14 ms·

3M has been facing a raft of litigation that has prompted the move Generally speaking, toxic substances are only "cheap" due to externalizing many of the costs

• throwawaylinux 4y ago
  > 3M has been facing a raft of litigation that has prompted the move Seems like yet again corrupt and incompetent regulators and oversight fails, and real action only really happens when the courts are used to hold them to account for damages. EDIT: Maybe those libertarians do have a good idea now and again...
  • wahnfrieden 4y ago
    Rather than “ancaps” you might rather look toward actual anarchism
• runnerup 4y ago
  I always thought that if our universe is actually a simulation, it's one of countless simulations trying to determine a solution to the Tragedy of the Commons. I suspect it's one of the hardest problems to solve in any universe.
  • jraby3 4y ago
    I try really hard not to use single use plastic. Especially plastic bags, plastic bottles, etc. This frequently means I’ll be extremely thirst throughout some days but will wait till I get home or to work to drink filtered water out of the tap. I went to Las Vegas about a year ago on a work trip and realized that the hotel I stayed at uses more plastic bottles in an hour than I would use in my lifetime with no thought to conserving them. All this to say that tragedy of the commons is an extremely hard problem to solve, even when you know about it and care. I constantly repeat to myself “no single drop of rain thinks it’s responsible for the flood” and try not to think of that Vegas hotel.
    • pigsty 4y ago
      That example is one reason why legislation is necessary. There will always be detractors saying we should just make people want to make the right choice, but all it takes is one person in a company to make a decision that outweighs the collective efforts of millions.
      • dublin 4y ago
        Aristo! Aristo! A la lanterne!
    • swarnie 4y ago
      I've got to a similar conclusion as you but with a very different outcome. It makes absolutely no difference if i minimise my plastic or diligently sort them for recycling because a Vegas hotel will make all my efforts for naught. Climate change is already here and there is nothing the individual can do about it. The optimum play now is to accept that the group is useless and make individual steps to mitigate the effects on you personally. Sorry, never nice doing a pre-7am nihilism dump.
      • jraby3 4y ago
        I think individuals can help but not so much by conservation. More in trying to affect policy change at local or national political agencies.
      • paulryanrogers 4y ago
        Apathy guarantees failure. "All it takes for evil men to succeed..." and all.
    • wjnc 4y ago
      Dehydration is more of a risk to you than the environmental risks you marginally save on others. Still I applaud the effort since the economists view is too restricted. Get a stainless steel container and hydrate for a lifetime.
      • 4y ago
  • silisili 4y ago
    It's hard to solve in our system, which implicitly encourages it to happen. In a non capitalistic, small enough community it isn't a worry. The real problem I think is how to scale that thinking to a world population.
  • worldsayshi 4y ago
    Calculate the hidden cost. Slap a proportional tax on the products that cause the cost. Then split the tax income evenly to the population. Is it really that hard or are we making it hard?
    • worldsayshi 4y ago
      I mean it's hard in the same way as converting from a dictatorship to a democracy is hard. There's a huge political transaction cost. And then you'll wonder what took you so long.
    • adrianN 4y ago
      Calculate the hidden cost. Tell the companies that you'll either vote for a tax or accept a lucrative post in their board of directors after your term is over. Profit! Calculate the hidden cost. Spend half of the cost on a marketing campaign to sway public opinion against a tax. Profit!
      • worldsayshi 4y ago
        Maybe one way to mitigate is to have a separate branch of the political system dedicated to calculating the costs. Then make the methods for calculating as publicly available as possible so that they can be reproduced by non-profits. We have managed judicial systems. We can manage this too.
        • adrianN 4y ago
          I don't see how that helps. For example there are many publications available that calculate the cost of CO2, eg [1] from the German government. Yet global warming is still a problem. [1] https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/1410/publikationen/2020-12-21_methodenkonvention_3_1_kostensaetze.pdf https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/14...
          • worldsayshi 4y ago
            Dictatorships are still a problem too. But it's not because we don't know what the alternative looks like. Figuring out what the alternative should look like is a big challenge but let's not pretend that that is the main issue here.
  • quickthrower2 4y ago
    Look out mother mature in general. It is brutal. Can we socially evolve like the Vulcans?
    • 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
      Evolving into a culture of totalitarian rationalism like the Vulcan, would require irrational parties to be at an evolutionary disadvantage. That rules out any modern democracy from ever doing it, since discriminating anyone acting on instinct or feelings won't ever get a majority vote. Totalitarian regimes might succeed, though.
      • quickthrower2 4y ago
        I wonder if we are "beyond the basics of evolution and selfish genes" now in terms of human intelligence, technology, society and soon: AI. For example once a species can edit it's own genes, you get to a point where maybe the genes "competing" and "being selfish" becomes meaningless, and some other defining "replication force" takes over as the dominate shaping of future life. We might get to "the selfish data"? Genes being a special case.
        • 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
          Narh, when it comes to breeding, we humans tend to be quite predicable. Outliers definitely exist, but they generally don't procreate as much as people who just feel the urge and go for it. In order to shape evolution you'd need to make what would essentially begin as an edge case and make sure it's such an advantage that it reduces the likelyhood of others having more children than you.
          • quickthrower2 4y ago
            True, and this is why ants and cockroaches are more “evolved“ than humans. (although is it the being or the gene?) But humans can conceive bigger goals: we could genetically engineer new beings, and replace natural gestation with something else. These are untenable ideas but in 100 yrs ethics might change and the temptation to change how we and things evolve would be there.
  • EastLondonCoder 4y ago
    Is it really that hard though? On the top of my mind I can come up with several success stories of solving tragedy of the commons type of problems. For example: Global regulation around CFCs made the ozone hole shrink The don't mess with texas anti littering campaign and similar outreach programs worldwide reduced littering In general taxing negative externalities seems to have an effect
    • amelius 4y ago
      The solution isn't difficult. It is getting everyone to agree on that solution that is difficult.
      • Xelynega 4y ago
        Or is most of the difficulty in trying to convince people who've read articles about "the tragic of the commons" and think that's the natural state of the world that they're wrong?
  • stuaxo 4y ago
    We should remember that the original tragedy of the commons didn't happen, the idea was based on false assumptions around how greedy people are. We could start by looking at how people managed systems sustainably including the original commons. https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false-and-dangerous-myth https://aeon.co/essays/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-is-a-false...
    • oblio 4y ago
      Your article doesn't say what you're saying. Your article says that the tragedy of the commons does not have to happen, but we don't really have the numbers. Those examples could be cherry picking, and everyone's personal experience kind of says that the opposite is more common (commons mismanagement). That's why the original article was so influential: it gave a name to something we've always seen. It's great that we can assume tragedy of the commons is not as immutable as some law of physics, but it still looks like a powerful social force unless proven otherwise. And I imagine, like any social study, it's going to be very hard to get actual numbers for the tragedy of the commons versus comedy of the commons scenarios.
      • tim333 4y ago
        I live in Britain where the original commons were located and have yet to see a tragic one. The idea may apply to things like overfishing.
        • throwaway2037 4y ago
          Do you think the overfishing situation will get better/worse/same after Brexit?
          • tim333 4y ago
            No idea to be honest.
          • Xelynega 4y ago
            That's a question that's nearly irrelevant to determining if overfishing is because of a tradgedy of the commons. If post-brexit overfishing numbers increase, what evidence is there that the increase is due to individual greed and not a government policy?
  • titzer 4y ago
    Earth's ecosystems have evolved biodiversity for exactly this reason: to recycle the waste products of life forms at all levels. They've gotten really good at this. There is still geologic evidence of this having gone way, way out of control, like vast limestone deposits, coal, and fossil fuels. Those were the unrecyclable byproducts of the day. Who knows what plastic will look like in the geologic record, but at this point they look destined to be a fine dust that will give future (non-human, likely) geologists a perfect marker of the Holocene.
    • oblio 4y ago
      Life optimizes for the most efficient resource usage. Those deposits were not an efficient source of energy. But life itself is incredible, we have non-oxygen using lifeforms (inefficient, the earliest lifeforms), sulphur-eating lifeforms. Life can use up almost anything, <<if it has to>>. If it doesn't, it just leaves it alone.
  • nwienert 4y ago
    Japan
  • hoseja 4y ago
    It's only hard if you care about individual rights. Otherwise your multicellular self is a good example of a solution.
  • goodpoint 4y ago
    > Tragedy of the Commons ... one of the hardest problems to solve in any universe. No, it's not at all. It's a problem that humans encountered for millennia and solved successfully again and again. That's what organized society is for.
  • fghjkewur 4y ago
    the funny thing about your comment is that it is only a hard problem because you were fooled on the premise. the term itself was a fake argument against the commons, in favour of privatization of commons. every single word of the argument today is known to have been a falacy. so the answer to the tragedy of the commons is to not believe in it. property is the real issue. but even thinking that way will offend your sensibilities.
  • marssaxman 4y ago
    The idea of the "tragedy of the commons" is an ahistorical myth, promulgated quite recently by a racist, eugenicist, nationalist fearmonger: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-tragedy-of-the-tragedy-of-the-commons/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-tragedy-of-t... History offers many examples of human communities successfully managing their common resources, over generations.
    • TEP_Kim_Il_Sung 4y ago
      Those communities are usually around Dunbar's number, 100-300 people, or organized around such. It's easier if you know the people you live with.
    • tomrod 4y ago
      This article is both an illuminating critique of the author but also an ad hominem to the argument. Terrible people can be absolutely correct. In this case, the tragedy of the commons both exists and affects many things (like international fishing). It is true that history shows examples of communities managing their common resources over generations. This need not be the default; when it isn't you get the tragedy of the commons. That is why its important to both understand it and to build community norms that encourage respect for common resources. Would I be correct in my read of your take that you don't believe the tragedy of the commons exists? If it does, do the original author's other beliefs matter when discussing it?
      • Xelynega 4y ago
        > It's true that history shows examples of communities managing their common resources over generations. This need not be the default; when it isn't you get the tragedy of the commons It looks like you're agreeing that counterexamples to "tradgedy of the commons" being a default state exist in history yet your conclusion is "tragedy of the commons is the default if a better option isn't employed". Why can't it be true(based off your same evidence) that tragedy of the commons is an unnatural state, and respect for common resources is the default?
      • marssaxman 4y ago
  • ambientenv 4y ago
    "I suspect it's one of the hardest problems to solve in any universe" ... and yet solve it we must. I feel it will begin with a new enlightenment which will be thrust upon us as our survival becomes increasingly threatened and that will manifest in a rewriting of our core values and a redefinition of wealth more in line with and reverence for the natural world.
  • guerrilla 4y ago
    Are you familiar with the work of Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in economics, who won it for debunking the so-called Tragedy of the Commons in general and specifying where it applies in particular?
  • vt85 4y ago
    [dead]
  • einpoklum 4y ago
    There was, and is, no tragedy of the commons. It is an a-historical thought experiment by pro-capitalist writers. The commons work well enough, and are managed collectively. Want to read the high-brow argument? Try: https://anarchistfaq.org/afaq/sectionI.html#seci6 https://anarchistfaq.org/afaq/sectionI.html#seci6 Want the lived-experience argument? I live in Palestine. Palestinian villages managed their lands collectively for ages and ages, up until the 20th century. This broke down not because anybody was misusing the commons, or fencing, or whatever - it broke down because the damn Ottomans started a land registry and you got a few people making themselves official owners of huge swaths of land they should not have had any claim to. So the only tragedy was external elements disrupting the commons by force.
• fastball 4y ago
  It's a difficult balance to strike though. Forcing companies to consider all possible externalities is very difficult / expensive to get right. And if you don't get it exactly right, you very quickly increase your surface area for issues like regulatory capture, etc. Just another in the long list of coordination problems where it is hard to arrive at the pareto-optimal solution given human selfishness and our lack of omniscience.
  • jahnu 4y ago
    These companies often know quite well there is a huge cost they are offloading on others. Evidence for this is seen in the huge sums spent on lobbying and politics in general.
    • flownoon 4y ago
      This essay suggests that the amounts spent on lobbying are not in fact huge sums: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in-almonds/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/09/18/too-much-dark-money-in...
• eyelidlessness 4y ago
  The humans making the cost/benefit analysis are largely the ones whose cost is actually external. I certainly wouldn’t do the same math, but I’m not casually enriching myself by making people sick. The people who buy their products are largely their victims, not their accomplices. Nearly everyone does NOT own the means of production, and the few who do know exactly what’s wrong and keep on doing it to everyone but themselves until they’re forced to stop. Maybe someday we’ll realize that too.
  • bwi4 4y ago
    Technically, Blackrock and Vanguard own the means of production. We gave them the capital to do so through our pensions and 401(k)s. My 401(k) menu doesn't include ESG funds, but those that exist have higher expenses and lower performance than an indiscriminate index fund. If the regulators have been captured by lobbying and revolving doors to industry, the only option left is to vote with your wallet, but that's easier said than done.
    • eyelidlessness 4y ago
      > the only option left is to vote with your wallet I know it’s not popular here but I’ll say it: class analysis. You can vote with your fingers and bones. You can vote with your personal dignity. Your investment portfolios are just part of capitalism and it isn’t predestined.
      • maeln 4y ago
        And voting with your wallet means that if you are poor, you have no voice.
    • triceratops 4y ago
      Divestment without regulations doesn't work. You dumping your polluting investments is just someone else's opportunity to pick them up for cheap and make a profit. Voting with your wallet is noble, but pointless. Vote with your actual vote.
• upon_drumhead 4y ago
  While it's not 3M, American Scandal (Podcast) did a season on a coverup by DuPont that's totally worth listening to. https://wondery.com/shows/american-scandal/season/41/ https://wondery.com/shows/american-scandal/season/41/
  • steve_adams_86 4y ago
    I haven’t done my homework but I find it strange that I hear so much about 3M while DuPont seems as bad — or worse — but it could simply be that I’ve read more about DuPont and I’m missing some inexhaustible list of atrocities 3M has committed.
    • bwi4 4y ago
      DuPont discovered PTFE while exploring for new refrigerants. It was used in the Manhattan Project because it could resist flourine used in the gaseous diffusion of uranium, then marketed as Teflon after WWII. 3M discovered PFOS while developing rubber that wouldn't degrade when exposed to jet fuel, then marketed it as Scotchgard.
      • Mistletoe 4y ago
        I shudder when I think about how I used to coat every new couch and my shoes with this stuff. No mask when applying. Skin contact for years…
• rich_sasha 4y ago
  Coal cheap, nuclear expensive.
  • Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    Nuclear objectionable due to the highly toxic waste product for which no accepted solution has been implemented yet. I mean don't get me wrong, I'm in favor of nuclear energy as a CO2-less high potential source of energy, it's just that they're fucking around with the waste too much and umming and arring about it while it just sits near the nuclear power plants, instead of just burying it in a mountain like they do in finland [0]). They could decomission a strip mine and fill it back up with lead-and-concrete encased nuclear waste, then bury it in another few hundred meters of sand - nobody would be the wiser for the next millennia. In theory. [0] https://www.science.org/content/article/finland-built-tomb-store-nuclear-waste-can-it-survive-100000-years https://www.science.org/content/article/finland-built-tomb-s...
    • Robotbeat 4y ago
      It’s pretty safe being stored near nuclear power plants. The folks keeping it from being buried in a mountain are folks opposed to nuclear energy… ironically due to (overblown) waste concerns. They don’t WANT the waste problem to be solved.
  • diordiderot 4y ago
    Yeah, but the point is thats only if you don't price in externalities. (Sorry if this is meant to be a sarcastic comment)
• Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  We get it, but we don't care because capitalism / free market / small government / money / competition. Competition goes beyond just companies too, countries compete with each other, to the point of starting wars over e.g. natural resources, territory, and access to infrastructure. And one future scenario is wars over more basic resources like food and water, as climate change will cause droughts and famines. At the very least it will (and already is) triggering mass migrations.
  • refurb 4y ago
    I doubt it’s capitalism when communist countries were some of the worst polluters to date.
    • kennywinker 4y ago
      Who are you referring to? You use the past tense, which means you're probably not pointing a finger at china - which is hardly communist, making huge strides in cleaning up their emissions, and their emissions are largely the result of making stuff for the rest of the world. Which means you're probably talking about now-defunct communist countries, i.e. the soviet union? So your argument against capitalism driving pollution in the hundreds of countries around the world where it appears to be driving pollution is a single example? A country that did most of it's polluting during a rapid industrialization with the stated goal of "catching up with the west". Meanwhile during that same soviet period not one but *two* rivers caught on fire in a single year in the USA. Which is all to say that I'm unconvinced. It really seems like the driver of most of the pollution in the world has been capitalism. Perhaps communism is worse, but that doesn't let capitalism off the hook - it's not a two-choice binary system here.
  • anonkogudhyfhhf 4y ago
    Not really. Countries define property rights and solve problems. Domestic overfishing is countries removing externalities and making them part of the market
• nonethewiser 4y ago
  > Maybe someday humans will get that. Clearly 3M has. What's unfortunate is the long feedback loop. It takes a lot of damage before it starts becoming expensive for suppliers.
• itsoktocry 4y ago
  >Maybe someday humans will get that. We do get it. Sometimes the costs aren't known in advance, and you can't include every potential future issue in the cost/benefit calculus. Isn't that literally what the article is pointing at? Shareholders put pressure on the company to stop this, and they are. Sounds like a success story.
  • frgtpsswrdlame 4y ago
    I don't think it's a success story when a chemical company is pressured to stop producing something because of it's health effects after that chemical has made it into the blood of nearly every individual on the planet.
  • hammock 4y ago
    >Sometimes the costs aren't known in advance 3M knew for decades about the dangers of exposure to PFAS chemicals but didn’t inform the public. During the 1970s and ’80s, it conducted studies on its US workers that showed PFAS building up in the bloodstream. In 1977 the company determined PFOS was “more toxic than anticipated” in a study of rats and monkeys; in 1978 a monkey study had to be stopped after all the animals died within the first few days because the PFOS doses were too high. In 1980, minutes from an internal 3M meeting said workers at the factory in Antwerp were told the chemicals had been found in human blood, but the company decided not to tell the government
  • rurp 4y ago
    Expecting investors to vote against their own financial interests for the greater good is a terrible system. 3M investors only care because of the threat of lawsuits and other legal trouble; those are the mechanisms we need to improve. Stricter environmental rules and enforcement will force companies to reduce harmful externalities. The shareholder pressure is incidental. Free markets are generally bad at handling pollution because the costs are so diffuse and long term; there's often a way to increase profits at the expense of someone else's health in a manner that can't be precisely quantified immediately.
• iicc 4y ago
  >Maybe someday humans will get that. That's what the litigation is.
  • kennywinker 4y ago
    The implication of your statement is that the people running 3M are acting in an in-human way. I would agree.
• andrepd 4y ago
  The same thing applies to many other activities: fossil fuels, usage of single-use plastics that someone else will clean up, promotion of unhealthy and addictive substances like tobacco, etc. I am skeptic that market mechanisms achieve the best outcomes at all times, but I'm positively certain they don't when externalities are not even priced in!
• willio58 4y ago
  Agreed. If we could force companies to pay for externalized costs we could get to a net-zero earth immediately. Suddenly investments in green energy would increase 1000x
  • m463 4y ago
    (and plunge civilization into a dark age overnight) Maybe people would stop self destructive habits like cigarettes and alcohol... (and maybe meat, and keeping pets) But all current electricity use would be diverted to solar panel and battery factories for a few years. Only rich people with solar panels could take hot showers... probably then only during sunny days. (interesting thought experiment)
    • s3p 4y ago
      None of this is directly implicated by the comment above.
• dmitryminkovsky 4y ago
  This can be applied to basically all “cheap” things. There’s a Russian saying: “a cheap person pays twice.”
• lazide 4y ago
  Eh, there is literally nothing this doesn’t apply to, near as I can tell. We just gloss over, or hyperfocus on areas based on current fashions.
• cryptonector 4y ago
  Hey Doreen, did you get access back to your google accounts?