Proposal Raised For GNOME Software Labeling Its Carbon Cost / Environmental Impact

[oleid]

My wording probably wasn't very clear, we're still talking about the main cause. We, just like everything else in the atmosphere, affect it and probably by a lot. But that's not the same as our CO2 being the main cause. Semantically it's a small difference but the consequences are huge; if we go in head first trying to solve it by reducing CO2 alone then we might find ourselves fighting the equivalent of a lithium stockpile fire with a squirt gun.

It may well be that carbon dioxide is not the main cause and that there are other substances that should not be released into the atmosphere. However, by reducing the burning of fossil fuels, emissions of these substances may also be reduced. In any case, switching to renewable energy sources makes sense as we don't have that much oil left and it makes more sense to use it to produce medicine and tools than to simply burn it.

[Djhg2000]

It may well be that carbon dioxide is not the main cause and that there are other substances that should not be released into the atmosphere. However, by reducing the burning of fossil fuels, emissions of these substances may also be reduced. In any case, switching to renewable energy sources makes sense as we don't have that much oil left and it makes more sense to use it to produce medicine and tools than to simply burn it.

On the surface those sound like good arguments, but when you look deeper into them they're not.

We have plenty of oil left. Oil companies want it to seem like a scarce resource so that they can keep hiking up the prices, but new drilling sites are being discovered all the time. Environmentalists are blocking some of them so that's one factor putting brakes on the utilization of oil resources, but they're still there. We also know how to make synthetic fuel to run regular combustion engines on but right now we're still using oil because it's cheaper. Shell even tried to market their synthetic gasoline as a better option both for the cars (higher octane) and the environment (not a fossil fuel) but people kept buying the oil based stuff because it was a few percent cheaper. Yes, this actually made it out to the pumps where the customers could decide for themselves but it still flopped incredibly hard.

Plastics don't need fossil oil either. Plastic can be made from many byproducts, they can be made from biomaterials and they can even be made biodegradable. Most of the time it's slightly more expensive and they each have different properties of course, but we definitely don't need fossil oil to make plastics. Some thermoplastics can even be recycled almost indefinitely. PLA is a great example because it's being used a lot in 3D printing, where it competes against ABS. The key factor for the market dominance of PLA wasn't because it's slightly cheaper (usually sold at the same price or very close), doesn't release (at this scale almost theoretical levels of) toxic fumes, because it's made from corn starch or even because it's biodegradable, it's the fact that ABS smells worse when printing with it. That's right, PLA is the winner because it's the cheapest thermoplastic that doesn't smell bad. People don't care about the environment argument, they care about price and convenience.

So all that's really left in the debate is CO2. Which again brings us back to the question of whether we're actually the main cause or if it's just yet another distraction from actual issues we should be dealing with. Reducing CO2 is a great thing for the marketing departments because it's a once dimensional value we can optimize into oblivion at the cost of all other variables people aren't looking at, like different kinds of efficiency.