Comment by SilasX | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SilasX | Hacker News Reader

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>The plastic bag ban caused much gnashing of teeth, but it was a basic instance of market failure (nobody pays for the externalities of bag pollution), and people have adapted fine since the ban took effect.

But the ban caused much, much more damage than needed to remedy the externality. If mispricing were the problem being solved, they could slap an appropriate tax on the stores' bags, and then stores would pay it, fold it into prices, implement policies to discourage too many bags, roll their eyes, and move on.

Instead, the bag law means they must explicitly charge the customer for bags; they can't just absorb it into prices (as every store did before).

(And I don't know if you've ever worked as a cashier, but adding another step to every transaction gets old really quick, and holding up a line so someone can dig for a dime because they forgot to ask for one the first time around is ridiculous.)

Furthermore, ten cents is (by any reasonable back-of-the-envelope measure) far more than the magnitude of the externality, and it's not put into a fund to remedy the externaliites, nor can I get the ten cents back when I redeem it and thereby prove that it's not going into some bird's lungs.

This is just like most hastily-considered conservation policies: penny-wise and pound foolish. I'm likewise hounded to cut back on showers, despite them producing far more economic value than uses of water that are basically value-destructive (growing alfalfa) and which get a free pass. Similarly, I get paid nothing for having an ultra-low-carbon lifestyle, while people get large government subsidies to make their already-wasteful lifestyle a little less so.

Yes, it sucks when externalities aren't priced in. But we shouldn't use that justification as carte blanche to overcharge for the wrong ones.

Plastic bags are not an economic question. Most voters in the Bay Area do not want them used at all. Local ordinances against plastic bags have wide-spread popular support.

Plastic shopping bags cause serious problems for sea life as well as some terrestrial creatures. Plus they result in pervasive, long-lasting litter that most of us in the Bay Area are sick of looking at. There are simple alternatives like bringing reusable bags that make these problems go away.

This is is not an ill-considered initiative by some faceless bureaucrat. At least in my county most of the predicted benefits have been achieved with minimal inconvenience to the citizenry. [1]

[1] https://oaklandnorth.net/2014/09/22/alameda-county-ordinance...

The point is to encourage you to bring your own bag, eliminating a disposable bag from use. To do that you have to charge explicitly for it.

It's kind of ironic, plastic bags probably have one of the lower environmental impacts of all the things one might find in a grocery store.

I mean, most people burn more fuel driving to the store than they use plastic bags in a year (a gallon of gasoline is about 6 pounds), but we don't have a 'combine trips' awareness campaign.

It's not just the oil being used, it's the environmental damage from the bags themselves as well. Besides there are incentives in place in many municipalities to encourage car pooling and using lower emissions vehicles (car pool lanes, gas tax, EV subsidies, etc).

We are talking about SF and plastic bag. Most of us don't drive in SF...and we do combine trips / car share because Uber/Lyft cost. Financial incentive cannot be ruled out as inefficient that fast imo.

Germany has been charging for bags at the store for at least 25 years. I don't understand how Americans have so much trouble with the most inconsequential of amenities they are asked to provide the environment.

You're shoving words in my mouth. I don't care about bag taxes, I think it's stupid we pay so much attention to them and ignore things that are far more harmful. And we do ignore them, so it's not simply a case of being able to do both, the bags really do seem to be capturing attention from more pressing issues.

Why shouldn't we pay attention to them as well as the larger things? Especially in America where the harsh reality is were going to have to change our lifestyles a lot over the next 50 years, boiling the frog is probably the best way to keep everyone calm.

I mean, water alone is going to be a major issue for California.

I think it is pretty clear that energy is going to get cheaper and cleaner. This helps a lot with household water use (agricultural volumes are still pretty expensive).

Figuring out how to make the benefits of the growing economy more widely available seems like a pretty big problem, but I don't think that consumption in the US will have to decrease in any meaningful way.

It's not being charged for bags. In the states, we just have too many dubious laws. People can't bring in even a small backpack into most stores, without leaving it with the guy would could care less at the front of the store? Most stores are located vechicle distances away from most Americans.

It's not the bag, it's a cornucopia of bigger problems, poor planning, stifling regulation only enacted to generate revenue, etc. we are projecting on a bag.

Interesting, in Atlanta, I do must of my shopping with a backpack and haven't been asked to leave it at the front of the store or have it checked for years.

Ditto. I've been asked to have my receipt and bag inspected before. I politely decline and don't break stride...not like they can do anything but get the police to come harass me, only to find I've done nothing wrong, which police rather dislike - in a 'boy who cried wolf' sense.

I consider it part of implementing a cultural status quo (recycling is good) as opposed to being overly useful. Plastic bags are really in-your-face pollution.

The SF ban was motivated partly because the plastic bags were literally clogging the machinery at their processing center. Even with the ban, they have employees scrape the bags off periodically.

Yah its misguided, I do a fair number of park/etc cleanups. The old school ultra thin bags break down really fast in the environment when exposed to UV. Most of the time, when I tried to pick one up they simply disintegrated into powder. Plastic drink bottles OTOH, those things are everywhere and seem to last forever.

Just over the past few years the heavier reusable (mostly plastic) bags are starting to show up everywhere now, and they don't seem to break down as fast. I have yet to see any of them in any state of decomposition.

Its not about the environmental impact, its about the litter problem.

The point of any Pigovian tax is to discourage its use ... where that use is value-destructive once you account for the externality. So it still doesn't make sense to tax it by more than that value, which the plastic bag tax clearly does.

There's a very common misconception that a) product X has a negative externality, therefore b) it must be value destructive on net, therefore c) no one should use it, therefore d) it's good to slap arbitrarily high taxes on X. But b-d) don't necessarily follow from a).

Your assuming a specific value exists for environmental pollution. Instead, by it's vary nature people chose a completly arbitrary value.

Abstractly, the environment is clearly worth more than every other thing in the world combined. EX: If 6.9 billion people needed to die to maintain a breathable atmosphere that would be a simple choice. How to messure lower levels of harm is what's subjective.

PS: Consider burning fossil fuels has directly lowered the amount of free oxegen in the atmosphere. There is not enough fossils fuel know to exist for this to be a real problem. But in a world where there was it would be a much more direct survival issue.

If the enviornment kills off 6.9 billion people, that's not much of a choice. If you have a choice, you find another way.

That's rather Magical thinking right there. In some situation those would be your only choices.

Hypothetically, you can slightly adjust the comet's orbit and save ~10% of the global population or do nothing. You have 30 seconds to decide and failure to act within 30 seconds kills everyone. The longer you wait the more people die.

PS: Sure, your unlikely to be in that situation. But, the earth is a finite system and physics does not care. Or as someone on Easter Island learned you can cut down the last tree.

> Consider burning fossil fuels has directly lowered the amount of free oxegen in the atmosphere.

Can you back this up with any data at all? You do know that plants breathe CO2 and exhale oxygen, right?

Sure, basic chemistry if plants extracted the C from CO2 we would end up with the same O2. However as CO2 levels are rising that is not happening enough.

Of note, the current concentrations are 209 460 ppm of O2 compared with around 380 ppm of CO2. So, it's currently a non issue. But again finite systems are finite.

PS: I only skimmed this as the first Google link: http://www.i-sis.org.uk/O2DroppingFasterThanCO2Rising.php. No idea if it's credable, so feel free to search.

> the current concentrations are 209 460 ppm of O2 compared with around 380 ppm of CO2. So, it's currently a non issue.

I certainly agree it's "currently" a non-issue; but I would add that given the numbers in the article it's going to continue to be a non-issue for the foreseeable future. The key fact from the article is that the rates of change of O2 and CO2 are of the same order of magnitude: a few ppm/year. That change is a percent or so of total CO2 concentration, but only a thousandth of a percent or so (1 part in 10^5) of total O2 concentration. So it would take a thousand years at current rates for the O2 concentration to decrease by 1 percent of its current value (which is still negligible in human terms).

Plus, that assumes a linear decrease over a thousand years, which is highly implausible. The article notes that we have only been measuring atmospheric O2 concentrations for a couple of decades. No meaningful conclusions can be drawn from that about what will happen to O2 concentrations over a thousand years. The best current model we have is the simple and obvious one that O2 concentrations in Earth's atmosphere are maintained at appropriate levels for oxygen-breathing animals as part of the cycle of plant and animal respiration, which has been going on for hundreds of millions of years, including periods when CO2 concentrations were much higher than they are now.

http://projourno.org/2013/12/bag-in-the-ussr-a-revived-job-g...

"In the Soviet Union, there were almost no plastic bags. Under communism, a plastic bag was so prized, people were rumored to wash them after use. Instead of plastic, most people had one of those string bags that look like miniature cargo loaders for ships and that you can’t keep small things in."

You seem confused about the point of plastic bag taxes/bans. The purpose of plastic bag taxes isn't to "price-in" an externality; rather, the purpose is to fundamentally change consumer behavior.

More generally, the language of economics ("pricing-in externalities") doesn't make sense when discussing irreversible damage to the environment:

1. When you can't repair the damage, the idea of "pricing-in" externalities is just confused thinking. (You can't buy a new planet and not all environmental harm can be reversed by spending money. At least for now.)

2. For any consumer behavior that causes irrevesable damage to the environment, the cost is at once too large to quanify and also too small to notice. (Many forms of pollution have highly nonlinear effects on the environment that are often impossible to quantify, especially at a global scale. I have no idea how anyone would go about calculating the "cost" of a lifetimes' use of plastic bags or fossil fuels, for instance, especially when you have to add up the permanent loss of a resource to humanity for the rest of the time it's on the planet.)

>The purpose of plastic bag taxes isn't to "price-in" an externality;

Maybe, maybe not; I was responding to a poster who was justifying it on that basis.

>More generally, the language of economics ("pricing-in externalities") doesn't make sense when discussing irreversible damage to the environment:

>When you can't repair the damage, the idea of "pricing-in" externalities is just confused thinking. (You can't buy a new planet...

Well, you can repair the damage from plastic bags.

>2. For any consumer behavior that causes irrevesable damage to the environment, the cost is at once too large to quanify

If your model contains infinities, it's automatically unhelpful; that takes you into Pascal's Wager territory. If the damage is infinitely bad, then it it would justify draconian measures against even trivial risks of too many plastic bags. But however bad they are, they're not infinitely bad. Such a model would justify arbitrarily high bag fees, not some piddling ten cents with the hope of changing long-term consumer behavior.

>If your model contains infinities, it's automatically unhelpful; that takes you into Pascal's Wager territory. If the damage is infinitely bad, then it it would justify draconian measures against even trivial risks of too many plastic bags. But however bad they are, they're not infinitely bad. Such a model would justify arbitrarily high bag fees, not some piddling ten cents with the hope of changing long-term consumer behavior.

Sometimes that's the reality of the situation, there are things that cannot be priced. That's why we don't consider a murder tax an acceptable way to deal with homicide.

We also don't treat murder as being infinitely bad, and we reject policies that would decrease the murder rate because they would cost us in terms of something else we value e.g. privacy and convenience.

I didn't mean to imply that it has infinitely negative monetary value. I mean that it is a sort of wrong that cannot be undone by money.

It's the same principle -- however bad some harm X is in the abstract (be it death or environmental catastrophe), it doesn't justify arbitrary measures to fight it, be it more cameras tracking your movement or $20/kg taxes on plastic bags, because in every practical sense the actual harm is bounded.

> Well, you can repair the damage from plastic bags.

Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe you can, but the costs to the environment involved in doing so are prohibitive. In any case, I don't think it's totally obvious that this is actually possible ATM.

> If your model contains infinities, it's automatically unhelpful; that takes you into Pascal's Wager territory

Yeah, well, reality > model. Unless we colonize space, destroying earth = infinity. So the implication of your statement is that pricing is a bad model for certain types of environmental damage. However...

> would justify draconian measures against even trivial risks of too many plastic bags.

...the realistic impact of most types of irreversible environmental damage has no known bound, but is not infinite.

Difficult-to-bound unknowns also make it impossible to quantify damages a priori at the level of detail necessary for pricing. Again, reality > model, so accurate pricing is a bad mechanism.

I think there are reasonable arguments against plastic bag bans. But trying base policy on an accurate accounting of the cost of long-term or irreversible environmental damage is a fool's errand in many cases.

(Also, note that my point is that in general, pricing environmental externalities is weird. Plastic bags aren't even nearly the best example of this, but are illustrative of the most common solution -- don't price, disincentivize.)

It sounds like you're saying you don't know how bad X is relative to other things, and nobody can make an estimate, but it's definitely not infinity, and the possibility of X favors your preferred policy over others.

That doesn't sound like it justifies any one tradeoff over another, nor tell us how we should decide to.

What's your best estimate for cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch?

You've heard of the precautionary principle?

OK then, let's say that for every plastic bag someone uses they are charged 1 million dollars.

Do you believe that this would "price in" the cost of a plastic bag? Do you believe that, given a million dollars for every bag used, the government could clean up this supposedly irreversible damage?

I believe it could. Not only that, I believe the price would be much less than 1 million dollars.

Or how about this. Let's say they instead used that money to fix a completely different problem that is also causing permanent damage, and is equal or worse than the damage caused by plastic bags.

There is always a price. There are always trade-offs and opportunity costs.

> Do you believe that, given a million dollars for every bag used, the government could clean up this supposedly irreversible damage?

You're missing the point.

If you charged a million dollars for every bag used then basically no one would use plastic bags. Or at least few enough people that the aggregate environmental impact would be negligable. As it turns out $5 or $10 would probably work as well as $1M.

The whole point is that it's totally impossible to come up with realistic estimates for something like plastic bag waste. So you set the prices high enough to disincentivize their use.

The purpose is the disincentive, not actually putting accurate prices on externalities. Confusing these two things is the source of the confusion in SilasX's original post.

> it's totally impossible to come up with realistic estimates for something like plastic bag waste.

If it is, then it's also totally impossible to show that plastic bags are harming the environment enough to make draconian regulation a net gain.

In other words, the real purpose of the regulation is an arbitrary exercise of power: some people just can't help telling other people what to do, and when those people get to write laws and regulations, this is what you get. "Saving the environment" is just the latest ad hoc justification.

Yeah right there is not a single genuine environmentalist in the whe world. They're all just control freaks hell bent on messing with your life /s

The proper solution is to research and find watertight, greaseproof, biodegradable bag. Then use as many of those as you need.

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