Comment by Liquix
18 hours ago
~90% of the plastic debris in the ocean comes from ten rivers [0]. eight are in china/SEA. millions and billions of single-use items are sitting in warehouses and on store shelves wrapped in plastic. even before the plastic is discarded, the factories these items are produced in dump metric tons of waste into the oceans/soil with little repercussion.
point is, none of our "personal lifestyle decisions" - not eating meat, not mining bitcoin, not using chatgpt, not driving cars - are a drop in the bucket compared to standard practice overseas manufacturing.
us privileged folks could "just boycott", "buy renewable", "vote with your wallet", etc, but sales will move to a less developed area and the pollution will continue. this is not to say that the environment isn't important - it's critically important. it's just to say that until corporations are forced to do things the right way, it's ludicrous to point fingers at each other and worry that what we do day-to-day is destroying the planet.
That's definitely not true. Let's take Americans, for example, driving their cars to work. Americans are about 15% of the world's emissions, of which 25% or so is transportation, of which well over half is cars. So you not driving to work is making direct impact on 2-3% of the world's overall emissions. Likewise, your decisions on all the other things, if taken in aggregate, will have a significant impact on overall emissions.
"Driving to work" is hardly a "vote with your wallet" style consumer choice. Our housing, building, and transportation policies have been geared towards encouraging car-dependence for nearly a century. In places with better public transit and bike lanes, people spontaneously choose to use those modes of transport. Just like with companies dumping as much plastic waste/CO2 as they can get away with, this is a policy problem, plain and simple. No amount of pro-environment metal straw campaigns will solve it. At best environmentally-conscious messaging could encourage changes in voting behavior which influence policy. At worst people could be convinced that they're "doing their part" and fail to consider systemic changes.
Regular voting is usually what affects things such as the transportation infrastructure in your country or city. It’s a slow proceed though.
Here in Oslo there has been a lot of investment in bike lanes, but just because one part of the local government builds more bike lanes doesn’t mean that other parts of the government will follow suit. Police still doesn’t care about cars illegally blocking the bike lanes. The people ploughing snow see bike lanes as the last thing that should need ploughing, preferably no earlier than 2 weeks after it snowed. A dedicated bike path I use to work is supposed to be ploughed within 2 hours of snow, but it took a week before anything was done and now three weeks later it’s still not to the standard that the government has set.
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I would agree with you, but Americans intentionally reinforce car dependence whenever it's discussed.
It's bad enough that even non-US people regurgitate those talking points despite them being significantly less true for them; because they see it so much online.
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See, my point is that everyone first goes “it’s not me”, then they understand it is them and go “but it’s not my policies” and then they vote in the policies which are the problem. It’s totally fine to go “we need collective action to fix this”. But you have to actually join the collective action. You think billionaires are getting rich by committing environmental arbitrage? Then don’t oppose attempts to make the costs appropriate, even if you must now pay your fair share too.
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Meat and dairy specifically accounts for around 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).
If people collectively just ate a bit less meat and dairy, it would go a long way. Don't even have to be perfect. Just show a little bit of restraint.
Right just a little bit of restraint. On an unprecedented scale of coordination by hundreds of millions to billions of people - a scale of cooperation that has probably never occurred in human history (and there's no reason to believe it will any time soon).
But sure, if people "just" did a "little", it would go a long way. Just a _little_ restraint from the entire population all at once in perpetuity. No big deal.
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The US government could help by ending subsidies towards meat and dairy production, which will prevent those products from being artificially underpriced.
https://www.ewg.org/news-insights/news/2024/10/usda-livestoc...
Greenhouse gas emissions are only a fraction of terrible things that humans are inflicting on the environment, and meat/dairy are both nutritious food that provides requirements for sustenance, and if not eaten need to be replaced by something else that will also cause greenhouse gas emissions (aka, a 10% reduction in meat consumption does not equal to a 1.45% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions)
I think it's kind of crazy to place the burden of environmental destruction on individual buying habits, rather than the people in power who actually have the ability to make sweeping changes that might actually move the needle.
Let's start with not incentivizing, then disincentivizing the mass production and importation of plastic garbage waste and e-waste that not only create greenhouse gas emissions but pollute the environment in other, irreversible ways.
And if your government and leaders don't make this a priority, and regardless of who you vote in, big-name corpo donors get their way instead, then maybe it's time for a new government.
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Not encouraging population growth everywhere but particularly in the highest per-capita consuming and polluting countries, but rather allow them to naturally level off and even gradually decline would go a much longer way. It would enable significant emissions reductions and reduction in all other environmental impacts of consumption without impacting quality of life.
Eating bugs and living in pods sounds great and all, but if the end result is just allowing the ruling class to pack more drones and consumers in like sardines then it's not really solving anything.
I was able to cut out 95% of meat without it being much trouble.
Since my birth the population of earth has almost doubled.
How much of Americans driving to work is because they choose too though? Amazon's 5 day RTO policy is a good example. How many of the people now going to an office 5 days a week would've done so without the mandate? I see the traffic every day, and saw the same area before the mandate, so I can tell you with confidence that there's many more cars on the road as a result of this commute. this all funnels back to the corporate decision to mandate 5 days in office.
Exactly. IMO, any politician who's serious about saving the environment or reducing the number of cars should be proposing bills to heavily tax employers for every unnecessary commute they require of their employees (maybe $100-$500 per employee per unnecessary day required in the office).
if taken in aggregate, will have a significant impact
This is a good sentiment. But, in context, it is a fallacy. A harmful one.
Consumer action on transport and whatnot, assuming a massive and persistent global awareness effort... has the potential of adding up to a rounding error.
Housing policy, transport policy, urban planning... these are what affects transport emissions. Not individual choices.
Look at our environmental history. Consumer choice has no wins.
It's propaganda. Role reversal. Something for certain organizations to do. It is not an actual effort to achieve environmental benefit.
We should be demanding governments clean up. Governments and NGOs should not be demanding that we clean up.
This assumes all emissions / externalities are created equal, which they are not.
You are right. Though for CO2 that simplification comes pretty close to true.
Could you say more?
Are you talking about comparing CO2 to N2O to CH4 to fluorocarbons, for example?
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The emissions from vehicles are different from plastics produced by factories.
Also, while important, 2-3% of world emissions is a drop in the bucket compared to the other 97%. Let's consider the other causes and how we can fix them.
Think about this: for many people, not driving to work is a big deal. If people collectively decide to do that, that's a lot of effort and inconvenience just for 2-3%.
while 3% might sound like a drop in the bucket, there isn't any single specific chunk of the rest of the 97% that will immediately cut, say, 30-40% of emissions (also remember that 2-3% is the super specific "Americans not driving cars", not "everyone in the world not driving cars").
There isn’t really a magic wand we can wave and get 50% back for free and without inconvenience. The other 97% involves things like individually figuring out where our electricity generation goes. Or figuring out which farms to shut down, or what manufacturing we don’t like anymore. All of this must happen. It will be inconvenient. I picked a slice that is immediately relevant to a lot of people here. But there are a lot of axes to look at this.
> That's definitely not true. Let's take Americans, for example, driving their cars to work.
Even an example like this that is carefully chosen to make consumers feel/act more responsible falls short. You want people to change their lives/careers to not drive? Ok, but most people already want to work from home, so even the personal “choice” about whether to drive a car is basically stuck like other issues pending government / corporate action, in this case to either improve transit or to divest from expensive commercial real estate. This is really obvious isn’t it?
Grabbing back our feeling of agency should not come at the expense of blaming the public under the ridiculous pretense of “educating” them, because after years of that it just obscures the issues and amounts to misinformation. Fwiw I’m more inclined to agree with admonishing consumers to “use gasoline responsibly!” than say, water usage arguments where cutting my shower in half is supposed to somehow fix decades of irresponsible farming, etc. But after a while, people mistrust the frame itself where consumers are blamed, and so we also need to think carefully about the way we conduct these arguments.
I think many Americans driving to work would be happy to work from home if not RTO mandates (encouraged by the government at least on a local level).
The amount of people who choose to not drive to work is significantly impacted by policy.
> Let's take Americans, for example, driving their cars to work.
This is easily solved by switching to EVs. A small-size EV (perfect for personal transportation) is only slightly less CO2-efficient than rail ( https://ourworldindata.org/travel-carbon-footprint ).
I wish the world would ditch public transit entirely. It's nothing but a misery generator. It's far better to switch to remote work and distributed cities.
I unironically like public transport because someone else does the “driving” for me. I’m sure someone is going to explain how Waymo solves this but sitting on a train with my laptop and breakfast while I magically get teleported to my office is much nicer than even being in the back seat of a car.
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Public transit is not miserable everywhere. In Central European countries it can be quite enjoyable.
I have always felt this way too. Our personal choices do not move the needle on fossil fuel and plastics. One could embrace aversion to these out of a sense of sustainability to signal virtue, but lets not pretend it will save the planet. It won't. Restricting aviation flights, stopping wars and minimizing the dirty fuel used in maritime freight does much more. But the world will not do it.
While I agree in general, my opinion is that customer choices do also matter and can move the needle, slowly, with larger cultural change.
Personally, trying to make better choices, big or small, isn't about "virtue signalling". It's about acknowledging the issues and living according to ones values.
This line of thinking is what undermines democracies and ruins the environment. Your choice might just be a drop in the ocean, but guess what the ocean is made out of.
> it's just to say that until corporations are forced to do things the right way
But this isn't going to happen by itself. We need to vote for people who believes in regulating these corporations (rather than deregulating them).
> "vote with your wallet", etc, but sales will move to a less developed area and the pollution will continue.
But voting with your wallet is literally moving sales to a more developed area with less pollution?
I think this is wrong.
Descriptively / "objectively" if you make your demand cleaner, you decrease demand for dirty consumption. You can't say individuals don't matter by comparing them to the world, that's invalid.
Normatively, is it a useful lie? Maybe, to some extent. People are lazy, selfish, and stupid. Peter Singer points out that we might be nice to people nearby, but we don't give money to people starving in other countries even if we think it will make a real difference. And no human can really know how even a pencil is made, so we make poor decisions. A carbon tax would unleash the free market on the problem. But saying individuals can't act is not good leadership, if even the people who say they want to fix the issue won't make personal sacrifices, why should the average voter?
Regarding the immediate effect I am sure your point is valid. But it’s also a bit of a cynical point of view, wouldn’t you say? People make these statements and pursue these personal lifestyle decisions because of their dreams for a better future - not its immediate effect. Just as companies need a vision to succeed, societies need vision as well. If a lot of people are vocal about something and live it, it has a chance of becoming anchored in laws and so force companies to do the “right thing”. Regulation follows collective values.
This massively lets the Philippines off the hook. China has a gazillion people, and so does India, and the rest of SE Asia is bad for pollution, but the Philippines — with 1.5% of the world’s population — is an incredible 36% of ocean plastic pollution.
Also a call-out to Malaysia who are an upper-middle income country and contribute far too much per capita given their income situation, but again, they are a drop in the ocean compared to the (much, much poorer) Philippines.
Having spent half my life in South-East Asia, there’s a cultural problem that needs fixing there.
A pretty graph that make it clear just how bad the most egregious polluters are comparatively: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ocean-plastic-waste-per-c...
What are they doing in the Philippines? Dumping household waste straight into the rivers?
I think they are fishing commerially a lot. Most of the ocean trash comes from the fishing industry (e.g. abandoned nets).
Pretty much. Buying everything in sachets and then not having any real waste disposal; https://earth.org/philippines-plastic/
Per capita beef consumption is down by 35% in the US since the 70s. From 62kg/person/year to 35.
Beef produces ~100kg CO2 per kg of meat. That's a reduction of 27,000kgs of CO2 reduction, per capita.
That's not nothing. By simply reducing beef consumption by 1 kilogram a month, you can prevent more than a metric ton of CO2. If 5% of Americans cut 1 kilo of beef a month, that'd knock out 15 million tons of CO2.
Small changes can have an impact on aggregate, and just because someone else is not making those changes doesn't excuse us looking at ourselves and saying, "I could choose something else this time".
It’s helpful to put this issue into perspective. But dismissing issues as not worth caring about on the grounds that there exist larger problems is fallacious and, to me, quite a dangerous way to live life.
“Why worry about your town’s water quality when some countries don’t have access to clean water?”
“Why go to the dentist for a cavity when some people have no teeth?“
“Why campaign for animal rights when there are some many human rights abuses going on?”
This is nothing but head-in-the-sand, arms-in-the-air, feel-good baloney to convince oneself to sleep well at night.
Guess what happens when you buy a used laptop instead of a new one?
That's right: less "standard practice overseas manufacturing".
Lifestyle change right there.
Buying less, using the same for longer, buying used goods instead of new are lifestyle changes that anyone can make and have an undeniable very clear impact by reducing the amount of stuff that needs to get made. Using my smartphone for 6 years instead of changing every 3 years doesn't mean the one I didn't buy gets sold elsewhere. It means one less sale.
This reads like an attempt to pass the blame to others. Per capita CO₂ emissions in the US are one of the highest in the world, and significantly higher than those in China or SEA. This is despite the US/Europe moving some of our dirtiest/cheapest manufacturing to that region.
Personal choices matter. See the amount of energy used on air conditioning in the US compared to areas of Europe with comparable weather for a banal example. If we want to significantly reduce emissions it will happen through a combination of personal choices, corporate action and government policy.
And 80% of all the trash in the oceans come from fishing industry (e.g. abandoned nets).
well, it's really not about the destruction of the planet but making our habitat more hostile and humans more sick.
sure, STEM will continue to find remedies and cures but at some point we're fucked just because the gene pool was reduced to an unnaturally selected bunch that survived & thrived completely alienated from the actual world.
sure, no biggie, wahaha, that's the name of the game, the old will die, the young repeat the same nonsense and that microbiome and all that other stuff we carry with us as hosts, potentially most likely in a beneficial symbiotic relationship, have no implicit mechanisms to cancel the contract and pivot towards some species or other that won't be d u m b enough to shit all over it's own home & garden, consequently ruining the bio-chemistry with the smell, taste and look of feces everywhere - in the body as well as outside - and all that while it's getting a bit hot in here.
and I doubt that the consequences of controlled demise in a deteriorating environment all while the meds and drugs of leadership and the people fade out quite a few of the brains and the bodies implicit reactions to a lot of sensory perceptions to everything that was vital, crucial to notice for a 'million' years can't be projected to at least some degree. I mean "blindspots" are a thinking tool, after all, but those thinking brains and minds believe in black swans and the better angels of our nature so that doesn't really mean a thing.
the population itself is fine, a habit of psycho-social education and all consecutive upper levels being insanely afraid of competition and insights from below. thing is, whatever financial survival schemes people are running, they all have death cult written all over their faces.
btw, most of this was for fun, I'm really not worried at all. climate change is more a cycle than man-made acceleration. my only point of interest is the deterioration of the species due to all the things that we do and then worry more about the habitat than our and all kinds.
we absolutely can turn the planet into a conservatory. through any climate.
"Personal impact" is just laundering the responsibility of government and corporations so it looks like it's our fault.
It is true that everyone everywhere all at once could suddenly make the right decision forever and save the planet. But is a statistical anomaly so extreme it's not worth pursuing as a policy. No policy maker worth their salt would look at that and consider it valid long term.
We have a playbook. We refuse to use it. We ban products, and then the companies that refuse to change or cheat get shuttered, and we move on.
Do we talk about pollution or emmissions?
One of the most imminent problems with the environment isn't due to plastic pollution (which is of course terrible, might well have unforseen ramifications via micro plastics, and is impacting negatively biodiversity), but CO2 and other gases impacting climate.
While we should strive to fix both, it's more important in the short term to limit the amount of CO2 pollution before it's too late.
Finally someone who speaks this out. What we do is more or less fly poop ... good four own well being but with almost zero impact. I'll go on doing some things because I think that some of that are the better ways to handle this or that or it's better for my health but with no expectation that I'll change anything.