We've got a ban on plastic straws (ie, you can't use one then throw it in the trash in the resteraunt) to help save nature. But you go outside and the amount of trash just blowing into the water from various encampments near the water is just nuts.
Their are claims of concerns about carbon emissions, but absolute opposition to any work around nuclear. If carbon emissions was the or a very important issue, you'd be going full out on lots of ideas.
I followed the attempted development of a solar install closely in a rich / white area (hard left otherwise). It was fought tooth and nail. the erosion underneath, the shading of a creek, this and that. Really - they didn't want to look at it. Full stop.
So yes, even my early passion for some things have moderated a bit. It seems to be the left telling other people how to live. Heaven forbid folks live in smaller houses in the US, instead we are on china for their emissions (likely half per capita of US?)
I'd love to see more problem solving from the left, rather than the sort of in your face bans on things. Can't we tax plastic straws 1 cent per straw or do a carbon tax or something that's a bit less nanny state style or so random and arbitrary?
Tons of plastic in ocean for sure, but less noticeable unless you are in asia where the rivers and coastal areas are crushed with trash at times.
It's just weird our focus is on a plastic straw being disposed of in a restaurant. I mean, the amount of plastic bags in the shipping boxes I see on my street each trash day - mindboggling (airbags amazon and others use).
But perhaps more relevantly, however unsightly this whole plastic soup is, I kind of doubt the impact is anywhere near that of climate change, and I'm concerned these kind of issues serve as a kind of feel-good distraction.
Maybe that's too pessimistic; maybe the world can deal with plastic soup and climate change and forever chemicals and animal welfare and whatever at once. I'm just not very confident of that.
I wouldn't be surprised if the litter ratio was 10,000:1 or more.
People in houses are probably using more plastic than people who don't have money for a house. They have more money to spend, and a large % will go to plastic, on average.
You’ll meet plenty on the left, especially scientists, who are in favor of nuclear. Where I live (Switzerland[0]), the biggest NIMBY against nuclear are the provincial nationalists who are going nuts about installation of a subterranean disposal site in their area (proposed because it is the most suitable site due to geological properties). My turning point with nuclear was about 15 years ago when learning about thorium. Very eye-opening.
[0] - To the grandparent comment, natural born American who spent most of the adult life and all of childhood in the States. Emigrated a decade ago and still keep close tabs. This post is giving me serious flashbacks to the 1992, when Bush called Gore “Ozone Man”. Was that a genesis of the contrarian political differentiation?
Cellophane is not plastic.
Cellophane is biodegradable.
Rayon is the same substance as cellophane, but in a different shape.
Cellophane and Rayon are often made using the "viscose process", which requires the use of carbon disulfide, which is toxic, and the process has toxic byproducts.
I wasn't able to figure out if this process has more or less toxic byproducts than processes for making plastic films.
I wasn't able to figure out if this process is more carbon-intensive than processes for making plastic films. Harvesting plant matter, pumping water around, etc. sounds energy-intensive. Is it better or worse than digging carbon sludge up out of the ground?
Malicious actors try to conflate the two. Carbon gas emissions pose an existential threat to the future of human society; plastic straws do not.
So I take it will take awhile for us to get these things right...
Carbon capture? Hell no!
Micro nuclear? Hell no!
Ban straws? Yes!!
We did the whole glass bottle use thing for milk etc etc - but at some point you realize some of these high profile enviro actions are basic hot air - we'd be better off with getting rid of them entirely and doing things like
1) Carbon tax on all sources of carbon emissions that then pays for ANY solution (carbon capture, solar + battery, mini-nuclear) that folks want to try.
2)
But with your nitpicking maybe you are?
It's a lot easier to find fault in a point-source danger in your back yard (even if the actual risk is low) than to be afraid of a much more diffuse danger will likely kill more people, but probably not you.
While I agree nuclear is the right way to go... it's frankly too late to put all our eggs in that basket. It takes over a decade just to turn on a new plant in the US due to all the regulations. We can work to improve that situation, but at the end of the day, solar and wind can be deployed much faster and at a lower cost.
> I'd love to see more problem solving from the left, rather than the sort of in your face bans on things.
I'd humbly submit you aren't listening the left arguments if you think they aren't putting out solutions.
Most people I know on the left deride paper straws just as much as you do.
The serious solutions that have been proposed are things like carbon taxes, subsidies for renewable installation and electric vehicles, ending subsidies on the fossil fuel industry. Regulations decreasing allowable fuel consumption from vehicles.
These are serious solutions that would have major positive impacts.
And, as you can imagine, they've all been met with total opposition from the Republicans. Ranging anywhere from outright denying that climate change is real to lying about the impacts of renewable tech or fear mongering over things like "How can we recycle every part of the solar panel! Guess we better just burn oil instead".
Nuclear is a fine solution, it isn't the only solution and it is absolutely more of a long term solution until regulations around new plants ease up.
In the mean time, the best actions we can take today are making it more expensive to release greenhouse gasses in the first place through taxation and subsidizing greenhouse gas free power generation.
I've heard this exact same thing said for 20 years. I expect I'll be hearing it for another 20 at least.
Wind production in the US has grown from about 2 million megawatt-hours / month in 2005 to 33 million megawatt-hours / month today.
Solar production in the US has grown from 1.5 million megawatt-hours / month in 2014 to 17 million megawatt-hours today.
Building new wind and solar is now cost-competitive with continuing to run existing coal power plants.
With a friendly federal government (if our government actually does anything), I expect wind and solar to grow immensely in the next 10 years. Wind especially looks strong right now.
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/
The EIA expects 10% growth in wind and solar this summer compared to a year ago.
Funny thing about this movement. It's caused more greenhouse gas emissions than just about anything. Anti-nuclear "environmentalists" are just about the best friends the fossil fuel industry has ever had. You'd almost think the whole thing was orchestrated by them, that's how great the partnership has been for them.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/sunshot-2030
> Anti-nuclear "environmentalists" are just about the best friends the fossil fuel industry has ever had.
Agreed, and that was mostly by design of the fossil fuel industry. Initial anti-nuclear rhetoric came from them.
That said, the numbers are different today than they were 20 years ago. Solar and wind cost less and has less regulatory barriers to jump over to get deployed than nuclear. That will be true right up until land becomes a premium (which it isn't).
20 years ago, solar and wind were FAR more expensive than nuclear. Now, they are nearly the cheapest form of power generation (I think existing hydro still holds that crown).
Yes, that's exactly what I heard 20 years ago too. One day it could even be right. It's a flimsy argument to discount nuclear energy with though, a proven reliable cheap low-carbon energy source (when the regulatory environment has not been corrupted by the fossil fuel industry and"environmental" lobbyists) that has been ready for 50 years. See: France.
Also, there's this [1].
[1] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/08/05/youve-got-30-billion-...
> Also, there's this [1].
There's lots of things. France GHG emissions per capita: 6800kg/yr, Germany: 8520kg/yr. France electricity cost: 0.22c kw/h, Germany: 0.36c kw/h.
The only reason straws caught on is because no one cared. We are all absolutely willing to give up straws since they don't require any real change in our behavior. Most stores offer reusable bags but people (and lobbyists) would fight back if disposable bags were outlawed. We could charge for them but people would rather pay an extra $0.50 at the grocery store than change behavior. We are addicted to convenience. People hate change, more than the pieces of change, more than anything else. There is a lot of awful in this world driven specifically by people's fear of change.
This doesn't seem like an exclusively left-wing ideology - anti-housing sentiment is strong across the board across US politics. Try building an apartment building in a conservative part of town and you'll get much of the same bad faith opposition as anywhere else (and more often than not, apocalyptic caterwauling).
NIMBYism is sadly a scourge that knows few political boundaries.
It's a pretty bad look, because people see these huge subsidies and balk, thinking that nuclear is a continually expensive form of energy, even though these are one time costs.
George H.W. Bush ("Bush 41") actually had a decent track record on the environment and climate change:
* https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/george-h-w-bush-underst...
The craziness with the GOP started more recently (post-1990s).
There is a difference between campaign rhetoric and policy, to be sure, but the country lost clarity of focus rapidly as a nation after the Gulf War and began to let trivial things divide it. (I remember the 1990s culture wars, and I’d like to forget.) Bush senior may have been one of the last decent human Republicans outside of his periodic populist gestures. I’d say Nixon (modulo corruption) or Ford (ineptitude) or Eisenhower was probably the last. I’ll never forgive the Bush son for pissing away my generations’ future and Rove’s mobilization of the demos into this gerrymandered hellscape.
A lot of blame goes to Bush 43 ("Dubya") for a lot of things, but I generally view him as a patsy for those around him that actually made the decisions and pushed them through.
IIRC, you can date that phase to 1994 and Newt Gingrich.
Though that was maybe more like phase II, with phase I starting in ~1980 with Reagan.
The neoliberal movement gained a major presence in the Republican Party at the beginning of that span, and by the early 90s it had also captured the Democrats.
The Fairness Doctrine fell, and its absence was quickly exploited. The ball took a while to get rolling, but was moving fast by the early 90s.
Economic libertarianism saw some important activity near the beginning of that span, and its very confident anti-government and laissez-faire positions and language became very influential through the 90s, and it continues to grow.
The fusion of the GOP and evangelical Christianity became (very deliberately) much more solid in the late 70s and the 80s.
Basically the Republicans began in a bunch of ways to shift toward their 2rd major re-organization and re-orientation since WWII in a short span of years around 1980, with the 90s being when they'd pretty much finished that shift. They may be working on a 3rd one now, which we may end up backdating to the Tea Party movement (that time being this incarnation's "~1980" turning point). We'll see, depends how the next 5-10 years goes, may amount to nothing.
As a side-effect (or bonus, to those behind it) the Democrats ended up having their 2nd major change in the same period, too (to solidly pro-neoliberal). AFAI can tell they're not starting their next serious shift, yet.
That's true, but I'd quibble with the "it continues to grow" part. IMHO, it's peaked. It's still strong, but Trump and other populists dealt it a blow; and it's arguably now sclerotic "old thing" instead of the buzzy "new thing."
Incidentally, these shifts are at the level of party leadership and policy. Nearly every Republican I've actually known since at least the 90s has had positions that match Trump's more than they match the average R politician, even as the party itself ignored, downplayed, or gone directly against many of those positions—I think that's exactly why Trump took those positions and ignored the orthodox Republican platform where it didn't match, in fact, and at times you could even see him apparently workshopping positions live, it really was fascinating—so I'd say the Republican electorate has been Trumpist for quite a while. Actually, some Trumpist positions, including anti-neoliberalism, anti-interventionism, and free trade skepticism, are very popular on the left too, but, as with pre-Trump Republicans, not well-represented among their politicians—I think there's an opportunity there, should someone find the right angle to attack it.
Yeah, my understanding is that the Republican politicians basically governed for the capital class but used popular conservative social positions to keep enough support to make that work.
> Actually, some Trumpist positions, including anti-neoliberalism, anti-interventionism, and free trade skepticism, are very popular on the left too, but, as with pre-Trump Republicans, not well-represented among their politicians—I think there's an opportunity there, should someone find the right angle to attack it.
Yeah, I hope so. Trump is the kind of person the damages everything he touches. Usually that was bad, but in some significant areas the things he damaged really deserved that treatment (particularly the free trade dogma).
Fairly well document in Kurt Anderson's recent book:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_Geniuses:_The_Unmaking_of...
IIRC, the Democrats controlled Congress throughout the 1980s, so let's not assign things completely to a single person/administration.
Nick Bryant’s When America Stopped Being Great (BBC reporter who spent formative years in USA, beyond being on assignment there).
George Packer’s Last Best Hope (Packer has a bunch of other fantastic material)
The efforts to repeal the ACA show this in its most blatant form. The emotional heft of the argument laid entirely on the basis of one word: "Obamacare". It's no wonder that they failed to pass an alternative despite complaining about the ACA for the 10 years prior.
But going back to the '90s, it didn't help that '96 saw the passage of the Telecommunications Act. This led to rapid consolidation of local radio and TV news stations under one large corporate umbrella (Clear Channel). Independent stations can provide a variety of viewpoints. If they're all owned by the same parent, they start providing the parents' viewpoint.
The incentives are wrong, and I don't see them getting better any time soon.
What if they're right? Should we all go down with the ship just to maintain some sort of dogmatic pride in our preferred economic system?
In contrast, insect populations are dropping like a stone.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_population...
We’re going to have serious problems within the next 5-10 years if that continues. We also have declining water availability and increasing water usage in the western US. And we have a potentially massive issue with solar weather (which can theoretically wipe out all electronics).
No it's not.
> Human-caused climate change is occurring too rapidly for species to be able to adapt. Plants and animals are currently dying off at a rate that is 100 to 1000 times faster than the average rate of extinction over geological timescales. Because of this, there is mounting evidence that we are heading towards a mass extinction event.
https://skepticalscience.com/Can-animals-and-plants-adapt-to...
Adapt? Yes. Easily adapt? Not in the slightest.
Higher average temperatures are leading to changes in rainfall patterns. Some regions see more torrential rain while others see aridification.
Increased rainfall means regions that previously saw floods once a century will see them once a decade. Similarly regions facing aridification will see more and longer heat waves and less water availability.
While those situations are survivable they're destructive and thus expensive. Even if no one died during such events they will still cause significant economic impact. People can't just pack up and migrate en mass to avoid flood zones or arid regions.
Changes in rainfall also affect farming. A region with good soil may need increased irrigation to deal with aridification. Irrigation has its own set of problems it introduces even if there's some ready source of water to feed into the irrigation system.
Even small increases in temperature also affect atmospheric and oceanic conveyors. Even single degree increases can change the thermal gradients enough to break them down for portions of the year.
If money was infinite and humans acted without prejudice a lot of coming environmental issues would have some technological mitigation. Neither of those things are true so conditions in some places are going to get very bad.
I'm having trouble reconciling your statement there with your first one:
> I’m frankly less concerned about climate change - in reality we don’t have enough data for super definitive answers. Further, we can and the world can fairly easily adapt. A few degrees over a hundred years is easily manageable.
So let me understand:
1. You think that insect population decline isn't related to climate change.
Okay I can buy that. Humans have built a lot of roads and vehicles emit a lot of pollutants and pollutants kill insects. So what do you propose to do to solve that? Or do you think it's a different problem? Perhaps climate change is a contributing factor.
2. You think we have declining water availability.
Indeed, we do. Many states have had more severe and more prolonged droughts that previously recorded. But, on the flip side, some states are getting inundated with more rain than ever before. It's almost as if the climate is changing. So anyway, how do you propose to solve the water availability problems?
3. Solar weather could wipe out all electronics.
Yeah that's a tough one. It sure would be unfortunate if our planet's magnetic shield stopped working one day. But on the flip side there's not much we could do about it. So why worry? There's other things to worry about like climate change and the insect apocalypse.