Re:Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated
by frafra on Monday July 15, 2019 @06:32AM
(#20439483)
+1: landfills is the worst option and should be never used for non-inert materials (that is why EU mandates incineration before bringing waste to the landfill). It is very hard and expensive to do it properly, with a perfect first layer, in a stable place, putting a lot of heterogeneous compounds doing a lot of different (and even unexpected) chemical reactions, using pipes to exchange air and drain/burn methane, maintenance and monitoring the site even for hundreds of year after closing it. It is a nightmare to handle that kind of landfills. Please incinerate everything first, and maybe reuse the ashes for public roads, benches and so on.
Re:Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated
by reitzensteinm on Monday July 15, 2019 @02:38AM
(#20438625)
Worrying about how carbon taxes will affect the poor is absolutely legitimate, and that's coming from someone that thinks we need one yesterday. Calling it baseless propaganda probably says more about you than it does the argument in question.
Re:Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated
by bildung on Monday July 15, 2019 @04:15AM
(#20438980)
As a more generous interpretation of ZeroGravitas' comment: As the bird-and-windmill example shows, those people "worrying" are thought of as denying the fundamental viability of carbon taxes and only use the poor as a popular argument. Worrying about progressive taxation effects is of course very important, but then again also pretty easy to mitigate. And considering the fact that the parties propagating carbon taxes are mostly also the parties caring about the poor, I'm not very worried that the poor will be willingly outpriced of their mobility needs here. After all, that new tax makes the very resources available that would be needed to mitigate the unequal burden it would create.
Re:Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated
by reitzensteinm on Monday July 15, 2019 @05:18AM
(#20439199)
There's a fairly large contingent in tech that leans libertarian while also recognizing the impending climate disaster. A climate tax is simply accounting for the externalities of your actions.
I wouldn't at all assume that somebody on this site advocating for a carbon tax would take care to not make it regressive, and I think parent's lumping it in with bird strikes (a total red herring considering nobody is talking about banning cats or glass windows) and lithium ion mining (a failure to account for opportunity cost) is pretty conclusive.
That said, I'd be happy to learn I'm mistaken.
Re:Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated
by bildung on Monday July 15, 2019 @05:46AM
(#20439301)
Yes I am not from the US and thus I may be biased by the local political spectrum. Libertarianism is something uniquely US-American, I think. We do have bird strike protesters, though, and they pretty much all are from the right.
Re:Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated
by SamPatt on Sunday July 14, 2019 @05:47PM
(#20436329)
The first two citations are NPR. Not libertarian by any stretch of the imagination.
Re:Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated
by balfirevic on Sunday July 14, 2019 @06:50PM
(#20436767)
And neither is HN for that matter.
Re:Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated
by jeremysalwen on Sunday July 14, 2019 @10:58PM
(#20437792)
lol
Re:Landfill is underrated and recycling overrated
by ClumsyPilot on Monday July 15, 2019 @12:34PM
(#20442440)
Lol
The article likewise cites a whole bunch of libertarian sources that unsurprisingly conclude that government interference is bad.
On the other hand, here's a document comparing recycling to landfill (and incineration to generate power and a couple of other things). It summarises all the expert research from the actual field, rather than right wing economists.
Generally the experts suggest landfill is the worst option on several scales for basically all materials:
http://www.wrap.org.uk/content/environmental-benefits-recycl...
People who think recycling isn't good for the environment seem to fall into the same group as those who really worry about all the birds affected by wind turbines, or the impact of lithium mining or how carbon taxes will hurt the poor i.e. baseless propaganda aimed at people who care about the environment coming from people who clearly don't give a hoot.