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Study Pinpoints Source of Banned Gas That Saps Ozone Layer: Eastern China
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- stevespang 7y agoNot only banned flourocarbons, China and Asia are the main source of plastics entering the oceans through their rivers. Some are calling for environmental mercenaries, like Earth First! or GreenPeace, who will reek havoc on those who pollute or endanger the planet, ourselves included.
- mc32 7y agoGreenpeace etc have their hearts in the right place... sabotage though doesn’t help. Japan pays lip service and mostly ignores them. China will not take kindly to any interference. I can’t see them even trying.
- wavefunction 7y agoIf people won't respond to reason, should they be reasoned with? The danger of ego and the id. Yet still the danger grows nearer.
- internet_user 7y agohow does Japan pay lip service? I can only see that in terms of whaling, otherwise they seem to be a fairly clean country? Please point to more information.
- mc32 7y agoI’m only speaking to the interaction between Greenpeace and Japan, which is mostly concerning whaling. Japan kind of reluctantly puts up with their behavior. China won’t. They have near zero chance of making any impact in China.
- internet_user 7y agoPerhaps a Greenpeace ship needs to be attacked by Chinese on live TV in order to gain momentum? We need eco-martyrs too.
- mc32 7y agoIt won’t affect them just like when Russia poisons defectors abroad on foreign soil. Lots of noise and complaining but nothing can come of it. They’re too big.
- internet_user 7y agoNot just too big, they are outside of the US sphere of influence, while Japan is a client state really. We should still shame reprehensible behavior.
- mises 7y agoThey are not a client state, but may become one if we don't change things quickly. They have been an ally of America, because Amerifa projected an extremely strong influence into the Pacific post-WWII. We have had a succession of cowardly politicians afraid to stand up to others (see China's behavior in the S. China Sea, Russian Invasion of Ukraine, Iran building nukes). Both sides talk tough and refuse to act. Now we risk Iran dominating the Middle East and China becoming the world's number-one power and dominating Africa. We need to keep China down at all costs and prevent them from fully developing.
- andrekandre 7y ago> We need to keep China down at all costs really? china is a nuclear armed power, i’m not sure we want to see the result of “at all costs” type of thinking
- xfitm3 7y agoYet lawmakers want to take away my plastic straws. Sad.
- internet_user 7y agoWhich are probably made in China.
- Consultant32452 7y agoThey're also recycled* in China. *: In this context recycled means shipped to China and then dumped into the ocean.
- admn2 7y agoIs that actually what happens to our recycling? I was just wondering today how all this plastic gets repurposed. Does it get shipped overseas then dumped?
- Red_Tarsius 7y agoSome plastic is used to make polyester clothing, but the latter can't be recycled any further. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyF9MxlcItw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyF9MxlcItw
- internet_user 7y agoso what happens to that? burned?
- internet_user 7y agoWhich is why it's better to have cellulose/paper straws.
- xfitm3 7y agoPaper/cellulose straws are inferior and maddening to use. Yes, I need to use a straw.
- bArray 7y agoAs much as I hate to see the environment getting destroyed, eco-terrorism is not the way forwards. Every normal person is empowered to help: purchase from people whose ideals you agree with, win the hearts and minds of those around you, re-use everything you safely can.
- internet_user 7y agoHow much choice do you really have if literally all of your choices are from China?
- bArray 7y agoWe can bring about political change which makes these practices financially non-profitable. Simply use regulation to price them out of the market.
- slowmovintarget 7y agoAnd perhaps there should be tariffs on Chinese goods to prevent them from dumping poisonous products on the market. Some of these things like lead and cadmium in children's pencil cases made me wonder if this was intentional.
- umvi 7y ago> And perhaps there should be tariffs on Chinese goods Someone other than Trump will have to do it though, otherwise the motives are all wrong
- Fjolsvith 7y agoIf the results are positive, the motives won't matter.
- acct1771 7y agoA lot of it certainly isn't making Chinese manufacturing management lose sleep.
- refurb 7y agoOh god, I’d love to see some environmental mercenaries go after China. Look at how they treat their own Muslim citizens! You think they’d hesitate to lock up/beat/kill them?
- Fjolsvith 7y agoCommies vs Environmentalists? It'll never happen.
- internet_user 7y agoShould they be under international sanctions for polluting our commons and destrying the planet?
- llukas 7y agoSimpler is to return production to countries that have proper environmental regulations. Right now we outsource pollution production to China.
- internet_user 7y agoReally, moving a supplychain is easier than punitive tariffs/sanctions?
- kbenson 7y agoRequiring companies to not do business in countries (or use specific industries in those countries) based on some specific goal is a form of sanctions.
- whoevercares 7y agoUS was shipping most of its garbage to China for years until China stopped accepting it not too long ago. Millions of people in China had suffered from the pollutions of those imported garbages(there’s a documentary about this). Who’s at the moral high ground here?
- anthuman 7y ago"International" sanctions by whom? Most of china's pollution is manufacturing for the west. The biggest polluters ( in total and per capita ) in the world today are still europe and the US. Almost all the pollution and environmental destruction the past 200 years were by europe and the US. Should there be "international" sanctions on us? There ain't no saints this world. And those who claim to be saints are the worst villains.
- docker_up 7y agoI mean, let's be honest here: is this really a surprise? There's a business culture of dishonesty throughout the country that is unprecedented. Their food supply is poisoned by factories that simply don't care about life and only care about money. There have been articles about how cooking oil is recycled from waste, and how fish are fed feces instead of food and packed in ice from polluted waters. Fake milk, fake baby formula, fake eggs for crying out loud. They add poisonous chemicals to pass tests, but those chemicals killed hundreds of pets in the US. And when the FBI went to investigate, the factory has already been burned to the ground to eliminate evidence. My friend worked at Uber and she said that the amount of fraud perpetrated within China was staggering, more than any other country on a per capita basis. There was an article on HN recently talking about how some Chinese products on Amazon have 40x the safe amount of lead and 30x the safe amount of cadmium in children's products. How does lead and cadmium get into a Spider-man pencil case for fuck's sake? It's so bad that even Chinese citizens simply don't trust the products made in China. When Chinese citizens go abroad they buy things like baby formula because they know they can't trust Chinese baby formula. It's sickening. I'm teaching my children to completely stay away from cheap Chinese products because we seriously have no way to know if it's safe, and our government has cut funding time and time again so it doesn't have enough resources to test the goods coming in. It's reprehensible.
- internet_user 7y agoAnd not to mention dumping radioactive waste into steel/other metal. That's how cadium and lead end up in pencil cases - dump waste into consumer goods, and then ship them to your house. https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/the-growing-global-threat-of-radioactive-scrap-metal/ https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/the-growing-global... "India and China were the top sources of radioactive goods shipped to the U.S. through 2008, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Bartley, a metallurgist who has tracked radioactive contamination since the early 1990s, said there’s no evidence the situation has improved." It's not just reprehensible. It's down right psychopathic. Sick.
- roywiggins 7y agoA lot of awful things happen because people are just negligent, desperate, and ignorant. Perhaps a lot of the radioactive scrap is being created knowingly, I don't know. When there are well-documented incidents like this, I can imagine this happening in small ways all the time and stuff just entering the supply chain by accident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident Of course when organized crime gets involved your diagnosis of psychopathy is not too far off: https://gizmodo.com/the-mob-is-secretly-dumping-nuclear-waste-across-italy-1513190243 https://gizmodo.com/the-mob-is-secretly-dumping-nuclear-wast...
- mrnobody_67 7y agoWe also know the source of the plastic in the ocean... turns out it boils down to a very small number of rivers, in a very specific region of the world. 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...
- internet_user 7y agoTarrifs proportionate to percentage of pollutants in river outflow should work great. I've heard they say you tax things you don't want to see? why not tax pollution at the source, the rivers?
- raxxorrax 7y agoTried that but the river had no money.
- tty2300 7y agoLikely to change soon. Those areas have stopped buying plastic waste from the rest of the world.
- sephamorr 7y agoHaving seen the trash coming down several of these rivers in person, everything I could identify seemed to be of local origin. I certainly didn't see non-local languages written on plastic bottles, for example.
- internet_user 7y agoIt's just fashionable to blame everything on the West. The East isn't any different.
- daodedickinson 7y agoSo absolutely nothing was coming from upstream? Or, at least, it seemed local trash was dominating the area and perhaps staying put? Perhaps when it gets too full of local trash, some of it gets moved to the ocean?
- heybrendan 7y agoTFA made me think of Dr. Mehmet Oz' interview of Dr. Jordan Peterson [1] from last year (2018). I've transcribed part of the interview below: Dr. Jordan Peterson: > "I've always been obsessed with totalitarianism and authoritarian governments whether they're on the Right or the Left for years--decades really. I spent almost all of my free time thinking about what happened in Nazi Germany and in Russia during the Soviet era; but also when Mao was [in] China--there were other places as well. [I was] trying to understand how it was that we could have got off the rails so absolutely terribly. I started studying that at the collectivist level, looking for political or economic reasons. But as I investigated further those levels of analysis [...] weren't providing the answers that I wanted--I think partly because I was really interested in the notion that there's something to learn from what happened, say in Nazi Germany: but there's something to learn at an individual level. That's my estimation. I don't think that there were innocent masses of people led astray by a single malevolent leader. I don't think the fundamental motivations for what happened in Nazi Germany were economic and I don't think they were in the Soviet Union either. As I read more and more about the situation, I realized that the proclivity of individuals to avoid responsibility and to lie, especially about their own lives and about their own experience, were really the reasons that those systems went so far astray." > "[...] The lessons there for me were psychological and that taught me an awful lot about the role of the individual: people like Viktor Frankl, for example, who wrote Man's Search for Meaning, a perennial classic and a great book--insisted that a large part of the reason that Germany went off the rails so badly was because individual Germans were so willing to falsify their own experience. Alexander Solzhenitsyn who wrote the Gulag Archipelago, the best document on what happened in the Soviet Union, also made exactly the same argument." > "So I got interested in the psychological causes of catastrophic governance and that taught me a lot. It taught me about responsibility. About the responsibility of the sovereign individual. We have an idea in our [Western] culture, it's a very powerful idea: that each of us is of intrinsic value. But associated with that value is a responsibility: we have a responsibility for our own integrity and for that of our families but also of the state." This begs the question: are Chinese business men and women willing to falsify their own experience at the expense of the {environment,personal integrity} to make a buck and/or survive? The business culture of dishonesty (borrowing from HN user docker_up) can't persist forever. [1] https://youtu.be/AscPHmLWo-M?t=322 https://youtu.be/AscPHmLWo-M?t=322
- tozeur 7y agoHaving been an expat traveled to over 25 countries, I can confidently say our natural world is fucked. Modern industrialism has given the third world too much manufacturing power. And they aren’t aware of the consequences and don’t care, because “fuckit I want kids toys and double ply toilet paper for my family too, not just the Westerners”
- BurningFrog 7y agoAll currently rich "sophisticated" countries were in a similar phase when they were fighting their way out of poverty. Once countries get rich enough, they can afford to care about the environment. China seems to advance much faster than others did historically, so I'm hopeful.
- whiddershins 7y agoWe also assumed as countries became more rich/industrialized/advanced they would become more democratic, and more concerned with human rights, and less zero-sum adversarial in dealing with the United States. I think those hopes are no longer mainstream thinking in regards to China. How confident should we be about the prediction that China will adopt similar policies to the US in regards to the things you are mentioning?
- BurningFrog 7y agoChina has definitely become much better on human rights. It's not often mentioned in polite company, but the Chinese communist government killed ~65 million of its own citizens under Mao. I don't want to downplay the current regime's many and serious human rights violations, but they are thankfully on a much more modest level. Internationally, China has focused strongly on peaceful trade, not military confrontation.
- Joakal 7y agoThey didn't kill them. They went through a government change, a revolution where they were experienced in fighting, not farming. The alternative was living under the old government that they hated. It's like in Zimbabwe, they kicked out the white farmers and suddenly they're no longer the bread state.
- wyxuan 7y agoTragedy of the commons. If there is a shared resource, let the people act in their self interest and sap away all of it.
- wtdata 7y agoSincerely, all this environmentalist's manifestations we are seeing in EU, would actually make sense if they where in front of the Chinese embassies here. Instead they keep demanding local actions from the EU, as if the EU hasn't been in the forefront of environmental protection for almost half a century now. This way they are just diverting the attention away from the real main issue: China.