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Comment by vouaobrasil | Hacker News Reader

This is the sort of thing the free market/capitalism is very bad at: accounting for the slow and diffuse damage of a product that brings immediate economic gains, because the bad consequences only make themselves apparent after we've already produced gigatons of plastic that brought immediate econmomic advantages.

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It’s like you never heard of the USSRs coal burning, or nuclear experimentation, etc.

Never said other systems were good.

It also seems basically impossible to fix too. Once we've reached the point of no return (probably there now), that's it, we're done.

Arguably the plastics break down until they become basic short polymers that exist in everything though no? At some point they progress from micro-plastics to non-harmful substances. So having a break point where we stop producing plastics would mean that we stop adding then to the environment whilst allowing the eventual half-life of the material to take its course (granted that's probably 10s of thousands of years from now, but with clean up operations that could be accelerated).

Well, no. Some common plastics like polycarbonate aren't biodegradable, and will basically never break down without application of significant heat/water/enzymatic activity/etc. For some of these, the half-life could be a great deal more even than 10s of millenia:

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssuschemeng.9b06635#:~:te....

Well no, the environment is probably easier to deal with than our bodies, and we get replaced gen by gen.

Yeah, probably.

Exploiting externalities isn't just a capitalism thing. The Romans were well aware of the problems with lead plumbing yet they still used it.

The rampant air pollution in China is another example where you can't blame capitalism.

What else would you blame? The air pollution ramped up with China opening up to capital markets. China has fewer social programs than Canada and many more powerful private companies than EU. Calling China communist doesn't make it any more true than me calling myself the Queen of England.

I think you can destroy the environment with industrialization using different distributive glosses. The Soviet Union did it with a very diminished sense of private property and limited internal markets. I think sometimes it is capitalist ignoring of externalities and other times it is socialist ignoring of externalities.

The soviet union most likely did what it did because it was totalitarian, not because it was socialist. A dictator can choose to pollute a river, but that’s kinda besides the point. The point is that the incentives that capitalism creates for individuals’ behavior will tend to drive them to produce without consideration for externalities. Even a dictatorship may arguably have more incentives against such, cause the dictator needs to avoid pissing off the people so much that they overthrow him. Capitalism instead explicitly accepts most behaviors which pursue profit regardless of their externalities. To the extent we don’t do that today, it’s mostly the result of changing our economy to be a more mixed model with government regulation.

China has lowered the air polution in their cities by a lot. They are investing heavily in renewables and fixing desertification.

I don't mean by that that China is a communist country, because it isn't. It is a dictatorship with a capitalist vision. But they are more socialist and people based than others.

Why can I say that? Because they are effectively trying to fix the problems that their capitalist vision has brought, like environment contamination, pollution and desertification.

You've given the wrong example and proven right the other comment: A strong government can fix the problems a liberalized economy can bring.

Of course. I never said that capitalism was always responsible for every trouble. Just that it's also a bad system, except of course for technological growth, in which case it's a great system. The common root is always technology.

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