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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

This makes me wonder how many deaths the widespread use of plastics in packaging has saved over the years from improvements in nutrition (reduced spoilage lowers net food costs and increases food availability) and reductions in food-borne illnesses.

The death rate from food-borne illness is pretty low now (with advances in processing, transportation, packaging, phase-change refrigeration, and surveillance of outbreaks).

We might be able to have our cake and eat it to with better/different packaging, of course.

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Similarly: how many deaths can be attributed to pollution from coal plants powering the energy-costly Haber-Bosch process? (Without which the population never could have exceeded 3 billion people.)

If it was required to enable billions more to be born, in some sense billions more deaths can eventually be attributed to it.

The actual measure here is “preventable deaths”. Yes, every birth will (so far) result in a death. But there is a big, big difference between dying at 82 because a power plant enabled your birth, and dying at 63 because the emission from the power plant caused you to die from a heart attack or cancer. That 19 years would certainly matter to you and your family! And that’s before we consider what other ill effects you might have suffered because of those emissions.

You're not measuring "preventable deaths". All deaths are preventable deaths. It's just that it's not worth preventing many deaths.

You're talking about life years. (The standard measure is actually QALYs, quality-adjusted life years.)

I'd rather be born and die than never exist at all.

100%; that’s exactly my point (though I admit I sent readers off in the wrong direction on the surface).

Billions lived at all and tens of millions died an early death? That’s a pretty great trade if your only choice is to take or pass on that as a sole, binary option.

> I'd rather be born and die than never exist at all.

In the limit there is no difference.

I'm not sure that's a logically coherent statement.

Tho either could have happened, only one of those things could be experienced.

About 100,000 per year, actually.

Between 25 and 33 deaths per TWh generated [1]. It's about 40% of the world's generation capacity. It totals right around 45,000TWh/yr (3890MToe). [2] So that works out to approximately 1.125-1.4 million people per year dying from coal power. I've seen other reports point to around 800K.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_consum...

At a statistical value of $9M per life (the value used by the NRC when evaluating nuclear safety improvements), 30 deaths per TWh would add $0.27/kWh.

To remind people, Haber-Bosch process produces fixed nitrogen in the form of ammonia from hydrogen. In the US, almost all hydrogen is produced from natural gas (not coal), although other fuels are more common in places like China.

We used to use hydroelectric power to make hydrogen (using electrolysis) for Haber-Bosch, but gas reforming of methane ended up being much cheaper in the 1950s once that process became invented and widespread.

That's a good point!

It seems very hard to weigh the cost/benefits of something like this especially when the evidence for the possible health costs are so difficult to collect. Think of all of the possible confounding factors that could result in these health outcomes, the fact that not all plastics are the same (phthalates are not the only compound of concern), and the fact that most probable adverse health outcomes are not acute (we have pretty strong evidence plastic packaging isn't acutely toxic), but would take a long time to develop which further increases the difficulty of forming any type of causal relationship between plastics exposure and health outcomes.

I wonder to what extend plastic packaging and the ubiquity of low quality food often found inside is contributing to obesity related illness.

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