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Comment by asark | Hacker News Reader

On the landfill topic, I found this Slate Star Codex post very interesting:

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.

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Save the rainforest is still my main environmental mantra, thanks 5th grade. And I still think the pursuit of biodiversity is the best goal. Way more compelling to the average person than co2. And it it turns out that co2 reduction is necessary to save those lemurs, so be it. But do it for the biodiversity -- to save the rainforest. Not nearly as compelling to save the rainforest in order to reduce co2, or whatever.

> And it it turns out that co2 reduction is necessary to save those lemurs, so be it.

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.

I'm curious how CO2 reduction is less compelling? Not to be blunt, but as an average American I'll likely never see the rainforest in person. I find it quite a bit more compelling to mitigate global warming, as that will drastically impact where I currently live. Sure, you can't use cute animals as mascots, but surely the people who live near coastlines should find the possibility of their homes being literally underwater more compelling than an environment they will never see.

But they see rainforests and lemurs on TV. Two cute cuddly eyes. To empathize with. The equivalent for co2 might be disaster movies (or Al Gore), which arguably are counter productive.

The people living on coast lines are generally rich, which gives them the expectation that they will be ok.

Recycling is done by all major governments because all the science and research suggests it is beneficial (in terms of carbon, energy, cost/profit).

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.

In my school days the main scare problem was acid rain.

And now you celebrate it as a success story?

> 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.

Er, we sent all the trash to other countries, and they dumped it in the ocean.

The made-up part was that running out of landfill space was something to actually worry about. And a lot of what was shipped over was "recycling". :-/

This just sounds like an even more stretched "scientists used to think the globe was cooling" to me. (I've just noticed someone unironically referencing global cooling in another comment)

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.

Likewise peak oil and global cooling.

A lot of our environmental issues have gone out of vogue because they tend to clash with the trendier value of immigration. It's easier for politicians to grandstand about carbon taxes and straws than face the real problems.

The poster doesn't seem to know much about any of the technical problems he's touching, and he's completely out of touch in some cases. I wouldn't pay any attention to his conclusions.

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...

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