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The performative stuff has to stop. On the one vacation I am doing since this pandemic began, I saw a place in Northern Italy give out paper straws enclosed in plastic wrapping. You have to be kidding me. It’s missing the point and greenwashing at its finest (unrelated to climate).

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?

It's important to remember that plastic waste is virtually unrelated to climate change. They both might be "green" issues, but plastic straws in our oceans aren't going to have any significant effect on warming the planet. They'll just end up causing ecological changes/damage.

Malicious actors try to conflate the two. Carbon gas emissions pose an existential threat to the future of human society; plastic straws do not.

You don't have to be a malicious actors. The same folks are pushing both issues and will not talk proactively / positively about anything?

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)

> You don't have to be a malicious actors.

But with your nitpicking maybe you are?

In fact, the plastic replacements often cause more emissions. Because of production or because more trucks are needed for the same products with thicker packaging. Supermarket chain in my country changed their packaging, the same amount now needs 2 trucks instead of one. Also glass bottles or cardboard are heavier so more fuel consumption.

Reusable "bamboo" cups are a fun example. I'm not sure if they are considered biodegradable anymore and then the fact that some countries in Europe had them remove from market... Due potentially leaching melamine and formaldehyde...

So I take it will take awhile for us to get these things right...

The solution would be to keep using plastic and set up garbage collection infrastructure in the countries who spill all the garbage in the ocean.

Are you sure it was a plastic wrapper and not e.g. cellophane?

Things I learned from Wikipedia as a result of reading your comment:

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?

I don't see it as political at all. It is simply NIMBYism. Everyone wants trash pick-up but not a landfill near them. They want sewer that always flushes but no water treatment near them. They don't want new malls because of traffic. They don't want new apartments because they are afraid of who may move in and their property values.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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've heard this exact same thing said for 20 years. I expect I'll be hearing it for another 20 at least.

You will be continuing to hear about wind and solar for the next 20 years for good reason: they're finally taking off.

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.

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=47936

Yes I'm sure I will, because that sounds exactly like what was being repeated 20 years ago. And I will keep hearing about it for a long long time while many new gas and even coal plants get built with their 50 year lifespans.

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.

Solar prices have been decreasing at a staggering pace. 20 years ago, solar was certainly infeasible. That's not the case today and certainly won't be in 20 years.

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).

> Solar prices have been decreasing at a staggering pace. 20 years ago, solar was certainly infeasible. That's not the case today and certainly won't be in 20 years.

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.

I don't buy that you heard that 20 years ago. I was around and interested in this stuff 20 years ago. The main argument was that solar was too expensive.

Also, there's this [1].

[1] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2021/08/05/youve-got-30-billion-...

It doesn't matter what you "buy" or not, doesn't change the fact that in 2000, there were certainly "environmentalists" and solar snakeoil salesmen claiming that nuclear didn't make sense because of solar.

> 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.

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.

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.

Trash from encampments is negligible when you realize how many plastics are just dumped into the ocean

Not where I live. The trash from encampments is pulled up and down the shoreline (tons of bird and other life) with every tide. It's noticeable.

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).

Apparently the type of plastic is quite relevant; but whether straws are worse than air-bags for shipping... who knows.

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.

If you consider how much refuse you generate per day per household member - and then consider that an encampment has next to no sanitization infrastructure, It becomes obvious that the encampment will generate orders of magnitude more waste in the ocean per capita vs. ordinary households.

I wouldn't be surprised if the litter ratio was 10,000:1 or more.

What?

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.

> It seems to be the left telling other people how to live. Heaven forbid folks live in smaller houses in the US

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.

According to a friend that works with utility companies to plan out future capacity, nuclear's problem is the high upfront cost. Companies don't want to invest in building one for this reason alone. Building a new one puts a lot of capital at risk.

Nuclear plants in America are old enough that many need to be upgraded. Turns out upgrading is so expensive that many choose to close instead. Just this week two in Illinois closed when the state refused to subsidize the upgrade.

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.