Hacker News Reader

Comment by afh1 | Hacker News Reader

None of it matters when China is burning coal like crazy and 99% of all ocean plastic comes from Asia.[1] Europe is mostly costly virtue signaling.

[1] https://www.weforum.org/stories/2018/06/90-of-plastic-pollut...

View on HN

If everyone keeps using everyone else's use of fossil fuels as a justification for their own, then no progress will ever be made.

When your waste is irrelevant vs that of your neighbor, paying a high price to do your insignificant part is simply inefficient. If people really cared about a global impact, the approach would need to be radically different.

If you reduce your waste, you have the high ground to use as leverage to coninve others. It's not a hard concept

Your six year old source itself states that in 2017, China stopped the import of foreign garbage. Meaning plastic pollution will have dropped in the six years since your source was published.

More importantly though, it wasn't even necessarily China's waste. Rich, Western nations like the one you're (likely) commenting from have sent their plastic waste to China, where it ends up in the sea. And you use that for justification that "using less plastic doesn't matter", and that it's "mostly virtue signaling".

Nah, it is mostly local plastic from what I can tell. And I come from a country which is a net importer of waste, not exporter. And China is not the issue, it is mostly the Phillipines. We cannot solve this other than by payibg for and forcing a couple of countries to solve their issue.

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/visualized-ocean-plastic...

It's not virtue signaling. Europe acknowledges that we are already good enough to keep basing our growth in fossils. But developing countries deserve some slack with fossil usage while they converge.

Indirectly, by requiring cleaner cars for example, there's a push toward China designing clean engines if they want to sell in Europe. In fact China is already selling a decent amount of cars in Europe.

Measures like ICE bans still improve the local air quality.

True. All of the measures mentioned have local benefits, with a price tag attached. Global impact is less clear cut.

Not much. Banning old ICE cars does but modern ICE cars does not pollute that much more than electric. A lot of the pollution comes from the tyres.

Yeah let’s not compare per capita or historic responsibility, or their huge investments in renewable energy, I don’t want to lower my first world lifestyle.

Per capita plastic pollution is highest in a handful of Asian countries, but for CO2 you have a point. Plastic pollution is caused by just a couple of countries.

On a per capita basis China emits more CO2 than Europeans.

The EU-27 and China are currenty ballpark; the EU has made a solid effort to come down overthe decades, China has risen by virtue of being the worlds largest trading source .. the argument can be made that western countries have outsourced the CO2 of much of their production to China.

All that aside, for those that want figures:

EU-27: https://www.statista.com/statistics/986392/co2-emissions-per...

China: https://www.statista.com/statistics/239070/co2-emissions-per...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com