dickerso

Funny story: I took your advice. Even though I'm far more interested in aviation than cement, I headed over to ConcreteTalk.com and signed up for their forums so as to implement your thoughtful advice.

Sadly, the posters over there with longstanding ties to the cement industry pointed to an example from the blogging world where a young man took a first-class flight from DFW-HKG in first class with carbon emissions that more more than ten times what an Indian citizen lives on for an entire decade. It was so much carbon, that if everyone did that annually, our civilizations carbon emissions would quadruple (if you doubt the math: about 15 tons of carbon for the trip, 7.8 billion people versus current global annual carbon emissions of 36.8 tons). The cement posters asked if the man had a plan to compensate the economic damages of other people directly harmed by climate change due to coastal flooding, diminished fishing yields, or droughts. They asked if the young man had a plan to ameliorate the environmental damages such as mass-extinctions and obliteration of arctic sea ice (about 538 square feet in the case of this DFW-HKG flight).

The cement-mixers assumed that because the young man had used up so much carbon out of our civilizations budget, the young man must have been doing something very important. But then they found out that he had done the trip for no particular reason other than to describe what the bedding felt, like, what the food tasted like, and what the menu was printed on. Hmm, well certainly then the trip must have made him very happy?? Alas, no!

Apparently the service employees on his flight had done an insufficient job at making the young man feel important through a number of micro-aggressions such as not using the young man's name or not prefacing drink orders with, "sir, would you care for..." and the young man tragically did not enjoy his trip very much at all. 😢

He tried to share his thoughts on these great injustices so that the world might become a better place:
https://onemileatatime.com/american-...class-service/

But sadly this just devolved into another internet dumpster fire of counter-attacks from one of the members of the service staff, threats from a purported pilot, etc.
https://onemileatatime.com/flight-at...e-bad-service/
https://onemileatatime.com/american-...ilot-trolling/

The cement-mixers just pointed and laughed at me and said: "why are you harassing us cement makers for creating something that's a crucial part of everyday urban life when aviation's going to count for a larger share of climate emissions than cement in the coming decades (ICAO's own numbers) when most aviation is totally discretionary and even the least self-involved poster-children of flying in the US are cringe-inducing?"

It's almost as though an infinite chain of finger pointing at every different way of slicing up a problem is more a distraction than a meaningful approach... 🤔

The irony of pointing to a positive reinforcement cycle of climate change (anthropomorphic climate change is leading to increased frequency and severity of major forest fires that leads to even more emissions)... 🙄