Comments | maarten: If you have class, don't fly business class

maarten

If you have class, don't fly business class

Apr 17, 2009 05:49

When we were checking in for our trip to New Zealand, I was hoping that we might get upgraded for the long flight from San Francisco to Auckland. I'm tall, I have trouble sleeping on airplanes, so it'd be nice to have the better seats. We didn't luck out, and in retrospect, I'm glad ( Read more... )

travel, carbon

Comments 15

eldan April 17 2009, 06:07:40 UTC

I think you're right in the general case, but that a free upgrade is a special case - they generally only happen when there are available seats in business class and overbooking in economy, so by virtue of someone getting an upgrade, one more person gets to fit onto the same plane than otherwise.

maarten April 17 2009, 17:48:15 UTC

Yeah, I suppose I agree with that.

I simplified the story a bit--in reality, if we'd been on an airline that we have frequent flyer miles with, we likely would have used the miles to get an upgrade, and so it's really that scenario that I'm glad didn't work out.

dreamerfi April 17 2009, 07:34:53 UTC

There are tougher choices to be made

True, but they're not always possible. My business is hosting. I could stop doing that altogether and have no income, or I could (and I do) host in a data center that has this:

http://www.evoswitch.com/en/the-green-fan/

Would that be acceptable?

maarten April 17 2009, 17:54:11 UTC

Ya know, while the aggregate hosting of internet services amounts to a lot of power consumption that we didn't have 20 years ago, it's not the biggest thing I'm worried about. For one, because anything that's electrical is easier to feed from clean replacement sources. (Good luck with that electric airplane...) For another, because data centers have strong incentives to keep power usage down.

I'm too lazy to do the math on the 24/7/365 power consumption of your servers, but I bet you burn more than that on your annual trip to Curacao...

dreamerfi April 18 2009, 07:06:22 UTC

My servers: about 20,000 kWh per year, which creates about 10,000 of co2.

My annual flight is about 1600 kg of co2.

Guess which one I wanted neutral first?

dreamerfi April 18 2009, 07:34:05 UTC

10,000 kg, of course.

Thread 7

waysofseeing April 17 2009, 21:56:31 UTC

I used to spend more time talking about carbon impact and other environmentalist ideas, and then Jon Evans summarized my thoughts on the subject so well that I stopped trying:

http://rezendi.livejournal.com/188834.html

maarten April 17 2009, 23:27:02 UTC

Before I post an enormously long ramble in response, can you say a bit more on how you see this applying to my post? I'm not sure if you're reacting to the proselytizing part, or pointing out the futility of my personal actions, or arguing the futility of any personal actions by anyone in the U.S.?

Do you think that global warming is just another silly Malthusian catastrophe prediction that will fail to come true like all the other ones you say have been predicted in the past 200 years?

waysofseeing April 17 2009, 23:55:27 UTC

Taking those questions in reverse order ( ... )

maarten April 18 2009, 00:57:05 UTC

Thing is, though, that as far as I know about your life and where you spend your energy, you're not directly working to do anything about global warming. Nor about animal cruelty, spousal abuse, traffic fatalities, genocides, cancer, or world peace. Jon's post reasons that "first, do no harm" is a useless stance and one needs to engage with the core issues to contribute anything useful. Are we, by induction, supposed to conclude that you just don't care about any of those things? Or that it's OK to care and not do anything as long as you also don't do anything "useless ( ... )

Thread 6