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A comment on Ocean plastic waste probably comes from ships, report says. Parent comment

Re:Ocean plastic waste probably comes from ships, report says by istjohn on Wednesday October 02, 2019 @05:52PM (#21141153)
You're misguided if you think we can prevent the coming climate catastrophe without making any sacrifices. It's not technological solutions or make tough choices. It's both. Perhaps your path would work if we started down it in earnest 40 years ago, but it's too late now. We're not going to turn this ship around with half measures.
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Re:Ocean plastic waste probably comes from ships, report says by pembrook on Wednesday October 02, 2019 @08:47PM (#21142470)
I fully agree, ideally we would be doing both! But due to obvious realities of humans, any time or money spent trying to tell people to stop doing what they are instinctively motivated to do is a waste.

Americans love to fool themselves into these naive, moralistic tirades that lead nowhere. Take the issue of teen pregnancy, for example.

For decades, the American approach was to wag their fingers at teenagers and tell them to not have sex (similar to how we currently wag our fingers at the developing world and their use of oil). Meanwhile, in Northern Europe, they focused on making contraception widely available for teen girls via state run healthcare programs.

Fast forward 50 years and the US has 6X as many teen pregnancies per capita as a country like the Netherlands. Ignoring human nature and focusing on moral appeals doesn't work for sex, and it won't work for consumption either:

https://www.guttmacher.org/fact-sheet/adolescent-pregnancy-a...

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Re:Ocean plastic waste probably comes from ships, report says by afiori on Wednesday October 02, 2019 @07:57PM (#21142102)
You are naive if you think your sacrifice will be enough, you need to convince others to join in, this is why so much of the funding focuses on reaching market viability.

If India and China will not join you every sacrifice you did was essentially worthless

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