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It seems you either don't know what an externality is, or you don't understand how plastic is an externality. In the second case, I literally cannot help you. T
by ouid 6y ago
It seems you either don't know what an externality is, or you don't understand how plastic is an externality. In the second case, I literally cannot help you. Try to imagine yourself as a member of the ecosystem which is actively collapsing? The oxygen you are breathing isn't made in a lab.
The creation, purchase, and disposal of plastic has consequences for people that are not involved in that chain, and therefore have no ability to be compensated (or in the case where those consequences produce a societal benefit, compensate) in this transaction.
This is a very common market failure. Most "transactions" actually effect everybody. One of the roles of government (and I suspect there are some radical economists that would say the only role of government) is to measure these external costs of transactions, and tax or subsidize the transactions accordingly. Externalities represent an essentially infinite amount of market failure, and the heuristics that are employed for dealing with them are almost necessarily very crude.
In the case of bottles, we are saying "Hey, we estimate the environmental damage of one plastic bottle at %d, and we are charging you that amount to sell one".
- thereisnospork 6y agoWhat specifically, and how large (dollars / plastic item/unit) are these externalites? If you can't describe and quantify them then there isn't an argument for compensating (taxes, bans) against them. [0] e.g. If I dump 100 PET soda bottles into the ocean how many humans would be inconvenienced, how many fish killed? My napkin math says essentially none of either.
- pixl97 6y agoHol up. Dumping those plastics in the ocean begins a cycle of creating microplastics. These plastic particles are being incorporated in food chains and the ramifications of this are not understood at this time, and may take some time to figure out.
- ouid 6y agoYour napkin math says this? So it must be right then... Surely all that is required for such a decision on the scale of every human doing this every year is some napkin math.
- Dylan16807 6y agoNapkin math is better than your complete lack of anything that resembles a number.
- ouid 6y agoNo, it's not. Napkin math is utterly useless here, and I think you don't understand utility. Ultimately, all utility functions (strategy space to R), when integrated over the rest of time, produce either a finite value, or an infinite value. Trying to figure out which, for a given strategy, is in general undecidable. Numbers sort of break down at this point. Or at least numbers as linear constructs. Humanity lives in a dynamical system, and as long as that dynamical system is stable enough (eigenvalues all near 1), we know from observation that evolution (in the biological sense) is capable of maintaining the invariants required to sustain human life and civilization. I will call this the flight envelope of life on earth. This is an extraordinary gift. If I can prove that Humanity's strategy preserves these invariants, I can count on evolution to extend our presence more or less indefinitely, at least up to the point where the sun runs out of hydrogen or we are struck by some very large celestial object. The squandering of this gift, by failing to maintain these invariants, has a literally incalculable cost. If we voluntarily exit the flight envelope of life, it is impossible to tell what will happen as a result, but it won't be as good as whatever we can get by staying in it. So my back of the napkin math says that the correct price to place on disposal of plastic into the ocean is "don't". There is no world in which the marginal utility of 50 trillion plastic bottles is greater than staying in the flight envelope.
- Dylan16807 6y agoThey don't last forever, the econonmy is not going to be in its current form for even a few hundred years, and if we're going with current methods the oil will run out too. And you didn't even give a reason that plastic would kick us out of the flight envelope if we ignore those flaws in the argument. So your very last line is true but you have done basically nothing to demonstrate that we have to choose between the two.