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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

I was snorkeling in Indonesia a couple years ago, and they didn't sell reef-safe sunscreen anywhere in the country, even in the national parks. It's insane to me that these sorts of locations that derive so much of their GDP from tourism don't even make it possible to protect the resources driving their economy, let alone encouraging or mandating that people do so. Like you would think that if you were a hotel near Kommodo National Park, and the only reason anyone ever stays at your hotel is to go snorkeling and see the Kommodo dragons, then you would stock reef-safe products in your gift shop. But sadly that's not the case.

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Are you from this planet? People consistently burn down all the things that sustains them in pursuit of short term gains. Like that's not even a philosophical point about greed and shortsightedness. It's an empirical fact you can bet on.

Sadly this is true, but it still seems illogical every time it happens.

Edit: Illogical because while you may be making money now, your actions will cause you to loose your assets in the long term.

Is it even illogical?

If you can compete better right now by doing X, at the cost of your business 30 years down the road, the incentives, long and short, probably line up with doing X. As an individual, you do it, and hope that in 30 years, you've earned enough to retire or transition to another revenue form. If you go the sustainable route, as someone else pointed out, you likely get out-competed by someone who didn't, and have to find an alternative livelihood even sooner. It's a snowballing issue, where even modest benefits in the short term actually result in massive benefits in the long term, despite a long term penalty.

So, the only way to align incentives with long-term, is for penalties to be applied short-term for behaviors that will impact an industry long-term. Otherwise every individual decision-maker has to weigh whether they are better off making their money and moving on versus trying to compete with a handicap long enough for the long haul.

Humans are just a lot better conditioned to respond to short-term stimuli than long-term goals. Maybe it's a product of our evolutionary history (avoiding predators, making sure we are fed) but it sure doesn't work well at global, collective scales.

Agreed. This is why I believe that we should have regulations and rules to make certain short-term gains painful. That self-regulation is at best wishful thinking.

Let's say that you have 'sustainability', fill in that word however you want, in mind when building your business. But a company who's primary concern is growth will most likely surge ahead of you, possibly squeezing them out of the market. That company can't just retrofit those 'sustainability' practices as by this time they are expected to continue their revenue and company culture is extremely difficult to change.

Are you aware of any studies or successful real-world implementations of systems to promote and incentivize long-term thinking, planning & action?

Dan Ariely and folks in behavioral economics in general have written a book or two on the matter. Basically it comes down to tricking your brain into long term thinking by hijacking short term thinking habits.

Like if you want to develop a running habit then eat a cake after every run and then after a while stop eating the cake. Then you start looking forward to the run because you anticipate eating cake which after a while becomes a running habit. Substitute whatever you like for the cake. It's all hacks though.

Humanity is basically doomed. At some point the thinking that we can innovate ourselves out of every dilemma we got ourselves into will stop working because the complexity of the dilemma keeps growing and technology will stop being the panacea it is at a certain level of complexity.

Illogical, yes, but common enough that we have parables about it. See: The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg.

It's perfectly logical I would say. You could argue that these individuals have seen the bigger picture, and realize that them doing the "logical" thing would disadvantage them over others. Not only that, but it's also perfectly logical to think that by the time these envionmental things become issues, we'd have come up with technology to combat/mitigate them.

We're not all automatons that think alike and share the environmental ideas that you do.

"When the last tree has been cut down, the last fish caught, the last river poisoned, only then will we realize that one cannot eat money."

The last tree will be cut not because of cutting trees but because of not able to provide sustainable (growth??) to farmers. It is because products of steel and plastic from multinationals. In the name of safety etc. -- From a farming who use to sow and grow pine tree in about 8 acres for 60 years now we stopped completely and planted eucalyptus knowing that our land may not be cultivatable anymore for next 20 years

You'd also think someone would realize that having better sunscreen does probably not nearly offset the 19000 miles round trip of fuel burnt for a trip from NYC to Indonesia.

Sorry, didn't mean to pick on you. I just get frustrated when people saw anything remotely "save the planet" and then tell me about their massively polutting air travel to distance lands.

The sunscreen may actually be more damaging than the air travel.

> It turns out that oxybenzone can be toxic to baby coral at levels as low as 62 parts per trillion. In plain English, that's equivalent to one drop in 6.5 Olympic swimming pools. Dr C. Downs surveyed reefs in Hawaii and the US Virgin Islands. His team measured levels as high as 1,400,000 parts per trillion. That's more that 20,000 times higher than the toxic levels.

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/greatmomentsins...

Completely separate issue. Ensuring that air pollution doesn't cause unacceptable levels of harm is what cap & trade is for.

In the case of cosmetics there are many ingredients that should just be illegal, whereas in the case of air pollution it's an issue of goods and services that should be legal, but where the total levels of various pollutants aren't currently capped and then priced accordingly.

In my case this was our honeymoon, so we would have gladly (or at least begrudgingly) paid an extra couple hundred bucks or whatever. Whereas someone else just wanting to go to some conference might instead choose to participate remotely.

They don't sell sunscreen based on titanium dioxide or zinc oxide anywhere in Indonesia? Hard to believe.

I mean they probably do somewhere, but not in any of the hotel gift shops, convenience stores, pharmacies, or dive shops where I looked.

Well, you did say "anywhere in the country".

Shouldn't it be the only sunscreen they sell there? It's in their best interest

Have you compared the amazon reviews between "normal" and "reef safe" sunscreens? "reef safe" stuff has poor reviews almost across the board, where as "normal" sunscreens often have excellent reviews.

Are you sure nanoparticles are reef safe? These particles break down too.

They do? Into what?

In any case, the issue is with other types of biologically active sunscreen ingredients.

https://cdhc.noaa.gov/_docs/Site%20Bulletin_Sunscreen_final....

One paper I read ages ago suggested these nanoparticles had similar behaviors subdermal as asbestos but drew no conclusions if they're carcinogenic. Then there's a few references floating about that I can't verify the veracity of that zinc oxide nanoparticles exposed to UV breakdown into free radicals.

Google search: zinc oxide nanoparticles free radical

The larger particle, and thus opaque versions of these sunblocks seem to behave as you'd expect, they stay on the surface of the skin pretty much entirely wash off and don't interact with the environment. But they're visible light opaque so you look like you've been painted.

Tragedy of the commons.

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