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Comment by hcarvalhoalves | Hacker News Reader

You seem to believe plastic containers are used due to being a more affordable and technically superior solution. That’s a common mistake.

The true reason it’s so cheap and available, is subsidies. $7 trillion as of 2023, to be exact.

Without subsidies, using a non-renewable, expensive to harvest resource, to produce single-use plastic would be an absolutely irrational decision.

https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/08/24/fossil-fuel...

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This bogus number comes from putting a value on the supposed environmental cost, but that is not what subsidy means in the economic sense. We already established that if we somehow could globally settle on a price for externalities, alternatives would be competitive, but they would still be intrinsically more expensive.

Except it isn't a "bogus number". Fossil fuel subsidies are real.

>"It’s not just the US: according to the International Energy Agency, fossil fuel handouts hit a global high of $1 trillion in 2022 – the same year Big Oil pulled in a record $4 trillion of income."

https://www.budget.senate.gov/chairman/newsroom/press/sen-wh...

I say give the subsidies to environmentally friendly producers instead, that don't use fossil fuels as the base material for producing packaging products. $1 trillion in one year is just an unfathomable amount of money to give away to corporations that are already making record profits far above the $1 trillion they already get.

If you say "$7 trillion to be exact" and then reduce that to $1 trillion in a followup, the number you initially gave is bogus.

I don't care to figure out exactly how much of that number is similarly misleading, but the article you quoted gives $20 billion for the US in 2022, or 0.3% of the federal budget that year. I don't support these (actual) subsidies, but clearly such numbers are not game changers when the average American spends 10% of their income on energy.

I never said "$7 trillion to be exact", that was someone else.

The fact is that any subsidies to fossil fuel companies is wrong. They don't need it, and petroleum use in almost all industries is ruining the planet.

The people lamenting “the ruination of the planet” would be the first to be eaten by the people starving due to cessation of petroleum use.

Nobody is advocating for a sudden "cessation of petroleum use". Taking away subsidies from petroleum companies that already make record profits year after year isn't going to cause mass cannibalism, and I'm not sure why you would think that. Replacing petroleum use with sustainable green alternatives also won't cause mass cannibalism - because the energy sources will be replaced with better alternatives. I'm not sure how you jump from "replace petroleum" to "mass cannibalism", it's really quite absurd.

You'd want to factor in externalities as well, both on the extraction side (fossil fuels are phenomenally under-priced, likely by a factor of millions), and disposal (environmental impacts of discarded plastics and pollution during manufacture).

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