Comment by endymi0n | Hacker News Reader

Comment by endymi0n | Hacker News Reader

This guy remembers me about the golden rule in product management: If a lot of customers complain about something, they are almost always right. If they tell you how to fix it, they are almost always wrong. Outdoor toilet? OMG, please!

It annoys me to no end that with the current environmental catastrophes, almost nobody approaches this with a quantitative engineering mindset, especially the ones who care most: Progressives (of which I consider myself one).

It‘s mindblowing how I can‘t buy a plastic wrapped cucumber in the organic shop even though it reduces waste from damage by 30%.

In a country where we recycle or cleanly incinerate 99% of plastic.

When 70% of the oceans‘ plastic comes from 4 rivers, none of them in Europe.

And they feel great about it, as if they‘re actually doing something.

Repeat after me: Large scale change will not come from individualized action. It just doesn‘t scale. The only working solution is to make the ecological choice economical.

The first way is the Elon Musk way. Just make the alternative better than the original. Best, but needs an extremely long breath with flawless vision and execution.

The second is large scale regulation. As much as I hate a lot about the EU bureaucracy, they did exactly the right things with incandescent lamps. Flat out banned them over a period of 10 years.

The same people who whined in the beginning about how mean the state is towards their free choice are now sitting in LED illuminated rooms with lower watts, better long life and almost equal CRI. All catalyzed by a removal of alternatives on the horizon.

I believe the just started CO2 tax can do the same.

CO2 tax is indeed the only way I think. Even if all ground transport and the grid is carbon free, we still have massive CO2 output in industry, agriculture, housing and airline industry - there's no way to fix that if the massive external effect CO2 has, is not paid by the consumer. It should create a CO2 market that puts a price on capturing it, with whatever is the best (cheapest) method at the time. We already have that with the certificates, but should be careful with those as they seem to be not the most cost efficient way of getting to negative carbon - a lot of money is afaik. flowing to developing nations that have below-average carbon emissions (at least as officially captured), without actually having to plant any trees.

You’re confusing a few things though. A plastic ban has nothing to do with climate change. The drivers for a plastic ban lie elsewhere.

And the fact that Europe’s rivers aren’t among the top 4 likely has everything to do with that plastic ban and the fact that Europe isn’t as populous as the places whose rivers do contribute the most plastic to the ocean. Also, the fact that until recently much of Europe almost certainly shipped their waste plastic off to China anyways.

I would say plastic bans only reduces ocean plastics on the tiny margin if the country has a well developed waste management system, which most European countries has.

Coming from a country importing garbage to use as fuel in combined power and heating plants I see no major problem with some countries exporting garbage.

China imported plastics to recycle, not throw into their rivers. They stopped because the learned that the health cost exceeded the tiny profits that industry made.

With that said, banning some kinds of plastic use under certain circumstances is a good thing. For a sustainable solution we still need to figure out recycling, correctly used, plastic is an awesome material.

Look at CFCs and the hole in the ozone. We came together as a world to ban them, and the hole in the ozone is largely healing. It's a great story.

But with one wrinkle: We had a good alternative to CFCs that cost about the same.

With oil and gas, we kinda don't have a good alternative yet. Sure, sure, solar is very cheap nowadays. But from a carbon footprint viewpoint? Solar is still pretty high when you remember you have to melt down all that silicon before you go soak up the sun.

Nuclear? Pebble Bed? Thorium? Public's got a very bad smell about that stuff. Besides, you just can't let all the autocrats out there get their hands on it otherwise they start making up things about having a-bombs and then things get invasion-y. Not cheap, those invasions.

Hydro? Wind? Great if you live in Vancouver or Nepal, but in Arkansas or Uttar Pradesh?

Unlike with CFCs, we just don't have a single power source that meet the requirements wherever you go. It's got to be a mosaic of power, and that's hard (read expensive) to manage and make.

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