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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)

#241

Post by throwaway894345 »

palmtree3000 wrote: post #145
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.

Sure, but you can make it as progressive as you want by redistributing the tax income back to people.

The tax income in this scenario is already devoted to paying for road improvements. There’s nothing left to be redistributed back. You can raise another tax for redistribution if you’re so inclined, but you can’t spend the money for road repair on redistribution (or else the road doesn’t get repaired, defeating the purpose).

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

#242

Post by pyrale »

neuronic wrote: post #189
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…

Don't make the mistake and rely on current rain. It's not funny how quickly moist regions can turn arid as a result of climate change. We have currently seen major droughts in Europe and it severely affects the ongoing energy crisis. A lot of power plants, nuclear and others, are in direct danger of not being able to be cooled anymore because you need RIVERS for that. And they need to be cool. Germany is currently ex…

> There needs to be water AND it needs to be cool. There is no nuclear power without water cooling.

The water doesn't really need to be cool, it can also be used in cooling towers, which means you don't have to put it back into the stream, and therefore you don't care about water temperature. The issue with river water is that we currently don't have enough to divert it for all our needs, be it for a nuclear plant, for irrigation or for drinking.

This winter and spring have been exceptionally dry in France, with slightly more than half the rain we usually get.

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

#243

Post by throwaway894345 »

rtpg wrote: post #180
cycomanic wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't get where "easier to transport via rail" comes from. The instant you have a post office, you do want some sort of roads, and the number of rails and switching you would need to get to even some of the distribution centers spread across various supermarkets is a big ask! That doesn't mean every single last meter needs to happen via truck (lots of deliveries in urban areas can happen via foot or scooter) but ..…

No one is saying “replace roads with rails”, they’re saying ship more things by rail up to the last mile (e.g., trucks take goods from rail depot to local markets). Today, much freight is shipped on highways.

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

#244

Post by paul_f »

airstrike wrote: post #108
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.

The corollary to this argument is that most environmental issues routinely blamed on individual behavior pale in comparison to the externalities from industry and commerce People talk shutting off the faucet while brushing one's teeth but ~70% of global freshwater usage comes from agriculture and ~20% from industry, with municipalities accounting for only 10%

As an example of this, most trash on the side of roads comes from stuff falling off commercial trucks, sanitation trucks, work trucks. Not from people chunking junk out the window of their car. Yet all the guilt is placed on individuals.

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

#245

Post by throwaway894345 »

williamscales wrote: post #143
dahdum wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, not at all. There's just no need whatsoever for trucks. We could simply use rail. The idea that folks on bicycles should be subject to gigantic, badly designed commercial vehicles while going about their business is absurd and a product of decades upon decades of lobbying.

The trucks that endanger cyclists aren’t going anywhere. They’re absolutely necessary to get goods from rail depots to markets so (among others) our dear cyclists can purchase them.

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

#246

Post by BlargMcLarg »

Tade0 wrote: post #229
BlargMcLarg wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't well-optimized. It's certainly more optimized, but anything outside a major city is optimized for cars first and foremost. Anything below the size of Eindhoven included. The stats reflect this (car usage is still going up / barely going down, car size increasing) and it is easily explained given how far people are expected to live away from work without paying a small fortune in rent. On top of that, infrast…

> and it is easily explained given how far people are expected to live away from work without paying a small fortune in rent. My country (Poland) has been de -urbanizing since the turn of the century for this exact reason. People can't afford housing in city centres, so they buy properties in the suburbs and opt to drive everywhere instead. The first generation that did this is currently nearing retirement and they'l…

Unfortunately, that generation is going out with a bang. Car size and driving are correlated with wealth, which explains the average age of new car buyers, specifically the luxurious ones.

What people fail to realize is just how much alternatives have to win out on cars to make a dent. Being marginally less expensive isn't enough when opportunity costs are far higher.

Those alternatives can be much better. That's the real story hidden within The Netherlands: you can't make a half-hearted attempt and expect it to solve itself after because the world believes Utrecht, an already small city by global standards, is the status quo of the entire country. If it doesn't cut deep into car ownership nationwide, it's not the success people claim it is.

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

#247

Post by paulcole »

Gordonjcp wrote: post #181
steve_adams_86 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the most dramatic changes an individual can make is switching to a plant based diet. Don’t support fishing, don’t support animal agriculture, and you’re way ahead. Not only in energy expenditure but resource utilization as well. It’s a stunning difference.

Doesn't shipping plant-based food around the planet cause massive climate change? PLant-based diets only make sense if you live somewhere where it's ecologically cheaper to eat plants than animals. This doesn't work, for most of the world.

Shipping anything around the world causes massive climate change.

> This doesn't work, for most of the world.

Yes, other than significant parts of Asia, North America, South America, Africa, and Europe this is a non-starter.

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

#248

Post by koheripbal »

grapeskin wrote: post #65
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…

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.

It's a classic whataboutism distraction attack on the conversation.

whataboutisms aren't bad because they're wrong - they are bad because they are a distraction. Either the commenter is trying to turn the conversation to a different topic they prefer to advocate for, satisfy their ego that they know more, or they are simply attempting to disrupt discourse.

In reality, the focus should be placed on solutions that have the greatest net positive impact. The size of the problems can guide, but some problems are more fundamentally difficult to solve (which makes them useful whataboutisms).

Of course, if we also added the criteria of "We should only debate things on a forum that the members of the forum actually have the ability to effect change on", then 90% of political posts would disappear.

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

#249

Post by paul_f »

Gordonjcp wrote: post #177
milesvp wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? water usage is a huge environmental issue. Only people far upstream really can say it’s not. We are amazing at not only diverting freshwater from streams and rivers, we’re also really good at pumping it out of the ground and diverting aquifer water from reaching downstream as well. While fresh water is largely renewable, it’s not like it’s an infinite resource and it’s very hard to see the long term effects of c…

Water usage isn't an environmental issue. There's as much water now as there ever was, barring a few hundred litres aboard the ISS. The issue is that you want to live in a desert but with a lifestyle like you're not in a desert. The hard conversation you need to have is that California is not habitable. There's no water and there's nowhere to grow food. If you want to make it habitable you'll need to turn all those g…

In my opinion, much of the farming in Southern California needs to end. Or at least we should revisit the now 100-year-old agreement on how the Colorado River water is used. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River_Compact

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

#250

Post by throwaway894345 »

Grimburger wrote: post #184
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.

> If tire wear is proportional to road wear It's not though, rendering the point moot. They are two vastly different materials with different models of wear. A quick thought experiment would make this very apparent: Do trucks need to replace tires at magnitudes less distance travelled than cars? Do cars tires last 100x longer than motorbike tires?

Your thought experiment incorrectly assumes trucks, cars, and motorbikes have the same number and size of tires. Trucks have more, larger tires to allow for more wear between replacements.
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