9 ms·

Just like Climate Change, oceanic plastic pollution is a case of Tragedy of the commons. I can separate my waste and recycle as much as I want (and I do!) but i

by eecc 8y ago

Just like Climate Change, oceanic plastic pollution is a case of Tragedy of the commons. I can separate my waste and recycle as much as I want (and I do!) but it’s all useless if a random idiot proceeds to dump my weekly household recycling output into a river and call it a day. This is nothing that can be solved with personal initiative and responsibility; it requires international regulation and enforcement. There’s no other way

wespiser_2018 8y ago
I disagree. Tragedy of the Commons is a situation that is about the management of wildlife and natural resources for the purposes of maximizing yield, with the lesson being regulated consumption results in maximal natural harvest. Pollution is just a negative economic externality, or consequence of an action that is unseen by the participants, where more pollution is always worse. Unfortunately, no one owns the oceans, and the normal ways for resolving externalities don't work without an aggrieved property owner.
- EB66 8y ago
  Your understanding of the tragedy of the commons is not accurate. Cases of pollution in public waters are typically prime examples of tragedies of the commons. Just because it's a "negative economic externality" does not mean that it is not a tragedy of the commons. Even the wiki page for tragedy of the commons lists "water pollution" as an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Example... Maximizing yield via regulation is usually the ECON101 lesson that accompanies discussions about the tragedy of the commons.
  - wespiser_2018 8y ago
    Still, I disagree, the mainstay of Tragedy of the Commons is about resource management through regulation, which does not apply well to oceans plastics. The "Water Pollution" example provided is about water management for the purposes of irrigation, and pollution of groundwater that needed for said irrigation. Ocean plastics could be different, if its just the systematic degradation of an ecosystem, orthogonal to resource management interests.
    - EB66 8y ago
      :smh:
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- blotter_paper 8y ago
  >Unfortunately, no one owns the oceans, and the normal ways for resolving externalities don't work without an aggrieved property owner. Hmm, so if we want to reduce human pollution of the oceans... we just need to colonize the oceans!
- matt4077 8y ago
  „No one owns the oceans“ = commons
  - wespiser_2018 8y ago
    Yes, I see. What I mean is that no single nation-state owns the oceans, so unlike most other examples of tragedy of the commons, where an organization has domain over the commons, the oceans are particularly difficult because there is no governing entity to resolve disagreements.
- notacoward 8y ago
  > Unfortunately, no one owns the oceans i.e. it's part of the commons. It has often been used as an example of such, because despoiling a resource still reduces supply just like direct depletion does. > the normal ways for resolving externalities don't work without an aggrieved property owner That is exactly what TotC is about. Even if one could split hairs about what's TotC vs. some other kind of externality, the fact remains that the dynamics are the same. In light of your own last sentence, do you disagree with GP's point that regulation is the necessary answer?
- mikeash 8y ago
  More pollution isn’t necessarily worse. The polluting activity can produce benefits that outweigh the harm of the pollution. Pollution is directly analogous to the standard Tragedy of the Commons scenario of a shared pasture, where the pasture equates to the environment, the cows are industry, and grazing the cows in the common pasture equates to industry producing pollution.
  - anigbrowl 8y ago
    the pasture equates to environment, the cows are industry [...] That's your problem right there. You're treating the cows as somehow separate from the environment. For this example, let's consider the pasture as an island so that you have nowhere else to go. The actual externality of cows eating grass is poop, which fertilizes the soil to some degree but can poison it in excess. Overgrazing is not an externality as such; it's depletion, and then all your cows die and so do you. Maybe you get to eat a few of the cows while you wait for more grass to grow but after they're gone you won't be able to live on the grass. The benefits of temporarily having more cows than you can sustainably graze is an illusion, because you can't eat them all as soon as the grass runs out. You too are part of the ecosystem. (Ok, in the real world you have other land available, trade, and so on. But that just distributes the problem over a large population and area, postponing the point where carrying capacity becomes an issue. And more often than not, profits are retained by one party while pollution is dumped on another whose suffering the profiteer has no desire to alleviate. In this example that particular cheat code is not operational.) There are two reasons this might happen: external forcing of the ecosystem (drought, being hit by a meteor etc.), or letting your herd expand faster than the pasture can grow new grass, which is essentially borrowing time from the future and dying when you've done so. The uncertain risk of external forcing inclines us to hedge against its possibility by accumulating excess, but since the known and increasing risk of feedback can't be directly compared with the uncertain external risk people tend to 'rationalize it' by making irrational appeals to possibility rather than probability. The most obvious example of this today is people who object to any and all environmental regulation by dismissing predictions of environmental problems as too vague while simultaneously insisting that mitigating them will definitely lead to economic catastrophe, even though weather and climate modeling is considerably more rigorous than economic modeling and the extremely harsh and obvious value and life destruction of environmental disasters. More pollution is necessarily worse. You can hedge it in the short term, but in the long term you mitigate it or you die - and while in the long run, we are all dead, dying faster than you need to is maladaptive. Running the system too fast increases entropy and that is a one-way ticket.
nhebb 8y ago
Considering the current state of recycling, it may be better to just throw our plastics away instead of putting them in recycling bins. With China turning away our recycling, some cities have started burning them (according to recent headlines - I don't have a source). I would think that would be worse for our environment that putting them in landfills. According to the study by the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research [1], 90% of ocean waste comes from 10 rivers - 8 in Asia and 2 in Africa. I'm not sure if what we do in the U.S. and Europe will have much impact on the oceans. [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluting-our-oceans-comes-from-just-10-rivers/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti...
- gdfasfklshg4 8y ago
  I think that how bad burning is depends upon the temperature. The level of control of the temperature and the sortedness of the plastic. Also whether the generated heat is actually used.
- the6threplicant 8y ago
  > I'm not sure if what we do in the U.S. and Europe will have much impact It's not like all of that plastic is just domestic consumption. Right? We just exported our negative externalities. We don't really have a moral high-ground here. Even if you are a Jedi master.
- koheripbal 8y ago
  The old strategy of burying garbage is looking better and better. We're literally sequestering CO2 by doing so.
  - Dirlewanger 8y ago
    And the problem with this is that things like batteries and other similar chemicals eventually seep into groundwater...
toofy 8y ago
> but it’s all useless if a random idiot proceeds to dump my weekly household recycling output into a river and call it a day. Even if that random idiot dumps their recycling, it is anything but useless. If you didn't recycle, that would be at least 2 idiots dumping their recycling. Sorry for being pedantic, but it troubles me when people worry they aren't making a difference because some other random idiot doesn't participate.
- hvidgaard 8y ago
  He is saying that the "random idiot" throws OPs waste in the river when disposing of it. As in the sorting the OP does, makes absolutely no difference because further down the chain they do not use the sorted waste for anything.
- notacoward 8y ago
  I don't think "random idiot" here meant another consumer. It meant an idiot at the recycling company, though it might not be idiocy. The stuff you put out on the curb doesn't just magically vanish the moment the big green truck pulls away. They have to put it somewhere. As one article I read recently put it, most of us (in the US) haven't really been recycling for years. We've just been shipping our carefully sorted garbage to China, so it just piles up there instead of here. Until they stopped accepting shipments. Now "recyclers" in the US have to find other markets, or figure out how to do some actual recycling on their own. Since neither of those is as profitable as what they've been doing, it wouldn't be too surprising if some resort to just negating consumers' efforts by dumping what they collect wherever they think they can get away with it.
  - toofy 8y ago
    Is this fake recycling happening on any kind of scale? This seems like something which could be pretty easily mitigated against by citizens following up with their local cities to verify that things are actually ending up at recycling plants. I'd be furious, considering what I pay for these services if I were to find out they aren't actually recycling. I guess I'll have to look into my local situation. This is a frustrating realization. It's becoming exhausting that it seems like more and more we can't trust companies to do what they imply.
908087 8y ago
Imagine applying "tech" industry logic to this? "Bbbut regulation will prevent small players from competing"

by eecc 8y ago

wespiser_2018 8y ago

I disagree. Tragedy of the Commons is a situation that is about the management of wildlife and natural resources for the purposes of maximizing yield, with the lesson being regulated consumption results in maximal natural harvest. Pollution is just a negative economic externality, or consequence of an action that is unseen by the participants, where more pollution is always worse. Unfortunately, no one owns the oceans, and the normal ways for resolving externalities don't work without an aggrieved property owner.

EB66 8y ago
Your understanding of the tragedy of the commons is not accurate. Cases of pollution in public waters are typically prime examples of tragedies of the commons. Just because it's a "negative economic externality" does not mean that it is not a tragedy of the commons. Even the wiki page for tragedy of the commons lists "water pollution" as an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Examples https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Example... Maximizing yield via regulation is usually the ECON101 lesson that accompanies discussions about the tragedy of the commons.
- wespiser_2018 8y ago
  Still, I disagree, the mainstay of Tragedy of the Commons is about resource management through regulation, which does not apply well to oceans plastics. The "Water Pollution" example provided is about water management for the purposes of irrigation, and pollution of groundwater that needed for said irrigation. Ocean plastics could be different, if its just the systematic degradation of an ecosystem, orthogonal to resource management interests.
  - EB66 8y ago
    :smh:
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
blotter_paper 8y ago
>Unfortunately, no one owns the oceans, and the normal ways for resolving externalities don't work without an aggrieved property owner. Hmm, so if we want to reduce human pollution of the oceans... we just need to colonize the oceans!
matt4077 8y ago
„No one owns the oceans“ = commons
- wespiser_2018 8y ago
  Yes, I see. What I mean is that no single nation-state owns the oceans, so unlike most other examples of tragedy of the commons, where an organization has domain over the commons, the oceans are particularly difficult because there is no governing entity to resolve disagreements.
notacoward 8y ago
> Unfortunately, no one owns the oceans i.e. it's part of the commons. It has often been used as an example of such, because despoiling a resource still reduces supply just like direct depletion does. > the normal ways for resolving externalities don't work without an aggrieved property owner That is exactly what TotC is about. Even if one could split hairs about what's TotC vs. some other kind of externality, the fact remains that the dynamics are the same. In light of your own last sentence, do you disagree with GP's point that regulation is the necessary answer?
mikeash 8y ago
More pollution isn’t necessarily worse. The polluting activity can produce benefits that outweigh the harm of the pollution. Pollution is directly analogous to the standard Tragedy of the Commons scenario of a shared pasture, where the pasture equates to the environment, the cows are industry, and grazing the cows in the common pasture equates to industry producing pollution.
- anigbrowl 8y ago
  the pasture equates to environment, the cows are industry [...] That's your problem right there. You're treating the cows as somehow separate from the environment. For this example, let's consider the pasture as an island so that you have nowhere else to go. The actual externality of cows eating grass is poop, which fertilizes the soil to some degree but can poison it in excess. Overgrazing is not an externality as such; it's depletion, and then all your cows die and so do you. Maybe you get to eat a few of the cows while you wait for more grass to grow but after they're gone you won't be able to live on the grass. The benefits of temporarily having more cows than you can sustainably graze is an illusion, because you can't eat them all as soon as the grass runs out. You too are part of the ecosystem. (Ok, in the real world you have other land available, trade, and so on. But that just distributes the problem over a large population and area, postponing the point where carrying capacity becomes an issue. And more often than not, profits are retained by one party while pollution is dumped on another whose suffering the profiteer has no desire to alleviate. In this example that particular cheat code is not operational.) There are two reasons this might happen: external forcing of the ecosystem (drought, being hit by a meteor etc.), or letting your herd expand faster than the pasture can grow new grass, which is essentially borrowing time from the future and dying when you've done so. The uncertain risk of external forcing inclines us to hedge against its possibility by accumulating excess, but since the known and increasing risk of feedback can't be directly compared with the uncertain external risk people tend to 'rationalize it' by making irrational appeals to possibility rather than probability. The most obvious example of this today is people who object to any and all environmental regulation by dismissing predictions of environmental problems as too vague while simultaneously insisting that mitigating them will definitely lead to economic catastrophe, even though weather and climate modeling is considerably more rigorous than economic modeling and the extremely harsh and obvious value and life destruction of environmental disasters. More pollution is necessarily worse. You can hedge it in the short term, but in the long term you mitigate it or you die - and while in the long run, we are all dead, dying faster than you need to is maladaptive. Running the system too fast increases entropy and that is a one-way ticket.

nhebb 8y ago

Considering the current state of recycling, it may be better to just throw our plastics away instead of putting them in recycling bins. With China turning away our recycling, some cities have started burning them (according to recent headlines - I don't have a source). I would think that would be worse for our environment that putting them in landfills. According to the study by the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research [1], 90% of ocean waste comes from 10 rivers - 8 in Asia and 2 in Africa. I'm not sure if what we do in the U.S. and Europe will have much impact on the oceans. [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluting-our-oceans-comes-from-just-10-rivers/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti...

gdfasfklshg4 8y ago
I think that how bad burning is depends upon the temperature. The level of control of the temperature and the sortedness of the plastic. Also whether the generated heat is actually used.
the6threplicant 8y ago
> I'm not sure if what we do in the U.S. and Europe will have much impact It's not like all of that plastic is just domestic consumption. Right? We just exported our negative externalities. We don't really have a moral high-ground here. Even if you are a Jedi master.
koheripbal 8y ago
The old strategy of burying garbage is looking better and better. We're literally sequestering CO2 by doing so.
- Dirlewanger 8y ago
  And the problem with this is that things like batteries and other similar chemicals eventually seep into groundwater...

toofy 8y ago

> but it’s all useless if a random idiot proceeds to dump my weekly household recycling output into a river and call it a day. Even if that random idiot dumps their recycling, it is anything but useless. If you didn't recycle, that would be at least 2 idiots dumping their recycling. Sorry for being pedantic, but it troubles me when people worry they aren't making a difference because some other random idiot doesn't participate.

hvidgaard 8y ago
He is saying that the "random idiot" throws OPs waste in the river when disposing of it. As in the sorting the OP does, makes absolutely no difference because further down the chain they do not use the sorted waste for anything.
notacoward 8y ago
I don't think "random idiot" here meant another consumer. It meant an idiot at the recycling company, though it might not be idiocy. The stuff you put out on the curb doesn't just magically vanish the moment the big green truck pulls away. They have to put it somewhere. As one article I read recently put it, most of us (in the US) haven't really been recycling for years. We've just been shipping our carefully sorted garbage to China, so it just piles up there instead of here. Until they stopped accepting shipments. Now "recyclers" in the US have to find other markets, or figure out how to do some actual recycling on their own. Since neither of those is as profitable as what they've been doing, it wouldn't be too surprising if some resort to just negating consumers' efforts by dumping what they collect wherever they think they can get away with it.
- toofy 8y ago
  Is this fake recycling happening on any kind of scale? This seems like something which could be pretty easily mitigated against by citizens following up with their local cities to verify that things are actually ending up at recycling plants. I'd be furious, considering what I pay for these services if I were to find out they aren't actually recycling. I guess I'll have to look into my local situation. This is a frustrating realization. It's becoming exhausting that it seems like more and more we can't trust companies to do what they imply.

908087 8y ago

Imagine applying "tech" industry logic to this? "Bbbut regulation will prevent small players from competing"