If we really care about conserving helium we would probably not vent it directly into the atmosphere while extracting natural gas.
Party balloons are not the problem here.
Building new refineries can take decades and is extremely expensive. The refinery and wells also must be located near radioactive reserves which decay and produce the helium.
You're absolutely right about party balloons not being an existential threat. There are two types of Helium for commercial sale: balloon-grade and Ultra High Purity Grade. Balloon grade Helium is used strictly for balloons and is not adequate to be used as a shielding gas or in any medical capacity. Ultra High Purity Grade has undergone the scrubbing process after extraction, and is safe for welding, industrial and medical applications.
So the ratio is somewhat arbitrarily (up to whatever the limit of your refining process is).
In the last few years there has been more low quality balloon grade (97.5% purity) produced by refineries in the US, increasing the availability and reducing the cost.
http://www.kornbluthheliumconsulting.com/wp-content/uploads/... https://zephyrsolutions.com/what-are-the-different-grades-of...
Water conservation is my favorite example. Yeah, let's all worry about not washing our cars when meanwhile agriculture and industry uses orders of magnitude more water and often has 0 incentives to reduce use.
> Corporations are extensions of the desires of the average person
The agriculture sector is not just wasting water for the fun of it. They're producing food for us, the consumers of food. Some of the food is more efficient with respect to water-use than other food. So you've got basically two, non-mutually-exclusive options:
1. Inform / expect individuals to make better choices (e.g., eat less beef, drink less milk, etc.), so that our aggregate demand for these products decreases, and the supply (production) follows.
2. Government intervention to, e.g., tax inefficient foods and/or subsidize efficient ones to nudge consumers in the right direction. Given our politics in the US, I don't see this as happening anytime soon. I remember the shrieks of "THEY'RE COMING FOR OUR ICE CREAM!!!" as a rallying cry against The Green New Deal a few years ago.
There is no "us" and "them" for responsibility of these things. It's everyday people, in aggregate, causing every environmental and social ill. It's complicated, but pretending it's entirely that guy's fault (damn agriculture!) is to shirk your tiny sliver of personal responsibility. You can choose to do better. Or you can wait for government to make you do better. But the end result will be much the same.
Instead of sitting back and hoping that millions will do some inconvenient action, why not instead focus on regulating the few dozens of entities actually causing the problem?
I have little confidence that significant-enough regulation is possible. We need people to do better while also advocating for the government to take actual, meaningful steps.
To address a few of your points specifically:
> "Nudging" consumers won't work either. You're never going to convince an entire population to voluntarily stop eating almonds because their production wastes water.
Yes. It can. See: cigarette use for example. Taxation works. If almonds are heavily taxed, and cost, e.g., 2x what they do today, you can reasonably expect almond consumption to drop.
> regulating the few dozens of entities actually causing the problem
Again, the "entities actually causing the problem" rounds down to "all of us". Exxon-Mobile isn't just creating CO2 emissions for fun. We're buying gasoline from them because,collectively, a bunch of us want to live in suburbs, drive big comfortable SUV's, etc. Sure, Exxon-Mobile is very interested in maintaining the status-quo, and it's a shame they have the power/cash to do so. But collective individuals as U.S. voters and consumers refuse to change their habits, and generally vote against politicians willing to do anything that'd inflict any inconvenience / change on their lives. Every time gas prices go up even slightly, people lose their minds.
> There is no "us" and "them" for responsibility of these things.
Baloney. Warren Buffet was right when he said "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." I'd have no problem supporting water restrictions locally if it wasn't just a total distraction, a "going through the motions" if you will, while the biggest users of water do nothing.
Edit: coincidentally, I just saw this article on NYT just after posting this comment: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/18/climate/california-merced... . There should be no restrictions on local users of water until agriculture is addressed.
In this case, it can’t be just city dwellers responsibility but farmers too. What individual resp in this case means that it is easier to persuade individual residents than individual farmers. Or that they don’t care about problem and dumping responsibility for it where nothing will happen.
I agree, these regulations you're pointing out aren't sufficient. But I maintain, I think the finger-pointing crap is a distraction. Nobody's going to do anything when they can point their finger at the bigger-offender, and feel vindicated in their own inaction. And since numbers are so easily fudgable, everyone feels this way (see: leading U.S. politicians blaming Africa for climate change [1], about as ridiculous a claim as is imaginable)
[1] https://blog.ucsusa.org/derrick-jackson/house-speaker-mike-j...
Corporations are extensions of the desires of the average person.
If you give people the rundown on helium, of course they will be incredulous that gas drillers are just venting it.
But if you tell them that capturing it will increase their energy bill by a few dollars a month, suddenly they will find sources that say the helium shortage is blown out of proportion and not really something to worry about.
Everyone wants to do the right thing, but only a handful are willing to sacrifice even an inch for it. Corporations are just the physical manifestations of this behavior.
Not true. The people who own and manage corporations only follow the desires of the average person when it’s convenient and profitable for them. They also put in a lot of effort to shape the desires of the average person in a way that’s profitable for them.
It is profitable because it what the consumer wants.
In general, if people really want guilt free products, and are willing to pay a premium, someone will make and sell them.
If you want to maximise profitability, you need to make the consumer want things they don't need, then sell it to them in the most unfulfilling way you can get away with at the least cost to you. This is why the game industry is so desperately moving to subscription models (following the greater trend in software) and why Amazon is full of thousands of nearly indistinguishable brands selling you the same flawed goods. The benefit of this model is that you can also better compete on price (because you don't have to compete on quality) and normalize buying the same damn thing over and over again instead of having it last half a lifetime. If you do need to seem like you compete on quality, just add flashy new features of questionable use and remove old ones - often enough you can just cycle back after a few generations.
And if you're really lucky you can frame your product as a lifestyle or fashion good. Like there's now literally a current trend of people buying a specific travel mug as a fashion and lifestyle item. Filling their storage cabinets with dozens of these things in different colors or buying useless accessories for their accessory travel cup. This isn't driven by the consumers wanting travel mugs, this is entirely driven by selling the idea to consumers that they must own this specific travel mug and must have at least one in every color that is necessary to match their outfits. If it wasn't for advertising, nobody would buy them.
As proof, I submit the fact that I don't want one and don't have a cabinet full of them.
Companies don't care what people want, as long as they want something. That could be eco-friendly free range coffee mugs, but the customers aren't interested in that
Yes. Humans are not rational economic actors. Humans are social creatures that can be manipulated through social engineering. That is my point. Holding a gun to a person's head is the most blunt and crude form of manipulation and also happens to be illegal. Modern advertising is a lot more refined than that.
What I contested was this:
> It is profitable because it what the consumer wants.
If you mean "it's profitable because it sells", then that is nearly tautological and I have no idea why you'd feel like you'd have to say that. What I assumed you meant was what people usually mean, i.e. "it is profitable because it fulfills a pre-existing need consumers wish to satisfy". My reply dissected that (common) claim at every step:
1. It is more profitable to induce a perceived need than to find a pre-existing need.
2. It is more profitable to only fulfill a need temporarily so you can sell to the same consumers multiple times.
3. It is more profitable to fulfill a need inadequately so consumers don't stop looking for a new way to fulfill the need after the purchase.
Implying that consumer choices are made freely in a vacuum without manipulation (i.e. what "not holding a gun to your head" implies) when we literally have billboards on the side of walls and advertisements blaring from every screen all the time and an entire caste of people literally referred to as "influencers" to appear authentic while trying to make you buy things is a bit disingenuous. And that doesn't even factor in the actual options available to consumers and how they are limited or their ease of how their access can drastically vary with zero relation to the underlying resource cost.
The reason we don't have eco-friendly free range coffee mugs is (aside from that not being a meaningful descriptor) that the coffee mug market is extremely saturated and coffee mugs are a solved problem because it's cheap to make long-lsting coffee mugs and the number of coffee mugs each consumer needs is very limited. The reason everyone's buying these overpriced coffee mugs is not that they need coffee mugs, it's that they have an induced desire for what that specific brand of coffee mugs represents.
> As proof, I submit the fact that I don't want one and don't have a cabinet full of them.
Either you're the one perfectly rational human who is more immune to social cues than the most autistic introvert, or you've just discovered that you're not part of the target audience of fancy fashion lifestyle coffee mugs. There is more than one consumer identity.
Heck, there are even consumer identities for people who think they're immune to advertising and influencers. Who do you think all those Che Guevara t-shirts and "nuke the whales" posters were sold to in the 1990s (before they became "ironic" fashion-wear)? The Devil Wears Prada had better media literacy than that: https://artdepartmental.com/blog/devil-wears-prada-cerulean-...
To quote Garfield: You're not immune to propaganda.
>>Yes. Humans are not rational economic actors. Humans are social creatures that can be manipulated through social engineering. That is my point. Holding a gun to a person's head is the most blunt and crude form of manipulation and also happens to be illegal. Modern advertising is a lot more refined than that.
Agreed
> It is profitable because it what the consumer wants.
>>If you mean "it's profitable because it sells", then that is nearly tautological and I have no idea why you'd feel like you'd have to say that. What I assumed you meant was what people usually mean, i.e. "it is profitable because it fulfills a pre-existing need consumers wish to satisfy".
My point is closer to what you called tautological, and my point is that it is not accurate to attribute choice, agency, or control to the consumer, while attributing full agency, control, and responsibility to seller. If you want to make a critical judgement about corporations selling crap for profit, at a minimum, you have to be open to a critical judgement about consumers wanting crap. There is a duality to it and feedback loop. If people weren't hungry to buy prestige, sex appeal, or fleeting distractions from their problems, crap wouldnt sell, and advertising for it wouldnt work.
Restated, what I object to is holding individual human desires and preference as flawless or perfect, and refusing to acknowledge the causal role it plays in what products are produced and profitable.
You can't simultaneously hold that corporations are exploiting a flaw in consumer psychology without admitting that consumers have a psychological flaw.
>The reason everyone's buying these overpriced coffee mugs is not that they need coffee mugs, it's that they have an induced desire for what that specific brand of coffee mugs represents....Either you're the one perfectly rational human who is more immune to social cues than the most autistic introvert, or you've just discovered that you're not part of the target audience of fancy fashion lifestyle coffee mugs. There is more than one consumer identity.
The fact that different target markets exist is itself evidence that differences exist in consumer desire and response to advertising. People have different levels of response to advertising, and different response to different kinds. I dont claim to be immune to it, but I do think that people can be more or less susceptible, and personally strive to align my consumption with realistic long term self interest.
I think that individuals play a role in commodification and consumerist behavior, and this can be reduced by thought, introspection, and cultural shifts. If there is a "solution", I dont think it is a world where individuals are lusting for crap that provides distraction or short-term satisfaction, and corporate restraint is only thing that keeps it from being produced.
Each of your core claims have corollaries:
>1. It is more profitable to induce a perceived need than to find a pre-existing need.
I dont know if I agree. The world has a lot of real big and expensive problems. Housing, healthcare, human development, sustainability. There is a lot of money to be made if individuals see these as a priority.
>2. It is more profitable to only fulfill a need temporarily so you can sell to the same consumers multiple times.
Customers prefer cheap short term solutions to more expensive or painful long term solutions. Long term solutions are expensive. See #1
>3. It is more profitable to fulfill a need inadequately so consumers don't stop looking for a new way to fulfill the need after the purchase.
Buy it for life products exist, and most dont buy them, for various reasons. Somehow advertising is less effective.
My point is that they often manipulate consumers into wanting what's profitable.
If something isnt wanted, it cant be profitable.
So there are layers of waste.
[0]: https://www.energy.gov/fecm/articles/natural-gas-flaring-and...
Yes, though that's just because methane is itself 2 orders of magnitude worse for the environment than carbon dioxide, not because combustion itself is actually good.
(or if you mean combustion in the abstract, not in this particular situation, keep in mind that aerobic respiration is combustion; without combustion the only life forms that would continue to exist would be anaerobic bacteria)
maybe you think that you, or people like you, are the ones who would be making the decisions about what is necessary and what is unnecessary. that is a dangerously naïve viewpoint; power and coercion have their own logic
how many of the things you did today were necessary?
even if the answer is more than zero, that's probably only because you interpreted 'necessary' as 'necessary to taylor alexander'. but you can rest assured that an authoritarian government will not interpret it that way unless you are the head of state
This has absolutely nothing to do with deciding who is allowed to breathe and to suggest otherwise is absurd.
There's interesting work being done to make some forms of wellhead capture more feasible though.
https://news.berkeley.edu/2023/11/13/capturing-wellhead-gase...
I also recall that then too there were articles about how us foolish consumers were wasting this non-renewable good on party balloons while the actual amount of helium used to fill party balloons is less than a rounding error compared to how much helium industry needs and uses (which in turn is nothing compared to how much uncaptured helium is lost during natural gas extraction).
Also, LNG typically undergoes a step where dissolved nitrogen (which is typically several percent of natural gas) is flashed to vapor. Helium is less soluble than nitrogen in LNG, so the helium will be flashed off also. There's then the problem of separating the helium and nitrogen, but presumably that's an easier problem.
Rather long and grim Network Rail (UK) public service announcement.[1]
I don't see why party balloons haven't moved to hydrogen, myself. They'd add a bit of spark to the occasion.
Ever look inside an old-style flashbulb, where a tangle of fine wires takes the place of a conventional incandescent bulb's filament? That's what you'd have if a metalized balloon were to somehow bridge the hot and ground conductors on a high-tension power line. The event would last about as long, and the power company wouldn't even notice it.
(Interestingly it is possible to attack power transmission facilities by dumping bundles of carbon filaments all over them ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphite_bomb ). But you're not going to do any damage with a couple of party balloons.)
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mylar-balloons-and-power-lines-...
Reclosing works best when the main problem is lightning. But this is in California. Dry climate, high fire risk most of the year, multiple huge fires started by power line contact in recent years, and not much lightning. PG&E is gradually moving to underground cables where lines can't be well clear of trees, and is now much more aggressive about tree trimming. Compare Florida, with high humidity and many lightning strikes. There, reclosing is a big win, since most trips are from lightning.
[1] https://www.tdworld.com/test-and-measurement/article/2096949...