Like most of my friends, I’ve taken to carrying a rucksack around, with an additional bag-for-life inside. I don’t recall the last time I had to buy an additional bag. I guess I’ve saved around 300 bags in the past year.
Not to mention that everyone just assumes that fewer plastic bags sold = many more cotton bags produced without providing any numbers. Maybe plastic bags are mostly being reused more? Maybe people remember to bring a cotton bag they already owned anyway to the store more often?
Also, that 7100x number is for ozone. For climate impact, it's 52x, and that number doesn't include disposal. See hannob's comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20581751 and the point in the tweet chain here: https://twitter.com/arthurhcyip/status/1115749691566821376
> Studies have shown multiple times [1], [2] that cotton bags require far more energy and water to produce than almost everything else and need to be reused circa 7.100 times for non organic and twenty-thousand times for organic cotton until they surpass plastic bags.
And yeah sure, both is better than one. But one of those two is much more important. One will remove , say, ~10% of species and humans, the other will remove, say, ~50% of species and humans.
The climate catastrophe also is not only caused by rising greenhouse gases (although yes, that's causing the most disasterous results). Other results of unbridled human (ab)use of their natural environment is causing biodiversity collapses everywhere. Single use plastics are an important factor there, wreaking havoc to many different environments.
Sometimes priorities really are complicated but in this case they aren't.
[1]: I'd argue flimsy cotton bags are a non-solution to this problem, as they still do not really discourage single use. They don't fundamentally change people's behaviour, and as a result don't address the systemic cultural problem. Proper, well made, high quality, repairable shopping bags exist. It's a shame we need to be so inconvienced to go out shopping prepared, but that's a cultural mindset we have to get over.
[2]: They are only "cheap" because the real impact of these products are not accounted for in the price you pay for it. Again, it's a systemic cultural problem that this is acceptable and even desired.
Each commenter is stating the two things are definitively NOT equivalent, that one is far worse than the other, and that everyone can care about both—but should really care about the temperatures issue more because it’s worse by a lot.
It sounds like you and the other false-equivalence-accuser are the ones who are making false equivalency happen here—you’re both saying that because rising temperatures and habitat pollution/destruction are bad for the environment or Earth's climate, they are both equally bad and worth caring about equally, or at least simultaneously—THAT is so textbook false equivalence I'm struggling to understand how you and the other FE-accuser are doing it without realizing.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CA7zXLWUIAAaSfS?format=png&name=...
We'd need to drive way less, stop sending products overseas, build high speed underground trains. Even more importantly we'd need to make sure that India and Africa are going to follow the same principles because they're going to exceed the consumption of the West in future. That being said, I do not care because I do not plan to have children.
That is a bit sad. We need more thoughtfulness-enhancing genes in the genetic pool.
The parent is saying, “A and B are both bad. A is worse by an order of magnitude. I (and others) should care about A more.” There’s no suggestion of A and B being falsely equivalent to each other on the same order of magnitude based on a loosely shared common feature or property that is manipulated or misrepresented to incorrectly/dishonestly establish A and B as equivalent. That is what false equivalence means.
The parent is grading two bad things according to their estimated impact, and is perfectly justified in choosing to focus on the one they think is worse. They aren’t suggesting nobody care about item B—just that it not be cared about more than the far worse item A.[0]
[0]: I'm just rephrasing the parent's argument and pointing out the argument is not equating A and B (which is required for a false equivalence); I'm not taking a position on whether or not the argument is correct.
Without those numbers, bringing up climate change does little more than discourage a worthwhile effort.
I almost entirely agree. From a purely environmental perspective, habitat pollution and species destruction is 100% worth caring about, understanding, and reducing/eliminating. I think we're sadly living in a time where public discourse has equated environmental impact with climate impact, and fails to keep them separated when necessary.
Some things are worth caring about and doing because they are destructive to the environment(s) on Earth as a whole—and we should avoid destroying the environment itself, as well as habitats, ecosystems, and species when we realize we are doing so. Some things are worth caring about, understanding, and reducing/eliminating because they are destroying the climate itself, which is getting dangerously close to becoming actively unfriendly to humans and other species in a relatively short timeframe. These things are occasionally, but not always, interacting & influencing the other. Environmental destruction can, in turn, cause climate destruction/change. The reverse also holds. I think many people have difficulty discussing one without bringing up the other, or in very specific cases, discussing them as if they are equivalent.
However, the two examples I called out as accusations of false equivalence that do not hold were more whataboutism than false equivalency. The accused were not claiming the two things to be the same—they directly admitted they were different issues, with different concerns and impacts, and still wanted to push that one was more important (at least to them) than the other. Had the accusers pointed out the whataboutism, I wouldn't have commented. But they called it false equivalency, which prompted me to point out that their responses actually rode the line of false equivalence far more egregiously than the comments to which they replied. I stand by that assessment. I wasn't seeking to defend the accused's whataboutism—it was both distracting and unhelpful. But it was important to me—some random internet nobody who really doesn't mean much of anything at all—to point out that the accusations were incorrect and try to prod the accusers to not go throwing around a term like false equivalence without it being warranted. I guess just because words and terms matter. Public discourse is better when we keep that in mind.
This is something the "green" movement needs to take on board - unfortunately a lot of the hobbyist end of the movement doesn't really get this.
[0] https://www.dw.com/en/almost-all-plastic-in-the-ocean-comes-...
Buy a single cloth bag and keep it for life, atleast in my area, they survive a long time.
Personally, I have a "consumption" of less than 1 cloth bag per year, I fear I commit worse sins to the climate than that during that year.
But impact of the air pollution is the warming!
https://climate.nasa.gov/causes/
> Humans have increased atmospheric CO2 concentration by more than a third since the Industrial Revolution began. This is the most important long-lived "forcing" of climate change.
When they are widly used you will.
I've used canvas bag from Tesco. It fell apart after few years. I definitely did not use it 7000 times.
When plastic bags were free I was reusing them as trash bags if I collected too many of them. Now I'm buying dedicated trashbags. I definitely spend more on plastic bags then I used to. I can only hope part of this money goes towards environmental efforts.
PlanetMoney said you needed to use a bag 131 times to be equivalent, not 7k. I see numbers floating around but no sources.
In any case. Reusing a bag not only reduces the bag usage the first time it's used but every subsequent time too. A reusable bags isn't preventing a single plastic bag, it's preventing at least one, probably two, maybe three and possibly four plastic bags each use considering how durable and large they are. Which is to say, you could fit (at most) two double bags of groceries into a single reusable.
>> When they are widly used you will.
But all those cotton bags you see quickly disintegrate back into the biome, while the plastic ones stay plastic for a million years...
I had one that looked pretty much like this: https://m.indiamart.com/proddetail/tesco-shopping-bag-368709...
Is it canvas or cotton?