Until China starts be more aggressive in cleaning up their environment or the USA decides to sanction against polluting industries, nothing will change.
Not on the scale China's has been. Their environmental destruction has been on such a scale that nearby countries, even those separated by ocean, have greatly impacted air quality and the oceans themselves have been greatly affected.
Sweden wasn't wreaking Poland's skies and waters as it industrialised.
London's "killer fog" is quite famous, and Russia's Lake Karachay still holds the distinction as the most polluted spot on earth.
Sure, China affects its neighbors. China is a big country compared to Sweden.
There's nothing unique about China's environmental problems. Every nation in Europe was at least as dirty during their own industrial revolutions. A hundred years ago, every building in urban Britain was jet black with soot. In 1952, the great smog of London killed 4000 people and brought the whole city to a standstill. The urban pollution in modern China would be entirely familiar to any elderly Briton.
China are making great steps to remedy their environmental problems. They're a leading investor in solar, battery and nuclear technology. They industrialised faster than the west and now they're cleaning up the mess faster than we did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Long-Range_Trans...
Comparing the scale of this environmental destruction with anything humanity did 100-200 years ago is what is, as you put it, "compete bunkum".
America's CO2 emissions per capita are still more than twice that of China. The Chinese government is clearly taking major steps to curb their resource use and their environmental impact; the current US administration is repealing environmental regulations en masse and has seriously mooted abolishing the EPA altogether.
China has some serious environmental problems, there's no debate about that. The problem is when China is painted as a unique or extreme environmental villain, which is simply untrue. China's environmental regulations currently lag behind the west by a few decades, but they're making meaningful progress in the right direction.
http://www.sustainabletable.org/906/waste-management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
The very article you linked put the entire amount of US farm waste at 335 million tons. This is much less than China's 1.3 billion tonnes (AKA "metric tons") for pork alone.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/cd.live/uploads/content_image/conte...
> America's CO2 emissions per capita are still more than twice that of China.
Again, from the standpoint of the environment, there is no extra credit for being absurdly overpopulated.
China emits more CO2 than the US, the EU and Russia combined.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
Per capita is the only equitable measure of pollution.
I certainly agree overpopulation of the earth is a tragedy likely felt for generations, but petty bickering over these very issues is why global leaders can't make any progress in greenhouse gas emissions.
> Per capita is the only equitable measure of pollution.
Would you then believe that if Australia were to have a population of 3 billion and produce double the pollution China currently does, that the continent would be doing well on environmental issues simply because per capita numbers were lower?
In any rational analysis, the environmental strain an ecosystem can withstand is directly related to the size of that ecosystem in comparison to the strain.
The strain an ecosystem can withstand is, unfortunately, not increased in a per capita manner as human population in the ecosystem increases. This may not be equitable. Nature often isn't.
Citation needed.
But just using logic, Sweden has about 10 million people today.
During industrialization it probably had much less (there was a population explosion in Europe after WW2).
Let's say Sweden had 5 million people. Industrializing country of 5 million of people vs industrializing country of 1-1.5 billion is something which is ridiculous to compare.
Imagine trying to industrialize double or triple of Europe from agrarian society again and tell me you think it would be clean and tidy process.
> "The 1950s census showed that China had 557 million people, and some professionally-trained demographers began urging that policies be put in place to limit population growth. Mao Zedong condemned such views on the grounds that under socialism a large population was a great resource, not a threat. Consequently, some of the most prominent proponents of birth control were labelled rightists and removed from power… by the time Mao died in 1976, China’s population exceeded 900 million."
-Ebrey, Patricia Buckley (2010). The Cambridge Illustrated History of China, p. 327.
In the future, we will likely see an even larger devastation of the environment from India and other countries with large and growing populations.
Not sure what can be done about it. I guess mother nature will sort that out once we run out of resources. It will be like a defensive reaction of an organism, human race might just get purged from the Earth.
All you have to is educate women and give them reliable access to birth control.
In every country where women are empowered to control their own lives and their own fertility, they have chosen to have fewer children.
We don't need some horrible Malthusian resource crunch, we just need feminism.
The fertility rate in China is massively below replacement at 1.57 births per woman. India is barely above replacement at 2.4. The fertility rate in India today is lower than the fertility rate was in the US in 1970. The global fertility rate has halved in 50 years. Even in the poorest countries in sub-Saharan Africa, the fertility rate is declining. The fertility rate in Rwanda has more than halved from 8.4 in 1980 to 3.8 today. As far as I can ascertain, Niger is the country on earth with a persistently high fertility rate.
Population growth is a solved problem.
I don't think the idea is "extra credit", but rather a matter of scale changing the nature of the problem, just as you wouldn't directly compare the problem of networking 10 computers to the problem of networking 1000 computers.
Capitalism saves us all. Children become too expensive so couple's will only have 2. Or none, if Korea and Japan predict a trend.
And so far not even that was enough to lift 1/3rd of their population out of poverty...
China should never have done this. There is no international EPA to stop them from pooping in their own yard so to speak.
Though conversely, no one forced western countries to send their waste to China without at least having a backup plan for if the economics (or relevant political matters) changed, as they apparently have.
But don't you have to admit China is quite socialist / communist and already "hinders" quite a bit? And yet they still rape the environment. Look at what they did with Lake Baikal in a few years. The Gobi desert is expanding. The smog and pollution is worse than LA in the 80s, and so on.
So, what is the answer? "Hindering" capitalism is too vague.
One thing that's undeniable is that without external intervention (which usually means the state), private industry will tend to pollute as much as it can.
Also - remember strong central government isn't inherently "left" or "right" and the current US view of the left/right spectrum isn't the only possible one. Staring at a 2-axis version of the political spectrum is a good way to break a damaging mental habit.
Now, unsaid is that means that advertising and consumerism must be minimized and provide utility other then make you buy the new shiny trendsetting thing.
Generally, when the cost of a bottle or bag is statistically significant, people care for them. Stores sell more bulk stuff, refill bottles, and offer little in the way of their own packaging. It's all a lot less convenient.
In the US, various bulk stores have tried to introduce the packaging reuse notion, but all have gone out of business because we take convenience over reuse.
This will only change when reuse is equally convenient. If I knew how to accomplish that, I wouldn't be pontificating here, but running my own business doing just that.
The delivery vans have doors at the side with rows of shelves that these trays fit onto, so it’s a lot better protected than a parcel thrown into the back of a van.
Picture: http://www.shetlandtimes.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Sa...
But the benefit has to be offset by those who choose to have bags because you get 10 times as many bags as you would if doing the packing yourself.
Not sure of the exact cost but there is a flat charge so it is the same for 1 bag or 100.
'Without bags' isn't always practical with some homes where there is restricted access.
Ever since they ruined Fresh by just lumping it in with Prime Now deliveries, most items come in disposable paper bags with disposable insulation inserts for frozen stuff.
I think the introduction of plastic bottles and paper cartons was the initial reason for dropping it? Back then recycling was purely a direct cost/benefit thing rather than for environmental reasons.
Seemed like a pretty good idea to me. It went out of business, though, I think because people wanted Pepsi and Coke brands.
Nothing stops the Pop Shoppe from dispensing Pepsi and Coke brands any more than it stops the local pizza place from dispensing Coke brand Coke from the soda fountain.
Surely, the license is not an obstacle since it's already being done.
I particularly loathe styrofoam peanuts and bubblewrap. Those should just be banned (or taxed heavily!). Use cardboard. There ought to be a way to "foam" paper to substitute for styrofoam peanuts. Then the stuff just disintegrates on its own after a while.
Maybe go back to waxed/oiled paper instead of plastic, too.
We just need some leadership(!) from central government to enforce widespread adoption of biodegradable packing materials.
It's not just that. Stores in the US don't trust their customers enough to move away from bulky packaging that takes forever to open.
Pretty straight-forward really. Increase the cost of once-off convenience. If it costs more to do it the dirty way, people will do it the clean way. But in america, they'll just vote in people that will dig a bigger hole. Probably in what used to be park-land.
Placing the blame entirely on idiot consumers isn't the best either. Where are the fortunate people in society who not just educating but also leading by example?
Elon Musk is the only person of importance I can think of that is actually putting their money where their mouth is to make the world a better place.
Go down your building. Look at people throwing trash. Do they bother to split paper, plastic or glass? Not at all. They'd throw anything into the closest trash.
The business model is super simple.
To me that has always seemed like a problem to be solved, rather than just tossing it all. Sure, that's the way it is today, but is it the way it has to be? If metals are so eminently recyclable, why can't other materials be?
I also have a sneaking suspicion that raw materials & landfills are just as subsidized if not more, making it difficult to rely on cost effectiveness as the ultimate arbiter of environmental friendliness or total social cost.
There are industries that are inherently pollutant or energy intensive.
Rich countries tax and regulate it. China welcomes it with open arms, allowing them to operate under very lax regulation.
China put itself in this situation.
Recycling, save for very specific things, is neither environmentally beneficial nor economically viable. We recycle so many things because the operations are subsidized, and we feel good because we assume the recycling bin doesn't end up in the dump.
Sorting refuse for recycling is a time consuming, tedious process. I hope that automation can actually make recycling more things viable. Reuse is best, but lots of things can be recycled for raw materials, particularly metals. Plastics don't recycle very well, glass requires more energy to reprocess than making new glass, and paper can be allowed to biodegrade or mixed into existing paper process.