>The whole carbon footprint thing was created to shift blame from the dirty industry to inviduals
you think that "the dirty industry" are just emitting carbon for the fun of it?
you think that "the dirty industry" are just emitting carbon for the fun of it?
Emitting carbon has negative externalities (climate change) that are not priced into the emissions, rather they are passed onto the future you and future generations. We can change this by putting a price on carbon. This will incentivize the growth of cleaner alternatives, give Joe an opportunity to not contribute to emissions, and this will affect the profits of the “dirty industry”.
The “dirty industry” wants to keep profits as high as possible for as long as possible, it’s just business. Blaming average Joe on the problem is a distraction. Blaming individuals for systemic issues is fruitless. Industry knows this. The longer policy can be delayed, the longer profits can be made.
The systematic issues that folk talk about abstractly are things like “too many people pick SUVs rather than commuting by subway” or “society needs to switch away from eating so much beef”. It isn’t just a matter of waltzing into a factory and turning some dials that the greedy factory owner doesn’t want to change
When I talk about systemic issues, I talk specifically about the distribution of personal choices people can make that lead to outcomes. Taken into context, this means that if I only have one choice for electricity provider, and my investor owned utility makes a decision to burn coal to generate electricity, there’s very little I can do to change that. If the area I live in has only single family zoning, things are so spread out that it means that most people need a car for basic human needs like going to work and getting groceries. In my city electricity and transportation represents 80% of emissions. These systems have big impacts. You can throw all the personal responsibility that you want at that and not make any meaningful changes.
We don’t have to have these systems, you could empower the community to make power purchasing agreements to buy electricity on the wholesale market that would be cleaner than what the utility provides. You could pass mixed use zoning to allow developers the autonomy to build commercial/residential mid rise buildings. People could walk to a lot more stuff. We just choose not to do that.
This is a matter of waltzing into your town hall, state legislature, and congress and demanding that we allow people the ability to make better choices. If people had real choices, we’d have better outcomes.
Many jurisdictions in the US allow people to sign up for alternative energy providers. Electricity is fungible, so technically you might be using electrons from a coal power plant, but on a kWh basis you are supposed to be getting all your electricity from renewable sources. That's basically how so many companies can say they're running on "100% renewable power", without having to build wind turbines/solar panels around their facilities.
>If the area I live in has only single family zoning, things are so spread out that it means that most people need a car for basic human needs like going to work and getting groceries.
1. You can vote with your feet.
2. of all the issues to bring up, this seems like the weakest one. NIMBY zoning laws are probably the most grass-roots type of lobbying there is. It's hard to blame corporations for that.
>You can throw all the personal responsibility that you want at that and not make any meaningful changes.
The comment you replied to doesn't mention "personal responsibility" at all. It only mentions "people" and "customers", ie. groups of people. If 80% of consumers don't want their electricity bills to rise and like white picket suburban houses, that's ultimately a problem with "people" and "customers", even if the remaining 20% are trying to be green but can't be.
They do it because it's what consumers want. It's not industries job to kneecap themselves so that less scrupulous companies can gain market share.
On top of that, our governments are full of cowards who won't create policies that make it more expensive to destroy the planet than to save it.
Look at the classic beer industry... you have/had a crate full of standardized glass bottles, with metal caps and paper labels, you pay some deposit to take the crate and the bottles, you drink the beer, return the crate and the empty bottles to be washed and refilled, get back your deposit (or take a new full crate), and that's it. Yes, some energy goes for transport and washing of those bottles.
Now look at soda industry.... you have 6 plastic bottles full of soda, capped with plastic, with plastic labels, wrapped in plastic (a "six pack"), set on a pallet, wrapped in more plastic, that you throw away after you drink them (or return them for recycling, and then china burns them).
And in the meantime, we're discussing and banning plastic straws.
And this is just a tiny thing, compared to all the poisons that are emited by large industries, especially in 3rd world countries using unregulated, dangerous chemicals (pesticides, herbicides,...) that are killing the local ecosystems, so nestle can earn 2cents extra on a box of cocoa powder.
I'm not sure what time period "classic" implies, but what you described hasn't been the case for years.
About 12 percent of all U.S. beer was sold in returnable bottles in 1981. Since 2007, the percentage has been negligible, according to statistics kept by the Washington, D.C.-based Beer Institute.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/reusable-beer-bottles-facing-ex...
>Yes, some energy goes for transport and washing of those bottles.
I find it strange that you admit this is a thing, but ultimately gloss over it. What really is the TCO of plastic bottles vs glass bottles? It's tempting to conclude that reusing must be better than throwing stuff out, but given the costs associated with transporting heavy glass bottles and/or sanitizing them, it's not exactly obvious which one has overall higher costs.
>(or return them for recycling, and then china burns them).
There's a lot wrong with recycling today (eg. ending up in landfills because recycling is too expensive), but what you described isn't one of them. Landfill space in the US is cheap as it is. Nobody is shipping plastic half-way across the world only to incinerate them.
It's still the case in many countries for "normal" (non craft, etc.) beers.
> I find it strange that you admit this is a thing, but ultimately gloss over it. What really is the TCO of plastic bottles vs glass bottles? It's tempting to conclude that reusing must be better than throwing stuff out, but given the costs associated with transporting heavy glass bottles and/or sanitizing them, it's not exactly obvious which one has overall higher costs.
Considering that CO2 is not the only thing, and we have problems with microplastics, we should consider that impact too.
> There's a lot wrong with recycling today (eg. ending up in landfills because recycling is too expensive), but what you described isn't one of them. Landfill space in the US is cheap as it is. Nobody is shipping plastic half-way across the world only to incinerate them.
But we did just that, before china banned import. We ship that stuff over to china "for recycling" and they burn it. Same with e-waste in africa ( https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/burning-truth-... )
Realistically speaking the amount of microplastics being generated from drink bottles is negligible in first world countries. Over there, the overwhelming amount of plastic waste is properly managed (recycled or landfilled), which means they're not sitting in rivers degrading and generating microplastic.
> But we did just that, before china banned import. We ship that stuff over to china "for recycling" and they burn it. Same with e-waste in africa ( https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/burning-truth-... )
Again, it's more complicated than that. The importers are actually trying to recycle the plastic/e-waste. It's just that through a combination of incompetence/malice, that some of the unrecycleable waste gets improperly disposed.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/03/13/7025017...
>China had plenty of capacity to handle plastics and lots of cheap laborers to sort the recyclable materials from the nonrecyclable. By 2016, the U.S. was exporting almost 700,000 tons a year to China alone. Overall, China imported 7 million tons from around the world.
>About five years ago, the Chinese government started to worry about all this trash coming in. A lot of the plastic was contaminated with stuff that made it difficult and expensive to recycle – paper, food waste, plastic wrap (which is not recyclable). And some of the plastic was hard to recycle and thus not profitable to import.
I suppose your statement is technically true in the sense that yes, we do ship plastic to china, and yes, they burn some of it, but that statement is still misleading. With the same logic you could also say that we send people to hospitals to die.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/8bceef94-86cd-11e9-a028-86cea8523...
1. I get the joke you're trying to make, but realistically speaking the fact that the company is in the "fun" industry, doesn't mean the company itself is being run "for fun".
2. that's at least somewhat misleading because the pollutants mentioned are pollutants that tend to be aggressively curtailed for land vehicles (because of their negative effects on local air quality), but are far less of an issue on the open sea
3. I get excusing the consumer if the good/service in question is essential and there's no pollution free alternative, but it seems weird to pin the blame on Carnival when consumers are making entirely discretionary purchases that are known to have negative environmental impacts.
Yes, for fun and profit.
This idea that Exxon Mobile is solely to blame for gasoline emissions or that a factory owner is the only one responsible for the emissions from their factory, rather than the person who purchases and uses those products is quite frankly absurd.
No it's not. The cost of pumping CO2 into the air should be factored into the cost of running a polluting factory. If it's not factored in, there's basically zero chance that a "clean" alternative factory will be economically competitive today. Asking everyone in the world to voluntarily spend more on goods that they're not even sure are manufactured in a cleaner way (see "greenwashing") seems like a dead end to me.
I also agree with you we should factor in CO2 production as a cost, to take advantage of the economic system (which actually works pretty well within it's domain after all, eh?)
For some reason lots of people have this idea that the path to solving climate change is for consumers to make no changes to their wasteful consumption, but somehow fix it on the backend so everything is net-zero. In reality, the only workable path must include systematic changes that result in people consuming less (along with lowering industrial emissions for the consumption that remains)
combine this ^ with:
https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2016/12/05/tale-fish-two-cou...
> An example of this would be when a wild cod is caught off the coast of Alaska and, due to economic factors, is shipped to another country to be fabricated into fillets and packaged. If this process of turning a whole fish into packaged fillets occurs in China, the cod fillets are declared “Wild Caught Product of China” upon import into the United States.
Yes, the fishing industry is to blame for shipping caught fish from USA to china and back, and the whole thing is very absurd.
When it comes to CO2, personal vehicles emit several times more carbon than the entire global shipping fleet.
I don't see how it's any more absurd than manufacturing iPhones in China only to have it shipped half way across the world to the American consumer.