Hacker News Reader

Comment by Cthulhu_ | Hacker News Reader

One of many, though; I'm really getting my hackles up with corporations making end users responsible for things like plastic, industrial farming and co2 emissions. Yes they're a part of the equation, but there's much bigger impact to be made if they work from the top down.

Mind you, there are things like that going on (at least in my neck of the woods), with things like subsidies to consumers for going to battery powered cars and installing solar panels, and subsidies to e.g. energy producers for building wind farms out at sea.

View on HN

> I'm really getting my hackles up with corporations making end users responsible for things like plastic, industrial farming and co2 emissions.

Me too, but GP has an argument along these lines here.

Commute is a big, and often deciding factor, in private car ownership. Get rid of it, and most drivers will lose the major reason for owning a car. Expand the delivery systems for day-to-day stuff like groceries, and another big reason - buying in bulk - goes away. While people living in sparsely populated areas will still need their cars, the dwellers of large cities with serviceable public transport infrastructure might be more inclined to get rid of their cars, and just rent one for an occasional out-of-town errand.

In this way, normalizing work from home creates top-down pressure for reducing the number of private cars in use.

> Get rid of it, and most drivers will lose the major reason for owning a car.

I think this is backwards.

We saw during the pandemic a mass exodus from cities. Once people could work from home, they decided they didn't want to live in a city anymore.

Once you remove the burden of commuting, suburban / rural life becomes _even more_ attractive, increasing the need for cars.

> Once people could work from home, they decided they didn't want to live in a city anymore.

IMO it’s too early to claim that. People left the city during the pandemic because there was no point paying the premium to live in a city when all its amenities are closed. As cities open back up we might see a lot of people return. Anecdotally, I know a bunch of early career folks in their 20s that moved back in with their parents during the pandemic to save cash. That most certainly isn’t their long term plan.

I don’t doubt that a good number of folks won’t return to the city once this is over. But I wonder if that’s just an acceleration of moves they would have already made in the next 5 years or so, rather than something indicative of the death of cities.

I agree. As for most things, the internet narrative exaggerates reality. New York is already quickly coming back to normal -- certainly slower than before, but offices aren't open yet. Once they open, the intangible benefits of being in the office will re-appear, and result in the same cultural forces that have led to cities for ~all of human civilization.

People who are betting against urban life are basically making a bet against human nature based on short-term trends.

Cities are certainly not the norm when looking at "~all of human civilization.". The norm by far is small anarchic-communal villages (150 people or less). Yes, eventually some outliers form, and villages become a large metropolis, with all of the problems and certain pitfalls that entails.

The past year also saw a 50%+ spike in urban violent crime rates, and repeated riots in nearly every major city. Anecdotally most of the professional families I know who fled to the suburbs cited safety as the primary reason.

citation please.

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/06/953254623/massive-1-year-rise...

You're forgetting the key bit: It was during a pandemic, and so especially during the first 6-12 months, people didn't feel safe being around others. They also often legally didn't have any space outside they could enjoy. Suburbs bring personal space and the legal right to be in your back yard.

A city is an entirely different experience when its residents are allowed to use parks and can enjoy dining out, walking to a market, strolling to the cinema, etc...

Yup. In between the waves of lockdowns, cities were actually more pleasant to be in than they normally are - with so many offices closed, there was a lot less people and cars on the streets, meaning less pollution and less noise.

Without the commuter rush, many places were much more pleasant. I'm in a suburban area and it used to be a solid hour of "line 'o cars" on the main street by my house. God forbid you want to go somewhere at 5pm or 8am.

Now it's more congested, but traffic still moves pretty quick. I'm not looking forward to all the commuters going back to the office.

"for a brief period during unprecedented times, a city apartment was as pleasent to live in as a proper house. This has quickly passed."

Almost. A proper house still has more space, and less noise constraints :).

This is such a bizarre comment. Do you think people will just forget how easily it was for their entire lifestyle to become illegal? Do you think those that moved to the suburb will forget the incredible freedom they purchased?

I think the pandemic highlighted a key deficiency of cities which most people will not soon forget.

I downsized to one car during the pandemic. The only reason I had two cars was because we were a family of commuters. Now that no one in the house is commuting, there's little point to owning and maintaining multiple cars.

And the one car I do have could potentially last me the rest of my life because I've gone from commuting 12k miles per year (time 2), down to around 3000.

Second had car prices have soared and people might not be keep to go back to jammed public transport due to covid.

My last two bus trips had betwen1 and 5 people blatantly ignoring the mask requirements and this is in on of the UK covid hot spots.

> there's much bigger impact to be made if they work from the top down

Exactly. Germany banning plastic straws while simultaneously funding a new natural gas pipeline feels very much like they just want it to seem like things are improving.

Public consciousness seems to lack the ability to prioritize issues.

Disposable plastics are a problem first and foremost because they cause proliferation of microplastics in the biosphere. This is an issue, but it's not an important issue right now. It's likely harmful to biosphere and to us in the long run - but as of today, there's no noticeable harm being done that can be tied to microplastics, which suggests any negative effects are weak.

Climate change, on the other hand, is a civilization-ending threat. We keep burning more fossil fuels, and it's quite likely our grandchildren will get to starve to death. Preventing this should be our absolute top priority. Microplastics can wait.

It's like trying to administer first aid to an accident victim who has a nasty skin cut on their arm, and a leg that got cut off below the knee. Yes, that skin cut is painful and it needs treating to prevent infection, but it can wait - the first priority is to deal with the leg, before the victim bleeds out.

> Public consciousness seems to lack the ability to prioritize issues.

Things that everybody is going to notice first-hand have an outsized impact on public consciousness. When combined with democracy, this has nasty consequences.

For politicians banning plastic straws is a no-brainer: easy to ban, no real impact on anything, and everyone is going to notice it and feel like something is happening. Same for plastic grocery bags and cutlery. Do it and maybe you'll grab some of those Green votes, same play as the Energiewende.

Meanwhile if you make industry even just .1% more efficient the impact is larger by orders of magnitude but nobody is going to notice, first-hand, right now. So it's pointless when you only care about votes. Which is sadly a main feature of democracy.

Do you have any better alternatives to a democracy?

There doesn't seem to be any good one.

GP described what's a clear systemic failure inherent in the current implementation of the system. This doesn't mean we have to throw the system away - figuring out how to mitigate this problem would work too.

On this, I don't have any solid ideas. In a way, it's a marketing problem: maybe there's a way to make people more receptive to reality than to feel-good but ultimately meaningless actions?

I sometimes wonder if governments shouldn't have an official propaganda department, with an official website, explaining in layman's terms the reasoning behind various laws being introduced. You'd go to a page for plastic straws ban, and see the government's official word on why it was drafted, what problem it's meant to solve, how it attempts that, and how they track the results.

Of course, everyone would have a field day debunking every single article from a million different angles, but at least it would serve to anchor the discussion. And it would be a place for a smarter politicians/parties to explain why increasing efficiency of some industry by 0.01% is a huge win by the current administration - hopefully leading to more such actions in the future.

There's a thin line between giving clear explanations and patronizing the citizens, but I think governments need to start walking it - as it is, politics is way too complicated for regular people to follow in any meaningful sense, other than repeating soundbites.

Nope, I'm just noting a failure mode.

Republicanism, lots of little democracies competing against one another for citizens, yet united when it comes to things like national defense. The US was originally designed to be a constitutional republic but a growing federal government has degraded it to more of a simple representative democracy.

I never heard the term "Republicanism". Are there any (real) countries that practice this? Australia's states have lots of divested powers. How do you feel about that balance?

Im not familiar enough with government in Oz to say but the closest example in modern times would be the EU, although they have a heavier hand than I'd recommend. If people in say France were unhappy with their government they can more easily move to Germany then if they were separate nations not in the EU. The key is giving the states enough control that they are distinct from one another while allowing people to move between them. If the federal government takes too much power the states become homogeneous and you lose the ability to vote with your feet like that.

How does the EU handle cases where one member wants to treat something as contraband and other do not? With open borsers for people and trade can one meber state have different laws for banned items or substances?

> With open borsers for people and trade can one meber state have different laws for banned items or substances?

The Netherlands have fairly lax laws on substances and are a EU member. If you take something from the Netherlands into a country that doesn't want that item within their borders you are subject to the local laws. Same thing that would happen if you brought contraband from South America to the US really.

IMO, if you try to make industry .1% more efficient, they will lobby the hell out of everyone to make sure that doesn't happen, because it affects their profit, and they threaten to withhold their campaign contributions. So instead, politicians do unimportant things like limit plastic straws.

Bottom line is, voters may elect politicians, but companies fund their campaigns.

Crowded, rich countries that responsibly burn garbage & waste still have a serious issue with dioxins generated by burning plastics. You can filter some of it, but usually areas around these plants have much higher than normal dioxin levels.

That said, I like the balance in your comment about the known effects of microplastics. At the moment, it is just a hype story. Honestly: No one really knows, but we should continue to seriously monitor and research the issue. I have heard that stretchy clothing (aka "ath-leisure") causes a lot of micro-fibres to be shed during laundry. This is simiar to microplastics, as most ath-leisure is made with synthetic materials that are essentially refined oil (as plastics).

Natural gas is great. It doesn't generate as much pollution as one might think. Other than fully clean energy like hydro and solar, it is one of the best.

it doesn't generate much in terms of particulate emissions (eg it's not dirty like diesel) but it's quite bad in terms of greenhouse effects. the natural gas pipeline network leaks a relatively large amount of the gas that transits it (it's on the order of several percent per year) and because it's such a distributed problem it's not economical for companies to fix it purely on a cost-savings basis. And natural gas (methane) is an extremely potent greenhouse gas - it is #2, behind only carbon dioxide in overall impact on the atmosphere, and something around 100x as potent as CO2 over a 100 year lifespan.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/06/the-us-natural-gas-industry-...

new studies suggest the leak rate is around 2.3%, which is about twice as high as previously predicted - and at 3% you have offset all the benefits compared to coal generation. Again, obviously that's still better in terms of particulate emissions/acid rain, but you wouldn't be doing any less global warming. So it is still significantly bad in terms of greenhouse effect, not nearly the panacea the fossil-fuel industry would like to present it as.

(and conversely - the fact that it's such a distributed problem makes it difficult/expensive to clean up. you can capture CO2 and particulates from a point source - it's expensive and it sucks but you can do it. But you can't stop 2 million miles of pipes from leaking a little bit at every fitting.)

the only saving grace is that methane does oxidize relatively quickly, on the order of tens of years, whereas CO2 is pretty much there forever. but if we're still pumping out more natural gas into the atmosphere 10 years later, that's not really the fix people think it is. Again, it's 100x more potent over a 100 year lifespan than CO2, the "long term" picture isn't all that rosy either.

How much of that gas was going to leak anyway? The fields they pipe it from probably don't hold it all in. Any stats on this in Google are buried under reports on the extraction industry, so I can't find anything concrete.

"Anyway" from what reference point? The gas stayed in the ground for millions of years before we poked a bunch of wells into the reservoir. If the wells are shut in correctly, they shouldn't leak appreciably. As the comment above notes, the more pipes you have, the more gas is going to leak.

Unfortunately, in many places you can't produce oil without producing gas, and with so much gas right now, there's not a lot of financial incentive to capture it all. If we reduce the need for oil, we'll reduce gas leak emissions as well.

That's the question. How much makes it to the surface? Oil used to pop up everywhere before humans sucked up all the easy to reach surface sources. There's still a little that comes up from the ocean floor without any human help.

https://response.restoration.noaa.gov/oil-and-chemical-spill...

Why would it be different for other things created by the same processes? And do the pipes let less leak out than if we just left it in the ground?

This source suggests that geological methane emissions are about 40% of total emissions: https://phys.org/news/2021-03-natural-geological-methane-emi...

Oil and gas seeps notwithstanding, the vast majority of reservoirs are stable and likely to remain so over human timescales unless we stick wells into them and start piping fluids around on the surface.

slight addendum to the above - I should have said "not dirty like fossil-diesel". I'd like to make the point that synthetic diesels like biodiesel are extremely clean in terms of particulates and is in fact one of the more interesting "bio-fuels" (although of course there are always problems with any approach that puts food in direct competition with fuel for feedstocks).

I'm confused by the second part <<funding a new natural gas pipeline>>. I assume you are talking about Nord Stream 2.

Switching from brown coal to natural gas can reduce carbon footprint by about 50%. This is a good stepping stone to reduce the huge amount of brown coal that Germany uses for power. Also, the reduction in NOx and SOx is huge by switching from brown coal to natural gas. Another big win for public health.

Do I misunderstand your point?

Germany has limited places to harvest wind (North Sea) and limited solar resources. How else can they reduce their carbon footprint? I guess they can build massive solar arrays in Libya and then build the world's largest long-range DC power line to Munich? (No joke: Singapore might do this with Australia.)

It seems you argue it’s a stepping stone, then you argue there’s no other way. Both of these can’t be true.

But if you ask me, the long term answer is nuclear. I know it’s controversial but many of the issues are blown out of proportion.

I would argue, that when you take a holistic view of the complete environment, including the soils and subsoils where our food largely comes from, the only long term answer you're left with is to de-civilize and go back to hand tools, local living, and animal transport for the rare times it's needed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com