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Comment by feydaykyn | Hacker News Reader

What about taking the longer view? Most technologies, including plastics, were a lot more expensive than the products they replaced before going mainstream, with society organizing around them and subsidizing many of the costs.

For instance, take petrol-powered cars. It took building cemented roads, petrol stations, petrol distribution networks, supertankers, boats, trucks, car companies, refineries, etc. Cities are built for cars, with large roads while space is at a premium and could be used for something else. All that was 100x more expensive than horses and came with a new set of problems.

Another topic: plastic "feels" cheaper, but it's because some costs are not factored into the price, for instance in environment and health. I am not endorsing the following report, just citing it as an example of this idea: https://wwf.panda.org/wwf_news/?3507866/These-costs-for-plas...

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All this counts into the "I'm usually very pro-tech". The point I'm contesting here is pure ideological regulation, without numbers behind it. Ban on plastic bags is actually the perfect example. You can calculate the number of times you need to actually use a reusable bag before it breaks even, and it's stratospheric. I'm not googling for a (potentially biased) source, but I'm sure you've seen such numbers.

And the downside is twofold. First, there's actually a pretty decent correlation between how expensive something is and how harmful for the environment. If you use a hand-made cloth bag made from cotton that was hand-grown in a garden using only renewable energy, it's expensive because you have a higher number of man-hours spent on it - and those man-hours are actually generating orders of magnitude more negative externalities for the simple fact of keeping those workers alive. The 1 cent plastic bag may be made from oil using energy from burning coal, but it's actually much cleaner because it used only a fraction of the man-hours. Whenever you hear claims that "it's a lot more expensive but it's green", the first guess is somebody didn't factor in everything.

The second downside is that bans are taking choice away. If you think there are negative externalities, and you have a good enough argument - by all means, tax those plastic bags until you compensate. If there are still objections to people buying the more expensive plastic bags, those objections are most likely ideological, not practical. Which yes, I still continue to hate with a fiery passion.

> If you use a hand-made cloth bag made from cotton that was hand-grown in a garden using only renewable energy, it's expensive because you have a higher number of man-hours spent on it - and those man-hours are actually generating orders of magnitude more negative externalities for the simple fact of keeping those workers alive.

This style of energy accounting makes no sense to me. Humans are going to use up resources and create pollution, regardless of what their specific source of income happens to be. More artisanal cotton bags means less of something else, in some broad sense, but that says nothing about the environmental accounting of the other side of the margin. The ratio of workers making luxury goods vs. mass producing cheaper substitutes for those goods will have little to no bearing on how many humans happen to exist, birth rates are clearly dominated by other factors.

I don't want to start a flame war, so I'll stop there.

I want to share a podcast you may be interested in, because it's dicussing how to price nature from an economic perspective:

Pricing Nature is a limited-series podcast from the Yale Center for Business and the Environment and the Yale Carbon Charge. It tells a story about the economics, politics, and history of carbon pricing, which many argue should play a critical role in any national climate policy. We feature conversations with carbon pricing experts from government, academia, and civil society. To learn more, visit our website, pricingnature.substack.com.

I was a bit "flamy" with my first comment, sorry. I'm honestly not very into podcasts - short attention span? But if by any chance you have a written source I'll probably take a peek.

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