Silvaire wrote:
A more direct approach is to ask if they earn enough money to satisfy their responsibilities and still have fun, or have they been relatively unsuccessful in planning their lives?
I used this, slightly toned down, with #1 sarcastic acquaintance and it worked really well – I’ve not heard a single word since 
thank you @Silvaire
Sometimes the direct approach is the best one.
I think the most difficult to defend is the environmental impact. I once received comments about driving my Tesla as a way to offset burning tonnes of kerosene in the TBM. It does look like hypocrisy to be honest.
Then one wonders about commercial travel. People fly to another continent while they could go by bike to the nearest lake. Again burning a ton or two.
And same goes for business travel – really couldn’t use Skype?
Electric planes can’t come soon enough.
Most outspoken environmentalists are driven by emotion and inconsistent in their choices so it’s not hard to find hypocrisy. I generally ask them if they have children, did the world need them, and how do they feel about their children’s environmental impact.
I’ve calculated how much fuel I burn annually traveling by airliner for recreation and IIRC it’s roughly equivalent to what I use in my own plane, also for recreation. If I include my wife in the equation, we use about twice as much in airline travel as in our plane.
I was recently talking to someone who works at the Environment Agency. I was expecting an argument about flying, but despite having very strong opinions he was reasonable and listened. I did make the point that properly leaned at altitude a light aircraft doesn’t burn much more fuel than a big four wheel drive car (I’d recently got 18mpg* from an O320 and was quite proud), but has the benefit of going in straight lines at three times the average speed, so probably less carbon. I think they’re more interested the bigger picture, ensuring government and big business operate properly rather than demonising individuals. He commutes to work with a reasonable detour to take the kids to nursery On the other hand, it can’t be easy for eco-warriors to get too high in any government organisation, even the EA.
Even electric vehicles aren’t necessarily eco-friendly if their charge is from fossil fuels and they use hazardous materials like cadmium in the batteries.
Following Silvaire’s question, outspoken environmentalists should be extinct in a generation or two
Le véritable voyage de découverte ne consiste pas à chercher de nouveaux paysages, mais à avoir de nouveaux yeux.
*imperial gallons
Yeah, I was easily getting 10l/100km (23 mpg) in my DA40, but the TBM is more like 40l/100km (6 mpg).
It’s true that EVs emit harmful gases out of town. I love it. Much better than directly inhaling NO2 on the streets.
Silvaire wrote:
I generally ask them if they have children, did the world need them, and how do they feel about their children’s environmental impact.
incidently, today one of our newspapers has picked up on this issue and interviewed a few folks who claim to have given up the idea of children “for the environment”. Ok, so they end their line and often enough live lifes quite solitary and are happy to have all the free time. Do they really do it for the environment? I doubt it, rather many have found out one way or the other that a solitary life with changing partners for particular projects is a much freer lifestyle than a family.
Well, I beg to differ. I became a father with 55 years only (way too late) but even if it means I won’t be able to fly or do other fun stuff for the forseeable future due to time constraints, nothing can compensate me for the smiles and hugs I get by my daughter. And, as I remarked to a guy who recently challenged me, as parents of a single child, we in fact have produced exactly half the population we are… and that is us who are both single kids as well. So in one generation we have managed to reduce our families footprint by 4/5ths. To deny parenthood and even imply to do so by force (there are plenty of horror stories of the 1 child policy in China and so on), to suggest to force castrate people to keep the population figures low is equal to some of the worse athrocities comited by folks who thought they could gas or shoot a couple of million folks in ethnic or political cleansings. Extremism has long found the way into environmentalism but has been overshadowed by others so far… but that does not make it less dangerous.
Rather than implying that we should not have children and slowly die out we should educate our kids so that they know responsibility.
It is going against evolution. They are leaving the earth to those who care less about it, rather than producing kids with their own, responsible genes, and brainwashing them into responsible behaviour.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
And, as I remarked to a guy who recently challenged me, as parents of a single child, we in fact have produced exactly half the population we are… and that is us who are both single kids as well. So in one generation we have managed to reduce our families footprint by 4/5ths.
This.
It’s quite seductive to say ‘ah well, if it wasn’t for all the 7 billion other people in the world we wouldn’t have to worry about climate change’.
Rather than implying that we should not have children and slowly die out we should educate our kids so that they know responsibility.
It’s true that EVs emit harmful gases out of town. I love it. Much better than directly inhaling NO2 on the streets.
Quite true. Better still: install PV panels at home and charge your car this way (and the rest of your home). Even in Poland, especially when being extra smart and using Tesla’s home battery packs 
The broader picture: electric cars can at least be charged using renewable energy, so countries can, and should, enable it.
