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Topic: Climate Change and You (Read 14320 times)
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Climate Change and You
Judith Curry says
Quote
A few weeks ago I spotted this quote:

” “Climate change” is just a mental tattoo — a phrase we invoke with an air of scientific sophistication to give some sense of knowledgeability about the unknowable.”

That statement pretty much sums up the whole thing. Climate ‘science’ has become boring, mostly dotting i’s and crossing t’s (or worse yet, crossing i’s and dotting t’s). Even if we assume the science is ‘settled’, the policy discussion is even more boring – infeasible solutions that even if successfully implemented would very possibly leave us worse off than doing nothing (such has having inadequate electricity and fuel for heating during the winter).
(source)
Post COP 26, how do you feel about "Climate Change"?
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"Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility." - James Thurber
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts!" - Richard Feynman
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Re: Climate Change and You

Reply #25 –
Public companies are public. Clearly their impact on the environment is part of accounting, both for the shareholders and other stakeholders.

Re: Climate Change and You

Reply #26 –
It seems to me that you presume a reliability of attribution (to man-made carbon emissions, of consequential "climate change") that even the IPCC has not...
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"Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility." - James Thurber
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts!" - Richard Feynman
 (iBook G4 - Panther | Mac mini i5 - El Capitan)

Re: Climate Change and You

Reply #27 –
If you don't know what your company is releasing into the environment, you probably shouldn't be running it. It is a question of accounting.

Targets and what you are going to do in the future are different, but not fulfilling them can be breach of contract. The new SEC rules don't seem to require that, just that if you say "I have a plan", you have to show what that plan is, not that it will succeed. But investors should then be able to discern between those who don't have a plan and those who do, and among the latter who has got a good plan and who has not. Companies with no or bad plans, and/or big climate exposure will be riskier investments.

Re: Climate Change and You

Reply #28 –
Quote from: jax – on
Companies with no or bad plans, and/or big climate exposure will be riskier investments.
When cult science comes to predominate what's usually called environmental protection, indeed! But virtue signaling is still the most that is required...to avoid onerous regulation/litigation. :)
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"Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility." - James Thurber
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts!" - Richard Feynman
 (iBook G4 - Panther | Mac mini i5 - El Capitan)

Re: Climate Change and You

Reply #29 –
David Attenborough wrote a foreword to the Dasgupta review.
Quote from: David Attenborough, Foreword to the Dasgupta review
Today, we ourselves, together with the livestock we rear for food, constitute 96% of the mass of all mammals on the planet. Only 4% is everything else - from elephants to badgers, from moose to monkeys. And 70% of all birds alive at this moment are poultry - mostly chickens for us to eat. We are destroying biodiversity, the very characteristic that until recently enabled the natural world to flourish so abundantly. If we continue this damage, whole ecosystems will collapse. That is now a real risk.
Given where and how I grew up (fairly deep in the countryside, engaged in farming activities with a notch above primitive level of technology) I thought the mass of wildlife vs. mass of civilisation was roughly equal. Yeah, if you want truth, don't be an optimist.

Quote from: David Attenborough, Foreword to the Dasgupta review
Economics is a discipline that shapes decisions of the utmost consequence, and so matters to us all. The Dasgupta Review at last puts biodiversity at its core and provides the compass that we urgently need. In doing so, it shows us how, by bringing economics and ecology together, we can help save the natural world at what may be the last minute...
The analytical-contrastive (as opposed to holistic) mind that gave us modern science and the entrepreneurial  (as opposed to contemplative) spirit that gave us capitalism tend to disregard the consequences of their own actions. The environmental concerns come only now, reactively, when the consequences of previous disregard are too obvious to deny.

Analysis is okay when you compare and contrast, e.g. plus and minus are definitely not the same thing and should not be mixed up. However, plus and minus are also interdependent - one cannot exist without the other, and if/when the one exists, so does the other. It is similar with ecology and economy. Economy draws from ecology, so in a complete account of economics ecology would never have been relegated to an externality. I'm sure ancient people understood this properly and considered ecology the more fundamental of the two, economy being a subset of ecology or a superstructure on ecology. But we have ruined it along the way, and have not learned any lessons from a number of earlier civilisations fallen due to disregard of ecology.

Dasgupta's purpose is to translate ecological reality into economic concepts and to make ecology amenable to accounting. I'll see this weekend if he succeeds.

Re: Climate Change and You

Reply #30 –
Quote from: ersi – on
have not learned any lessons from a number of earlier civilisations fallen due to disregard of ecology.
Note that the Easter Island for example was a completely made up hoax. Its civilization never fell (or at least not until Peruvian slave raiders captured most of the population).

Re: Climate Change and You

Reply #31 –
Good point. I have wondered if e.g. Mayan civilisation had indeed been abandoned due to some ecological catastrophe or was it abruptly ended by colonial firepower. In the latter case the events would be analogous to the way Inca and Aztec empires ended (and also more in line with Mel Gibson's movie). Colonial era is not a too distant past (it is arguably even ongoing) so we should know better.

In some sense one could somewhat disingenuously argue that civilisation never ends for ecological reasons, only transforms. A staple resource ends, so humans will adapt, one might say. But I'd draw the line where humans must radically adapt or die. E.g. Vikings in Greenland did not last long, because Greenland could not sustain cattle, so Vikings went extinct. At the same time, Eskimos never had a problem. Maybe a few Vikings adapted and aligned themselves with Eskimo way of life, but that's indeed the end of Viking civilisation in Greenland.

The distinction here is between a civilisation (or high culture) and a way of life (low culture). A lower human culture does not affect the environment much more than the animals in the region would, whereas a civilisation reshapes landscapes and horizons so that it is the environment that either adapts or doesn't. But yeah, a matter of degree.

Re: Climate Change and You

Reply #32 –
Quote from: ersi – on
Dasgupta's purpose is to translate ecological reality into economic concepts and to make ecology amenable to accounting. I'll see this weekend if he succeeds.
I'm intrigued, ersi! Who again it this Dasgupta fellow? :)
Quote from: ersi – on
The distinction here is between a civilisation (or high culture) and a way of life (low culture). A lower human culture does not affect the environment much more than the animals in the region would, whereas a civilisation reshapes landscapes and horizons so that it is the environment that either adapts or doesn't. But yeah, a matter of degree
Glad to see you acquiescing to the real world! (I'm not bothered by the "low" and "high" misnomers...:)

Perhaps you can let loose of your ridiculous partisan pejoratives long enough to discuss...? Nah, you're a Never-Trumper, silly as it seems! You'd not know how to discuss anything with an American -who wasn't a Demon-crat- or some other species of America hater. You've got your pride, after all...
[Did you really say SDI wa evil? "You can't protect yourself from our attack! That's — provocative..." said the Kremlin, and -as a good little school boy- you believed it then (if you didn't understand it) and you believe it now, because — jeez, you hate to admit when you're wrong! :)]

Shall we keep talking? I'd like to... But, of course, it's up to you: As you know, I don't care about "forum niceties"[1] -going off-topic is, in this place, de rigor, no?!

But you have a persona to maintain... I'll understand if you demure.
1 I've seen threads I've started go sideways, into interesting -but non sequiter digression, that was worth my while...!:)↵
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"Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility." - James Thurber
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts!" - Richard Feynman
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Re: Climate Change and You

Reply #33 –
Quote from: OakdaleFTL – on
I'm intrigued, ersi! Who again it this Dasgupta fellow? :)
His research was funded by British Treasury. At least somebody tries to come up with a complete theory for economic analysis. Not sure if anybody will make use of it though. In practice it usually suffices to be a good accountant to see through the defects of mainstream economics and also circumvent the defects, but it is long overdue to give a positive expression to a complete economics in modern terms.

Quote from: OakdaleFTL – on
[Did you really say SDI wa evil? "You can't protect yourself from our attack! That's — provocative..." said the Kremlin, and -as a good little school boy- you believed it then (if you didn't understand it) and you believe it now, because — jeez, you hate to admit when you're wrong! :)]
In my current job, I have to understand something called "dual-use goods". They are things that the counterpart says are for one purpose, but I have to know they can be, and are, actually used for a different, risky or criminal purpose about as often.

I have seen and understood doublespeak in action almost since birth. You, on the other hand, think (and say) that Reagan can do nothing wrong and always means what he says. Here's a hint: Reagan was an actor. And a politician too!

Reagan's Star Wars was not for defence or protection, obviously, duh. It was for military supremacy - when USA already had military supremacy. USA always had military supremacy. Take a look at history: When has USA ever been attacked? The answer: Never. USA has always been on the attack, but it has never been attacked by any other country. When USA purports defence, it is such a ludicrous lie that only the most brainwashed daily flag-worshippers cannot see through.

Usually it is said that Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex, but when I read it, I saw that it was a blueprint and a manual for how to bloat it.

And, different from you, I have no partisan bone to pick in this. E.g. JFK and Nixon were equally evil wrt Cuban crisis and Vietnam war.

Re: Climate Change and You

Reply #34 –
Quote from: ersi – on
Reagan's Star Wars was not for defence or protection, obviously, duh. It was for military supremacy - when USA already had military supremacy. USA always had military supremacy.
As usual, you ignore whatever is unfamiliar... Was not the Soviet Union's stated (and practiced) goal to subvert the world -specially the West, and the Americas, in particular- to Communism?
(There was a little kerfuffle about Party membership, here; in the '50's, the overthrow of our government by subversion was a no-no! My, how times have changed!:)
Why -you seem to ask- would any nation seek obvious military supremacy, over an adversary who intends that nation's demise? Gee: Let me think... When Reagan called the Soviet Union an evil empire, he wasn't just reading the lines of some speechwriter... He spoke clearly about what "diplomats" dare not mention: Reality trumps ideology, and politics becomes meaningless when war is a real consideration...
The US had no (stated) aims of acquisition or subjugation of the territories of other sovereigns. The Comintern was a different animal, no? :)
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"Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility." - James Thurber
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts!" - Richard Feynman
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Re: Climate Change and You

Reply #35 –
Quote from: OakdaleFTL – on
Why -you seem to ask- would any nation seek obvious military supremacy, over an adversary who intends that nation's demise? [...] Reality trumps ideology, and politics becomes meaningless when war is a real consideration...
"Intends" is not reality. "Does" is. USA has never been attacked by any other country ever. This is the historical and geopolitical reality.

Of course, it is true that most of the actual conduct of politics - diplomacy - is fluff, huff and puff, i.e. just rhetoric, total non-reality. This is why you need to distinguish between words and deeds. USSR never attacked USA - and in the rest of the world they attacked much less than USA. Yet USA *did* accelerate the nuclear arms race with reference to protection from USSR - not in word, but in deed.

Not that USSR is or was anything good. No, it was evil. But USA is at least as bad. At least. I have no difficulty in stating that none of the major powers is any good, all are lying morally empty power-hungry war-mongering colonial imperial capitalist pigs. And USA trumps them all.

Re: Climate Change and You

Reply #36 –
So well propagandized you are! (Says Yoda...:)
Mortality -since it became philosophical- is, for intellectuals, a "ball of confusion"! But the ole standby -Them vs Us- suits most people. (Which is to say, means little or nothing — except in times of crisis; then some will want to take a step back and look at what-all is going on, to see if thee's a more reasonable way of dealing with conflicts, conflicting aims, zero-sum thinking about same...[1]
Communism always had (totalitarian) domination as its goal. American capitalism had — a good idea that it could promulgate...

I'm sorry for all the havoc and inconsiderate non-kow-towing we've engendered.... But, hey, life goes on! We can't all be plebes. (You-all can get your Telly free from our insidious influence easily enough, if your gub'ment will permit ya to![2])
1 I be one such...↵
2 RJ, are you lurking? :)↵
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"Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility." - James Thurber
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts!" - Richard Feynman
 (iBook G4 - Panther | Mac mini i5 - El Capitan)

Re: Climate Change and You

Reply #37 –
Quote from: OakdaleFTL – on
American capitalism had — a good idea that it could promulgate...
Capitalism is a bad idea, particularly in combination with the modern defective economics. Capitalism rewards insatiable greed. It encourages deceptive and shady business practices and is polluting the planet with impunity. There is no sense of responsibility anywhere in the system.

You can call the greed industriousness or free enterprise instead, but it does not change the fact that capitalism has no controls for consumer protection or environmental protection. Monetary profit rules and now we have the global consequences at hand.

Of course capitalism spreads easily, because the average joe is greedy. But this does not mean greed should be fomented. Lions eat lambs, but this does not mean lambs should be fed to lions. The average joe is greedy and the good idea is to restrict the greed, not foment it. Some regulation restrictive of the excesses of capitalism is in place in most continental European countries. Some in USA also, but there is a better systematised consumer and civil protection in Europe.

An even better idea would be to institute a system of economy where industriousness is systemically channelled to rewarding the provision of *necessities* first (as distinguished from *luxuries* such as houses you don't live in and *manufactured needs* such as batteries and connectors that only go to your Apple device, not anywhere else) and employing *sustainable means* second (as in recycling and renewable resources).

In practice, this better system of economy has been inherently or naturally or institutionally at work only in hunter-gatherer societies. I have personally experienced it also during the anarchy that was the transitional era during and after the collapse of USSR. The cracks in the economy appeared early in the Gorbachev's era, as soon as he legalised so-called cooperatives, which permitted some small private enterprise, particularly trade of anything that could be sold/traded in рынок and ярмарка.[1] This caused grey economy to explode, while there was no administrative official bureaucratic capacity to account for what was going on in it, so it was basically untaxed, in effect black market rather than grey. And since it grew bigger than the official taxable economy - or big enough to threaten and replace it -, the official economy was doomed. As the regime collapsed with hyperinflation, shops became empty and money became purposeless, so countryside people like me naturally turned to tilling the land, which we had been doing anyway all along, even though it had been illegal.

When shops don't feed you, then you feed yourself, which just so happens to be the most meaningful (self-)employment for a human being, particularly when it is not a new way of life that you need to learn and adapt to, but something you grew up with. When you feed yourself from a given piece of land, you obviously take care that the piece of land remains productive across your lifetime, you avoid polluting it. And around your home you make use of any and all available materials and you do not throw them away after use - there is no place to throw them away to! - but rather make repeated use of them until they are completely exhausted. If inexhaustible, you keep repurposing the materials, i.e. recycling.

This is what I used to do with absolutely everything and it was perfect. In comparison, the current capitalist fads of recycling and sustainability are a painful joke and mockery, a scam and money grab in addition to all other scams and money grabs that we already have more than enough of in capitalism.

So the best time of my life was during the transitional era, when the government was not there and the society fell back close to a hunter-gatherer way of life. For most city people it was horrible times, but I was quite happy to have my city relatives around helping to toil and then share the produce. My industriousness was naturally channelled to the provision of necessities, even though my economic scope was limited to my extended family and immediate neighbourhood. A properly instituted economic system would enable a larger scope for small businesses.

In summary, even though this was clearly the most sensible form of economy, unfortunately this was not an instituted form of economy. It was a fall-back state in the absence of government. Eventually another government cropped up and began taxing so that shop goods, corporate brands and manufactured needs gained priority over the produce of the land. All the systemic evils of capitalism were viciously enforced with a vengeance.

Capitalism is a very very bad idea. And American capitalism is a global humanitarian disaster. You should be able to observe the *manufactured poverty* locally in the streets of SF and LA, those tents of homeless and the crawling drug addicts. At least things are esthetically not that bad over here.
1 Things like farmer's market, community festivals, garage sales and other occasions/events like that. Cooperatives also operated sales kiosks.↵

Re: Climate Change and You

Reply #38 –
Quote from: ersi – on
Of course capitalism spreads easily, because the average joe is greedy.
I'm not convinced it spreads all that easily. If you look at it historically it's quite a top-down forced proposition. As you also retell yourself from a very different perspective:
Quote from: ersi – on
All the systemic evils of capitalism were viciously enforced with a vengeance.

Re: Climate Change and You

Reply #39 –
It might be instructive, ersi, to read Bill McKibben's Deep Economy... :)
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"Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility." - James Thurber
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts!" - Richard Feynman
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Re: Climate Change and You

Reply #40 –
I have read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, probably a deeper thing.

Re: Climate Change and You

Reply #41 –
How often you revert to mysticism! :)
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"Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility." - James Thurber
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts!" - Richard Feynman
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Recycling is stupid

Reply #42 –
According to Finnish news a supermarket was found abusing the bottle recycling system. Supermarkets feature bottle recycling machines where customers return their empty bottles and cans and get a little coupon on them to be used at the counter of the same supermarket the recycling machine is attached to.

The supermarket gets remunerated for recycling based on the accounting in the machine, not based on the amount of bottles and cans. The supermarket figured out that the amount of bottles and cans goes unchecked, so they ran the bottles and cans through the machine multiple times.

According to more Finnish news the recyclability of pre-2012 bottles will end at the end of this year, so if you want to recycle them in the recycling machines, better hurry up. Next year those bottles will not be recognised by the machines anymore.

I can go on and on how the current EU system of recycling is a sad joke compared to the Soviet recycling system, the worst of it being its ultra-narrow scope. The amount of things you can recycle is nowhere near of what can and should be recycled right now, and also nowhere near the scope and amounts of what was recycled in Soviet Union. Clearly there is no attempt to ever get anywhere near that.

And the little that you can recycle is made both supertortuous and expensive for end consumers. The consumers need to put stuff in the correct bin when it's never clear what the correct bin is. At the same time, the producers of crap that we are forced to consume can continue producing harmful and unrecycleable crap unchecked. As to bottles, the remuneration for the effort to take them to the machine is simply not worth it, which is why many people leave this task to the "professionals".

Update: According to even more Finnish news people now have the wonderful opportunity to comfily slip their empty bottles in a tube-shaped bottle container where the "professionals" I referred to above can equally comfily pick them up to take the bottles to the actual recycling machine. Clearly this is not an example of recycling. It is an example of that recycling is a frustrating burden and a sad joke.


Re: Climate Change and You

Reply #43 –
@ ersi: When you make people do stupid things for stupid reasons, don't be surprised when some decide to make money off of it. Of course, under the Soviet system only the party members are allowed to scam the system!
(We won't mention the civilian criminals... :) )
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"Humor is emotional chaos remembered in tranquility." - James Thurber
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts!" - Richard Feynman
 (iBook G4 - Panther | Mac mini i5 - El Capitan)

Re: Climate Change and You

Reply #44 –
I saw widespread pollution first-hand in the Soviet Union's former satellite states in the mid-'90s. It was cleaned up by West Germany and the EU. So I would be inclined to think of this recycling prowess as a sign of poverty first and foremost, assuming it's not mere propaganda.

Additionally I don't believe there is such a thing as an EU system of recycling. Perhaps that's what you mean by a sad joke, but whatever Finland does or doesn't do has little bearing on you or me.
 

Re: Climate Change and You

Reply #45 –
Industrial pollution is the same everywhere and in all ages, as far as I have lived, travelled, and seen. This is my main gripe: Industries and corporations always got off the hook easy. They got off the hook back then and are getting off the hook now too. I am talking about how the recycling is imposed on people while it is not natural to capitalism to impose it on people. Capitalism values greed and hoarding. Recycling propaganda is completely out of place in the system of capitalism.

Quote from: Frenzie – on
I saw widespread pollution first-hand in the Soviet Union's former satellite states in the mid-'90s. It was cleaned up by West Germany and the EU. So I would be inclined to think of this recycling prowess as a sign of poverty first and foremost, assuming it's not mere propaganda.
Propaganda about recycling did not exist in Soviet Union. The word "recycling" did not exist. The Soviet government did not do anything, either in terms of propaganda, institutional oppression or outright persecution, to force people to recycle. There was certainly no propaganda in terms of "the West is lousy at recycling while we Soviet people are the best the world has ever seen!". That the West is lousy at recycling is my own private observation based on experience.

There was so-called "return" in Soviet Union. You could return your old newspapers and books to recycle paper. You could, if you wanted to. You did not have to. There was no punishment if you did not do it. You could also return rusty metal stuff.

People quite eagerly returned glass bottles to supermarkets (or whatever name one would put on the Soviet equivalent of supermarket). Many bottles cost more than their contents, so the activity of returning bottles provided significant gains, very different from our current times where there is no significant gain, unless you're a professional, either picking up bottles full time or you're in the relevant business as a manager of a supermarket or recycling trucking so there is enough scale in returning bottles.

Moreover, in Soviet times returning of the bottles was not a machine procedure, but human interaction. You did not go to a stinking machine. You went to a human who did not stink too different from yourself.

As to returning paper or metal, people did little of it. Why? Because people had multiple use for those things privately. They thoroughly recycled paper and metal in their personal households out of their own initiative. There was no propaganda that people should behave this way. They just did. It was a way of life. And supermarkets did not sell stuff that consisted of mostly packaging. They sold things very thinly packaged, if packaged at all.

Compare this to current way of life: It is impossible to not buy unusable trash, mostly packaging, from supermarkets. Then you need to get rid of the packages. You have to sort them correctly. As a very simple example, say you get a milk shake at McDonalds. The straw is paper nowadays, but the lid is still plastic, so if you want to be correct, you need to sort the straw and the cup in one bin, the lid in another. It should be obvious that this is an insane and stupid requirement that turns everybody against the very idea of sorting and recycling. Compare to Soviet times: Any and all drinks are provided in real glasses that you return. You do not throw the glasses away!

What should be done right now with recycling is to orient all requirements against the industrial producers. Make it law of the land that industries must stop producing crap. Everything that they produce must be useful and usable. Stop producing plastic. Also, the industries should do their own sorting of the crap. They produce the crap, so they should sort and recycle it. The people should not have to.

Quote from: Frenzie – on
Additionally I don't believe there is such a thing as an EU system of recycling. Perhaps that's what you mean by a sad joke, but whatever Finland does or doesn't do has little bearing on you or me.
Yet every EU country that does recycling does it the same way. Exact copy-paste systems of bottle return. Exact copy-paste imposition of sorting on people with punishments attached without any reward, while the industry gets away with something like paper straws instead of plastic straws while being free to still produce plastic lids on paper cups. Why would that be? One little googling and three EU directives come up:

Quote from: https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/waste-recycling-in-europe
EU targets for waste management are key drivers of increasing recycling rates. For example, the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive sets targets for the separate collection and recycling of electrical and electronic waste; the Waste Framework Directive includes targets for the recycling and preparing for reuse of municipal waste; and the Packaging and Packaging Waste Directive defines targets for recycling packaging waste. In total, EU waste legislation includes more than 30 binding targets for the period 2015-2030.
Note *binding targets* in the last sentence. So there absolutely exists an EU system of recycling.

Edit: You buy something from the supermarket. Whatever you buy, most of what you get is packaging. There is no second purpose to the packaging, so you throw it away, but you have to throw it in the correct bin.

Unfortunately, often enough the packaging is made of multiple elements, so it needs to be sorted into several different bins. This is work. You need to know what goes where and you need to manually pick stuff apart to place different parts in correct bins.

This is work that should be appreciated and remunerated, but instead you have to pay for the garbage truck visiting your house. Paying for the garbage truck to visit your house comes in addition to what you already paid when you bought the garbage. You pay for garbage when you buy it (even though you don't want or need it) and you pay for it again when the garbage truck collects it.

Logically, when I give something away (as in giving away my garbage to the garbage truck), I should get paid. But in the topsy-turvy modern world, at this point I have to pay even though it's somebody else who is getting all the profits of the transaction (both the garbage and the money) and I already paid for the garbage once when I bought it in the first place!

This is why garbage sorting is absolute idiocy. If garbage professionals want to get paid for it, they should do the sorting.

The real reduction of waste in the economy can come not through recycling and punishing ordinary people for failing to recycle, but through punishing waste producers. Just don't produce the crap in the first place, idiots!

Re: Climate Change and You

Reply #46 –
Quote from: ersi – on
Moreover, in Soviet times returning of the bottles was not a machine procedure, but human interaction. You did not go to a stinking machine. You went to a human who did not stink too different from yourself.
The small local neighborhood grocery store still doesn't have a machine; the chain grocery store has had machines since the Soviet Union was still a thing.

Quote
What should be done right now with recycling is to orient all requirements against the industrial producers. Make it law of the land that industries must stop producing crap. Everything that they produce must be useful and usable. Stop producing plastic. Also, the industries should do their own sorting of the crap. They produce the crap, so they should sort and recycle it. The people should not have to.
Have you not seen exactly that happen in Estonia? There's significantly less packaging now than a decade ago. Where there used to be paper with a plastic wrapper now there's only paper.

Quote
Note *binding targets* in the last sentence. So there absolutely exists an EU system of recycling.
In Rotterdam trash separation is done at the trash processing plants, not put upon citizens. This meets the same targets as that which is done in some other places by pre-separation. Both systems, plural, have similar end results. The minimum targets are the same but how to go about it is up to each individual country and municipality. Many go further than the minimum, many do not.

Re: Climate Change and You

Reply #47 –
Quote from: Frenzie – on
Have you not seen exactly that happen in Estonia? There's significantly less packaging now than a decade ago. Where there used to be paper with a plastic wrapper now there's only paper.
May I point out that the process of producing paper is no less poisonous and polluting than producing plastic. Particularly when we are talking about utensils we eat from, i.e. in terms of what ends up directly inside us. Ever felt the smell of a pulp mill?

Producing more paper does not equal less pollution. It's more pollution. It's like producing electric cars. We need less cars, not more. We need less pollution, not more. E.g. Cuba never produced a single car, so people drive their American cars that they have maintained since 1950s. That's the way: Stop producing cars!

I do not believe for a second that there is less production of single-use crap now compared to ten years ago. This much is up for my belief, because I have not looked any deeper into it. But I know for an absolute fact that there is far more production of single-use crap right now than there was thirty years ago. And forty and more years ago, when Soviet Union was still alive and well, single-use crap, such as fast food utensils, was not a thing at all (in Soviet Union). Forty years ago it was only beginning to become a concept in medicine with single-use syringes and such.

Quote from: Frenzie – on
In Rotterdam trash separation is done at the trash processing plants, not put upon citizens. This meets the same targets as that which is done in some other places by pre-separation. Both systems, plural, have similar end results. The minimum targets are the same but how to go about it is up to each individual country and municipality. Many go further than the minimum, many do not.
Good for Rotterdam. I will believe it when I see it. What you are also silently saying is that this is not the case in Brussels, nor is it the case anywhere else in Europe. And nobody except me is suggesting the policy of making recycling the requirement and responsibility on industries instead of on consumers. Whenever I say it, it's treated as a novel idea.

Surely you have seen propaganda that we consumers should consume responsibly, even though the reality is that we are forced to consume stuff that is available in supermarkets and shopping centres. We cannot buy "green" stuff that is not there. We can only buy stuff that is there. So, if we should only buy "green" stuff, then first manufacturers must be forced to produce only green stuff. This is obviously the way it should go, but nobody besides me is suggesting it. The propaganda is that consumers must become responsible instead.

To be clear: Crap labelled "green" is still crap. It's crap because "green" is just a tiny corner in the supermarket, i.e. it's not a serious alternative. It's crap because "green" is just a label that makes stuff more expensive, while there is no certainty that it was produced any differently than non-green crap. It's crap because it represents the same single-use throwaway principle, no maintainability on the end-user side.

Re: Climate Change and You

Reply #48 –
Quote from: ersi – on
Producing more paper does not equal less pollution.
The same paper minus plastic is less, not more. All plastic packaging has also been greatly reduced in the amount of plastic. Of course this is doubtless primarily done because less costs less but the end result is the same.

Quote
What you are also silently saying is that this is not the case in Brussels, nor is it the case anywhere else in Europe.
I have no idea what they do in Brussels. You are likely correct that it's closer to what you describe, but the point remains that the EU isn't enforcing some particular method. Your municipality is responsible for its own choices.

Quote from: ersi – on
And nobody except me is suggesting the policy of making recycling the requirement and responsibility on industries instead of on consumers. Whenever I say it, it's treated as a novel idea.
I'd say that's exactly what's been done in for example EU Directive 2019/904 as well as the recent right to repair vote, and it's how we previously solved the acid rain and ozone layer crises. You're unhappy with it because it doesn't go far enough, leaves too many loopholes or something similar but it's well established.

Re: Climate Change and You

Reply #49 –
Quote from: Frenzie – on
The same paper minus plastic is less, not more.
Any more elaborately manufactured "paper", such as paper cups or dishes, include plastic. Glanzpapier is probably mostly plastic. A paper newspaper has no plastic, but look up the list of chemicals used in the washing process to get the paper to be as white as we want it...

Quote from: Frenzie – on
...it's how we previously solved the acid rain and ozone layer crises.
I'm of two minds about this. First, nice of us to have solved those crises. This shows that man-made environmental problems can be cleared up. Climate denialists are stupid.

However, having solved the acid rain and ozone layer crises, how the hell did we end up with the current "global warming/climate change" thingie? Didn't we learn anything from the earlier crises? Because all along, it's the same wider problem: Industrial pollution. We haven't solved it after all...