I always thought that if our universe is actually a simulation, it's one of countless simulations trying to determine a solution to the Tragedy of the Commons.
I suspect it's one of the hardest problems to solve in any universe.
I suspect it's one of the hardest problems to solve in any universe.
I went to Las Vegas about a year ago on a work trip and realized that the hotel I stayed at uses more plastic bottles in an hour than I would use in my lifetime with no thought to conserving them.
All this to say that tragedy of the commons is an extremely hard problem to solve, even when you know about it and care.
I constantly repeat to myself “no single drop of rain thinks it’s responsible for the flood” and try not to think of that Vegas hotel.
There is literally nothing I could possibly do that could come even close to making up for that...
I can say from personal experience this is not true! You can help fix other people's mistakes! I was an energy engineer for a while.
You'd be amazed just how much low-lying fruit there is in terms of energy waste. I was also GOOD at this job. Instead of doing the brainless measures, I would really dig and do a lot of modeling and data mining and stuff to figure out truly optimal solutions. My fee + cost of measures were easily covered within 1-year of savings, and yet it was an incredibly difficult sell to get people to want to spend the money.
But... I had one client, for whom I had to sign an NDA, that single-handedly blew all the others out of the water. They had been emitting LARGE (like, think ~1 ton/month) quantities of sulfur hexafluoride for years. Sulfur hexafluoride, if you don't know is 23,500 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. This had been going on for YEARS.
Our three-man team came in and was able to find all the leaks with some really nice thermal cameras so they could replace the failed seals and parts.
Or, if you still work in the industry and can find a way to make the shipping routes more efficient, or prevent future mistakes like that, you could make it into the green and achieve CO2 karmic heaven!
Obviously this advice is not good advice for anyone who wants to have children :)
That’s not to say that we should encourage them specifically to have children either; just that children represent potential in a way that the number of bunker-fuel cargo ships does not.
There is no practical way we can achieve the goal of survival for all through reduction of CO2 emissions. It's a farce because we'll never get all parties to agree.
The only path forward is to hope we have some very clever science and engineering that can help us survive this disaster.
It's a farce because it's already too late for emissions reductions to cut it. We need to pull carbon out of the atmosphere or, as you say, engineer other solutions.
But a robust solution is not going to be limited to the physical/material domain. Societies are malleable and so are people. We need to design ourselves and our activities into a vibrant planetary ecology, not throw up our hands and try to patch around historically contingent circumstances
As Octavia Butler put it, God is change, and change is not to be reacted to, but to be shaped
Could we come back from it? Hard to say.
If anything, we will not have enought humans around with our birth rate.
Technology is getting cleaner and cleaner each year: ev, solar panels, etc.
Look into Tony Seba for the energy revolution And joan Lomberg about what are our most important problems and solutions
I think we should put far less energy on climate change and more on our human problems: war, famine, poverty, corruption, etc.
There are ways to have children without creating your own.
Plus someone in your position doing a great job could probably save a ton of carbon from hitting the atmosphere.
If you make fewer mistakes than the person who replaced you if you quit, you will make up for your mistake eventually.
You should have no guilt over this (although efficiency is always to be aimed for). And carbon is probably the least objectionable byproduct of burning the bunker oil that fuels ships - you can't make anything that heavy burn cleanly without insane combustion temperatures.
Why not carry a reusable water bottle? I have a great double-wall steel bottle (Hydro Flask), which is much better than a plastic bottle because it keeps water cold all day long and is basically indestructible.
In most places I travel to it's not difficult to find sources of clean, cold water to refill it. Worst case, I will buy a large bottle of water to refill it from, which at least is cheaper and generates less waste than using multiple small plastic bottles throughout the day.
They actually dent quite easily. I have a 40oz Hydro Flask with a couple dents from an incident with a spider a couple years ago. I had my bottle on the counter top while I was eating and suddenly a spider was on it. In an attempt to kill the spider, I knocked over the bottle on to the wooden floor (trying to squish it). It dented the bottle near the top and on the bottom. I looked up some videos and it's definitely not just me. Found one where it looked like a whole family dented theirs and they used a trick with dry ice and a hair dryer to fix them. I don't know if it gets harder to fix the longer you wait. Mine still works okay, so I haven't done anything about it.
I'm pretty sure the outside is aluminum, fyi, unless they make multiple types. The inside part is probably steel.
I love my Hydro Flask and have drank more water because of it. My only complaint is that the straw lid gets a lot of crap building up in the small gaps and it seems impossible to adequately clean. Maybe an ultrasonic cleaner could do it.
I can't vouch for its durability when used to beat a spider to death because I'm not afraid of tiny harmless animals, but in every other respect I have nothing but praise.
The original standard Hydro Flask is, except the lid, entirely Type 304 stainless steel (aka: 18/8 steel), powder coated on the outside.
Or just get a reusable plastic one, perfect can be an enemy of good.
Individual use of plastic is not relevant, as long as it goes to landfil and not ends up in the ocean througg recycling fraud. In UK most plastic ends up sent to poland, where it's burnt or sent onwards to Turkey where it becomes untraceable. I stopped recycling plastic because the system cannot be trusted - at least if it stays in UK you know it wont be hurting anyone.
Half of plastic waste in the ocean waste is discarded fishing nets.
Aluminum is not an amazing food contact surface — it’s quite reactive. I would not use an uncoated aluminum bottle for anything other than plain water.
The aluminium bottle I have is likely coated, I wouldn't know - i do use it just for water, and it seems fine.
The aluminium bottle I have is likely coated, I wouldn't know - i do use it just for water, and it seems fine.
[1] https://www.brikksen.com/home/page/blog?p=the-different-grad...
(Of course, we should just reuse glass containers, like we did when I was a kid - a small deposit is a big motivator for kids to collect bottles for reuse!)
[1] https://www.zojirushi.com.hk/enproductsview.php?oid=6&tid=17...
(One big problem with PTFE is that it starts to slowly decompose at a lower temperature than its melting point. This makes it messy to work with. As I understand it, the decomposition products are gasses, so this is a problem at the factory and for the environment, but I don’t think its a problem for end users.)
Life's too short to be worried about funny looks.
There will always be detractors saying we should just make people want to make the right choice, but all it takes is one person in a company to make a decision that outweighs the collective efforts of millions.
As for avoiding bags I have two wicker baskets like this https://www.amazon.de/-/en/gp/product/B009BMXLLI/ which means I can avoid shopping bags and they are actually quite convenient for carrying.
Tap water is luckily very drinkable in Germany (rumor has it that Coca-Cola company bottles it and sells it under their 'Bonaqua' brand).
However, there is so much out of our control with plastics that require regulation. Just think of the packaging.
Though where I live, even table water would be better than unfiltered tap water. Not because of health concerns (I actually had my tap water lab tested as the building is from the 60s), but because of limescale in the kettle and disgust on my tastebuds ;)
After the world seems to be in agreement that CocaCola and most lemonades are best served carbonated. But for water there's this weird schizm over carbonation.
It's interesting because the correct answer is that each country/region has different expectations from bottled water, mineral water.
But anyway, I think anywhere in London, so long as you run it through a filter (ie: Brita filter) and chill it, it tastes more or less as good as any bottled water.
Get a stainless steel container and hydrate for a lifetime.
Whole being thirsty isn’t optimal the actual risk of something serious happening is negligible. Especially since I monitor my urine color and other signs. It’s more convenience and the habit of convenience we’re all so used to these days.
I’m not so sure about that. Some people are more susceptible to it than others. There’s also some weird trait that makes some people drink less water than others. Both my father and myself seem to share this trait. We have to force ourselves to drink water. For whatever reason, I could go an entire day without drinking water. Not sure why it is, but it causes problems. I was on vacation with my father and he collapsed in literally the middle of nowhere because of dehydration. It was pretty scary and he almost didn’t survive.
This strikes me as something constantly asserted but never proven. It should be pretty trivial to find out if this is the case, medically, so there should be data. I went ahead and searched around and although I see a lot of headlines about it, there is a lack of definitive corroboration. I found these sources:
"According to the lay press, 75% of Americans are chronically dehydrated. While this is not supported by medical literature, dehydration is common in elderly patients."[0]
" In fact, scientific studies suggest that you already get enough liquid from what you're drinking and eating on a daily basis. We are not all walking around in a state of dehydration."[1]
"The notion that there is widespread dehydration has no basis in medical fact"[1]
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK555956/ [1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/water-works-2/
My mother in law was hospitalized twice for dehydration. She is mindful of it and still some days she doesn’t drink enough. Drinking is hard for her as other commenters mention here too. After that I just started drinking an extra liter of tea by just carrying the bottle around. Even the extra peeing stopped after a few weeks.
It's the insane amount waste and environmental pollution that single-use plastic generates that is the problem.
Best choice is to insist on glass packaging wherever you can. It's inert and infinitely recyclable.
Forget shorter showers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2TbrtCGbhQ
The thing is, the motivation for given topic is always fair and just, and so are the goals, so its normal to want to do more and more. But at one point they move so far from general population they are seen as extremists, and whatever good their push is trying to achieve is completely blocked by this extreme approach and negative emotions it sparks.
Get engaged in politics, create groups, figure out who has real deciding power and apply soft pressure there... this is how good changes are done in timely manner. Other way is to wait till SHTF and there is reaction, but damage is already done like in this topic. Otherwise society just heads to division and conflict on many levels, and as for example covid showed us if you push big part of population hard/long enough they will eventually move to some outright non-smart positions that will be then very hard to abandon.
The advantage to ‘save the whales’ over save every endangered species is it’s much easier to gain traction and you can pick the easiest targets.
80% of the bang can be gotten for 20% of the buck.
I'm reasonably sure Coca Cola and co should be the biggest targets in the anti-plastic campaign.
Many of them don't even care about reducing resource consumption, they're goals are much more philosophical.
We'd wind up with wood stoves instead of solar panels. Resources consumption would go down, maybe, but it might just be because a lot of people would die.
Other than than that, obviously I'm all for improving society and all.
People treat plastic bags as single use, but you can reuse them for years. I’m not saying you should seek them out, but don’t just throw them away after one use when you find yourself with some.
It takes real amounts of thought to reduce your footprint; the visible/obvious solution often isn't the right one.
The thing is, the majority of voters in most societies don't want those regulations.
Assuming we didn't riot ourselves to rubble, other nations will quickly outstrip us. Eventually we'd be a vassal state of another superpower. Either because they'd buy our politicians, use crises of supply shortages to force us into free trade deals which axe our externality taxes, or via outright force.
Other nations would do to us what the USA did to Latin America when those nations wanted to throttle their development for ecological reasons in the 60's and 70's.
Sustainably, we probably wouldn't even be able to keep and train a competitive military -- 6% of our nations carbon emissions are from our military, accounting for 52% of federal carbon footprint, and our military emits more GHG than 140 countries (individually/separately).
Perfect is the enemy of good.
The US could focus on lower cost - high impact externalities taxing.
It could persuade, cajole, bully its partners and allies to agree to a treaty doing the same. It did it for FATCA, for sure it can do it for climate change and general environmental destruction.
Once you have such an international treaty in place, most of the rest of the world would follow. US partners and allies are probably 70% of the world economy, and the countries with the most slack, economically, that can best afford this.
Yeah, I said governments, plural.
It makes absolutely no difference if i minimise my plastic or diligently sort them for recycling because a Vegas hotel will make all my efforts for naught.
Climate change is already here and there is nothing the individual can do about it. The optimum play now is to accept that the group is useless and make individual steps to mitigate the effects on you personally.
Sorry, never nice doing a pre-7am nihilism dump.
Most of the cartons are either lined with plastic, or they are tetra packs. Both of these options (especially tetra packs) are much more difficult to recycle and worse for the environment than simple PET bottles.
[1] https://hydrapak.com/collections/water-bottles/products/stas... [2] https://www.katadyngroup.com/us/en/8019641-EZ-Clean-Membrane...
There are entire continents that essentially dump most of their (plastic) trash straight into rivers (and thus oceans). Looking at you (South East) Asia...
In UK recyclers get paid by the government a small amount per ton recycled. It is , however, not enough to trully recycle anything. So they take out a few valuable plastics, and pay randpm company in poor country to tale this plastic, and to sign paperwork saying that it's going to a recycling facility. In reality it will simply be dumped, and money will be pocketed.
Then when someone complains, they pull the documents thst were signed by some random fall guy, make a surprised face, and claim they thought the plastic would be recycled.
Recycling plastic is very hard as a single product is often a combinaison of different kind of 'plastics', which happen to be a generic name for different materials, and which impose different kind of treatment for each of them. Colored plastics add up to the issue as you can't recycle different colored plastic of the same kind together...
For example, a single coca-cola bottle is typically made of 3 kind of plastics : the bottle itself (transparent), the cap(red with white or black scripting), and the wrapping around of the bottle (made of 2 or 3 different colors).
And that's nothing compared to toothpaste tubes, which was taken as an example in a recent 'Der Spiegel' issue to illustrate the ecologic nightmare plastics represent. And let's not forget ketchup plastic bottles, which is also some kind of marvel of assembled plastic enginering.
Plastic recycling is currently more a matter of vertue signaling than a reality as only 1 to 5 percent of plastic (I don't know the exact numbers) is curently recycled worldwide.
In western world (or at least in europe), most of them are incinerated in electricity thermal generators or buried in waste dumps.
Until recently, american waste (plastics) were send to China to be buried or burned, until the chinese government made it illegal.
The real indicator should be some kind of a 'plastic consumption index' by countries and/or companies and/or household, used to monitor the amount we produce it, use it and get rid of the waste.
Single use plastic is way better than recycled plastic at slowing global warming.
China banned the import of waste in 2018. But other countries do still import it.
Not where I live (northeastern USA), where the vast majority of discarded plastic ends up in landfills. Virtually none gets "washed (or dumped) into the ocean"; the minor exception is trash dropped by thoughtless people.
In many parts of the world, this is completely normal, unfortunately, not a "minor exception". Even here the UK, canals and rivers are often full of floating plastic bottles, bags, and other litter. I know because I've volunteered to clean it up: the quantities we pull out is insane. And a few weeks later, it's all back again. Frustrating and sad.
I really think that people aren’t that fragile and the bottled water industry has done an excellent job of making people think they need to constantly hydrate in order to not have a heat stroke.
Imo it’s enough to just pay attention to yourself and how you feel.
It becomes a sickness at some point. Check out Scott Adam’s law of slow moving disasters if you want some optimism.
It’s more that it just doesn’t seem worth it. We use a bag for a few minutes and it’s in our environment for 1000 years. It seems like such a bad trade to me.
We could start by looking at how people managed systems sustainably including the original commons.
https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false...
In a single masterstroke they gained assets and labour.
Your article says that the tragedy of the commons does not have to happen, but we don't really have the numbers. Those examples could be cherry picking, and everyone's personal experience kind of says that the opposite is more common (commons mismanagement). That's why the original article was so influential: it gave a name to something we've always seen.
It's great that we can assume tragedy of the commons is not as immutable as some law of physics, but it still looks like a powerful social force unless proven otherwise.
And I imagine, like any social study, it's going to be very hard to get actual numbers for the tragedy of the commons versus comedy of the commons scenarios.
If post-brexit overfishing numbers increase, what evidence is there that the increase is due to individual greed and not a government policy?
Tragedy of the commons is now defined in game theory and is a naturally occurring phenomenon when people have limited resources and the drive to survive.
Global regulation around CFCs made the ozone hole shrink
The don't mess with texas anti littering campaign and similar outreach programs worldwide reduced littering
In general taxing negative externalities seems to have an effect
But life itself is incredible, we have non-oxygen using lifeforms (inefficient, the earliest lifeforms), sulphur-eating lifeforms. Life can use up almost anything, <<if it has to>>.
If it doesn't, it just leaves it alone.
Is it really that hard or are we making it hard?
Calculate the hidden cost. Spend half of the cost on a marketing campaign to sway public opinion against a tax. Profit!
We have managed judicial systems. We can manage this too.
[1] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/14...
Figuring out what the alternative should look like is a big challenge but let's not pretend that that is the main issue here.
No, it's not at all. It's a problem that humans encountered for millennia and solved successfully again and again.
That's what organized society is for.
the term itself was a fake argument against the commons, in favour of privatization of commons. every single word of the argument today is known to have been a falacy.
so the answer to the tragedy of the commons is to not believe in it. property is the real issue. but even thinking that way will offend your sensibilities.
Totalitarian regimes might succeed, though.
We might get to "the selfish data"? Genes being a special case.
In a non capitalistic, small enough community it isn't a worry.
The real problem I think is how to scale that thinking to a world population.
The commons work well enough, and are managed collectively.
Want to read the high-brow argument? Try: https://anarchistfaq.org/afaq/sectionI.html#seci6
Want the lived-experience argument? I live in Palestine. Palestinian villages managed their lands collectively for ages and ages, up until the 20th century. This broke down not because anybody was misusing the commons, or fencing, or whatever - it broke down because the damn Ottomans started a land registry and you got a few people making themselves official owners of huge swaths of land they should not have had any claim to. So the only tragedy was external elements disrupting the commons by force.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-tragedy-of-t...
History offers many examples of human communities successfully managing their common resources, over generations.
Terrible people can be absolutely correct. In this case, the tragedy of the commons both exists and affects many things (like international fishing).
It is true that history shows examples of communities managing their common resources over generations. This need not be the default; when it isn't you get the tragedy of the commons. That is why its important to both understand it and to build community norms that encourage respect for common resources.
Would I be correct in my read of your take that you don't believe the tragedy of the commons exists? If it does, do the original author's other beliefs matter when discussing it?
The author of this article agrees with you, and says so; I was more interested in the latter half of the article, where he explains why "the facts are not on Hardin's side".
> Would I be correct in my read of your take that you don't believe the tragedy of the commons exists?
The privatization of the commons seems to me the much greater tragedy, leading to large-scale exploitation and irresponsible environmental degradation. From what I see, distributed networks of human-scale communities tend to manage shared resources in a sustainable way; to fuck things up on a grand scale, you need centralized power and a managerial distance from consequences.
It looks like you're agreeing that counterexamples to "tradgedy of the commons" being a default state exist in history yet your conclusion is "tragedy of the commons is the default if a better option isn't employed".
Why can't it be true(based off your same evidence) that tragedy of the commons is an unnatural state, and respect for common resources is the default?
Still, I'm grateful for your linking to this excellent critique of the source article which, among other things, provides a handy label for an ethically and morally dubious extrapolation the critique labels "lifeboat ethics" which I often seen deployed by the wealthy against the impoverished.
> an idea [Hardin] called “lifeboat ethics” [0]: since global resources are finite, Hardin believed the rich should throw poor people overboard to keep their boat above water. [1]
[0] https://rintintin.colorado.edu/~vancecd/phil1100/Hardin.pdf (link in OP)
[1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-tragedy-of-t... (OP)