Astral Codex Ten

F-35

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F-35

Article

F-35 is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 25, 2021 and May 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “the same amount of carbon an F-35 burns on one airstrike”; “the F-35 was a dangerous boondoggle, when in fact in the F-35 has so far performed well”. It most often appears alongside Google, United States, Vox.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: August 25, 2021
  • Last seen: May 29, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Carbon Costs Quantified
August 25, 2021 · Original source
Check the sources for explanations of how I calculated some of these. Lbs CO2 is self-explanatory - except that in a few cases, especially those involving beef, it also includes other greenhouse gases, converted to CO2 at equivalent levels of global warming contribution. Avg US person-years is what fraction of the average American's yearly carbon emissions that much CO2 represents. So for example 0.25 means it's one-quarter of the average American's yearly emissions, and 50 means it emits 50 times as much CO2 as the average American. $ offset is how much money it would cost to offset that much carbon, by eg planting trees. Offset cost is controversial, so I've included two numbers - optimistic and pessimistic. “Optimistic” is closest to the existing consensus, and is the price at which most companies will sell you offsets. I took Native Energy's $15/ton as my guide, but there are lots of places with more or less the same price. They usually work by paying people in Third World countries not to cut down trees; since trees remove carbon from the atmosphere, this ought to offset emissions. But there are a lot of ways this can go wrong. The Third World people can accept the money, then cut down the trees anyway. Or they can take money for not cutting down trees that they never intended to cut down. Or they can take money from multiple people for not cutting down the same tree. Or they can lie and there were never any trees at all. Offset companies try to watch for these failure modes, but a lot of people are skeptical. Also, even when this represents the true price of offsetting the marginal unit of carbon, it might not scale. You will run out of trees to protect long before you run out of carbon to offset. “Pessimistic” comes from Climeworks, a company that builds giant reverse-factories which take carbon out of the air. If you’re maximally skeptical about any charity's ability to offset CO2, these are the people for you - they can literally hand you a bottle full of the carbon they removed, so you don't need to take anything on faith. But they charge as much as $1000/ton (I think other places charge less, more like $250-500/ton, but they’re still kind of experimental and you personally cannot buy offsets there). You’ll notice there’s more than a whole order of magnitude between the optimistic and pessimistic estimates - welcome to climate economics. Cost or value is kind of hand-wavey. For some things, it's the price of the item - for example, for "train trip LA -> NYC", it's the cost of a cross-country train ticket; for "eat a cheeseburger", it's the price of a Quarter Pounder at McDonalds. Other times it's about making money - for "mine one Bitcoin", it's the value of one Bitcoin (which may be wildly different now than when I wrote this, sorry). For corporations, it's their yearly revenue; for countries, it's their yearly GDP. This isn't very principled and I'm sorry. I included this so I could calculate the %Cost statistic below. %Cost is what percent of the cost/value of something it would take to offset its carbon (I used the geometric mean of the optimistic and pessimistic offset estimates for this, so a little over $100/ton; people could reasonably complain that if you believe normal offsets work, these numbers are all an order of magnitude too pessimistic). A lower number is “better”. If something’s %Cost is 10, it means that it would take 10% of the cost of item to offset the carbon produced. I gave various things whose cost is entirely based on electricity a %Cost of 45, which is the general %Cost of electricity - it will be less in places with more renewables, and higher in places with more fossil fuels. Some of these numbers are kind of arbitrary, and the whole category has weird implications - for example, if the airline company doubled the price of every ticket, their %Cost would go down, and they would look more carbon-efficient. I wouldn't make too much out of these numbers, and I’ve left them in grey to emphasize this. Sources are listed at the bottom of this post. This table can’t tell you what your ethical duties are. I'm concerned it will make some people feel like whatever they do is just a drop in the bucket - all you have to do is spend 11,000 hours without air conditioning, and you'll have saved the same amount of carbon an F-35 burns on one airstrike! But I think the most important thing it could convince you of is that if you were previously planning on letting yourself be miserable to save carbon, you should buy carbon offsets instead. Instead of boiling yourself alive all summer, spend between $0.04 and $2.50 an hour to offset your air conditioning use. But you may not want to literally offset your carbon. I use “offset” here to mean a donation that removes a linear and quantifiable amount of carbon from the atmosphere per dollar. But this is probably a less effective use of money than donating the same amount to a generic anti-climate-change charity. Clean Air Task Force is the one I’ve heard a lot of smart people recommend, though I also donate to speculative carbon removal work like Project Vesta. Depending on your philosophy of what offsetting means and when it’s acceptable, you might want to calculate how much it would take to offset your carbon use, then donate it somewhere else instead. What are the responsibilities of an ordinary citizen facing the threat of climate change? I support light yokes; if I had to advise people based on what I learned making this table, I would suggest: Try to stay informed.
Inline links: Native Energy, a lot of ways this can go wrong, Climeworks, Clean Air Task Force, Project Vesta, light yokes
Links for May 2024
May 29, 2024 · Original source
Noah also (IMHO correctly) relates this to the ~2015-2020 media consensus that the F-35 was a dangerous boondoggle, when in fact in the F-35 has so far performed well. Maybe the military is just bad at communicating the rationale for its projects to the civilian world.