Trinidadian fishers film ‘half-hearted’ oil spill clean-up | Hacker News Reader

Trinidadian fishers film ‘half-hearted’ oil spill clean-up

theguardian.com

132 pointsx14km2d35 comments

I can't fathom how anybody still advocates for this industry unless they're getting filthy rich off it. For example I always see overlap in climate change denial and advocacy for these fuel industries. Like, okay fine, deny climate change science, but how can you still argue that this crap is fine for the environment? You want polluted waters, polluted air, polluted everything?

I'll probably be flagged for this post as it contributes nothing, it's just an emotional outburst, but sometimes man I just feel hopeless, helpless, and have no idea what to do when humans are just short-sighted apes.

It's not hyperbolically "fine", but unless you're living a rustic nearly off-the-grid life, you're regularly enjoying modern goods dependent on the fossil fuels industry for transport, fertilization, packaging, plastics, energy – from essentials like food up through luxuries.

Perhaps you try to minimize your consumption of obviously fossil-fuel dependent products. Still, most complex highest-value products – like everything computer- or medical- or entertainment- related – only became possible with the massive surpluses-over-subsistence, & advanced fields-of-practice, that fossil-fuels enabled.

Humans are getting smart enough to now massively decrease the energy intensity of many high-value activities, or leverage energy sources with fewer (but not zero) unintentional or unmetered negative spillovers.

But it took the lucky bonanza of fossil fuels to get humanity to here. (I suspect it even took that bonanza to train up enough minds for you to be aware, & angry, about an oil-spill that's (likely) thousands of miles away from you – instead of totally focused on a short life as a subsistence farmer.)

Humans have lived for millennia with a slower rate of tech advancement, yet here you're saying that the planet had to be sacrificed out of necessity. That's like arguing that it's necessary to sacrifice the brain on cocaine and amphetamines for a boost in productivity. The brain is life, the planet is life. These things cannot be sacrificed for some greater good because they are all there is.

We've been aware of renewable energy for a very long time now. The concept of a fully-functional solar powered refrigerator first appeared in 1935. Can you imagine where we would be if we spent the last 100 years on clean, renewable energy? Maybe not 2020 levels of technology, but still damn far, and with a healthy planet.

Yes - but the humans that lived for those "millenia" were much smaller in number than today. They were much poorer, often "dirt poor", despite constant manual labor that barely left time for literacy – much less HN-like discussions.

They died comparatively young, often of diseases we can now avoid/cure, or in violent battles for meager resources.

And, those were no great stewards for the environment either. They used slash-and-burn famring. They hunted species to extinction. The Sahara desert (& lots of other desertification) might be the result of primitve land misuse. And of course they rarely met a slightly-different tribe of humans on the next hillside, competing for limited resources, that they didn't eventually try to massacre (often succeeding).

Unless you are over 100 years old – I'm not – there's no "we" that could have magically decided, with what they knew 100 years ago, to magically prioritize "solar refrigerators" or whatever other fairytale innovation you think could've replaced today's fossil-fuel usage. (Solar refrigerator usage wouldn't have delivered your computer, your meals, your education, or your entertainment.)

There's only the people who existed then, doing the best they could with what they then knew, and now us, doing the best we can with what we now know. "We" now are only recently rich enough & smart enough to even care about far-away oil spills, & long-term sustainability. And we owe those riches & smarts to the flawed best efforts of prior generations.

As we unwind those arrangements & path-dependencies that, with hindsight, are hurting us or likely to hurt our offspring in the future, we have to be realistic about how to feed, educate, & give meaning to 8 billion fellow humans. I don't want to go back to a tiny population of humans eking by – when lucky! – on hunter-gathering or subsistence farming, until the sun burns out. (And any defections to a more ambitious developmental path would be held down by what new religion or government, exactly?) If that's the 'sustainable' future, we might as well just end it all now – homo sapiens already lived that cycle of mundane misery, for hundreds-of-thousands-of-years. I'd rather see how the 'progress' path, with potential happy & ever-varying lives for billions or trillions more humans, might work out – instead of just retreat back to the 'safe stagnation' path.

>Humans have lived for millennia with a slower rate of tech advancement, yet here you're saying that the planet had to be sacrificed out of necessity. [...]

They also had life expectancy at birth of 30, and regular famines. I'm sure you'd change your tune after your wife died with your child in childbirth.

I’d be interested to know how oil consumption and the industries it supports are responsible for the lack of famines and lower maternal mortality rates typically credited to policy changes (farm subsidies), and the advancement of medicine and hygiene standards.

The agricultural revolution is responsible for both low child mortality and the lack of famines. Pesticides, herbicides, artificial fertilizers and motorized farm implements are the reasons why humanity has been able to grow exponentially over the last 1.5 centuries, why famines have lessened and why better nourishment lead to fewer child deaths (with a small helping of better hygiene). All that is dependent on coal and oil.

Much of our food is fertilized by energy-intensive synthetic fertilizers which are often created by fossil-fueled energy and almost always moved to the field and applied by internal combustion engines. That same ICE equipment is used to harvest and transport food. Oil is used in plastics which are used extensively in both food distribution and medicine/hygiene products.

The majority of fertilizer used in the world is the result of the Haber–Bosch process[0] and that requires fossil fuels. Without the ammonia from this process, crop yields globally would drop like a stone.[1 see graph, world population vs. ammonia production]

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

[1]http://sites.psu.edu/shelbyfosterportfolio/wp-content/upload...

It was a little thing called the Industrial Revolution and the rise of automation that it enabled. That was all sparked by the use of coal as an energy source, and later oil. Without coal and oil, we would all be toiling away on primitive farms still, having ten children and losing four of them before the age ofe 3.

But these are merely historical facts. My ancestors almost certainly did a lot of things I don't like, and "But your ancestors did them" doesn't make them OK for me to do.

There likely are other ways we could have got here, but we can't change how it actually happened, that's not how time's arrow works. However we can choose how we go forward.

The explosion of fossil fuel conversion is much later than subsistence farming. Even by the time of the previous pandemic you aren't doing subsistence farming. Once it has occurred to somebody to have horses do the hard work, which don't run on fossil fuels, one man can produce far more food than his family can eat.

Lots of tricks can be done independent of the fossil fuel conversion if you either don't have that yet or you have reasoned that it might be a bad idea. Where my sister lives there's a mill, the mill has a canal, but it also has a river next to the canal. A river is free power for a mill, whereas the canal is an easy way to move goods to the mill for processing. Now, Salt's Mill was never in fact operated this way, it had enormous boilers and a vast rainwater reservoir - but if we'd not used fossil fuel power you could have built a (smaller, much less powerful) mill at this location and still produced fabric and changed the world.

In a sense the reason we have the microwave oven is World War II. You can make good radar using a klystron to get shorter radio waves (the basic idea of radar will work with nice long radio waves that are easy to make but it's shit), but the klystron you're using won't fit in an aeroplane. However, once you invent the cavity magnetron that's much smaller, you can put radar in an aeroplane - now your planes can find enemy planes. Or, you can put the magnetron in a relatively inexpensive steel box in your kitchen and cook food with it. Would we have invented the microwave oven anyway? Probably, but the actual way we got it involved a global war that killed an enormous number of people.

Still, "Let's have more wars so we get better kitchen appliances" doesn't make sense, and likewise pretending fossil fuel usage doesn't accelerate climate change doesn't make sense.

You would get a lot from reading "Strangers in Their Own Land". A sociologist goes to southern Louisiana to talk to people to try to learn why the group of people who is often most directly impacted by pollution is also so often vocally anti-regulation.

I grew up the area, in a place literally referred to as "Cancer Alley", and it's a fascinating mixture of culture, cognitive dissonance, power structures, and limited economic opportunities.

The short answer is that everyone, everyone makes their life choices in the context of a larger culture that they absorb mostly automatically and unconsciously. We like to consider ourselves autonomous actors that make our own choices, but our culture defines the set of choices that are even thinkable, and provides the heuristics we use to rank those choices.

Culture changes slowly, irrationally, and preferentially to the benefit of those in power. The result is that our habits for making decisions are often out of sync with what's materially best for us.

On top of that, we are a tribal primate species. We're hardwired to feel a deep emotional need to be included by and valued by our social group. For almost all of our evolutionary history, abandonment meant death. So we feel an innate pressure to conform to the beliefs of those around us.

Mix that all together, and it's fairly easy to end up with people acting against their self interest or making unthought choices that go against their values.

>I can't fathom how anybody still advocates for this industry unless they're getting filthy rich off it [...] but how can you still argue that this crap is fine for the environment? You want polluted waters, polluted air, polluted everything?

Because even though most people are against "polluted waters, polluted air, polluted everything", it's only in the abstract. They care about cheap transport (and associated goods) more. See: the yellow vest protests, the failed carbon tax in switzerland, or the US opposition to gas taxes even from democrats[1].

[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/house/559063-democrats-have-tur...

It it possible that your cherry picked examples of failed regulations are genuinely bad laws for reasons besides the intention? Even the US got NOX and SOX emissions under control, and pretty rapidly too, so it's hard to imagine that environmental regulation is politically impossible writ large....

Note that the NOX and SOX auction system is very simple and there isn't a carbon reduction scene proposed today that is free of all sorts of insane riders and generally bad exemptions, credits, and subsidies, the concept of government setting the price of carbon (which is unpalatable to Americans) aside.

Greedophiles simply do not care. If it's not the path to more money, ignore

This industry powers our cars, paves our roads and provides us with plastic, probably the greatest material ever invented. All of us are "rich" from the oil industry.

This industry gives us cancer, contaminates our food, gives our children asthma, and is creating an uninhabitable Earth with catastrophic climate change. But enjoy your coca cola while you wait in a traffic jam on the highway.

I think an important point here is that as much as the industry is a problem, especially since it lobbies in its own interests, it is a problem we have helped to create and perpetuate with our lifestyle demands.

Agreed! It's a coordination problem across the entire society. Government hasn't done a good job pricing in all the terrible externalities I listed above, so it needs to reflect the full costs with an honest price signal to change collective incentives for all of us.

We live longer and healthier now. That's in part made possible through extensive use of crude oil.

I think its important to understand that there are very few 'climate deniers' alot of opposition comes from people who refuse to give a blanc cheque to take extreme measures to stop any form of enviromental damage or Co2 emission. From an economic standpoint we've benefitted so much on these early versions of power harvesting that taking drastic measures would destroy economies, The people who would be hurt most by a economic downturn are people who do not have enough resources to support their daily needs. That's why politicians want a clear, concise solution that still allows the economy to grow. William D. Nordhaus won the nobel price for analysing different scenario's to see what the optimal balance is between the economy and policy change. You can't throw money at the problem if there is none.

every person I've met has been of outstanding moral character and somewhat decent understanding of the problem, therefore I think the reluctance of extreme measures can be seen as the wisdom of a crowd. No one wants to step too hard on eachother's toes for a good reason.

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2018/nor...

Could you please provide specific policy examples that would illustrate drastic vs non-drastic measures? I think it would help me understand your point more fully.

The most tone deaf promise/policy is to be completely carbon neutral by year x. It really doesn't seem likely we'll be turning off the last fossil fuel power plant any time soon. and no amount of carbon tax is suddenly going to make the production of steel or fertilizer carbon neutral. even research can only reduce, not eliminate alot of key components in order to have a functioning society. I also think alot of developed countries are already doing their best to produce better sustainable alternatives for key area's like double glass windows or capturing more green energy. Its the developing world that still increases their fossil fuels and has little money for longterm development.

Even more problematic, I think, by proxy of high energy prices, companies and products that hurt the enviroment the most have fled to countries with the least restrictions. trying to reel that in to more developed countries is on the same complexity level as eliminating tax evasion schemes. And I dont see many on HN believing that's simple to do.

It's definitely bad, but my view on this is to tackle also the problem at the source: cars. gas or even electric cars which have a pollution and carbon impact about the same magnitude. We must de-motorize the world, 80% of people in developed countries live in cities yet 95% household have cars, that's way too much. We must change people lifestyles on a global scale. When I see people stay in their parked cars with their engine and radiators maxed out for AC, when I'm riding among this perpetual dense traffic of cars , when I still hear them the night, I get the same reaction as this fisherman.

I agree. If you've ever had a conversation with someone that lives in the suburbs in a single-family home on a quarter acre on a cul-de-sac about the environmental impact of their choices, you might as well be debating about eating their children.

Getting folks to change their behavior will take top-down significant restructuring of the economy.

We must change our lifestyles -- but does that solve this problem?

We have better tools for dealing with spills. Yes we should shrink the industry that causes spills by removing demand. But that larger, slower, systemic change is compatible with also having more responsible responses to the near-term and acute problem.

An American gun-shot wound victim still needs acute care, even if all agree that also systemically we need to get rid of guns.

And in fact, placing responsibility on the companies involved to dedicate real resources to cleaning up the mess they've made makes the business less profitable and helps the system move towards more responsible behavior. Paying to clean up is of a piece with paying for emissions, in that both recognize some portion of the externalities that are otherwise inflicted on the community.

One step farther along the path to the root of the issue: Cars are incredibly expensive. That people in cities often choose to own cars and pay those prices reflects that they get more value from the car than the costs, often because alternative transport solutions are not cheaper, are way less time-efficient, and not nearly as convenient.

Fix that and many people will quickly pivot away from cars, reducing pull-through demand for oil, tires, brakes, lubricants, etc.

This isn't fixable. The only solution is to make cars more expensive, because it is impossible to improve alternative transport without massively raising prices. Alternative transport will always be massively inferior in cost or quality (usually both). Some may advocate subsidizing alternatives by taxing car traffic more. But as soon as the desired effect of vanishing car traffic appears, subsidies will vanish, alternative transport will be expensive and bad again. And everybody will be poorer, less happy and nobody will have gained anything (except alternative transport profiteurs).

If you constrain yourself to having public transport be self-sustaining in the funding department, you’re probably right. I don’t see a particular reason to think that that constraint is some kind of necessary, inviolable condition.

Oil is used for so much more than gasoline. Plastics are made from oil as well.

We can ban the use of plastics for disposable packaging, or really any disposable application, too.

FTA: " A freedom of information request carried out in April by FFOS revealed there have been 498 reported oil spills on land and at sea since the beginning of 2018.

There have been no resulting prosecutions or fines by Trinidad and Tobago authorities. "

This is disgusting. I'll set aside the arguments against the petrochem industry, which are many, obvious, and unfortunately prone to extremist controversy.

What I'm truly saddened by here is the obvious level of corruption here. While oil extraction and transport will never be 100% clean, it's demonstrably possible for it to be 1000x better than this, but without a government willing to stand up and force these jackholes to pay for their externalities, it's not gonna happen in places like this.

Maybe an international coalition is needed to fine, punish, and regulate oil extraction and transport? In practice that would probably be US money funding 2nd and 3rd world people to do the work (see UN Peacekeeping forces), but it seems better than no regulation.

Trinidad and Tobago's GDP is $24 billion. The top 33 oil companies made more revenue than that in 2018 [1]. Not total. Each. Saudi Aramco's 20218 revenue was $414 billion.

When businesses are more valuable than governments, they are above the law.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_oil_and_gas_co...

damn, shouldn't be touched bare handed either, right?

He is trying to make a point. Like he said, people will ingest the oil because they are dispersing it in order to make it sink, being on his hands it's probably the least of his worries.

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