Dead sperm whale found in Indonesia had ingested '6kg of plastic' | Hacker News Reader

Dead sperm whale found in Indonesia had ingested '6kg of plastic'

bbc.co.uk

227 pointsVBprogrammer148 comments

Over the past few months I have been trying to figure out a solution for environmental issues in developing countries (like India where I'm from). Conclusion is, because of the democracy, the change is not possible from inside, some external force has to be there.

Here governments take decision for the short term because they have to please the common (& uneducated) men for the next election. Hence the agenda of environment doesn't get much attention. That's why have poor plastic management.

Educating people about these issues will take decades (& it will be too late). Only way forward could be if some constant external pressure is put on their governments using agreements/accords (like Paris Agreement) and some system is setup which will monitor issues like plastic management and carbon-emission. If countries are not following some standard they should be penalized.

Countries like US, Canada, Germany can take initiatives in doing so. Its not only about their carbon-emission & plastic-management, its about the whole planet.

Developing countries should be pressurized(!!) for reducing their population as well. In India, from past 2 decades, no government had an agenda to control population (which is the root of all the problems here). With some external pressure this could also be done I guess.

And most importantly, large & impactful countries like US and China shouldn't waste their time on petty issues like trade-war & focus on big issue here!

At the bottom most level it really does boil down to education and awareness. One could argue they go hand in hand. Even in western nations being educated is not enough, you must be aware of your actions. This is why I always point at legislation as the most effective means of getting anything done. Lead by example through innovation, investment into sustainable tech, methods and living and pass legislation that does away with the bad and promotes the good.

I guess to even get to this point we need to rewrite laws on lobbying to get special interests out of politics. Why stop there, might as well get campaign funding an overhaul to eliminate conflict of interest. Put in short term limits that do away with politics as a career choice and pass laws that promote it as civic duty.

To add to the recipe, make representatives directly accountable to votes against public majority with the ability for the people to kick them out of the office through expedited voting where a majority can remove a representative within a 48 hour time window. While we are at it, start imposing prison time for corporate crimes and start enforcing it. Add transparency to all political conversation online and offline for any member of the public to review. Face to face meetings are to be accompanied by a third party for documentation.

Creeped out? Yeah... so I think we need a total overhaul of values, economy, social systems, work policies and many laws to get to a point where we can do some good. Of course it al starts with education which is cut short by insufficient funding by said politicians.

Ok, it’s hopeless and we’re doomed.

Coming from someone who agrees with supports environmental initiatives on e.g. plastic management and climate change, I always find it condescending and insensitive when people assume political differences will be resolved by "educating" the other side.

It's difficult to know how Indians would behave in an alternate universe where environmental awareness was a higher priority, but I don't find it hard to believe at all that an Indians (or Chinese, or Americans...) would knowingly pollute the environment even if they were aware of that effects. For developing countries especially, the economic gains of dirty industrialization are very attractive even despite the environmental costs. I could certainly understand many people in developing countries understanding both the benefits and the costs and going on to choose the same path that they're already on.

One of the first things you notice upon visiting developing countries is that household waste is often dumped in very visible places where it tends to spread naturally and easily, including near watercourses used for drinking. With consumer waste it's less the gains of industrialisation (after all, they consume a lot less than us) and more a lack of interest in ensuring it's dumped further away from their homes and water supplies. Pre-industrial European societies generally saw absolutely nothing strange about dumping excrement literally outside their front doorsteps, so it's not as if we can claim any longstanding cultural obsession with cleanliness either.

Having the resources to deal with clearing it up is certainly part of the equation, and clearly there are still many people in developed countries that happily litter and sneer at the concept of recycling, but I think it's a stretch to say that environmental education and campaigning doesn't have a significant effect on attitudes.

Agreed. It’s also that there needs to be cultural changes in many cases, short term views are ingrained in many cultures and pointing out a fault in someone’s culture isn’t something people are open to no matter how dire the consequences are.

Here in Canada, the provincial government of Ontario is dismantling the environmental protection apparatus piece by piece in the name of democracy and pleasing some section of people. We do have a lot more education, so there has to be something else. I think it is all about what is the general population (or some section of it values more). Right now environment is not at the top because something else is.

I've only heard of them scrapping carbon cap + trade and fighting against carbon tax. If they've also dismantled regulations regarding more acute, pressing types of pollution I'd like to know.

1. On slashing environmental watchdogs - https://www.nationalobserver.com/2018/11/15/news/doug-ford-s...

http://www.rabble.ca/news/2018/11/doug-ford%E2%80%99s-govern...

2. Cancelled green subsidy program (GreenON) on efficient thermostats and lights (https://www.thestar.com/business/real_estate/2018/06/20/gree...)

3. Ontario electric car subsidy is no more

4. Cancellation of 758 renewable energy projects / contracts. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-municipalit.... (paywalled)

5. Intend to open up protected areas (greenbelt) for developers. This has not been executed yet.

> And most importantly, large & impactful countries like US and China shouldn't waste their time on petty issues like trade-war & focus on big issue here!

Agreed with much of what you said, but this is a bit irrelevant for Indian environmental policy, no?

Not really. The attention span of the people with the legitimacy to push through painful reforms is limited. The bureaucracy is just people doing their job. If there's no pressure from above they will take the path of least resistance and minimize personal risk, i.e. keep the status quo and cover their asses.

I find it insane that the top comment is focused on India. 1) this is a global issue and 2) the US created the template from which other countries are pushing forward. Blaming this in one region or country without calling out the contributions to the problem by the US is nuts.

https://www.dw.com/en/almost-all-plastic-in-the-ocean-comes-...

I’m not disagreeing about the source of the plastic. I’m suggesting that talking about the source of the plastic without also discussing issues such as western oil and chemical companies operating in the regions this plastic is generated ignores fundamental issues such as the undermining of regulatory regimes by these same companies to keep costs down. CO2 has a similar story. India didn’t wake up and come up with this technology on their own. The infrastructure to produce this plastic is in place to supply more than just their demand. This is geopolitical and not purely technical.

Edit: if it was purely technical then god help us given Silicon Valley’s view on regulation.

What % of the plastic generated from the rivers in India and China are because of Western countries?

It’s as if you’re not reading my comment.

The problem is generally not that we are producing plastic. The problem is that some people just throw it away when it's broken / old / what ever, essentially dumping it to the flowing water to get rid of it. This behaviour and attitude towards nature is something that I as a westerner just can't understand and I won't accept any blame-shifting games here.

Poverty is also a very bad excuse to dump plastic in nature. I have been poor as f*ck and the thought of dumping garbage around hasn't even once crossed my mind. Urgent action (like severe fines and even jail-time and such for dumping plastic, but also positive reinforcement) is something the developing countries need.

It is as if you are also not reading my comment.

I’m not shifting blame. I’m sharing it. Look into some of the places the plastic grocery bag you “recycle” get handled. In some cases they are put on a ship and sent to India, sorted by hand, then melted using dirty fuels, again, by hand. So this “America takes care of its plastic, so India should too” is flat out wrong. We may not be as bad, but we do not handle our own issue completely. And if the US is sending your country their trash and doesn’t follow up with how it was handled, how is that not an incentive to do in the most cost effective manner possible, even if that means harming persons and environmental health?

Or let’s talk about clear cutting the Amazon for agriculture. How dare Brazil do that! Have you flown over middle America??? It’s all developed farm land. There are entire states that are basically monoculture agricultural where natural ecosystems used to be. Are you suggesting we return that land to its natural state?

Or let’s talk about electronics. Should we have jail time if you are responsible for purchasing a device without ensuring it was sourced in an environmentally responsible manner? Should people that purchased devices manufactured from raw materials derived by strip mining and processes that leach chemicals be given prison sentences?

Educating takes a fair amount of mystic to make people believe in you. That's the hardest part.

And, who determines what the curriculum is? For example, for a while it was practically (or technically?) illegal to teach evolution in some schools in the southern US. Just 'educating people' is not the full answer, and it could actually be more harmful in the end to educate people with wrong information than to not educate them at all.

no need for cosmological concepts to raise the education level

Perhaps we need a new religion.

heh, I wasn't planning on divinity level of faith, but you'd be surprised how much stupid resistance people will put when you tell them things. The minute they validate you, anything you say goes

This wont be anywhere near fixed, if the worlds population keep going up. We need some event to cull the population down a bit!

> Here governments take decision for the short term because they have to please the common (& uneducated) men for the next election. Hence the agenda of environment doesn't get much attention. That's why have poor plastic management.

No, it's pretty much like this in the US too. It's very difficult to get legislation that takes >2 years to start paying off to pass at the federal level. If it takes > 2 years for constituents to realize any benefit from it, politicians generally have little to no incentive to push for it. You get the occassional rarity, but you need consensus, and the current system is built to reward short term gains, often times with the expense of long term losses.

For example, in the USA the Democratic Party’s passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 (which took a few years to show its effects) was initially so unpopular vs. a barrage of negative propaganda and an opposition that rallied against it for political gain that the backlash knocked the party out of power in the House of Representatives for the next 8 years.

And that’s for something (healthcare) with very clear and direct effect on people’s lives, where the remedy was a centrist approach first proposed by Republicans.

Taking larger-scale action against an even longer-term threat where the only visible benefit is “see we prevented calamity” and where some of the richest multinational corporations’ short-term future is directly threatened will be much harder still.

A pollution tax of some sort seems like the most obvious answer.

> Educating people about these issues will take decades (& it will be too late). Only way forward could be if some constant external pressure is put on their governments using agreements/accords (like Paris Agreement) and some system is setup which will monitor issues like plastic management and carbon-emission. If countries are not following some standard they should be penalized.

The history of CFCs[0] is a very good sketch as to how these issues play out. Granted, there were very good and cheap-ish alternatives to CFCs. Still, using CFCs as a guideline indicates that real action is about 10-20 years away (~2030 to 2040). Going to Wikipedia and putting in the year 2040[1], we see that large parts of the EU will have banned petrol burning cars by that year and that space based solar power should be coming online.

So, yay!? These things take time, but don't be discouraged. We are making progress and I feel that we will do it 'in time'. We need to work hard and be vocal to try to accelerate these timelines, of course, but have faith in your fellow man's intelligence and labor (please ignore that whole Daylight Savings Time insanity, though).

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorofluorocarbon#History

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2040

EDIT: I figured I should include a link to the year 2030 as well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2030

Outside pressure and assistance would certainly help, but change can come from within too. Ocean pollution is diffuse and hard to see the effects of, especially when you're participating in a developing economy and you've got a lot more pressing needs. River pollution is easy to see, and results in clear health hazards.

One of the sparks of the US environmental movement was when a river caught fire because of all the crap that was in it. [1]

Agitate towards cleaning up rivers and other water bodies; sewage, solid waste (trash), and industrial waste are pretty common, and they're all manageable; it just takes capital, sustained effort, and some amount of enforcement. Dumping is visible enough that enforcement in the court of popular opinion can be effective enough, when the courts of law are not enough.

Having clean(er) water will help with all sorts of health issues, the economy, and international relations (competition over water sources is lessened if downstream water is cleaner and more usable)

Keeping plastic out of rivers should also keep it out of the ocean; unless you just collect it all, and then ship it out on a barge and dump it; but even then, having built the collection apparatus, you'll be in a better place to deal with the waste responsibly later.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuyahoga_River

Here in Vietnam (one of the largest produces of plastic waste in SE Asia), unless someone replaces the entire government and educates all the people, I think there really is no hope on the matter. Depressing.

>>In India, from past 2 decades, no government had an agenda to control population (which is the root of all the problems here)

Problems are solved, only when they are acknowledged to be problems.

In the last elections, the current prime minister talked at length about reaping the population dividend.

Also a lot of population is not exactly bad if you need masses of low paid workers building your roads/highways/sky scrapers. The problem with India is we aren't doing that.

Just for comparison 6kg of plastic in a 60 ton animal is the same as 6g of plastic in a 60kg organism (or a little above one teaspoon of plastic ingested by a teenager).

what are you saying...? that whatever toxicity of ingesting plastic is proportional across all living things by weight?

Generally we measure how lethal something is by using an LD 50 that looks at mass of chemical per mass of body. There are exceptions to this, but as a first assumption it seems reasonable.

I don't think toxicity (LD 50) is relevant for plastic consumption. This sort of stuff packs into the gut and doesn't move or decompose. So the animal has to vomit it up or get surgery because it won't move down. I think the relevant comparison is ratio of pyloric sphincter between two species (the exit of the stomach). I'd be curious to know what that ratio is and it might be surprisingly close to one almost certainly less than 10. I do not know what the skill with which a whale can vomit, I do know that my lab mix pup is especially skillful.

To the same extent, the weight or mass of the plastic may not be relevant as well. The shape, density, and strength of the plastic would probably matter much more than the weight.

There could also be a selection bias, the plastic found is what was stuck, smaller parts would have gone the whole way through.

Plastic is effectively nontoxic. The hazard is mechanical (digestive blockages)

Agreed, it seemed a trivial quantity for such a large animal.

>Agreed, it seemed a trivial quantity for such a large animal.

Go swallow 6 grams of plastic. Let me know how that works out for you.

To add to your point, a plastic grocery bag weighs in under 6 grams. I don't want that in my body.

It's a very good point and I'm glad the parent raised it. But wouldn't you find it distressing if teenagers were regularly found with a teaspoon full of plastic in their stomachs?

We regularly find teenagers smoke behind the school (at least around here), we don't panic because of it.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=things+found+in+people's+stomachs&...

There is a laxative product that is commonly prescribed to childhood cancer patients that is just polyethylene glycol. You take about a teaspoon of plastic micropellets and stir them up in a glass of water and drink it.

The PEG used for medicine has very short chain lengths, and I would be surprised if it isn't liquid or water-soluble, and not taken in the form of actual micropellets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene_glycol

I think we'd be a bit more disturbed if teenagers accidentally ingested the teaspoon full of plastic whilst going about their daily lives and eating their regular diet, especially if the plastic wasn't designed in a way which made it easily pass through the gut.

That would say more about the teenagers than about usage of plastic in the modern world.

While I understand the comparison you're trying to make, I'm not sure weight is the best estimation here. A whale can be heavier without being larger. While the whale may weigh 1000x more, it appears to be only around 10x as big (sperm whales are 40 feet long, and somewhat wider than humans).

If you take a look at the picture in the article, and analyze what it had ingested: "115 drinking cups, four plastic bottles, 25 plastic bags and two flip-flops," it seems much less trivial than a teenager ingesting a teaspoon.

A better comparison would be that, size-wise, it is the same as a teenager ingesting 2.5 plastic bags, 15 drinking cups; that alone seems like enough to cause serious health issues.

Shouldn't we compare by volume, not length?

Worth noting that a greater proportion of a whales body is fat, to deal with the cold cold waters... The size of the digestive system probably isn't quite what one would expect from scaling purely by a volume ratio.

Beside what others are saying, this whale does not look like a big sperm whale. According to Wikipedia [1], a 20-meter animal weighs up to 60 tons. This one looks closer to 10 meters and probably weighs less than 15 tons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sperm_whale#External_appearanc...

If I cut your fingers from both hands is about 100g of your anatomy, but the distress for your life is enormous. Even being less than 0.1% of your body mass. So the question here is not about the toxicity vs. body mass. Is about the amount of material in your digestive system.

That's a plastic shopping bag. Try swallowing a plastic shopping bag.

Not a fair comparison. See[1] how a whales digestive tract can be a fraction of the size of a humans, relative to overall size.

Also 6 grams can be three whole plastics cups - or a dozen lightweight bags, not that neat little teaspoon full.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=sperm+whale+anatomy&t=ffsb&iar=ima...

I find it baffling, that parent comment made just a comparison without giving any opinion, and pretty much every sibling comment is telling them they are wrong... lol.

Fascinating how people project their opinions onto others and argue with them. Parent even got called a moron and told to eat a plastic bag xD

Pretty much every one assumed that on a human scale weight it's not that much, though still wrong.

I wonder what's the name for this behaviour.

weight? really?

Go by the size & volume of the animals' digestive systems. It is the plastics relative to the digestive systems volumes that is the killer.

I recently came back from Padang, Sumatra, was really impacted by the level of pollution and did quite a bit of research.

- It is too simplistic to just say it's all about education. Yes it needs work however there is just not the infrastructure to manage the level of rubbish. Jakarta has a giant landfill that receives 9000 tonnes of rubbish a day. It had a landslide in 2005 that killed 143 people [1]. Indonesia are working with Sweden around waste to energy technologies but it seems locked up with other environmental concerns. This would be a great area for R&D spend - making efficient / environmentally sound waste to energy systems that are cost effective (and robust enough) for this part of the world [2].

- So much of the rubbish I saw was from single serve items, particularly snacks and toiletries. Reducing plastic bags would help but I think it's not focussed on the primary issue. I think pressure on companies like Procter & Gamble, Nestle, Unilever etc to move towards biodegradable single serve packaging would go a long way - perhaps pragmatically this is a much better place for governments to provide subsidies??

- As can be seen with the Sulawesi earthquake other countries cannot just show up and expect Indonesia to welcome them with open arms. It has to very much be a partnership not a 'we know best' colonial spirit - Perhaps an effective thing for universities to do is increase scholarships in these key areas for Indonesian students.

[1] https://geoenvironmental-disasters.springeropen.com/articles...

[2] https://www.infrastructureasiaonline.com/strategic-partnersh...

A lot of doom and gloom here. I feel ya but I want to point out we have the necessary solutions to save ourselves if we just notice and apply them. For example, olivine just might "cure" atmospheric CO2. [1]

The primary things to look to are: Bucky Fuller's "Design Science Revolution"; applied ecology (aka Permaculture); and Neurolinguistic Programming to help us get over our BS.

[1] https://climitigation.org/category/olivine/

You know that neurolinguistic programming is pseudoscientific new age magic bullshit, right?

Normally I give people the benefit of the doubt and presume they meant natural language processing and expanded the acronym wrong, but I can't see how that could apply here.

Yes, I meant the other NLP.

> You know that neurolinguistic programming is pseudoscientific new age magic bullshit, right?

I know no such thing. I'll grant you that most of the people talking about it, and many of the practitioners, are saying "pseudoscientific new age magic bullshit", and that's extraordinarily unfortunate.

Nevertheless, the foundations and principles of NLP are sound and the reproducible results should not be ignored. NLP develops algorithms for change that work. Is it a scientific body of knowledge? No. But it should be. We should do science to it.

I'll point out that it originates with an application of Chomsky's Transformational Grammar to transcripts of therapy sessions with very effective therapists (Fritz Perls, Virginia Satir, and Milton Erikson. I think I spelled the names right.)

It's not pseudoscience because it doesn't claim to be scientific. Despite it's unscientific nature it does provide reliable, repeatable algorithms for overcoming our worser natures. We can use the techniques without buying into any "new age magic bullshit" whatsoever. The whole point is that you don't have to believe in any particular thing to have the techniques work. It's like aspirin. You don't have to believe in aspirin to relieve your headache with it. Aspirin doesn't care. NLP is the same way. In fact, you can alter your belief structures using NLP, so logically it's ontological status must be "meta-belief", but that's getting way far afield.

My main point stands: NLP works. (So who cares if it's wrapped in astrology or the "Enneagram", or wearing rubber pants? We can clean it up later when the fire has been put out, eh?)

Science has been applied to it many times. It "works" insomuch as people feel better after they're told that they're getting treatment. It has never shown to be more effective than a sugar pill. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]

The most favorable paper to neurolinguistic programming in the entire literature amounts to "some people say it makes them feel better, therefore evidence doesn't matter"[9]

So yeah, sure, it "works" in exactly the same way as kisses from mom on your boo-boos "works". It might make you stop crying for a while, but that is not how a rational person measures effective treatment.

1. http://psycnet.apa.org/record/1984-21020-001

2. http://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0022-0167.34...

3. https://web.archive.org/web/20070615185758/http://www.mheap....

4. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/hrdq.3920010...

5. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1559-1816....

6. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/hrdq.3920080...

7. https://content.sciendo.com/view/journals/ppb/41/2/article-p...

8. http://web.archive.org/web/20120905075141/http://jarhe.resea...

9. https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/1746564101104...

I don't know what to tell you, other than those "scientists" must have been doing it wrong.

I mean it. What you have presented above is pseudoscience. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

> The replication crisis (or replicability crisis or reproducibility crisis) is an ongoing (2018) methodological crisis in the social and soft sciences in which scholars have found that the results of many scientific studies are difficult or impossible to replicate or reproduce on subsequent investigation, either by independent researchers or by the original researchers themselves.

These are not physicists. Their inability to measure some effect of NLP techniques argues for their incompetence, not the non-existence of the effects. NLP isn't hard. I don't consider myself a practitioner, but I have some experience applying NLP to get definite results. The techniques work. "Submodality" manipulation alone should garner a Nobel prize.

Let me ask you, do you have any direct, personal experience with NLP? In other words, what's your motivation here? You're not going to convince me it's bunk, because I overcame crippling depression using it, and because I understand the principles and they make sense. (Most of them, there are NLP-derived techniques that work but no one know why. The so-called "VK Squash" for example. Profound effects without a trace of theory as to why.) Am I going to convince you? Maybe we should talk about NVC instead? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication

My dude. Please go get yourself some education on how science works. I feel embarrassed for you.

The reproducibility crisis is about the prevalence of false positive results in the scientific literature. This video is a good primer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42QuXLucH3Q

A false positive is when a paper says "this works" when it actually doesn't, because of a statistical fluke in their sample.

Even if citing the reproducibility crisis as an excuse to believe something that science has repeatedly found to be false isn't a really bad reason for belief (which it definitely is)...

it doesn't even apply because there can't be false positive results regarding neurolinguistic programming because there aren't any positive results regarding neurolinguistic programming. Even the paper put out by neurolinguistic programming practicioners themselves wasn't able to produce a detectable effect over a placebo.

I'm sorry, my friend, but this is an intervention. You're in a cult. You're making the exact same arguments as homeopaths and faith healers and fortune tellers.

i notice that you didn't answer my question. Do you have any actual experience with NLP at all?

In any event, it really seems to me like you're more interested in insulting me than in learning about NLP, so I don't think there's any reason to continue talking about it, eh?

> You're making the exact same arguments as homeopaths and faith healers and fortune tellers.

I understand that there's a superficial resemblance and I hate that, but as I said, I don't know what to tell you.

NLP is really easy, so if those "scientists" weren't able to measure something it's got to be "user error". I mean, I've personally done lots of experiments that show obvious results, so... I could go on but what's the point, eh? You've got your reality and I've got mine.

> pieces of string (3.26kg)

Over half of it was string? Is this from fishing or something?

Likely from nets.

https://www.worldoceanfest.org/new-blog/2017/6/9/the-impact-...

Clothing?

The original wording is "tali rafia", which is a flat plastic string used for tying down/lashing many common everyday items. So no, not related to fishing.

Just today the Ocean Cleanup Project posted the first results on YouTube: https://youtu.be/RcRIE98y_UM

This is something I have been thinking about (and mindfully being unattached to either side). We know what it's like for society to go through an economic depression and how poverty effects developing countries, and I think it's pretty clear if we start wiping out the economy (which is the core of the problem besides over population) the save the planet, we will create one.

How many jobs exist/created from engineering, manufacturing, selling, marketing, transporting, and managing crap that we don't need? What would the world look like if we wiped out all of those jobs? How will developing countries be affected when their income from manufacturing these products is drastically reduced?

What do we have that replaces plastic for transporting and storing goods/food? Sand (silica?) is expected to become low in supply (e.g. for glass). How many trees would we have to cut down to replace plastic?

Part of me is wondering if the route we are currently taking is the best one, because change will happen gradually, giving us time to adapt. A sudden kick to the balls of our the global economy, on the other hand, would have an immediate, devastating impact; especially on developing countries.

Callum Roberts wrote “The Ocean of Life: The Fate of Man and the Sea” in 2013.

Everyone should read it. This article is discussing issues that are not at all new. That we treat it as new information is a symptom of the problem.

Are there any clean up projects going on at the major gyres shown in the article? Seems like that would be a good place to start.

Yeah https://www.theoceancleanup.com/

Though the majority of the plastic comes from people in Indonesia and China chucking it in the river. Those countries really need to stop that with old fashioned things like littering fines and sticking it in landfills. Plus recycling etc naturally.

Cleaning up gyres are important, but realize that when one removes trash from a gyre, more is back the next day. Stopping production is the most important first-step.

> Items found included 115 drinking cups, four plastic bottles, 25 plastic bags and two flip-flops.

How many straws though?

93% of plastic polluting the world's oceans comes from 10 rivers.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plas...

Yangtze - East China Sea (Asia)

Indus - Arabian Sea (Asia)

Yellow River - Yellow Sea (Asia)

Hai He - Yellow Sea (Asia)

Nile - Mediterranean (Africa)

Ganges - Bay of Bengal (Asia)

Pearl River - South China Sea (Asia)

Amur - Sea of Okhotsk (Asia)

Niger - Gulf of Guinea (Africa)

Mekong - South China Sea (Asia)

How much of that plastic is shipped there "for recycling" by other countries? Everything I've read on the subject seems to indicate we send tons of plastic to places that we know aren't really going to recycle it.

It's shipped there because it's bought. It's bought because the buyer intends to make money off of it, not throw it in a river. Although a lot of crap does wind up in the air and water, the environmental havoc wreaked by thousands of backyard plastic smelters is incredible.

"Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade" by Adam Minter https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17286721-junkyard-planet

Many recyclers are paid to take rubbish (especially unsorted rubbish). They claim they sort it and responsibly recycle or dispose.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/20/plastic-...

Feels like such a helpless situation. Is there anything to be done in the US to help with these rivers?

Polluting the planet for everyone should be the main reason for punitive international measures (sanctions, etc)

Perhaps a different way of viewing it is developing countries' polluting enables the high living standards in the developed world.

Who is then responsible?

Is that a fact though? If that were the case, Mexico, the US's third-largest trading partner and by most measures, a "developing" county, should be vastly more polluted than India, which is the US's 9th-largest trading partner.

The top-ten polluted cities are in India and Pakistan. China doesn't even make the top 20.[1]

Is Pakistan materially contributing to the high living standards of developed countries? It would be a stretch to suggest that.

However, the high standards of living the developed world are absolutely contributing to rising standards of living in the developing world. If it weren't for trade, South Koreans, for example would still be living in mud-brick houses with sewage dumped in the rivers. The HangGang would resemble the Ganges. The idea that high living standards elsewhere degrade living standards in developing countries is not supported by evidence.

Pollution rates tend to decline with the rising of an economy, which would suggest that increasing world trade would ultimately result in less pollution as countries become more developed. So by not "supporting" the high standards of living in the developed world, a country themselves wouldn't be able to progress to a developed state. South Korea, achieved their economic successes starting in the late 1970s when they were definitely not a developed country. They sold heavy industrial goods and then ventured into electronics and cars which gave them the economic activity necessary to become one of the most developed countries in the world. The absolute poverty rate in the 1950s was almost 50%. As of 2001, absolute poverty in Korea was less than 2%. It could be argued that without "enabling the high living standards in the developed world," South Korea would still be dumping raw sewage into rivers.

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/06/which-is-the-worlds-m...

Sanctions that charge per ton of plastic discharged

This means that the owner of the river either 1) Stops plastic entering the river 2) Charges for plastic entering it - passed on to the developed world through higher costs 3) Filters at the mouth of the river

Egypt can invite international organisations to measure the plastic entering the Nile at Aswan and leaving post Cairo. Sudan can do the same with the borders with South Sudan and Ethiopia (from memory), and so on.

How much would it cost to filter the discharge of these rivers to withdraw even just half the plastic? Is it even possible?

One thing it should be done in US is the super market shouldn't provide the plastic bag for free, and also shouldn't overwrap the staff when checkout out.

82% of people who quote statistics get them wrong.

From your article:

> A recent study estimates that more than a quarter of all that waste could be pouring in from just 10 rivers, eight of them in Asia.

The 93% stat relates to just rivers as a source of plastic pollution.

> rivers collectively dump anywhere from 0.47 million to 2.75 million metric tons of plastic into the seas every year, depending on the data used in the models. The 10 rivers that carry 93 percent of that trash are the Yangtze, Yellow, Hai, Pearl, Amur, Mekong, Indus and Ganges Delta in Asia, and the Niger and Nile in Africa.

Still bad but much less than the original stat.

You’re right about that article — however when looking at all marine plastic pollution, the countries responsible are the same: most notably China and South East Asia.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/which-countries-create-the-most...

https://www.statista.com/chart/12211/the-countries-polluting...

Claiming that China and South East Asia are "responsible" for all the plastic pollution they output is seriously misguided (no offense intended=) given that the region is "the plastic factory" for the whole world.

Is the plastic in the rivers postconsumer or preconsumer waste?

Thanks for posting these. I got the original information from another article, but it was full of ads so I chose a better source to link, which is where the discrepancy comes in.

The West pays China and SE Asia to make millions of tons of plastic for manufacturing the products we buy. The West sends millions of tons of plastic product "for recycling".

"China and South East Asia is responsible".

You see no contradiction there? I sure as heck do. The West, including my own country and citizens, are just as responsible.

Supply chains try (and fail oftentimes) to ensure child labour is not used. Why not pollution, environmental standards or CO2? It's not like the atmosphere and oceans respect borders.

So, can we filter at a point before they spread into their deltas? I’m guessing this is an incredibly complex task.

That's nuts. Also, that seems ripe for a meaningful stop gap solution which addresses at least part of the problem through collectors at the river deltas.

> 93% of plastic polluting the world's oceans comes from 10 rivers.

This statements contradicts your article, which states: "A recent study estimates that more than a quarter of all that waste could be pouring in from just 10 rivers, eight of them in Asia." Your 10 listed rivers contribute 93% of the plastic waste brought into the ocean _by rivers_.

Also see this breakdown by country: https://www.statista.com/chart/12211/the-countries-polluting...

Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam each bring more marine plastic waste into the ocean than Egypt, but there is not a single river carrying it like the Nile.

This elicits an emotional response from my acquaintances, but this gets to the main objection I have about feel-good measures like banning plastic straws. I understand the "everything helps" argument, but not when people and the media pour their energy and emotions into statistically meaningless measures then move on. I've been hearing the same concerns my entire life, yet things keep getting worse in statistically meaningful ways.

It's almost like all of the responsibility is out on individuals, while large industrial interests are exempt from consideration. Strange how that happened...

I call it do-your-partism and it’s a big part of the reason we have so many problems that people seem to care about that aren’t getting solved.

Very courous.

I would wager had you posted that %95 of the plastic waste was found to come from the Mississippi not a single reply would have defended / or taken issue / found exsxuses with your post.

In fact it would have just more bashing the west for polloting oceans.

Is it weird that this headline makes me think of Jon Bon Jovi?

Reasons to switch from oil based plastic to hemp oil based plastics.

> https://www.eppm.com/blogs/editors-blog/speaking-up-for-plas...

We need to get our heads out of our asses. I don't want to be that guy but... we either need to radically change the way we live or 90% of us just need to immediately cease to exist although I'm sure the remaining 750 million people would still find ways to sabotage our planet. 'SHTF' fiction and science fiction often turns to a pandemic wiping out large chunks of the population... that would be bad for you, for me, for most people but we aren't the only life on earth. We need to realize this, NOW. We need to grow up and start being responsible for ourselves as individuals and as a species. As far as we know we have exactly one habitable world in all of the universe and certainly only one habitable world within our current technological means. Come on people!

We're ruining this planet multiple ways for not only ourselves but nearly all other species. Nearly 40 gigatonsof carbon this year, microplastics are now in the water and air the world around and has even been found in human feces on multiple continents, at least one factory in China is using CFCs again, we're doing all sorts of environmental damage strip mining resources for our throw-away phones and MacBooks, we are depleting groundwater the world around at alarming rates, we're losing our social abilities by staring at screens, we are using an alarming amount of electricity just to speculate on cryptocurrency, we drive 100-200 species extinct on average DAILY, we wage wars over religion and oil and where an imaginary line should divide a group of people, we murder each other for sneakers and pocket change or because someone beat us in a video game, we die in internet cafes throwing our lives away on virtual characters trying to get the latest super epic bind on pickup gear while people starve to death, suicide rates rise as people feel overwhelmed and trapped and that there is no hope and that they'll have to work until they die, we chase billion dollar exits on our iPad fruit of the month SAAS app as we walk by homeless people outside of our offices, we ship produce halfway around the world to eat out of season and throw away enough spoiled food to feed every hungry mouth on the planet... we are a scourge on the earth, but we needn't be. We can sacrifice, we can make immediate changes to the way we go about things to slow the damage we are doing, to buy ourselves some time to not only stop but reverse it.

Sad thing is, the vast majority of people are oblivious or flat out don't care.

Maybe we will get lucky and some advanced species will fill our skies with their ships and temporarily take control of the situation. More likely, we'll destroy ourselves like probably countless other intelligent species that the universe has seen come and go.

It's depressing.

Which guy? Thanos?

Thanos was merciful by comparison since he only wanted to kill 50%...

losing 90% of humans still leaves 10% of humans. so 10% of problem. don't be that guy. be a guy who works toward a solution for the root-cause. i'd expect people in an it/hacker community to get that :D guess we're all 'those humans' after all eh :D

I say all of this as a thought experiment. But:

> Sad thing is, the vast majority of people are oblivious or flat out don't care.

I mean, if we're making mental jumps to wiping out billions of people - I'd argue that, does it even matter? Ie, in your example human life largely doesn't matter. Human survival maybe, but clearly not billions of lives. I'm not saying this negatively either, just acknowledging what topic we're discussing.

So if we're throwing away cultural norms on what we consider valuable, such as human life, why even care about nature? Our species? Other species? The planet?

It's an honest question. I imagine you could argue that human life is still the most important thing, but we simply can't exist with 7 billion people. Perhaps 6 Billion people need to die.

Regardless, I struggle to be emotionally invested in a situation where I decide 6 billion people die. 6 billion to save 1 billion? That's a tough pill to swallow. It's not like killing 1 person to save a million. Mentally I think I struggle at that thought so much that I'd almost rather choose inaction, passively killing 7 billion people, so I can't feel responsible for the decision to kill 6 billion people.

Interesting thought analysis nonetheless.

>So if we're throwing away cultural norms on what we consider valuable, such as human life, why even care about nature? Our species? Other species? The planet?

We have no issue eradicating mold that enters our homes, bacterial infections, viruses but people don't hesitate to create 800,000 something tons of plastic a day that mostly ends up in the trash, we don't mind pumping 40 gigatons of carbon in the atmosphere, we don't mind over fishing, depleting soil, throwing out food that we couldn't be bothered to eat, buying electronics designed to be thrown away after 1-3 years, etc.

We're already wiping out billions of people. We're just making it slow and painful. Cancer rates are increasing decade after decade, climate change is a very real thing that is going to start getting noticeably worse, we're one decent crop failure away from sparking a regional or even world war.

I'm not advocating we gather up 9 out of every 10 people and euthanize them, but it would be more humane than the myriad of slow and miserable deaths we are setting ourselves up for.

The next several decades are going to be quite interesting, and almost certainly not in a good way.

As a species, we have to wake up. We have to get the majority to not only acknowledge the issues we immediately face but to actually try and work on slowing and ultimately reversing them.

We have freemium apps raking in millions and millions of dollars a day but we''re painfully under-funding attempts at renewable energy and carbon sequestration and sustainable manufacturing.

One of the results of "loss of god / religion" (I'm not religious, just saying) is that humans have replaced those myths with "science and nature".

So, its perfectly congruent for true believers to advocate the death of billions if their god is being threatened. No different then fire and brimstone of old testament.

Strangely many such people are proclaimed atheist who don't recognize they have just selected a different mythological system to follow.

In the movie Dr. Strangelove the president was very upset by the idea of choosing who lives and who dies, which is when Dr. Strangelove brightly exlaims "that could easily be done by a computer".

Decades later, Deep Impact doesn't bother with the qualms, and just has the president solemnly proclaim on TV that a computer will randomly select people, on top of a fixed pool of "VIP", and the people watching TV are all just... sad, and hope they get picked. Not one person goes "What? What did he just say?".

This "meme", that a catastrophy destroys all but a selection, is as old as the Bible, i.e. of Noah as well as the Book of Revelations. Flood myths in general are fascinating, some even have "the bad guys" surviving the flood they themselves caused.

edit: I tried to find the "bad guys surviving the flood" one, I'm 99% sure it was on here http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/flood-myths.html

But I couldn't easily find it again, it's such a giant page. I think it involved lying to the gods about who caused the flood (or other issue), who then punish the wrong guys, while the actually guilty people survive. Could have been about two island peoples, one good one bad, but I'm not sure, it's been quite a while since I read that page.

> Regardless, I struggle to be emotionally invested in a situation where I decide 6 billion people die.

6 billion people will die. Heck, 7.5 billion will die. Everyone dies. The question is not when, but how, and how do they live their lives.

I think we should pursue a solution not of genocide, but one of mass sterilization. We should choose about 100 million people from all over the Earth that will represent the genome of the next generation of humanity and sterilize everyone else. And contrary to the closet racists' wet dream, this should be done in exactly the opposite way: we should strive to maximize genetic diversity and make sure that everyone has a pretty close relative represented. It would have to be massively automated, driven by genetic data, and highly, highly scientific.

That's the only non-morally-horrendous depopulation solution that I can think of. It would solve our population problem in ~60-70 years, naturally. Humanely I would say.

To some, it might be liberating even. The need to not ever worry about supporting children, or really, about the future at all. They don't have to live with a lower standard of living (by much). They don't have to figure out how to compete with 8, 9, 10 billion other people trying to claw their way up to the western standard of living. The childless could focus on bringing meaning to their lives in other ways, can invest in the next generation in other ways, and can transcend their biological destiny, which seems to be a cruel joke programmed into us from the very first bacterium.

It'd be like creating a living ark within humanity.

And the resources left over, designed to support 8 billion, need only support 100 million. There'd be a plethora of energy and real estate. A lot of the Earth could be turned back to wilderness. And humanity would take a smaller role. By choice. Instead of it being forced on us by the system collapsing on our heads.

Good luck sterilizing people against their will.

TBH I know it's a crackhead plan.

But then again I'm not sure this generation is all enthused about having kids. It costs a lot (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cost-of-raising-a-child-parents...), and if there were economic incentives that encouraged volunteering, that might actually get takers.

Jesus, absolutely not.

You don't think that a forced, mass sterilization is morally horrendous?

I am not a humanist. World population has doubled in my lifetime, and when you weigh the tremendous pain and destruction that has caused and will cause, 3 billion extra lives that will witness (or their very close descendants) an unprecedented mass extinction/collapse event due their own sheer weight, I'm not sure that rampant uncontrolled population growth is not the thing that is morally horrendous. Just look what humans have done to this planet in 30 years. Insect populations down 75%, mammals down 60%, the Great Barrier reef is half dead, extinction rates are 1000x normal, habitat loss, trash in the oceans, global warming, climate change, microplastics, mass pesticide use, fuck....it's hard not to view humanity (at least in relation to literally all other life on Earth) through a very, very dark lens.

Yeah, given all this I don't think it's morally horrendous that most people would not be allowed to have kids. They can do literally anything they want with the rest of their lives, but FFS don't have kids.

So you see humans through this dark lens, but advocate for these same humans to decide who gets sterilized, then carry it out forcefully?

I don't see how this happens at all. Dystopian military force? And if someone tried, it'd be a major conflict.

Is it more horrendous than what will happen if we just keep reproducing and using up the earth's resources?

File this under "Things still too radical to say in 2018."

Honestly, your proposed solution goes too counter to human nature to be viable, in my opinion. Not to say it wouldn't work if you could pull it off, just that there's too much going against it.

Human nature is selfish on a per-tribe basis. I think much of humanity's ills stem from our inability to effectively care about more than ~100-1k people. Even if you convinced the world to go along with this, including the inevitable rash of unrest by religious groups and murders/etc by people who feel they were unfairly sterilized, here are a couple questions I have with this plan:

1) Age distribution +30 years out from implementation? Developing nations with declining growth rates (most of them) are facing serious age-related care and resource issues as the largest section of population becomes elderly. The plethora of energy and real estate wouldn't kick in until the sterile group shuffles off, and the preceding ~10-20 years would be a really uncomfortable transition without some serious forced old-people-warehousing solutions. Even from just a "how many care nurses can we really get in here" point of view.

2) How to implement permanent, lasting cultural shift on wealth, growth, and sustainability? The mentality that led us here, that maximum growth and wealth is more important than sustainable growth, would have to be permanently squashed from the human psyche, otherwise it's only a matter of time before the "chosen ones" and their progeny get us right back where we started. I don't think anything is permanently squashable from the human psyche, especially things that lead necessarily to occasional "my tribe has to take a haircut so someone I've never met can improve," due to afore-mentioned tribal nature of humans.

There are more, but I don't have time to think of them. I would like to revisit this later, perhaps.

Personally, I think we need to re-organize society to be more in line with how humans are wired, then build-in rules and solutions for sustainable growth. Like designing society around many more, smaller towns, linked together by internet and services that make sense as national services (like risk pools, transportation networks, etc.) but are as close to self-sufficient as possible in terms of energy, food, and water. I don't know what that society would look like, or how to get there, though.

> Honestly, your proposed solution goes too counter to human nature to be viable, in my opinion.

I know it does. That's why we are well and truly screwed. But to be honest it's the only thing I can think of that would give us even a fighting chance, because a century of 7+ billion humans will absolutely suck this planet dry. BTW there is no such thing as "sustainable growth". It is a contradiction in terms.

I'll refer you to Al Bartlett. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3LryW47B_M

>I know it does. That's why we are well and truly screwed. But to be honest it's the only thing I can think of that would give us even a fighting chance

Agreed. We either have to kill 90%+ of the population or get a similar amount to agree to sterilize themselves.

I am NOT saying we need to start kicking down doors and shooting people or tranq darting them and snip-snip-snipping but unless an alien peacekeeping armada fills our skies with their ships and starts handing out free fusion plants and food replicators and machines to pull the carbon dioxide out of the air that manufactures inert carbon ingots... we're truly screwed.

Tech types are entirely too optimistic, they think just because we will need to figure something out that we will.

Ok, let's say fusion. Let's say someone got a fusion reactor online TOMORROW and that over the next 6 months they found ways to scale and mass produce it.

Now let's say they can start mass producing everything needed on multiple continents while construction companies set to work building all the facilities needed to replace the 60,000 something power plants on the planet. The construction of the buildings alone would take several decades purely to supply all the needed concrete (which itself creates absurd amounts of carbon dioxide).

So great, we create a solution to our energy problem which would let us drastically reduce our carbon emissions but under realistic conditions it takes us decades to convert fully to that energy, still spewing tens of gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year which would continue to worsen weather conditions, further acidify the oceans, likely lead to crop failures, kill more species that can't handle even modest temperature changes...

Sigh.

Only on HN can you find a thread discussing the merits of eugenics. These are not new ideas, in fact they were popular among 19th century intellectuals until those ideas culminated into some of the worst atrocities in recent human history in Nazi Germany.

There is no such thing as a "non morally horrendous solution," giving the power to decide who should procreate and who shouldn't to a single group or "algorithm" violates one of the most basic freedoms that we as humans have.

You know what would be more depressing? Actually a pandemic which wipes of 90% of the humanity and by chance, leaving the current infrastructure of nuclear plants, armies, satellites at the hands of untrained or a very limited set of people. If you think we(humans) are the problems, just wait till one of these get out of control and destroy the locality in which it happens. It's depressing, yes but getting rid of humans actualy isnt the solution, not after all the "changes" we have made to the planet.

You would cull 6.5 billion people because they like fashion and video games and are wasteful?

When it happens I hope you aren't swept up since we are going to need people who have the answers to everything.

> We're ruining this planet multiple ways for not only ourselves but nearly all other species

Totally and absolutely agree here.

> Sad thing is, the vast majority of people are oblivious or flat out don't care.

Also totally agree here

And here's some real thought experiment stuff I've been doing. So basically, should we continue this (unchecked population, unsustainable resource depletion), something has to give right? That's an absolute fact. Our pace of reproduction and resource use simply can't go on forever, and that's where things will get interesting. Will later generations (think 1,000 years+) have adapted a bit better? (E.g., in the future polluting the ocean for example is a crime on the scale of kidnapping or something similar).

I mean the fact at the end of the day is, this can't be sustained. Something is going to have to give in the way we live, eat, have kids, etc (and by we I mean all earthlings, I'm aware that the US reproduces at a fraction of the rate of emerging/frontier countries).

It's a really interesting problem with no clear solutions

If it cheers you up, the void doesn't care. None of this matters on cosmic scales. Or, depending on your philosophy of choice, you'll get a chance to go ahead and do this again eventually.

-your friendly neighborhood Nihilist.

I broadly agree, but I think you should drop the whole notion of killing any significant portion of the human race from your rant. It’s not going to happen and it only serves to distract from a necessary conversation.

Well, there are things you can do.

Earth Strike is one such very recent phenomenon that has organized that directly addresses failures of capitalism that is and has caused environmental collapse. They have direct demands (unlike Occupy that had none). They have direct action days already organized (January 15, 2019 ; April 27, 2019 ; August 1, 2019 ; September 27, 2019).

The group already has international interest and collaboration. Noam Chomsky has also given his blessing ( https://mobile.twitter.com/FleshTurtle/status/10620656342158... ).

https://www.reddit.com/r/EarthStrike/

http://earth-strike.com/

https://discordapp.com/invite/JAqJ7tB

And what do you intend to do via your Direct Action? No clue in the links you've given.

This org was formed 2 weeks ago. Many of the things are still up in the air, along with what exactly to do and how to go about it.

However, actions are being considered as: marches, protests, strikes, walk-outs, and non-violent protest based actions.

I know a similar group Extinction Rebellion blocked all major 5 bridges in London, over the same goals of Environmentalism.

Direct action these days just means walking around with signs.

No one can be bothered to learn what the term means so it’s just become a buzzword.

> throw away enough spoiled food to feed every hungry mouth on the planet

In Somalia, we shipped containers full of rice and much of it was stolen by warlords. Yet, if we send troops, you'd scream anti-war. If we don't send troops, the rice gets stolen and people starve.

Perhaps inconsistently, you complain that there are too many people, but then decry us for not feeding all of those people. You complain about carbon footprints, yet somehow, excess food in San Francisco needs to be sent to people in Bangladesh. How does that happen? On a ship perhaps? Maybe sailboats? We'll need refrigeration. Solar? We could shanghai a battalion of fat people to row it across the ocean?

> 90% of us just need to immediately cease to exist

Other than mass murder, what do you propose we do? You're anti-war, so we can't use that to reduce the population. You complain about people starving, so clearly that isn't a means to handle the issue. I'm at a loss. Perhaps mass sterilization of undesirables? I think we tried that a while back and that didn't turn out too well. Birth control? Maybe, but most humans actually want to reproduce and have families.

> excess food in San Francisco needs to be sent to people in Bangladesh.

Most of that food in San Francisco is coming from other countries to start. The U.S. imports 50 percent of fresh fruits, 20 percent of fresh vegetables and 80 percent of seafood.

We EXPORTED 133 billion dollars of food in 2017, the bulk of that being soybeans, beef and poultry.

Neither of these practices are sustainable and the US isn't alone in this practice. People don't want a can of corn that was grown locally in the past year or two, they want a fresh cob grown in the past few weeks which has to be shipped from another hemisphere. They don't want frozen fruit, they want to go to the grocery and pick over visually appealing fresh fruit that just finished its trip from China to their local retailer in Bumsville, Idaho.

Did you know that in the U.S. alone the cattle we raise eat enough grain to feed a BILLION people? The average cow will eat EIGHTEEN TONS of feed per year. Don't get me wrong, I love a hamburger or some beef sausage on my pizza but...

It's not gonna happen, most people still don't grasp the stakes at play nor how they are contributing in the worst ways possible.

On one side you have sometimes a bit too righteous vegans getting their third child, going "I'm saving the planet by teaching my children the right way to live!"

On the other side, you have nationalist sentiments going "I need to get as many children as possible or else our ancestry is dying out/our people are being replaced by foreigners!".

Throw in a good bit of religious anti-contraception and abortion sentiments, heavily propagandized among the poorer parts of the world, and the end result is still the same: Unchecked population growth due to large parts of humanity still seeing procreation as some kind of quantity contest where everybody wants to become the next Genghis Khan [0].

At this point, the only thing I'm unsure about is how far we gonna take it before nature is gonna cull the herd globally, but I seriously doubt we'll ever make it past the 10 billion before that's gonna happen.

[0] https://www.nature.com/news/genghis-khan-s-genetic-legacy-ha...

If someone is determined to be an example of sustainable living, having extra kids might be productive, even very much so, as it helps the signal-to-noise ratio of good values spread faster in the population; think of it as a multiplier. The actual weight of having more people is a rounding error compared to all the extra people who on top of it have questionable ethics and morals all around (most people including or especially westerners. Sure, poor people in developing countries are hopeless, but people from rich countries have more leverage used to exploit others.)

> as it helps the signal-to-noise ratio of good values spread faster in the population

This only works if the "don't care" population doesn't outgrow them. You are pretty much betting on speeding up, outcompeting them, but that in itself is only contributing to the overall problem.

Especially considering that the "don't care" approach requires less effort, as in time and resources for the individual, thus is more likely to be practiced succeed and given on to the children, of which they very likely will have more.

Because even children are something that needs to be "invested in" to actually meaningfully contribute when they are adults, instead of being another "net negative" to the sustainability of humanity on this planet.

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