3M has been facing a raft of litigation that has prompted the move
Generally speaking, toxic substances are only "cheap" due to externalizing many of the costs involved, like increased healthcare costs and lost productivity. If you do a thorough analysis of the costs of using such chemicals, they aren't cheap at all.
I always thought that if our universe is actually a simulation, it's one of countless simulations trying to determine a solution to the Tragedy of the Commons.
I suspect it's one of the hardest problems to solve in any universe.
I try really hard not to use single use plastic. Especially plastic bags, plastic bottles, etc. This frequently means I’ll be extremely thirst throughout some days but will wait till I get home or to work to drink filtered water out of the tap.
I went to Las Vegas about a year ago on a work trip and realized that the hotel I stayed at uses more plastic bottles in an hour than I would use in my lifetime with no thought to conserving them.
All this to say that tragedy of the commons is an extremely hard problem to solve, even when you know about it and care.
I constantly repeat to myself “no single drop of rain thinks it’s responsible for the flood” and try not to think of that Vegas hotel.
About 20 years ago, I made a mistake at work which I later calculated put an extra 8500 metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. (It had to do with the delay/routing of a cargo ship.)
There is literally nothing I could possibly do that could come even close to making up for that...
>There is literally nothing I could possibly do that could come even close to making up for that...
I can say from personal experience this is not true!
You can help fix other people's mistakes!
I was an energy engineer for a while.
You'd be amazed just how much low-lying fruit there is in terms of energy waste.
I was also GOOD at this job. Instead of doing the brainless measures, I would really dig and do a lot of modeling and data mining and stuff to figure out truly optimal solutions. My fee + cost of measures were easily covered within 1-year of savings, and yet it was an incredibly difficult sell to get people to want to spend the money.
But... I had one client, for whom I had to sign an NDA, that single-handedly blew all the others out of the water. They had been emitting LARGE (like, think ~1 ton/month) quantities of sulfur hexafluoride for years. Sulfur hexafluoride, if you don't know is 23,500 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. This had been going on for YEARS.
Our three-man team came in and was able to find all the leaks with some really nice thermal cameras so they could replace the failed seals and parts.
Sorry for going off-topic, but would you mind sharing a bit more about this business? The domain sounds really interesting to me. My e-mail is also in my profile if that's better.
Could you make your business free if you “don’t” find anything to fix, and then you charge a percentage of the benefit they receive? So if you save them 1 million, then you charge them $250k or some such percent
Yes you can do that, and some companies actually go a step further and pay for the upgrades themselves and become like a pseudo-utility (See ESCO's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_service_company) where people pay them what they were paying, and the company reaps the benefits of the savings,
but it actually gets really complex. Energy prices rise, and the clients needs change, they might sell their building, (who actually owns the equipment?) and it doesn't necessarily create correct incentives. It also delays payment by minimum a year, and it's a lot of additional hassle. (How do you handle disputes for unusual situations like them buying new equipment they didn't tell you about, etc. etc.)
That's in the range of 10x the CO2 an average human will produce in their lifetime. If you could find a way to get 20 people to cut their emissions in half, or 200 people to reduce it by 5%, or 1000 people by 1%, you could balance out your CO2 ledger :)
Or, if you still work in the industry and can find a way to make the shipping routes more efficient, or prevent future mistakes like that, you could make it into the green and achieve CO2 karmic heaven!
(Controversial comment warning) one way to save more than your lifetime’s worth of CO2 is to not have children. By not having children, you’re not just saving the CO2 output of the child itself, but the entire lineage that could have resulted from that single child.
Obviously this advice is not good advice for anyone who wants to have children :)
I don’t necessarily disagree with you per se, but I do think these “EV-lite” type analyses are too broad: environmentally conscious people may be more likely to have children who are environmentally conscious, work on climate engineering, &c.
That’s not to say that we should encourage them specifically to have children either; just that children represent potential in a way that the number of bunker-fuel cargo ships does not.
Even the most environmentally conscious person in an industrialized nation will emit massive amounts of CO2 in their lifetime, provided of course that nobody invents a "quick fix" for CO2 emissions in their lifetime. Of course in theory the child could be that person to invent that quick fix, but the expected value is still that the child will contribute to a lot of CO2 emissions.
It doesn't matter. Climate change is happening. It doesn't matter what we do as individuals, the system can't be changed from individual action and it can't be changed via collective action as that would require full cooperation.
There is no practical way we can achieve the goal of survival for all through reduction of CO2 emissions. It's a farce because we'll never get all parties to agree.
The only path forward is to hope we have some very clever science and engineering that can help us survive this disaster.
> There is no practical way we can achieve the goal of survival through reduction of CO2 emissions. It's a farce
It's a farce because it's already too late for emissions reductions to cut it. We need to pull carbon out of the atmosphere or, as you say, engineer other solutions.
But a robust solution is not going to be limited to the physical/material domain. Societies are malleable and so are people. We need to design ourselves and our activities into a vibrant planetary ecology, not throw up our hands and try to patch around historically contingent circumstances
As Octavia Butler put it, God is change, and change is not to be reacted to, but to be shaped
The earth is on a trajectory for <2.5C just based on current technology and policies. The technology and policy path we're on (including developed but not yet implemented tech and policy) is likely to limit warming to <2C, but 1.5C is nigh-on unachievable. Assuming we don't hit any runaway conditions (which is an unknown unknown that we probably won't realize until we're already there)...the vast majority of the world will be just fine. And if governments can get their heads out of their behinds and pass marginally sensible immigration reform, the people who are displaced can move to locations where there are massive demographic bombs going off (most of the west) to stabilize their workforces.
The point is that "will emit massive amounts of CO2" isn't a complex enough metric: if that's how we're calculating EV (which I disagree with in the first place), then it would be perfectly appropriate for me to go around killing truck drivers and suburbanites.
To optimize, you should aim to kill as many people as possible. Bonus points for killing children of wealthy individuals, since they have the highest potential for future CO2 usage.
That's true. It's also an entirely different tragedy of the commons. If nobody has children, we are going to be screwed when our generation is too old to work.
Overheated flooding Greenhouse with a bunch of geriatric seniors bitching at each other and pointing fingers and with no one able to actually get up and do anything sounds about right.
If nobody has children, then it won't matter if there is more or less CO2 in the air. Environmental quality doesn't have inherent moral worth. The moral worth is in the impact it has on people in the world. Nothing at all matters any more if there are no people.
Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think any (serious) high CO2 predictions involve the extinction of our species, but rather extensive displacement as a changing climate changes zones of habitability on our planet.
If the human population reduced to 100m - still substantial - it's not technically extinction. But it's still essentially the end of our world and society. The people who died won't take solace in humanity not dying out.
I would hope and assume that the community rules of HN don’t look kindly upon advocating the murder of any specific individuals.
That aside, I think it’s naive to assume that your proposed action would have a relevant outcome. Any successor is going to need to travel between facilities just as much — if not moreso — as they are brought up to speed and need to have ongoing meetings with executives and managers across a dozen locations.
Not to mention the travel involved in post-death matters of funerals, media coverage, high profile criminal investigations, and so on. And of course the wealth of one person then gets inherited by perhaps a dozen people, any of whom might live a more lavish (i.e. carbon intensive) lifestyle when they inherit even a small fraction of such enormous wealth.
Quite frankly I don’t see how your proposal has any chance of being remotely carbon positive.
I’ve thought about this. I think it really depends on whether we need more climate-minded voters in the future. If we do then those susceptible to this message are exactly the wrong ones to hear it.
there is nothing controversial about pointing out the connection between having kids and CO2 output, the controversy begins when telling people which way they should decide.
Sure there is. I'm assuming you also routed cargo ships more efficiently in your job which prevented extra CO2 from being released. You can't pull the CO2 back in, but you can still prevent future CO2 from going out.
You can plant 8500 trees. Various entities do it for as little as $1 per tree (e.g. https://onetreeplanted.org/). If that stops you sleeping that's possibly affordable.
In one sense it may never, but in another sense it will. In that other sense, you know a mistake to avoid and perhaps can enlighten those around you not to make the same sense. Accidents happen, but you make up for them by making sure those accidents don't happen again or are very likely to be repeated.
Fortunately, this planet has abundant land and sea life that will absorb and fix that carbon dioxide for you, liberating highly reactive oxygen in the process. No problem - the amount of carbon used is proportional to the amount of carbon available. All available evidence shows that CO2 lags global temperature rises, rather than leading it. Science IS real, and it says carbon is NOT a pollutant.
You should have no guilt over this (although efficiency is always to be aimed for). And carbon is probably the least objectionable byproduct of burning the bunker oil that fuels ships - you can't make anything that heavy burn cleanly without insane combustion temperatures.
> "This frequently means I’ll be extremely thirst throughout some days"
Why not carry a reusable water bottle? I have a great double-wall steel bottle (Hydro Flask), which is much better than a plastic bottle because it keeps water cold all day long and is basically indestructible.
In most places I travel to it's not difficult to find sources of clean, cold water to refill it. Worst case, I will buy a large bottle of water to refill it from, which at least is cheaper and generates less waste than using multiple small plastic bottles throughout the day.
>I have a great double-wall steel bottle (Hydro Flask), which is much better than a plastic bottle because it keeps water cold all day long and is basically indestructible.
They actually dent quite easily. I have a 40oz Hydro Flask with a couple dents from an incident with a spider a couple years ago. I had my bottle on the counter top while I was eating and suddenly a spider was on it. In an attempt to kill the spider, I knocked over the bottle on to the wooden floor (trying to squish it). It dented the bottle near the top and on the bottom. I looked up some videos and it's definitely not just me. Found one where it looked like a whole family dented theirs and they used a trick with dry ice and a hair dryer to fix them. I don't know if it gets harder to fix the longer you wait. Mine still works okay, so I haven't done anything about it.
I'm pretty sure the outside is aluminum, fyi, unless they make multiple types. The inside part is probably steel.
I love my Hydro Flask and have drank more water because of it. My only complaint is that the straw lid gets a lot of crap building up in the small gaps and it seems impossible to adequately clean. Maybe an ultrasonic cleaner could do it.
I've had good luck with Simple Modern steel bottles, including back when I still hiked and did urbex and kept one strapped to the side of my backpack. It came through everything from scrambling up and down steep forested hillsides to getting bounced off crumbling masonry with little more than the occasional chip or scratch to the finish. I've dropped it plenty of times too, of course, and it's likewise survived unscathed.
I can't vouch for its durability when used to beat a spider to death because I'm not afraid of tiny harmless animals, but in every other respect I have nothing but praise.
Stainless steel starts with a metallic taste, but after first week of use it is usually gone. Also there is titanium and aluminium.
Or just get a reusable plastic one, perfect can be an enemy of good.
Individual use of plastic is not relevant, as long as it goes to landfil and not ends up in the ocean througg recycling fraud. In UK most plastic ends up sent to poland, where it's burnt or sent onwards to Turkey where it becomes untraceable. I stopped recycling plastic because the system cannot be trusted - at least if it stays in UK you know it wont be hurting anyone.
Half of plastic waste in the ocean waste is discarded fishing nets.
I once did a fair amount of experimentation and found titanium to impart a much stronger metallic taste than stainless steel.
Aluminum is not an amazing food contact surface — it’s quite reactive. I would not use an uncoated aluminum bottle for anything other than plain water.
If you’re sensitive to metallic residual taste, then look for containers made from a type of stainless that meets your needs. There are many kinds [1], I prefer 316 but you might need 321 for example. Some day I’ll engage a machinist to fab one up for me that uses standard gaskets I can get from any MRO firm in the world.
Glass with a silicone sleeve over it is surprisingly resilient. I have had a few glass bottles with silicone covers that I carry around (not all at once...) and have dropped them more times than I can recall and they always just bounce. Of course they can break, especially if you do something like put it in your shopping cart and drop something heavy on it (whoops).
The inertness of glass not only makes it always the first choice for food contact, it's also the most cleanly recycled material on the planet, when it does break. Unlike plastics (which for all practical purposes can't really be recycled), and metals, which require complex separation and realloying, glass can be easily separated visually and reused indefinitely. It is quite likely that the glass in your refrigerator right now contains glass first produced by the Romans.
(Of course, we should just reuse glass containers, like we did when I was a kid - a small deposit is a big motivator for kids to collect bottles for reuse!)
More than steel? We're talking about reusable bottles here, shipped empty. What is the comparison of empty glass or steel to full plastic? What is the difference in mass?
There exist industrial reaction vessels etc which are made of stainless steel with a bonded liner made of glass. That seems like the ideal "forever" food container material to me - chemically nonreactive and easy to clean, but lightweight and resilient to impact. The glass layer would be lost in recycling, but it shouldn't impede recycling the metal too badly as it'd just be a tiny bit more slag in the crucible.
Some also come with a non-stick (Teflon-type) coating. Zojirushi makes incredibly nice vacuum-insulated bottle [1] that unfortunately has a non-stick liner. The inside of the bottle is super easy to clean, but the chemicals used in the manufacturing are awful.
In theory the liner is PTFE (or maybe a different fluoropolymer) with nothing left to leach out. PTFE and its relatives are stable to temperatures well above that of boiling water, so leaching shouldn’t be an issue.
(One big problem with PTFE is that it starts to slowly decompose at a lower temperature than its melting point. This makes it messy to work with. As I understand it, the decomposition products are gasses, so this is a problem at the factory and for the environment, but I don’t think its a problem for end users.)
I've seen people try to have a full course fast food meal at a dog park. Maybe they got some funny looks (mostly from the canines), but everything was fine in the end.
That example is one reason why legislation is necessary.
There will always be detractors saying we should just make people want to make the right choice, but all it takes is one person in a company to make a decision that outweighs the collective efforts of millions.
I recently mail-ordered rice, and because I wanted to buy two different styles I did not opt for the 3kg (like 6 lbs) bag but 2 packs of 1.8kg. Turns out 1.8kg were packed in 3 bags of 600g, so now I have 6 bags at 600g rice, that on first glance look like they are paper, but its actually plastic coated paper. Its really hard to avoid at times.
As for avoiding bags I have two wicker baskets like this https://www.amazon.de/-/en/gp/product/B009BMXLLI/ which means I can avoid shopping bags and they are actually quite convenient for carrying.
Tap water is luckily very drinkable in Germany (rumor has it that Coca-Cola company bottles it and sells it under their 'Bonaqua' brand).
However, there is so much out of our control with plastics that require regulation. Just think of the packaging.
This varies by market. In the US, they just bottle tap water. In Europe this is really unusual, bottled water uses their own wells with different requirements and regulations. For example a stable mineral concentration and taste is very important for mineral water, but of secondary concern for tap water. Also tap water might come from surface water (rivers etc) while mineral water doesn't.
In Poland, there's "mineral water" where it needs to fulfill those requirements, and "spring water" that is basically bottled tap water. The first one costs like 0,5$ for 1,5L , while second one can be bought for as low as 0,2$.
Germany has mineral water and table water. Table water is the bottled tap water.
Though where I live, even table water would be better than unfiltered tap water. Not because of health concerns (I actually had my tap water lab tested as the building is from the 60s), but because of limescale in the kettle and disgust on my tastebuds ;)
Does the preferences for the qualities bottled water in Germany have any intersection with the history of public springs emitting carbonated mineral water?
You mean if everyone else's preference for flat water is linked to their springs emitting flat water?
After the world seems to be in agreement that CocaCola and most lemonades are best served carbonated. But for water there's this weird schizm over carbonation.
I would say it varies pretty widely on a much smaller than country level, moreso by source. Water from an aquifer almost always tastes much better than water from a river.
London tap water varies a lot in different parts of London. When I used to live in North-West London it was very hard (ie: full of minerals) so you'd constantly be cleaning the limescale gunk out of your shower, off your taps, etc. And I also remember it smelling noticeably "chlorinated" at times. Now I live in East London (E14) and it seems much softer - we get a bit of limescale but nothing like it was at my old place, and no pool-water smells.
But anyway, I think anywhere in London, so long as you run it through a filter (ie: Brita filter) and chill it, it tastes more or less as good as any bottled water.
Dehydration is more of a risk to you than the environmental risks you marginally save on others. Still I applaud the effort since the economists view is too restricted.
Get a stainless steel container and hydrate for a lifetime.
The risks of dehydration are way overstated imo. And I live in a warm weather country.
Whole being thirsty isn’t optimal the actual risk of something serious happening is negligible. Especially since I monitor my urine color and other signs. It’s more convenience and the habit of convenience we’re all so used to these days.
I’m not so sure about that. Some people are more susceptible to it than others. There’s also some weird trait that makes some people drink less water than others. Both my father and myself seem to share this trait. We have to force ourselves to drink water. For whatever reason, I could go an entire day without drinking water. Not sure why it is, but it causes problems. I was on vacation with my father and he collapsed in literally the middle of nowhere because of dehydration. It was pretty scary and he almost didn’t survive.
I have the same thing. I have to “force” myself to drink. Especially in Warmer weather. My daughters have the same. I’m not sure whether it is genetic or nurture.
Most people are constantly dehydrated. The fact lots of people drink sugary drinks makes it even worse. As someone dealing with a 3rd round of kidney stones - please stay hydrated! You don't want this pain, trust me...
This strikes me as something constantly asserted but never proven. It should be pretty trivial to find out if this is the case, medically, so there should be data. I went ahead and searched around and although I see a lot of headlines about it, there is a lack of definitive corroboration. I found these sources:
"According to the lay press, 75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated. While this is not supported by medical literature, dehydration is common in elderly patients."[0]
" In fact, scientific studies suggest that you already get enough liquid from what you're drinking and eating on a daily basis. We are not all walking around in a state of dehydration."[1]
"The notion that there is widespread dehydration has no basis in medical fact"[1]
The thing is that if you monitor your urine color (and act upon it) you are already managing hydration?
My mother in law was hospitalized twice for dehydration. She is mindful of it and still some days she doesn’t drink enough. Drinking is hard for her as other commenters mention here too. After that I just started drinking an extra liter of tea by just carrying the bottle around. Even the extra peeing stopped after a few weeks.
Exactly. What I always tell vendors when I get a strange look after refusing their plastic bag is that we use it for 5 minutes but it stays in the environment for 1000 years.
They make plastics that biodegrade in a few years. Supposedly even in a landfill they degrade (I've seen this debated, I'm not qualified to figure out who is right). However they are more expensive and so rarely used except when someone wants to make a point about being green.
Nothing wrong unless it is used to store food or water and contains some BPA-like compound (AFAIK it includes most plastic produces nowadays even so called BPA-free).
^^^^THIS!^^^^
There is early evidence that most BPA and pthlalate replacements may be considerably worse for you than the things they are replacing. (At least, worse in the sense that they are possibly more dangerous as endocrine disruptors and hormone mimics, and also possibly harder to remove from the body...)
Best choice is to insist on glass packaging wherever you can. It's inert and infinitely recyclable.
Do you know if that metallic taste is considered (in-)healthy? I have no clue and actually like that taste and must admit that in the steel for everything department I’m following the trends as well (steel for cooking - no PFAS; steel for drink containers - no plastics).
It's harmless. The sensation is electrolytic in origin rather than caused by taste receptor activation; it's like when you put a 9 V battery to your tongue except much less potential and therefore weaker feeling.
Single use plastics literally don't matter if they end up in landfill. The vast majority of plastics in the ocean are coming from about 5 rivers in China. Plastic in a landfill is fine, it's a no-op: oil comes out of the ground, does not get burned into CO2 in the atmosphere and then will go and sit in the ground for several thousand years (or more likely, we'll dig it all back up once energy is cheap enough that it can depolymerized and reused).
You wrote: <<The vast majority of plastics in the ocean are coming from about 5 rivers in China.>> I tried to Google about it but found nothing. Where did you learn about it?
You need to stop thinking about bringing your own footprint ever closer to zero, you must also stop thinking that doing so is a powerful revolutionary act, and join or create organized groups vowing to bring about social change. Be it in your family, your neighbourhood or your municipality.
Yes, unfortunately the core item that more hardcore evangelists for topic XYZ seem to be unable to grasp, maybe due to being too close/deep in the subject. If I had a NFT every time somebody on HN stated 'we need to abandon cars, or abandon plastics altogether' and similar, I would be drowning in a lot of useless tokens.
The thing is, the motivation for given topic is always fair and just, and so are the goals, so its normal to want to do more and more. But at one point they move so far from general population they are seen as extremists, and whatever good their push is trying to achieve is completely blocked by this extreme approach and negative emotions it sparks.
Get engaged in politics, create groups, figure out who has real deciding power and apply soft pressure there... this is how good changes are done in timely manner. Other way is to wait till SHTF and there is reaction, but damage is already done like in this topic. Otherwise society just heads to division and conflict on many levels, and as for example covid showed us if you push big part of population hard/long enough they will eventually move to some outright non-smart positions that will be then very hard to abandon.
The secret is to aim for lesser goals. Don’t try to get rid of all plastics just aim to reduce some specific kind of single use plastic etc. Setup an organization to ban cars in the central core of your city.
The advantage to ‘save the whales’ over save every endangered species is it’s much easier to gain traction and you can pick the easiest targets.
The problem is so many of the revolutionary groups are full of anarchoprimitivists and the like. I sure wouldn't want a revolution that put them in charge. It's getting scary out there with how many people openly want industrial society to end.
Many of them don't even care about reducing resource consumption, they're goals are much more philosophical.
We'd wind up with wood stoves instead of solar panels. Resources consumption would go down, maybe, but it might just be because a lot of people would die.
Other than than that, obviously I'm all for improving society and all.
> I try really hard not to use single use plastic. Especially plastic bags
People treat plastic bags as single use, but you can reuse them for years. I’m not saying you should seek them out, but don’t just throw them away after one use when you find yourself with some.
I love thin grocery store plastic bags, and reuse each one dozens of times. But my local government (small Massachusetts city) banned them, so now grocery stores have to use paper (much less reusable) or extra-thick bags (more bulky, less flexible, don't last significantly longer).
It takes real amounts of thought to reduce your footprint; the visible/obvious solution often isn't the right one.
I end up using the bags I get (from food delivery, shopping for fruits etc) as garbage bags or dog poop bags. So I reuse the ones I have. But they still last 1000 years in our environment to save me a minimal amount of convenience.
Actually the tragedy of the commons cannot be stopped by one government. If USA chooses to tax all externalities perfectly, both our production capacity and consumption will be a tiny sliver of its current quantities. By GHG alone we'd lose 80% of our economy, but that doesn't take into account the potential cost of removing dioxin and PFAS from our groundwater, remediating lithium mines, cleaning our air of fly ash, preventing any toxic chemical leaks, making our rivers and lakes and ponds drinkable again, etc. I believe that would reduce us to about 1% of our current GDP.
Assuming we didn't riot ourselves to rubble, other nations will quickly outstrip us. Eventually we'd be a vassal state of another superpower. Either because they'd buy our politicians, use crises of supply shortages to force us into free trade deals which axe our externality taxes, or via outright force.
Other nations would do to us what the USA did to Latin America when those nations wanted to throttle their development for ecological reasons in the 60's and 70's.
Sustainably, we probably wouldn't even be able to keep and train a competitive military -- 6% of our nations carbon emissions are from our military, accounting for 52% of federal carbon footprint, and our military emits more GHG than 140 countries (individually/separately).
> Actually the tragedy of the commons cannot be stopped by one government.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
The US could focus on lower cost - high impact externalities taxing.
It could persuade, cajole, bully its partners and allies to agree to a treaty doing the same. It did it for FATCA, for sure it can do it for climate change and general environmental destruction.
Once you have such an international treaty in place, most of the rest of the world would follow. US partners and allies are probably 70% of the world economy, and the countries with the most slack, economically, that can best afford this.
I've got to a similar conclusion as you but with a very different outcome.
It makes absolutely no difference if i minimise my plastic or diligently sort them for recycling because a Vegas hotel will make all my efforts for naught.
Climate change is already here and there is nothing the individual can do about it. The optimum play now is to accept that the group is useless and make individual steps to mitigate the effects on you personally.
You can carry a water bottle in a small backpack or if you're in a city with fountains use them. Or buy water that comes in cartons though I'm not sure it's easy to find these or if they're actually plastic free.
Water (or any other liquid) packed in cartons is mostly just green washing.
Most of the cartons are either lined with plastic, or they are tetra packs. Both of these options (especially tetra packs) are much more difficult to recycle and worse for the environment than simple PET bottles.
I have used the Stash bottle from Hydrapak [1] for a few years now, that one is the definition of light, and very versatile. The interesting thing is that the opening fits the filter by Katadin made for their BeFree bottles [2], so you could even take that on hikes where you are not entirely sure of the water quality (filters particles and bacteria, but not viruses). I actually carry and use this combo, not related to the companies.
The amount of plastic ending up in oceans/nature from "The Western world" is not very significant relative to the total.
There are entire continents that essentially dump most of their (plastic) trash straight into rivers (and thus oceans). Looking at you (South East) Asia...
The Western wolds is comitting massive fraud and has you fooled too.
In UK recyclers get paid by the government a small amount per ton recycled. It is , however, not enough to trully recycle anything. So they take out a few valuable plastics, and pay randpm company in poor country to tale this plastic, and to sign paperwork saying that it's going to a recycling facility. In reality it will simply be dumped, and money will be pocketed.
Then when someone complains, they pull the documents thst were signed by some random fall guy, make a surprised face, and claim they thought the plastic would be recycled.
Where does it end then ? Burned in the air ? I don't know if it is worse or better, I have no data about it. But I suppose it's neither neutral.
Recycling plastic is very hard as a single product is often a combinaison of different kind of 'plastics', which happen to be a generic name for different materials, and which impose different kind of treatment for each of them. Colored plastics add up to the issue as you can't recycle different colored plastic of the same kind together...
For example, a single coca-cola bottle is typically made of 3 kind of plastics : the bottle itself (transparent), the cap(red with white or black scripting), and the wrapping around of the bottle (made of 2 or 3 different colors).
And that's nothing compared to toothpaste tubes, which was taken as an example in a recent 'Der Spiegel' issue to illustrate the ecologic nightmare plastics represent. And let's not forget ketchup plastic bottles, which is also some kind of marvel of assembled plastic enginering.
Plastic recycling is currently more a matter of vertue signaling than a reality as only 1 to 5 percent of plastic (I don't know the exact numbers) is curently recycled worldwide.
In western world (or at least in europe), most of them are incinerated in electricity thermal generators or buried in waste dumps.
Until recently, american waste (plastics) were send to China to be buried or burned, until the chinese government made it illegal.
The real indicator should be some kind of a 'plastic consumption index' by countries and/or companies and/or household, used to monitor the amount we produce it, use it and get rid of the waste.
A lot of it doesn’t just go into the ground. It ends up getting washed (or dumped) into the ocean where it pollutes beaches, and gets ground down into micro-plastic particles which poison sea life. Still more gets incinerated, creating local air pollution and contributing to carbon emissions.
If you're putting single use plastic in a non-recycling bin in the developed world its pretty much guaranteed to go to landfill, not the sea. More so than putting it in a recycling bin where they might transport it on a ship to China.
Welcome to the developed world (in my case: Germany), where recycling is enforced by ordinances and/or contracts with your waste removal organisation, which will check if you did so properly, and refuse to take your refuse away if they think you have not recycled properly enough.
> It ends up getting washed (or dumped) into the ocean
Not where I live (northeastern USA), where the vast majority of discarded plastic ends up in landfills. Virtually none gets "washed (or dumped) into the ocean"; the minor exception is trash dropped by thoughtless people.
> "the minor exception is trash dropped by thoughtless people."
In many parts of the world, this is completely normal, unfortunately, not a "minor exception". Even here the UK, canals and rivers are often full of floating plastic bottles, bags, and other litter. I know because I've volunteered to clean it up: the quantities we pull out is insane. And a few weeks later, it's all back again. Frustrating and sad.
I had a similar discussion with friends who said they were going to stop flying completely. To me all you are really doing there is reducing the cost at the margin by reducing the demand by a tiny amount.
You really shouldn’t do this. You are risking your health by becoming dehydrated. I’m not sure your avoidance of plastic at all costs even makes sense on any level.
Funny how Europeans and others aren't constantly "hydrating" (in fact, they tell me they think Americans are silly for carrying water bottles around), yet they never suffer any effects of dehydration. (Most European meals are served with only single-digit ounces of liquid.) You really don't need to drink very much, and in fact drinking large quantities can produce some bad effects by demineralizing the body (magnesium in particular, but many others too), especially over the long term...
I monitor my urine color and how I feel. If I feel bad I’ll grab a glass of water or even buy a plastic bottle, but that happens maybe once a year.
I really think that people aren’t that fragile and the bottled water industry has done an excellent job of making people think they need to constantly hydrate in order to not have a heat stroke.
Imo it’s enough to just pay attention to yourself and how you feel.
Doesn't look like much of a 'law' to me. His optimism ignores some fundamental facts, like living in a (nearly) closed system. So there must be a point at which oil production will decline because our usage far outstrips it's production. Humans are trying to adapt yet I don't think extraction from shale, fracking, and giant super buildings in the desert are going to solve the fundamental issues around sustainability.
He’s not saying to ignore problems. Rather that we tend to fix things just in time once the problem becomes very apparent. Y2K is the best example. Fixing the ozone hole would be another one.
I really don’t worry too much. I’m lucky to be surrounded by the tech seen in Israel and just see so many innovative ideas and solutions to various problems on a daily basis.
It’s more that it just doesn’t seem worth it. We use a bag for a few minutes and it’s in our environment for 1000 years. It seems like such a bad trade to me.
Tragedy of the commons was a false-flag by british aristocracy which enabled them to seize Commonhomd land from Commoners in 1500's and drive them into poverty and endantured servitude.
In a single masterstroke they gained assets and labour.
Your article says that the tragedy of the commons does not have to happen, but we don't really have the numbers. Those examples could be cherry picking, and everyone's personal experience kind of says that the opposite is more common (commons mismanagement). That's why the original article was so influential: it gave a name to something we've always seen.
It's great that we can assume tragedy of the commons is not as immutable as some law of physics, but it still looks like a powerful social force unless proven otherwise.
And I imagine, like any social study, it's going to be very hard to get actual numbers for the tragedy of the commons versus comedy of the commons scenarios.
People act in their own self interest which is often at odds with the entire population’s interest. See: prisoner’s dilemma.
Tragedy of the commons is now defined in game theory and is a naturally occurring phenomenon when people have limited resources and the drive to survive.
Sure. But define “limited resources” and “survive”. When life is zero sum - i.e. either you die or I die, yes humans are often selfish. But in actual day to day life those situations are exceedingly rare. Our normal drive, in my experience, is to form communities around shared care of common resources - because that is often both in our personal self interest and in our communal interest.
Is it really that hard though? On the top of my mind I can come up with several success stories of solving tragedy of the commons type of problems. For example:
Global regulation around CFCs made the ozone hole shrink
The don't mess with texas anti littering campaign and similar outreach programs worldwide reduced littering
In general taxing negative externalities seems to have an effect
Or is most of the difficulty in trying to convince people who've read articles about "the tragic of the commons" and think that's the natural state of the world that they're wrong?
Earth's ecosystems have evolved biodiversity for exactly this reason: to recycle the waste products of life forms at all levels. They've gotten really good at this. There is still geologic evidence of this having gone way, way out of control, like vast limestone deposits, coal, and fossil fuels. Those were the unrecyclable byproducts of the day. Who knows what plastic will look like in the geologic record, but at this point they look destined to be a fine dust that will give future (non-human, likely) geologists a perfect marker of the Holocene.
Life optimizes for the most efficient resource usage. Those deposits were not an efficient source of energy.
But life itself is incredible, we have non-oxygen using lifeforms (inefficient, the earliest lifeforms), sulphur-eating lifeforms. Life can use up almost anything, <<if it has to>>.
Calculate the hidden cost. Tell the companies that you'll either vote for a tax or accept a lucrative post in their board of directors after your term is over. Profit!
Calculate the hidden cost. Spend half of the cost on a marketing campaign to sway public opinion against a tax. Profit!
Maybe one way to mitigate is to have a separate branch of the political system dedicated to calculating the costs. Then make the methods for calculating as publicly available as possible so that they can be reproduced by non-profits.
We have managed judicial systems. We can manage this too.
I don't see how that helps. For example there are many publications available that calculate the cost of CO2, eg [1] from the German government. Yet global warming is still a problem.
Calculating the hidden cost isn't simple "hard", it's nigh impossible. We've spent billions trying to calculate the externalities of a single gas (CO2) and we're still incredibly uncertain with giant error bars even with a ton of assumptions.
I mean it's hard in the same way as converting from a dictatorship to a democracy is hard. There's a huge political transaction cost. And then you'll wonder what took you so long.
Money is just a proxy here for the harm it does. Some people would rather not get a check for having lost body parts, a la that scene from Erin Brockovich. They would rather not endure the harm to begin with.
the funny thing about your comment is that it is only a hard problem because you were fooled on the premise.
the term itself was a fake argument against the commons, in favour of privatization of commons. every single word of the argument today is known to have been a falacy.
so the answer to the tragedy of the commons is to not believe in it. property is the real issue. but even thinking that way will offend your sensibilities.
"I suspect it's one of the hardest problems to solve in any universe" ... and yet solve it we must. I feel it will begin with a new enlightenment which will be thrust upon us as our survival becomes increasingly threatened and that will manifest in a rewriting of our core values and a redefinition of wealth more in line with and reverence for the natural world.
Evolving into a culture of totalitarian rationalism like the Vulcan, would require irrational parties to be at an evolutionary disadvantage. That rules out any modern democracy from ever doing it, since discriminating anyone acting on instinct or feelings won't ever get a majority vote.
I wonder if we are "beyond the basics of evolution and selfish genes" now in terms of human intelligence, technology, society and soon: AI. For example once a species can edit it's own genes, you get to a point where maybe the genes "competing" and "being selfish" becomes meaningless, and some other defining "replication force" takes over as the dominate shaping of future life.
We might get to "the selfish data"? Genes being a special case.
Narh, when it comes to breeding, we humans tend to be quite predicable. Outliers definitely exist, but they generally don't procreate as much as people who just feel the urge and go for it. In order to shape evolution you'd need to make what would essentially begin as an edge case and make sure it's such an advantage that it reduces the likelyhood of others having more children than you.
True, and this is why ants and cockroaches are more
“evolved“ than humans. (although is it the being or the gene?) But humans can conceive bigger goals: we could genetically engineer new beings, and replace natural gestation with something else. These are untenable ideas but in 100 yrs ethics might change and the temptation to change how we and things evolve would be there.
Are you familiar with the work of Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics, who won it for debunking the so-called Tragedy of the Commons in general and specifying where it applies in particular?
Want the lived-experience argument? I live in Palestine. Palestinian villages managed their lands collectively for ages and ages, up until the 20th century. This broke down not because anybody was misusing the commons, or fencing, or whatever - it broke down because the damn Ottomans started a land registry and you got a few people making themselves official owners of huge swaths of land they should not have had any claim to. So the only tragedy was external elements disrupting the commons by force.
This article is both an illuminating critique of the author but also an ad hominem to the argument.
Terrible people can be absolutely correct. In this case, the tragedy of the commons both exists and affects many things (like international fishing).
It is true that history shows examples of communities managing their common resources over generations. This need not be the default; when it isn't you get the tragedy of the commons. That is why its important to both understand it and to build community norms that encourage respect for common resources.
Would I be correct in my read of your take that you don't believe the tragedy of the commons exists? If it does, do the original author's other beliefs matter when discussing it?
The author of this article agrees with you, and says so; I was more interested in the latter half of the article, where he explains why "the facts are not on Hardin's side".
> Would I be correct in my read of your take that you don't believe the tragedy of the commons exists?
The privatization of the commons seems to me the much greater tragedy, leading to large-scale exploitation and irresponsible environmental degradation. From what I see, distributed networks of human-scale communities tend to manage shared resources in a sustainable way; to fuck things up on a grand scale, you need centralized power and a managerial distance from consequences.
> It's true that history shows examples of communities managing their common resources over generations. This need not be the default; when it isn't you get the tragedy of the commons
It looks like you're agreeing that counterexamples to "tradgedy of the commons" being a default state exist in history yet your conclusion is "tragedy of the commons is the default if a better option isn't employed".
Why can't it be true(based off your same evidence) that tragedy of the commons is an unnatural state, and respect for common resources is the default?
Along with a sibling, I agree that the concept of "Tragedy of the Commons" can be useful while its original author is a deeply flawed human being whose other arguments and extrapolations are insupportable and morally reprehensible.
Still, I'm grateful for your linking to this excellent critique of the source article which, among other things, provides a handy label for an ethically and morally dubious extrapolation the critique labels "lifeboat ethics" which I often seen deployed by the wealthy against the impoverished.
> an idea [Hardin] called “lifeboat ethics” [0]: since global resources are finite, Hardin believed the rich should throw poor people overboard to keep their boat above water. [1]
The humans making the cost/benefit analysis are largely the ones whose cost is actually external. I certainly wouldn’t do the same math, but I’m not casually enriching myself by making people sick. The people who buy their products are largely their victims, not their accomplices.
Nearly everyone does NOT own the means of production, and the few who do know exactly what’s wrong and keep on doing it to everyone but themselves until they’re forced to stop. Maybe someday we’ll realize that too.
Technically, Blackrock and Vanguard own the means of production. We gave them the capital to do so through our pensions and 401(k)s. My 401(k) menu doesn't include ESG funds, but those that exist have higher expenses and lower performance than an indiscriminate index fund. If the regulators have been captured by lobbying and revolving doors to industry, the only option left is to vote with your wallet, but that's easier said than done.
Divestment without regulations doesn't work. You dumping your polluting investments is just someone else's opportunity to pick them up for cheap and make a profit.
Voting with your wallet is noble, but pointless. Vote with your actual vote.
> the only option left is to vote with your wallet
I know it’s not popular here but I’ll say it: class analysis. You can vote with your fingers and bones. You can vote with your personal dignity. Your investment portfolios are just part of capitalism and it isn’t predestined.
I haven’t done my homework but I find it strange that I hear so much about 3M while DuPont seems as bad — or worse — but it could simply be that I’ve read more about DuPont and I’m missing some inexhaustible list of atrocities 3M has committed.
DuPont discovered PTFE while exploring for new refrigerants. It was used in the Manhattan Project because it could resist flourine used in the gaseous diffusion of uranium, then marketed as Teflon after WWII.
3M discovered PFOS while developing rubber that wouldn't degrade when exposed to jet fuel, then marketed it as Scotchgard.
It's a difficult balance to strike though. Forcing companies to consider all possible externalities is very difficult / expensive to get right. And if you don't get it exactly right, you very quickly increase your surface area for issues like regulatory capture, etc.
Just another in the long list of coordination problems where it is hard to arrive at the pareto-optimal solution given human selfishness and our lack of omniscience.
These companies often know quite well there is a huge cost they are offloading on others. Evidence for this is seen in the huge sums spent on lobbying and politics in general.
Agreed. If we could force companies to pay for externalized costs we could get to a net-zero earth immediately. Suddenly investments in green energy would increase 1000x
We do get it. Sometimes the costs aren't known in advance, and you can't include every potential future issue in the cost/benefit calculus.
Isn't that literally what the article is pointing at? Shareholders put pressure on the company to stop this, and they are. Sounds like a success story.
3M knew for decades about the dangers of exposure to PFAS chemicals but didn’t inform the public.
During the 1970s and ’80s, it conducted studies on its US workers that showed PFAS building up in the bloodstream.
In 1977 the company determined PFOS was “more toxic than anticipated” in a study of rats and monkeys; in 1978 a monkey study had to be stopped after all the animals died within the first few days because the PFOS doses were too high.
In 1980, minutes from an internal 3M meeting said workers at the factory in Antwerp were told the chemicals had been found in human blood, but the company decided not to tell the government
I don't think it's a success story when a chemical company is pressured to stop producing something because of it's health effects after that chemical has made it into the blood of nearly every individual on the planet.
Expecting investors to vote against their own financial interests for the greater good is a terrible system. 3M investors only care because of the threat of lawsuits and other legal trouble; those are the mechanisms we need to improve. Stricter environmental rules and enforcement will force companies to reduce harmful externalities. The shareholder pressure is incidental.
Free markets are generally bad at handling pollution because the costs are so diffuse and long term; there's often a way to increase profits at the expense of someone else's health in a manner that can't be precisely quantified immediately.
The same thing applies to many other activities: fossil fuels, usage of single-use plastics that someone else will clean up, promotion of unhealthy and addictive substances like tobacco, etc.
I am skeptic that market mechanisms achieve the best outcomes at all times, but I'm positively certain they don't when externalities are not even priced in!
> 3M has been facing a raft of litigation that has prompted the move
Seems like yet again corrupt and incompetent regulators and oversight fails, and real action only really happens when the courts are used to hold them to account for damages.
EDIT: Maybe those libertarians do have a good idea now and again...
We get it, but we don't care because capitalism / free market / small government / money / competition.
Competition goes beyond just companies too, countries compete with each other, to the point of starting wars over e.g. natural resources, territory, and access to infrastructure. And one future scenario is wars over more basic resources like food and water, as climate change will cause droughts and famines. At the very least it will (and already is) triggering mass migrations.
Who are you referring to? You use the past tense, which means you're probably not pointing a finger at china - which is hardly communist, making huge strides in cleaning up their emissions, and their emissions are largely the result of making stuff for the rest of the world. Which means you're probably talking about now-defunct communist countries, i.e. the soviet union?
So your argument against capitalism driving pollution in the hundreds of countries around the world where it appears to be driving pollution is a single example? A country that did most of it's polluting during a rapid industrialization with the stated goal of "catching up with the west". Meanwhile during that same soviet period not one but *two* rivers caught on fire in a single year in the USA.
Which is all to say that I'm unconvinced. It really seems like the driver of most of the pollution in the world has been capitalism. Perhaps communism is worse, but that doesn't let capitalism off the hook - it's not a two-choice binary system here.
Not really. Countries define property rights and solve problems. Domestic overfishing is countries removing externalities and making them part of the market
Nuclear objectionable due to the highly toxic waste product for which no accepted solution has been implemented yet.
I mean don't get me wrong, I'm in favor of nuclear energy as a CO2-less high potential source of energy, it's just that they're fucking around with the waste too much and umming and arring about it while it just sits near the nuclear power plants, instead of just burying it in a mountain like they do in finland [0]). They could decomission a strip mine and fill it back up with lead-and-concrete encased nuclear waste, then bury it in another few hundred meters of sand - nobody would be the wiser for the next millennia. In theory.
It’s pretty safe being stored near nuclear power plants. The folks keeping it from being buried in a mountain are folks opposed to nuclear energy… ironically due to (overblown) waste concerns. They don’t WANT the waste problem to be solved.
Generally speaking, toxic substances are only "cheap" due to externalizing many of the costs involved, like increased healthcare costs and lost productivity. If you do a thorough analysis of the costs of using such chemicals, they aren't cheap at all.
Maybe someday humans will get that.