy is not contradicting the unscientific claims. It's practically stipulating that they're true, or at least something that reasonable people can believe.
No, Ann, you have it all wrong.
They never, never, never cared about THEIR carbon footprints, they care about YOUR carbon footprint.
Flying to Switzerland for 2 days of skiing is a necessity because it's so stressful churning out an 800-word Op-Ed twice a week or giving rich people the noses they like. But, having a large pickup truck on your farm in rural Alabama is a crime against Gaia.
You're welcome.
Re: mandrewa:
I suspect a math error. Someone has made a mistake.
Here is a reference to a container ship using 1,660 gallons per hour. That one can hold 11,000 TEUs (containers) each of which can be up to 14 tons, so for 24 hours of operation, we're looking at approximately 40,000 gallons to haul 154,000 tons, or about a quarter of a gallon of fuel per ton per day. Assuming, say, 20 days to cross the Pacific, that's then 5 gallons per ton in total. Or for a single 14 ton TEU, about 70 gallons for the whole trip (or 140 gallons to move a 28 ton 40 foot container). So I come out somewhat higher than you, but similar order of magnitude. Excellent mileage.
Cruise ship probably burns something on the same order of magnitude per hour as the container ship (at least from a quick google), but instead of transporting 11,000 containers, it's only carrying a couple thousand people, each of them with a state room a bed, a dresser, their luggage, the necessary food, plus all the other entertainment facilities, the pool, etc etc. Plus it's constantly stopping and starting as it hops from port to port. So I can rationalise to myself how the efficiency would be significantly lower for the cruise ship than for the container ship. Sort of surprised it would be so much lower than for the airplane, though.
Ann Althouse said...
From the comments at the NYT: "The New York Times should publish articles like this every week in its Travel section. The kind of travel it encourages, not least in its 52 places in 52 weeks feature, is already directly contributing to the deaths and political violence recorded in its news sections."
Now here is someone not the least bit bewildered, or ambivalent, about the morally responsible thing to do. Must feel good to be so right, though this comment sounds a little angry.
I guess I'll be the biggest offender posting here today. My wife and I just returned after a trip of more than 3 weeks: a 13-night repositioning cruise across the Atlantic from Miami to Barcelona, with stops in Ponta Agorda, Lisbon, Seville, Granada, and Cartagena, followed by a week in Barcelona, then flights back to ATL via Paris. Had just a wonderful time. The Atlantic was as calm as a lake, the weather like being in San Diego (except for Seville and Granada, which were brutally hot). On the cruise we relaxed and I read 3 books, then in Spain we immersed ourselves in Spanish history and culture, visiting the old Jewish quarter and the great cathedral of Seville, the Alhambra in Granada, the Sagrada Famiia and La Pedrera in Barcelona as well as spent most of a day in the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya. (I am sure jaydub can envision all this as he reads it). Not a bad trip for an old retired deplorable redneck who is supposed to be too ignorant to appreciate all this. But I have not an ounce of guilt and i don't give a damn about carbon footprints and the myth of "global warming" or "climate change" or whatever they are calling it this week. My wife an I love to travel and we worked and sacrificed for over 40 years so we could have a nice retirement and do things like this and no one is going to stop us. Already have next year's trip on the books: the Baltic, including Estonia and St. Petersburg. Can't wait.
Re: Bruce Hayden:
- CO2 sequestering and remediation is never considered, despite the very real possibility that it would be far cheaper
Yes -- advances in this technology would be a lot more valuable than chasing the global carbon emissions reductions pipe dream. It would really be hard for it to be more expensive than the carbon emissions reduction option, particularly given that even according to the advocates, carbon emissions reductions won't actually prevent global warming in any meaningful way, just make it so that instead of 2 degrees of warming in a hundred years (or whatever, it'll be 1.8 degrees of warming. And we'll hit 2 degrees in 120 years instead. Just making up the numbers there, but that's the order of magnitude of impact I remember -- basically not a solution at all.
If the absorption spectrum of carbon dioxide is really is the main problem preventing efficient radiation of heat energy out at the relevant wavelengths, we should probably be devoting a lot more of our energy to the most direct solution, which is just leeching carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere (and helping developing countries "scrub" it out at the point of emission).
To whom is he paying money for carbon offsets ? I'd like to get in on that grift.
If people could get over that "authenticity" thing, perhaps they'd learn to prefer ersatz to the real thing.
After all, how many viewers could detect the difference between a good-fake Mona Lisa and the real thing? Better yet, a replica Mona Lisa could come far closer to displaying what da Vinci painted than the real thing, as it could show what it would look like without the varnish and crazing.
The Parthenon on the Acropolis would be tougher, as it's much larger and you couldn't really duplicate its setting. Then again, the original is a ruin and modern Athens doesn't look much like ancient Athens anyway. And you could include the Elgin Marbles.
Although if VR gets good enough, a few binary digits might be made to look better than all that costly reconstruction.
Traveling: Feels good to leave, feels good to return. It's a win-win.
loudogblog: Also, it's just my experience, but the people I personally know who travel the most seem to be more liberal and the people I personally know who like to stay close to home seem to be more conservative.
I think there's a good deal of truth to that. Or at least, that's my impression running into other Americans abroad, though perhaps this impression is an artifact of liberal types feeling free to unload their political opinions on strangers (just as they do back home), boorishly assuming that you share their cookie-cutter PC views. Non-progs, compatriot and native alike, take longer to suss out, what with our having to exchange the secret codes and handshakes these days.
We reactionaries who like to travel also find the coming home to be among the keenest of the pleasures of travel. (As my wanderlusting mother always said, "I love to travel, and I love to come home".) I relish the moment, all travel-weary, of at last opening the door into my own little kingdom of order and comfort. The house always seems in better order and cleanliness than I left it in, as if our guardian lares and penates have been at work in my absence.
Blogger John henry said...
“On our way to Glacier National Park on Sunday. Then drive around Montana and Idaho in a pollutionmobile for a few days.
Gorgeous area and we want to see it before all the other douchebags spoil it with their carbon footprints.”
As you probably know, parts of the park won’t be open for awhile, so plan accordingly.
We were in Kalispell over Memorial Day weekend. Nice, esp since the tourists haven’t shown up in mass yet. Room prices were roughly half what they will be in a month or two. We probably won’t go back there until maybe September. We do an overnight shopping trip every two or three weeks, rotating through Kalispell, Missoula, Coeur d’Alene and Sandpoint, all with a Wallmart, most with a Costco, and all about two hours away. I am thinking that due to price, the rotation will probably be: Missoula, Sandpoint, then Coeur d’Alene, except that we may try to hit the latter when we have family in to visit. Sunday brunch at Dockside at the CdA is really good, and maybe the best fine dining in the area is at Beverly’s, also at the CdA resort. Usually it is a one or the other situation for us, but two years ago we did both one weekend for my partner’s birthday.
I am prejudiced. I love mountains and big pine (etc) trees. Which means that I find much of east MT, and S ID (along with E CO) boring. We have both here in NW MT. We are 20 miles from ID the short way over the pass, and 50 going down the river. Love it here, but my partner is allergic to (or maybe just hates) snow and cold weather.
Tank just bought a new suitcase. I have pollutionmobile trips planned for July, August, September and October. I will be maximizing my carbon emissions by traveling alone. Along the way there will be much fishing. And visiting friends and relatives. I am not offsetting my carbon emissions.
The climate change crisis is a hoax.
Happy trails amigos.
A lot of great memories related to the places mentioned in the comments above. It’s hard to have those memories without actually traveling.
Blogger James K said...
Gahrie:
So you believe that those who preach, but are unwilling to be role models and make sacrifices, will at some time in the future be willing to make sacrifices?
I think they are misguided, but would genuinely support a carbon tax that results in reduced travel and fuel usage in general.
Well of course!
They're rich enough to afford to keep on traveling. So driving away the poorer tourists makes the richer tourists experience better.
No sale.
I'll believe AGW proponents actually believe in AGW when they stop traveling, and stop doing "high carbon footprint" things.
No "indulgences" accepted. No "but this trip is really important!" Those are not the actions of serious people who believe there's a problem. Those are the actions of virtue signaling weasels who just want more power for their side
Why should I have to choose between travel and hectoring other people for their decisions? I want to do both.
I also want to start a website where people an pay me to limit my methane emissions. Pay me $25 or I'll eat a burrito tonight. Unfortunately, carbonindulgences.com has been taken.
Balfegor, thanks for the check on my numbers. Your method for estimating the cost
from an energy perspective of moving a shipping container seems pretty good.
Still I was surprised by the difference in our estimates.
You came up with 140 gallons per 2 TEU for 20 days.
I came up with 41 gallons per 2 TEU for 48 days.
Or 336 gallons versus 41 gallons for 48 days. That's a pretty big difference.
Even though I was doing a ballpark estimate, that's too much of a difference. So
I investigated further.
From Harper Petersen & Co. (ship broker) the container shipping rate is currently
$26,000 per week on one of their 8500 TEU vessels.
So for 48 days, that's $179,000 from Baltimore to Perth. Or $42 per 2 TEU
shipping container.
But this I discovered through further investigation is only the cost of renting
the ship with crew and shipping containers (8500 TEUs) for 48 days, and it does
not include the cost of the fuel.
For that I go to MoreThanShipping.com . They give for a 7750 TEU vessel a fuel
cost of 217 tons per day. Interpolating to a 8500 TEU vessel that's 238 tons of
fuel per day. Or 0.056 tons of fuel per 2 TEU shipping container per day.
Or 2.69 tons of fuel per 2 TEU shipping container from Baltimore to Perth.
A gallon of bunker fuel weighs 10 pounds. So it's 538 gallons of bunker fuel
to move 28 tons from Baltimore to Perth.
According to MoreThanShipping bunker fuel costs $552 per ton. So it costs
$1485 for the fuel plus $42 for ship rental to move 28 tons from Baltimore
to Perth.
So this was the source of my error. I assumed $250 per 2 TEU because someone
I was reading wrote that the other day, and I did not double check. A more correct
estimate would be $1527 to send a 2 TEU shipping container half-way around the
world.
So assuming the energy density of bunker fuel and gasoline are about the same,
the new numbers are (context: Baltimore to Perth):
cargo ship: 538 gallons for 28 tons
Boeing 747: 145 gallons for one person
cruise ship: 1277 gallons for one person
The latter two numbers come from Automatic_Wing and I've verified the one for the
Boeing 747. The cruise ship is clearly an expensive way to travel from an energy
perspective, but then for a cruise ship, as Balfegor points out, most of the
energy being consumed has little to do with moving people around efficiently.
If we still had ships built for efficiently transporting people from point A
to point B, the energy consumption should be much less than on a jet plane.
According to MoreThanShipping, "Recent estimates show that moving goods by ocean
container can be 17 times more fuel-efficient than transporting the same goods
by air, and 10 times more efficient than transporting goods by road."
Last week my friend, who recreationally travels internationally once or twice a year, posted a selfie of herself and her husband in front of a glacier in Alaska, which they had accessed via a cruise ship.
“And for those climate deniers out there, this glacier is receding 100 feet a year!”
Lololol
I did not make the obvious comment, because I try to keep my snark to myself outside of Althouse, which of course is “Wow, what a horrible tragedy! I guess it’s time to ban sightseeing cruises to Alaska! And tourism to Iceland like that trip you took earlier this fall! And your destination wedding in Paris. And the girls weekend in Phoenix you flew to!”
"If you believe what the consensus of climate scientists and the proponents of the Green New Deal are telling us, you should never travel."
This is the essential fallacy of the alarmists, apparently propagated by Althouse here.
Logically, nothing follows from "believing" a "consensus." Values are involved: What matters about the consequences? How should we deal with them? No "consensus" of "climate scientists" can decide that for us. Is ain't ought, as Hume once taught.
Mountainman said: "Already have next year's trip on the books: the Baltic, including Estonia and St. Petersburg. Can't wait."
A cruise is the best way to see the Baltic countries, hands down. We did a 12 night cruise in 2017 from Stockholm to Amsterdam via Helsinki, St Petersburg, Talin, Rostock, Copenhagen, and Oslo. Spent a few extra days in Stockholm and Amsterdam, which was a good choice. Bring lots of cash, though. Those Scandinavian socialist paradises are very expensive to keep in operation.
If environmentalists want to actually do something real about CO2 levels, then Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota have a simple way to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere.
Lake Superior is deep and the bottom waters are anaerobic. We could inject money into rural economies by paying people to log trees and dump them in Lake Superior. Over the deeper parts of course. The wood would float at first but keep there it long enough and it will sink.
It would be interesting to calculate how many tons of sequestered CO2 the trees near to Lake Superior represent. And as new trees grew back they would suck even more CO2 from the atmosphere.
By the way it turns out that the logging industry unintentionally sunk a massive amount of timer in Lake Superior when the area was originally being logged.
See Underwater Logging in Lake Superior
This is another advantage of sequestering CO2 this way. If people two hundred years from now decide it was all a mistake and they want that CO2 back, it will still be there lying on the bottom of Lake Superior and they can recover it.
I saw the other day that Al Gore spoke to some group during Harvard's Commencement and advocated Harvard divest itself of fossil fuel investments. I so wished that I was there so I could holler out "How did you get here , Al; walk?"
@mandrewa I admire your mathematical work, but I have a question on expenses. Moving cargo by air usually puts that cargo quite close to its final destination so there is minimal movement to delivery. Container ships have a limited number of port facilities that they can use. After that the container must be moved by train, truck or, mostly likely, both. It then must be returned to the port facility, one would hope full so there would be no cost really, but given that we receive a lot more than we ship there's a good chance the container will deadhead from wherever it was finally delivered back to its home port. Can you figure out those costs? I can't! Certainly the lobby for the shipping industry didn't want to.
This is the NYT justifying their reporting by email and phone. Reporters don ‘t have to travel to remote locations, like the Blackfoot Reservation in Montana—they can do interviews via Skype. “Phoning it in” saves the planet!
If you are selling indulgences, the unit should be cubits.
Hey Caligula, ever been to Nashville? They have a Parthenon that's better than the original--it's new!
All these calculations. Guess I'll have to depend on my own understanding and judgement, since I am not about to check anyone's math, and I lack clear guidance from some higher power.
Narr
As in so much . . .
"its need to serve the emotions and vanities of its readers."
Speaking of which, how come this post didn't include Althouse yammering on about how she's sensitive re many of her readers' hate of the NYT?
Those disclaimers show up every twenty seven (or so) times she references NYT/WaPo.
Oh well, this post wasn't due.
Transference is fun.
And irony.
IMHO.
BTW, it'd be cool if the Times would marry it's lib readers.
You know, to make up for not being totally green.
Like happened when Althouse had to make up for the 2008 vote.
KheSanh 0802, you raise some good points. In my part of the United States the container shipping ports are Baltimore, MD and Norfolk-Portsmouth, VA. But you don't have to go to these ports if you want to ship something. There's a whole class of trucks on the interstate specialized for moving shipping containers. It's common to see both the 2 TEU units (40 feet long) and the 1 TEU units (20 feet long). They are loaded and unloaded as a whole unit off and on the ship and off and on the trucks by a crane at the shipyard.
If you're paying for a full container load anywhere in the United States then a truck brings it to your door and you load or unload it there. The prices I gave were only for the ocean going part. The transportation by truck will cost additional but since cargo miles by truck cost less than cargo miles by plane, then normally transportation by truck plus ship will be much less than cargo by air even if the airport is nearby.
But the issue of empty containers leaving the United States may be more problematic. It could be that this factor adds substantially to the actual cost of ship rental. I don't know.
"'When I did that calculation...'"
"Please show your work.
"He did: online calculator + sea-ice paper."
No, no, no. That's somebody else's work. That's like the H&R Block tax calculator. All the intellectual inputs are coming from somewhere else. I want to see HIS work. Otherwise, he's just bought into someone else's program. It could be propaganda. He could have been tricked. Do we need more propaganda in the NYT travel section? What about those polar bears? There sure are a lot of them.
It takes about 30,000 gallons of fuel to cross the ocean. A 747 can take 500+ people. It is around 6,000 miles
30,000/500 = 60 gallons per person.
60/6,000= .01 gallon per person per mile going at 500+ mph.
But even so, is 240 gallons of fuel for Lying Nimrod really destroying 92 cubic feet of ice?
I am done with my math but it sounds like he is using as his 'sin' the entire fuel usage of the aircraft to make his numbers seem artificially higher.
I have a simple proposal. Let us lobotomize every single individual who believes in anthropogenic global warming on the grounds that they aren’t using their brains anyway.
I think Althouse has missed why this truly is bewildering to some. There *is*a logical contradiction at work between premises deeply held: We are the good people but traveling produces CO2, which is what the bad people do.
The writer really cannot a way out of this paradox!
“KheSanh 0802, you raise some good points. In my part of the United States the container shipping ports are Baltimore, MD and Norfolk Portsmouth, VA. But you don't have to go to these ports if you want to ship something. There's a whole class of trucks on the interstate specialized for moving shipping containers. It's common to see both the 2 TEU units (40 feet long) and the 1 TEU units (20 feet long). They are loaded and unloaded as a whole unit off and on the ship and off and on the trucks by a crane at the shipyard.”
Friend of mine had a pretty good business going right before 9/11. Originally, he was using union stevedores to load his goods for overseas shipments. Then he discovered shipping containers, and built sorting and packing facilities just outside where the union had jurisdiction near several major container ports. Saved him a bundle and made him competitive internationally.
Get one or two intermodal trains going each direction through town here every day. Expect that they are headed to and from Seattle. The one thing that we seeing maybe fewer of are west bound trains carrying blue green 737 fuselages. Maybe, because they only come through once or twice a week. There was a derailment by Missoula maybe two years ago, when several ended up in the river.
Every immigrant who travels from Latin America into the US steps up from being a low-carbon user to a high-carbon user. Each day an area of sea-ice equivalent to the size of Guatemala maybe in length and width but not height is melted by traveling illegal aliens. Obviously this will add up within twelve years to such a height that - no more ice. Save the Polar Bears - Build the Wall.
I am not AOC, nor am meant to be.
Althouse, have you noticed that EVERYBODY here has denied your witless comment about "consensus"?
That they deny your faith-based belief in "Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change" is so well established that it is a FACT?
Perhaps a quick climb down the Ivory Tower is in order.
What say you?
Or will it be: "Further Blog Hostess sayeth not"?
'...your ride on a 2,500-mile flight releases enough carbon emissions to melt 32 square feet of Arctic summer sea ice cover.'
The thickness of the summer ice cover doesn't play a role in his calculations, I guess.
Not EVERYBODY here.
Kind of ironic, isn't it?
Caligula said...
The Parthenon on the Acropolis would be tougher, as it's much larger and you couldn't really duplicate its setting. Then again, the original is a ruin and modern Athens doesn't look much like ancient Athens anyway. And you could include the Elgin Marbles.
But you could paint them, as they were originally.
Bruce Hayden and others upthread addressed the junk science involved. As a mathematician with many mathematical models under my belt I want to look at the models, which are bunk. Let me simplify, for Howard and other innumerate readers.
Case 1: The models are very simple, in which case the chances that they adequately capture something as complex as our climate, or
Case 2: The models are very complex, in which case the chances that they satisfy the criteria for things like convergence (round-off error dampens out) and matrix conditioning and all the other things that good numerical analysts know to check is vanishingly small. Which leads directly to the butterfly effect.
Liberals have this quaint, unshakeable, love of complex mathematical models. Sort of like Robbie Mook's model on which Hillary Clinton (allegedly) based her campaign.
I'm amazed that people still refer to them as "fossil fuels".
People don't really believe that oil comes from dinosaurs, do they?
“I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who keep telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis.” - Glenn Reynolds, many times over the years, most recently on 5/29
Bill Crawford said...Square feet? Shouldn't that be cubic feet?
Two dimensional minds at work. What did you expect?
Also, when the elites vote to ban private jets and ground them immediately, I will be more inclined to listen to proposed solutions. Sending the government more money is not a solution.
“And for those climate deniers out there, this glacier is receding 100 feet a year!”
When we took that cruise the guide said “as it has been since the end of the Little Ice Age.”
I must have missed the part where Althouse expressed faith in the consensusm BTW.
LOL - well, Manhattan is an affront to Mother Earth. If Manhattanites are true believers, they need to abandon Manhattan, remove all of the buildings, roads, etc., to retore it to its pristine state. This will have the added benefit of removing paper master, The New York Times, another affront to the environment (and sanity).
Out on the briny with the moon big and shinny
Melting your footprint of carbon
I'd love to get you on a container ship to China
While I jet to Paris alone
Meade,
On a Slow Boat to China! LOL
How exactly does one "offset" a cow fart? By inhaling deeply, I suppose?
21-year-old American woman Lexie Alford claims she is the youngest person to visit every country. “My parents would take me out of school and place me on independent study for weeks and months at a time every year,” she said. “My parents placed a lot of importance on exposing me to every way of life around the world ..."
https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/3013287/21-year-old-american-woman-lexie-alford-claims-she
Several commenters above have suggested that the most moral thing that can be done to save the planet is commit suicide. They should read this:
https://www.amazon.com/Bridge-D-Keith-Mano-1974-11-05/dp/B01K13C7L0/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=the+bridges+keith+mano&qid=1559773848&s=books&sr=1-1
Satire, to be sure, but uncomfortably prescient back in 1973.
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