At first estimate we could just Google images of polluted rivers in Asia and Africa and look at the logos on the garbage.
From my priors, I'd estimate that the plastics would almost all be from locally-consumed products, simply thrown into the river as is common and accepted in such places.
My sense is that a lot of educated, wealthy Westerners don't realize:
1. How many people are in Asia and Africa.
2. How little effort they put into keeping their local environment clean. People just don't get how callous same cultures are about the environment; it cannot be believed until it's been experienced since it's so far outside of the wealthy Westerner's experience. (Plus, to believe such would also create cognitive dissonance with social justice creeds which are victim classes as inherently morally pure.)
> It has been a year since China jammed the works of recycling programs around the world by essentially shutting down what had been the industry’s biggest market. China’s National Sword policy, enacted in January 2018, banned the import of most plastics and other materials headed for that nation’s recycling processors, which had handled nearly half of the world’s recyclable waste for the past quarter century. The move was an effort to halt a deluge of soiled and contaminated materials that was overwhelming Chinese processing facilities and leaving the country with yet another environmental problem—and this one not of its own making.
> In the year since, China’s plastic imports have plummeted by 99 percent, leading to a major global shift in where and how materials tossed in the recycling bin are being processed. While the glut of plastics is the main concern, China’s imports of mixed paper have also dropped by a third. Recycled aluminum and glass are less affected by the ban.
> Globally, more plastics are now ending up in landfills, incinerators, or likely littering the environment as rising costs to haul away recyclable materials increasingly render the practice unprofitable. In England, more than half a million more tons of plastics and other household garbage were burned last year. Australia’s recycling industry is facing a crisis as the country struggles to handle the 1.3 million-ton stockpile of recyclable waste it had previously shipped to China.
Frankly I'm sick of people using environmentalism as their soap box like this. It doesn't make anything better to ignore reality because they want to condescend to the US and Canada and Europe. It's actively making it worse.
If Mad Men[0] is to be believed, there was plenty of littering in the US in the 1960s.[1] It took many public awareness campaigns by government and private industry, in a country far richer with nearly universal literacy, over multiple decades to make littering socially unacceptable. And I still see plenty of litter in the US today. Change takes time.
0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roREnVhd_og
1. https://www.reddit.com/r/madmen/comments/4oie71/how_accurate...
-Mothers supervising their kids as they defecate on a city sidewalk, or in the garbage bin in a busy train station.
-Dead mules left rotting and bloated in the sun for days right beside busy streets, with drinking water flowing nearby.
-Restaurant owners throwing garbage out the front door of their establishment onto the street right in front of the restaurant.
You're relating what I said to your own experience, which is Mad Men-style "littering". Only once you actually go outside your bubble can you understand that humans can do so much worse - and billions do.
I think to find a Western example you'd have to go back to horse and buggy days at least, and possibly to before widespread plumbing (e.g. late 1800's London cholera epidemics, the Thames literally full of shit).
I'm well aware of that. I grew up in India. I'm just asking you to place this behavior in the context of the prosperity and levels of education in the places where it happens. America, for all its advantages in material and human development, did not develop an anti-littering culture until very recently.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/01/what-happened-to-90s-e...
I'd been idly wondering about the topic for years—specifically, WTF happened to all those environmental things schools & kids' nature magazines & cartoons had all the students worked up about back in the 90s? Are they fine now? Did it all go poorly so they gave up? You know, save the rainforest, we're running out of places to put trash, and so on.
The TL;DR on "ZOMG we're gonna drown in trash if we don't do something!" is that it was always basically bullshit—we didn't fix it, it was just a made-up problem to begin with. Other things the post covers are less rosy. The rainforest issue... yep, still going on, still very bad, we're just not talking about it as much.
The threat to lemur habitats is 1) Malagasy people practicing slash-and-burn agriculture, exacerbated by a very high birthrate on the island which means there is ever more need for new agricultural land to exploit, 2) Madagascar’s poor using charcoal for cooking because they cannot afford something like kerosene, and 3) rampant logging so that the exotic wood can be shipped to China for the furniture industry. It has nothing to do with the CO2 crisis.
The people living on coast lines are generally rich, which gives them the expectation that they will be ok.
Er, we sent all the trash to other countries, and they dumped it in the ocean.
Most other nations just did a cost benefit calculation and quietly got on with recycling. America, which has lots of space comparatively, also did the same cost benefit calculation, mostly got on with recycling, but with a vocal chorus of detractors whose arguments seems to bizarrely return (across decades!) to what we teach small children not being 100% accurate.
Is this really the level of argument we're looking for in economic topics? Or is using these arguments basically an admission that we've lost and are fighting a desperate retreat using whatever emotionally salient arguments we can muster.
It's really weird that this little micro version of climate change denial (promoted by all the same sources) is still socially acceptable in certain circles when the arguments for it are so laughably weak. To see him praise John Tierney's articles is mind boggling to me, I thought his whole schtick was about rationality.
About "6. Peak Resource", which is the topic I feel most comfortable debunking :
- Peak oil is happening right now in many regions of the globe, the North sea passed its peak oil a decade ago, and he doesn't mention it. This peak oil/gas is currently putting Germany at a political risk, being more and more dependent on Russian gas.
- He puts up the price of oil as an indicator of resource scarcity. This might sound true to our small minds used to the "supply-demand" paradigm. But the price indicated is mostly controlled by politics rather than supply and demand. E.g. Gulf states trying to take other countries out of the oil market by artificially deflating prices thanks to their larger supplies.
- He mentions fracking/shale oil as a revolutionary new technique, although it was already researched at the times. He also fails to mention that fracking in the USA is awfully subsidized, not profitable and has not ever been. He also doesn't mention the new environmental impacts caused by this technique. The fracking companies are legally entitled to clean up their mess, but when they go bankrupt, not much they can do...
I like to think that the same thing can happen on a global scale.