Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Our biggest ever river catch?

theoceancleanup.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 190 posts

Re: Our biggest ever river catch?

#171

Post by Workaccount2 »

arrowsmith wrote: post #167
Workaccount2 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a take, it's strictly true. Plastic pollution is bad, but it's different (and orders of magnitude more manageable) than the pollution that is causing climate change.

Plastic pollution is the pollution that is causing climate change. The process of producing plastic emits huge amounts of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that's nearly 300x more potent than CO2. "Greenhouse gas emissions from the plastic lifecycle threaten the ability of the global community to keep global temperature rise below 1.5°C. By 2050, the greenhouse gas emissions from plastic could reach over 56 gigatons—10…

You can't evaluate plastic production in a vacuum because it's numbers are enormous and will scare anyone. There is a reason though why that article makes no comparisons though.

For reference, the two plastic plants mentioned in the article you linked can emit 3.65 million tons of CO2 per year (about 30% of the nations plastic production annual total). This is a little less than what the average natural gas power plant produces in a year.

And there are about 1000 gas plants in the US. And gas is the least emissive of the power fossil fuels.

So while strictly speaking plastic production does create greenhouse gases, you can basically offset an entire years worth of plastic production emissions with only a handful of wind and solar farms displacing fossil fuel power plants.

Also I don't count burning plastic in lifecycle assessments. That is trivial to outlaw and dramatically pumps emissions figures.

Re: Our biggest ever river catch?

#172

Post by Workaccount2 »

rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #156
Workaccount2 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a take, it's strictly true. Plastic pollution is bad, but it's different (and orders of magnitude more manageable) than the pollution that is causing climate change.

> orders of magnitude more manageable Nope, not true. Easy to say you can regulate the heck out of enforcing it, but if it was easy it would have been done long ago. Besides there not being a feasible and cost-effective way to track all the plastic in circulation, trust people would be quick to protest about government overreach on their right to pollute

It's more manageable because the impact on the climate is very small. Oil that is burned is far more harmful to the climate than oil that is turned to plastic.

Re: Our biggest ever river catch?

#173

Post by scotty79 »

rTX5CMRXIfFG wrote: post #158
scotty79 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still good. Way better than burning it.

Not making it is way better

Depends on what you do with dug out oil instead of making plastic. If you do almost anything else it's worse than making plastic and landfilling it neatly at the end of useful life.

Re: Our biggest ever river catch?

#174

Post by klysm »

missedthecue wrote: post #142
klysm wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling plastics a carbon sink is dubious because you have to spend energy to get the oil out in the first place. How about calling it an oil sink?

You have to burn much more energy to get sand out of the ground (glass), bauxite out of the mine (aluminum), or trees out of the forest (paper). It doesn't take much energy to get a ton of petroleum out, compared to a ton of sand, aluminum ore, or lumber.

sure, I said nothing about that though. It’s still wrong to call it a carbon sink

Re: Our biggest ever river catch?

#175

Post by klysm »

scotty79 wrote: post #106
klysm wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling plastics a carbon sink is dubious because you have to spend energy to get the oil out in the first place. How about calling it an oil sink?

Still good. Way better than burning it.

That’s leaning into a false dichotomy. Not extracting it in the first is clearly the best option

Re: Our biggest ever river catch?

#176

Post by cdrini »

renewiltord wrote: post #161
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This river cleanup is brilliant and effective. Messing with the top meter of ocean water does its own kind of damage. So much of the life in the ocean surface layer is going to be involved with the floating trash, like it or not. Ocean surface sterilization seems incautious and worrisome. Never mind we don't like to see trash. Stripping the ocean surface water will have unforeseen consequences.

I'm calling for a moratorium on the river barricades until we can determine that it's not damaging to the environment. They were so occupied with whether they could they didn't stop to ask if they should. This is why they need to teach ethics in school next to engineering. Messing with fragile systems like this is dangerous. Many studies show that blocking river flow causes the extinction of species. Until we can be…

1) this organisation was founded in 2013; they've been thinking and researching into this for a while, this wasn't a rash intervention.

2) they didn't block the river flow! 100% that would be very dangerous. The have a capture device on the surface of the water. Wildlife and water travel freely under the surface.

3) the mission statement of this organisation is about helping wildlife, so I reckon they think a lot about the impacts that anything they do can have on wildlife.

Re: Our biggest ever river catch?

#177

Post by cdrini »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #145
wasmitnetzen wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably because of the Shopping Cart Tragedy: The thinking that you can leave your shopping cart in the middle of the parking lot because it's someone's job to collect them. So people might throw trash into nature because they think that someone will collect it.

I wish it was as simple to solve as the Shopping Cart Tragedy. If you have an Aldi near you, you know that they never have problems with anyone leaving carts in the lot. A simple case of misaligned incentives that is easily solved with an effective solution. Shame that no other vendor in the States does it. For those not familiar with Aldi in the States, they have a very rudimentary analog system that locks the carts…

I love this approach! Most of the grocery stores in Canada (or are least Toronto) do this as well, expect it's usually a $1 coin.

Re: Our biggest ever river catch?

#178

Post by stevage »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #147
stevage wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it's certainly an unusual take

It's not a take, it's strictly true. Plastic pollution is bad, but it's different (and orders of magnitude more manageable) than the pollution that is causing climate change.

I agree with that. The weird part is suggesting that producing plastic is good because it drives up the cost of oil.

Re: Our biggest ever river catch?

#179

Post by gosub100 »

8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #94
pentae wrote: post #82

A commendable operation but sadly, this is a very small fraction of a percentage of the 8-10 million tons of plastic entering the ocean each year. The Ocean Cleanup themselves have estimated at least 75% of ocean trash is from fishing boats, and from living on a remote tropical island myself, at least 90% of the things you find washed up on the beach appear to be from Chinese fishing vessels. (there's usually Chinese…

I’m glad I’m doing my part one straw at a time /s

The anti straw campaign was proof that both sides engage in science denialism.

Re: Our biggest ever river catch?

#180

Post by staplers »

tiagod wrote: post #119
staplers wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Standing trees will aways be more of a carbon sink than dead flat trees.

Older trees fix less carbon than newer trees. Paper products are essentially made of carbon extracted from the air, and you just plant new trees in the farm afterwards. Plastic, on the other hand, is taking carbon that's already sequestered deep underground and pulling it to the surface, with an obvious net positive carbon footprint. All that said, as far as I remember, trees are not and can not be a very major form…

  trees are not and can not be a very major form of carbon capturing
My god. I may have to leave this website for good.

Just cut down all the forests they said! It'll be better for the environment!

Post reply on HN