Comment by Liquix

Isn’t it also the case that a lot of those plastics come from those rivers because the first world ships is plastic water to China to be processed (“recycled”) and that this is what skews the numbers like this?

That's definitely not true. Let's take Americans, for example, driving their cars to work. Americans are about 15% of the world's emissions, of which 25% or so is transportation, of which well over half is cars. So you not driving to work is making direct impact on 2-3% of the world's overall emissions. Likewise, your decisions on all the other things, if taken in aggregate, will have a significant impact on overall emissions.

I have always felt this way too. Our personal choices do not move the needle on fossil fuel and plastics. One could embrace aversion to these out of a sense of sustainability to signal virtue, but lets not pretend it will save the planet. It won't. Restricting aviation flights, stopping wars and minimizing the dirty fuel used in maritime freight does much more. But the world will not do it.

This line of thinking is what undermines democracies and ruins the environment. Your choice might just be a drop in the ocean, but guess what the ocean is made out of.

> it's just to say that until corporations are forced to do things the right way

But this isn't going to happen by itself. We need to vote for people who believes in regulating these corporations (rather than deregulating them).

> "vote with your wallet", etc, but sales will move to a less developed area and the pollution will continue.

But voting with your wallet is literally moving sales to a more developed area with less pollution?

I think this is wrong.

Descriptively / "objectively" if you make your demand cleaner, you decrease demand for dirty consumption. You can't say individuals don't matter by comparing them to the world, that's invalid.

Normatively, is it a useful lie? Maybe, to some extent. People are lazy, selfish, and stupid. Peter Singer points out that we might be nice to people nearby, but we don't give money to people starving in other countries even if we think it will make a real difference. And no human can really know how even a pencil is made, so we make poor decisions. A carbon tax would unleash the free market on the problem. But saying individuals can't act is not good leadership, if even the people who say they want to fix the issue won't make personal sacrifices, why should the average voter?

Regarding the immediate effect I am sure your point is valid. But it’s also a bit of a cynical point of view, wouldn’t you say? People make these statements and pursue these personal lifestyle decisions because of their dreams for a better future - not its immediate effect. Just as companies need a vision to succeed, societies need vision as well. If a lot of people are vocal about something and live it, it has a chance of becoming anchored in laws and so force companies to do the “right thing”. Regulation follows collective values.

This massively lets the Philippines off the hook. China has a gazillion people, and so does India, and the rest of SE Asia is bad for pollution, but the Philippines — with 1.5% of the world’s population — is an incredible 36% of ocean plastic pollution.

Also a call-out to Malaysia who are an upper-middle income country and contribute far too much per capita given their income situation, but again, they are a drop in the ocean compared to the (much, much poorer) Philippines.

Having spent half my life in South-East Asia, there’s a cultural problem that needs fixing there.

A pretty graph that make it clear just how bad the most egregious polluters are comparatively: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ocean-plastic-waste-per-c...

Per capita beef consumption is down by 35% in the US since the 70s. From 62kg/person/year to 35.

Beef produces ~100kg CO2 per kg of meat. That's a reduction of 27,000kgs of CO2 reduction, per capita.

That's not nothing. By simply reducing beef consumption by 1 kilogram a month, you can prevent more than a metric ton of CO2. If 5% of Americans cut 1 kilo of beef a month, that'd knock out 15 million tons of CO2.

Small changes can have an impact on aggregate, and just because someone else is not making those changes doesn't excuse us looking at ourselves and saying, "I could choose something else this time".

It’s helpful to put this issue into perspective. But dismissing issues as not worth caring about on the grounds that there exist larger problems is fallacious and, to me, quite a dangerous way to live life.

“Why worry about your town’s water quality when some countries don’t have access to clean water?”

“Why go to the dentist for a cavity when some people have no teeth?“

“Why campaign for animal rights when there are some many human rights abuses going on?”

This is nothing but head-in-the-sand, arms-in-the-air, feel-good baloney to convince oneself to sleep well at night.

Guess what happens when you buy a used laptop instead of a new one?

That's right: less "standard practice overseas manufacturing".

Lifestyle change right there.

Buying less, using the same for longer, buying used goods instead of new are lifestyle changes that anyone can make and have an undeniable very clear impact by reducing the amount of stuff that needs to get made. Using my smartphone for 6 years instead of changing every 3 years doesn't mean the one I didn't buy gets sold elsewhere. It means one less sale.

This reads like an attempt to pass the blame to others. Per capita CO₂ emissions in the US are one of the highest in the world, and significantly higher than those in China or SEA. This is despite the US/Europe moving some of our dirtiest/cheapest manufacturing to that region.

Personal choices matter. See the amount of energy used on air conditioning in the US compared to areas of Europe with comparable weather for a banal example. If we want to significantly reduce emissions it will happen through a combination of personal choices, corporate action and government policy.

And 80% of all the trash in the oceans come from fishing industry (e.g. abandoned nets).

well, it's really not about the destruction of the planet but making our habitat more hostile and humans more sick.

sure, STEM will continue to find remedies and cures but at some point we're fucked just because the gene pool was reduced to an unnaturally selected bunch that survived & thrived completely alienated from the actual world.

sure, no biggie, wahaha, that's the name of the game, the old will die, the young repeat the same nonsense and that microbiome and all that other stuff we carry with us as hosts, potentially most likely in a beneficial symbiotic relationship, have no implicit mechanisms to cancel the contract and pivot towards some species or other that won't be d u m b enough to shit all over it's own home & garden, consequently ruining the bio-chemistry with the smell, taste and look of feces everywhere - in the body as well as outside - and all that while it's getting a bit hot in here.

and I doubt that the consequences of controlled demise in a deteriorating environment all while the meds and drugs of leadership and the people fade out quite a few of the brains and the bodies implicit reactions to a lot of sensory perceptions to everything that was vital, crucial to notice for a 'million' years can't be projected to at least some degree. I mean "blindspots" are a thinking tool, after all, but those thinking brains and minds believe in black swans and the better angels of our nature so that doesn't really mean a thing.

the population itself is fine, a habit of psycho-social education and all consecutive upper levels being insanely afraid of competition and insights from below. thing is, whatever financial survival schemes people are running, they all have death cult written all over their faces.

btw, most of this was for fun, I'm really not worried at all. climate change is more a cycle than man-made acceleration. my only point of interest is the deterioration of the species due to all the things that we do and then worry more about the habitat than our and all kinds.

we absolutely can turn the planet into a conservatory. through any climate.

"Personal impact" is just laundering the responsibility of government and corporations so it looks like it's our fault.

It is true that everyone everywhere all at once could suddenly make the right decision forever and save the planet. But is a statistical anomaly so extreme it's not worth pursuing as a policy. No policy maker worth their salt would look at that and consider it valid long term.

We have a playbook. We refuse to use it. We ban products, and then the companies that refuse to change or cheat get shuttered, and we move on.

Do we talk about pollution or emmissions?

One of the most imminent problems with the environment isn't due to plastic pollution (which is of course terrible, might well have unforseen ramifications via micro plastics, and is impacting negatively biodiversity), but CO2 and other gases impacting climate.

While we should strive to fix both, it's more important in the short term to limit the amount of CO2 pollution before it's too late.

Finally someone who speaks this out. What we do is more or less fly poop ... good four own well being but with almost zero impact. I'll go on doing some things because I think that some of that are the better ways to handle this or that or it's better for my health but with no expectation that I'll change anything.