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Comment by BiteCode_dev | Hacker News Reader

I hear you, but if one maker makes you pay the real price of including the externalities, most consumers will by the equally good but much cheaper alternative.

In fact, at equal price, they will choose the most convenient form factor with beautiful and practical packaging.

We are not innocent in all this.

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The solution, of course, is to not permit any maker to foist their negative externalities upon the commons to unfairly undercut competitors. If you're going to blame a consumer for the producer's pollution, why not instead blame their landlord for charging them the rent that forced them to drive to work and so buy tires? Why not instead blame the landlord's bank for demanding repayment of the mortgage or the bank's shareholders for demanding profit instead of benevolent loan forgiveness?

I heard Santa had something to do with it too!

Nor are we at fault. Corporate consolidation has been happening for decades. They have psychologists on staff or contracted out to design products that sell based on inherent human bias and autonomic responses. We’re sold to at the subconscious level now.

I agree given only two choices the average consumer will spend the least, but doesn’t that suggest trying to make aware or change human behavior is the wrong approach to solving the problem?

I wouldn’t bother with land fills for a while. First on my list is standardizing electrical power at docks for container ships. They run the most polluting fuel on idle 24 hours per day while docked. The amount of carbon release is something like in the millions of automobiles per day. If they could plug into every port they can shut their engines off. They might not even need to carry the dirtiest fuel anymore.

> I wouldn’t bother with land fills for a while. First on my list is standardizing electrical power at docks for container ships.

There is some sort of effort going on, but IIRC it stalled as a consequence of covid [1]. Biggest problems are frequency differences (the entire world but the Americas runs at 50 Hz, but maritime+America runs at 60 Hz), and the fact that for the many megawatts a ship can use you need extremely high voltages to get that transferred at reasonable currents, which is a safety challenge on its own [2].

[1] https://sustainableworldports.org/wpcap/wg-3/our-mission/

[2] https://sustainableworldports.org/wp-content/uploads/Landsto...

Surely the consumption is reduced when they are sitting in port idling? And do ships really need a higher voltage than common industrial power? (480v, 3 phase) I realize 480v is dangerous but not unmanageable.

Container ships can have thousands of reefer containers on board.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerated_container

> Nor are we at fault.

Yes, we are. The vast majority of our (first world) consumption is not something we are forced to do. We (again, first world, but particularly here, in tech world) have comparatively massive disposable incomes and wide discretion about what we spend it on.

"I can't avoid plastics because it's what my sushi comes packaged in"

Don't buy the sushi.

You’re the delight of every B.S. oil company distraction campaign. You were precisely what the people who invented the term “carbon footprint” had in mind—an eager sucker.

Oil company revenues derive from the aggregate of consumer demand and behavior. Big Oil’s villainy in demand-generation campaigns and climate change denial is inexcusable, but this is a relatively small aspect of their nature. The majority of their activities are done because we consumers collectively ask them to do it.

Pretending that there’s a small number of bad-guy oil bosses is attractive because it makes the problem seem tractable. The inconvenient truth is that the collective action we seek amounts to collective change in our own lives.

Sent from my luxury smartphone.

Penalising polluting producers passes the price to the product purchaser.

That is a good thing

Yeah I agree, it's the best place to target it: the producers have the means, motive and opportunity to cut their pollution.

The real problem comes when considering imports. How to assess the emissions of overseas producers, and then track the "embodied pollution" in each product? Becomes very messy without solid international cooperation. So it probably then becomes necessary to tax certain things when they're either imported or at the point of sale.

That's why regulation is better than leaving everything to the market in many cases.

…and it’s not like we don’t produce similar regulation all the time.

The conversation here makes it sound like this is unprecedented, whereas it seems to me completely normal. There are no CFCs in my deodorant any more, or lead in my paint, or whatever.

Once regulation is in place, producers have motivation to innovate and drive the cost of disposal and reuse down, which is a great application of market mechanisms.

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