Comment by Grum9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Grum9 | Hacker News Reader

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I dont dismiss environmentalists, only their ineffective ideas, I happen to like clean water and air and think environmentalists are necessary check against corporate carelessness. Most people trying to solve a problem would focus their efforts on the low hanging fruit, in an attempt to have the largest impact in the shortest amount of time. But instead the focus is on petty targets that are simply annoying or unsightly, we ban plastic straws and bags, gas stoves and lawn mowers, loud engines, run farmers out business for using fertilizer to feed ourselves and a growing population, only to find out theres an extra UKs worth methane being pumped into the air because someone cant be bothered to find a crescent wrench and tighten some pipes. If the world ends it wont be because living creatures fart too much, it will because of idiocy (low yield ideas), laziness (this oil field), hypocrisy (the rich on their jets eating steak), and being more concerned with trying to appear to be accomplishing something rather than actually accomplishing it.

It seems like you've confused 'environmentalists' with various corporate greenwashing campaigns.

Banning plastic bags was sensible, it just didn't go far enough. Banning plastic straws was sensible, but replacing them with PFAS paper was evil.

Do you think it was natural how much corporate media attention the plastic straw thing got? Do you think it's natural how little attention Coke get in the media for their plastic waste? Do you think environmentalists are unaware of this?

The main point you seem to be missing is that there are a small number of individuals making a lot of money from the "low hanging fruit" problems remaining unsolved. You're pointing fingers at an artificial straw-man, one created by PR teams those wealthy people hired.

I don't mean this to sound too confrontational; it sounds like our opinions mostly overlap. I just really dislike seeing environmentalists get tarred with a straw brush.

In what way was the plastic bags sensible? We replaced recycled and sugar cane bags with awful cotton bags while instead importing garbage bags from China. The sale of imported plastic bags skyrocketed.

So ban the China bags.

The issue is with how the garbage system works. You need to put your tampons, condoms, diapers, etc. into something at home for the garbage truck to pick them up. If you don't solve the issue, people will just continue to the next solution. Maybe cotton bags that are absolutely terrible for the environment.

> In what way was the plastic bags sensible?

In the way that the number of trees I've seen covered in plastic bags has dropped > 99%. Seeing 5 or 6 plastic bags at once blowing in the wind, down > 99%. In the way that microplastics is a bad thing, and reducing the amount of them is good.

> We replaced recycled and sugar cane bags with awful cotton bags

What proportion of those plastic bags we banned were "recycled and sugar cane bags"?

And that's not what your initial argument was. I'd have liked to see them replaced with hemp, myself, but I'd rather see a cotton bag degrading peacefully than a plastic bag leeching random nasty shit everywhere.

>The sale of imported plastic bags skyrocketed.

Did it "skyrocket" to more than the number of bags we were producing before? No, not anywhere. In South Australia, for example, 400 million fewer plastic bags were used.

Plastic bag bans are total catnip for libertarians, particularly that large subset funded by fossil fuels.

There is nothing they hate more than widely popular and successful regulations to reduce fossil fuel use. So repeated attempts to discredit them are made.

https://reason.com/tag/plastic-bags/

They don't really stand up to scrutiny though:

https://www.nrdc.org/stories/do-plastic-bag-bans-work

> Seeing 5 or 6 plastic bags at once blowing in the wind, down > 99%.

I've never seen that. There's no trash on the ground where I live. I hope you picked it up.

> What proportion of those plastic bags we banned were "recycled and sugar cane bags"?

I have no numbers but probably 80+ percent considering all food chains and the biggest retail stores had made the change many years ago. That's where most of the bags were coming from. The ones you used multiple times when purchasing food, before using it as a garbage bag.

> Did it "skyrocket" to more than the number of bags we were producing before?

Yes. In the past you bought a recycled plastic bag, used it a couple of times and then disposed it with the garbage such as tampons. Now you buy rolls of imported plastic bags and use them for garbage but since there's no incitament to buy fewer, you stock up when its cheap. With the added benefit that you also have to buy cotton bags that are absolutely terrible for the environment.

As a result, the change is being rolled back this year by the government. Everyone have deemed it to be a major failure.

You are bringing up petty unsightly targets yourself. Aviation produces less than 2.5% of greenhouse gas emissions. Rich people and their jets don't even register in the scheme of things.

But they are the messengers, yet cant be bothered with any of this themselves, the only suggestions they ever have are what the rest of us can do to offset their life styles. Next Davos meeting online? Haha, oh you (adjusts monocle)... practice what you preach.

Or you can pretend some investor or politician somewhere doesnt rub elbows directly or indirectly with the companies that do the shit in the article. They control everything on the planet, business and politics, stuff like this article is just what comes to light. It could be fixed with a fucking phone call, but they might have to pay some overtime, which hits the bottom line, and they wont lose a nickel to back up their bullshit because their 14th bathroom needs a new gold shitter and those things are expensive.

Its more cost effective for me to chip my tooth on a metal straw or stop eating altogether.

Gates "guilty pleasure" is collecting private jets

https://www.motorbiscuit.com/bill-gates-private-jets-guilty-... https://twitter.com/goddeketal/status/1655658051855065090 https://www.newsweek.com/bill-gates-defends-using-private-je...

> But they are the messengers, yet cant be bothered with any of this themselves, the only suggestions they ever have are what the rest of us can do to offset their life styles

Who is this "they"? The only rich rich person I can think of that actively advocates for policies combatting climate change, and isn't a "celebrity" type of rich person (e.g. footballer or actor/musician) is Bill Gates. Most other rich rich people, à la Arnault, Musk, Bezos flat out don't care and don't pretend they do. They spend their billions on whatever tickles their fancy, consequences be damned. As to why I exclude celebrities, it's because PR and their brand is a big part of what they are.

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