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Fishing gear accounts for an alarming amount of plastic in oceans (2021)

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Re: Fishing gear accounts for an alarming amount of plastic in oceans (2021)

#121

Post by maxerickson »

noahtallen wrote: post #118
maxerickson wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is freshwater usage? My water comes out of a Great Lake and substantially ends up back in it, about as clean as it came out. It's not used up. Some energy is consumed making it potable and pumping it around, and then treating it. Farms in the Midwest happen to catch a lot of rain, are they using freshwater in a different way than an almond orchard in California, or is it the same (my expectation is that the almo…

Completely different scenarios, right? The rainy parts of the Midwest aren’t in a drought which makes water consumption important to track. California is. Anyways, they do use in freshwater differently. Where I grew up in NW Ohio, there is practically no irrigation. It rains enough there’s no need. Freshwater use is passive, in other words. Out west, farms have to actively pump water to irrigate since there’s not eno…

They are both consuming some of the natural growth/agricultural capacity of the planet.

Re: Fishing gear accounts for an alarming amount of plastic in oceans (2021)

#122

Post by themitigating »

epistasis wrote: post #24

To place this in context, it's 50,000 tons/year of fishing waste, versus 200,000 tons/year of microplastics from car tires: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/14/car-tyre... Further, microplastics enter the ecosystem far easier than the bulky big plastic from fishing gear, so the tire microplastics should be far more concerning to people. It's really weird how cars get a pass for so much. Try to live a…

Just because they are highlighting this issue doesn't mean they are giving car tires a pass.

Re: Fishing gear accounts for an alarming amount of plastic in oceans (2021)

#123

Post by jrajav »

hnick wrote: post #120
causality0 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why arguments that road-maintenance taxes should be applied to BEVs and bicycles are horseshit. Everything lighter than 4,000 pounds is essentially a rounding error as far as damage to road surface goes.

Wouldn't this in effect add a regressive tax to staple products like bread and flour, which are transported by trucks and would require raised prices to be passed on? I'd be interested in seeing the numbers and what price rise if any would be expected.

Are trucks an unavoidable reality of transportation? I don't think so. If there are ways to transport those staples aside from using trucks, it seems like an effective tax on using trucks would just be an optimization that encourages alternatives that don't spread as much damage onto general infrastructure.

Re: Fishing gear accounts for an alarming amount of plastic in oceans (2021)

#124

Post by bargle0 »

jrajav wrote: post #123
hnick wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't this in effect add a regressive tax to staple products like bread and flour, which are transported by trucks and would require raised prices to be passed on? I'd be interested in seeing the numbers and what price rise if any would be expected.

Are trucks an unavoidable reality of transportation? I don't think so. If there are ways to transport those staples aside from using trucks, it seems like an effective tax on using trucks would just be an optimization that encourages alternatives that don't spread as much damage onto general infrastructure.

What are the alternatives? Back every store up to a rail line?

Re: Fishing gear accounts for an alarming amount of plastic in oceans (2021)

#125

Post by cycomanic »

dahdum wrote: post #63
causality0 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really weird how cars get a pass for so much. It's really weird how trucks get a pass from people who don't give cars a pass. If tire wear is proportional to road wear, the majority of tire-originating microplastics is from semi trucks, not commuter sedans.

I don't find trucks and commercial vehicles getting a pass all that strange, they are far more essential than passenger vehicles. I consider most roads and basically all highways as meant for them, passenger vehicles are the luxury.

Freight is far easier to transport using rail. However, the massive subsidies that road freight receives over other means of transport (i.e. the use of the road infrastructure basically for free, as they don't pay for maintance according to the damage they cause) makes rail financially unattractive in many cases.

Re: Fishing gear accounts for an alarming amount of plastic in oceans (2021)

#126

Post by swayvil »

bargle0 wrote: post #124
jrajav wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are trucks an unavoidable reality of transportation? I don't think so. If there are ways to transport those staples aside from using trucks, it seems like an effective tax on using trucks would just be an optimization that encourages alternatives that don't spread as much damage onto general infrastructure.

What are the alternatives? Back every store up to a rail line?

Localize manufacturing for one.

Re: Fishing gear accounts for an alarming amount of plastic in oceans (2021)

#127

Post by hnick »

jrajav wrote: post #123
hnick wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't this in effect add a regressive tax to staple products like bread and flour, which are transported by trucks and would require raised prices to be passed on? I'd be interested in seeing the numbers and what price rise if any would be expected.

Are trucks an unavoidable reality of transportation? I don't think so. If there are ways to transport those staples aside from using trucks, it seems like an effective tax on using trucks would just be an optimization that encourages alternatives that don't spread as much damage onto general infrastructure.

For the last miles, delivering parcels to people and pallets to commerce, they are for sure. Rail just won't work well at that level of granularity. Between cities is probably another story where rail makes more sense but I'd guess it's much easier to schedule a truck at the last minute and you're not beholden to whoever operates the rail network(s).

Re: Fishing gear accounts for an alarming amount of plastic in oceans (2021)

#128

Post by themitigating »

Invictus0 wrote: post #94
grapeskin wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars don’t get a free pass. But literally any time someone says X is a big source of pollution, someone always screams that Y is worse so let’s stop focusing on X. Then when people talk about Y, forget it, here’s Z and it’s the real problem. They’re all bad. It’s not like there’s one single person on earth who only has time to focus on one single problem. There’s billions.

Ok, let's plug in X Y and Z. Suppose X is pollution due to letters-in-a-bottle thrown in the sea, Y is pollution due to humans peeing in it, and Z is pollution due to oil spills. Which problem should we focus on?

All? It's not a single person picking an enviornmental issue to work on, it's all of us.

What kind of deflection are trying to pass off?

Re: Fishing gear accounts for an alarming amount of plastic in oceans (2021)

#129

Post by themitigating »

ericd wrote: post #74
formvoltron wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes. You are right and I had not thought about tires as an obvious source of microplastics. What's the solution though?

Probably lighter vehicles? Wear is superlinear with weight. Unfortunately, EVs aren't great on this axis.

A Tesla Model 3 is about 4200lbs.

Most pickup trucks and midsized SUVs weigh more than this.

Re: Fishing gear accounts for an alarming amount of plastic in oceans (2021)

#130

Post by themitigating »

p1necone wrote: post #90
epistasis wrote: post #24

To place this in context, it's 50,000 tons/year of fishing waste, versus 200,000 tons/year of microplastics from car tires: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/14/car-tyre... Further, microplastics enter the ecosystem far easier than the bulky big plastic from fishing gear, so the tire microplastics should be far more concerning to people. It's really weird how cars get a pass for so much. Try to live a…

I'm sure you mean well by posting this, but comments like this aren't really helpful. Every time anything environmental gets posted here there's always someone saying "but other issue is more severe". If we take this attitude then nothing will ever be fixed. This isn't really a zero sum game - some people with the knowledge/motivation/clout can try to fix plastic waste from fishing equipment while some other people w…

I don't think he means well. He probably doesn't care about the environment because of selfish reasons but knows you can't use that as an argument, hence the whataboutism
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