Nope, this is completely wrong. People want to help but they have limited bandwidth. When you give them someway they can feel like they are helping without meaningfully doing anything, you’ve reduced their attention/effort that will go into real solutions.
Doing minuscule shit is absolutely harmful to the cause. This is one of those areas where a compromise is as bad as doing nothing with the additional downside of patting yourself on the back thinking you made progress.
It's a shame that a couple of generations have been led to believe that the only real environmental disaster is climate change. It's certainly a big and pressing one, but it's like we've all but forgotten the many other issues that our lifestyle of ready massive consumption has caused.
Some examples of other environmental impacts that 'reduce, reuse and recycle' helps with: the impact of mining and oilfield operations on the natural environment; heavy metals and other toxins in waterways from mining and badly managed landfills; microplastics in the ocean; acid rain from Nox/Sox emissions; many other forms of air pollution from the mining industry.
Just to name a few.
Methane and Nitrous Oxide also play a massive role. We produce less of those mostly through gas leaks and shipping/diesel fuel but they are a lot worse than CO2 if we think of it in terms of per kilo impact.
I am wholely in agreement with you but there are some pretty big percentage wise holes that we need to plug.
Namely:
1. Getting ride of coal and Natural Gas power generation (which means replacing with renewables +storage, or fission, none of which are easily deployable)
2. Stopping methane leaks in Oil&Gas pipelines and active/decomissioned wells.
And of course we shouldn't just ban or tax disposable vapers. But all disposable electronics.
Carnival Cruise's line of ships (which contain about 50 ships) contribute the same amount of emissions as all the cars in Europe. We could make the hard descision to regulate cruise ships away or maybe everyone in Europe could stop driving altogther
Yeah, Cruise ships are pretty nuts!
No. Stepping over dollars to pick up pennies is stupid.
These are the classical mistakes people make when optimizing software.
This way you end up spending a lot of effort to make your code 0.0012% faster.
I have no doubt this mistake will keep being made throughout all of human history.
From Primary Microplastics in the Oceans: Boucher & Friot 2017
35% Clothing and textiles
28% Tyres
24% City dust
7% Road markings
3.7% Marine coatings
2% Beauty products
<1% Plastic nurdlesMy source is https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2018/08/Great-Pacific-Gar..., which in turn sources its data from https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22939-w
The obvious issues are plastics breakdown at wildly different rates so the ratios of plastic pollution doesn’t match the ratios seen in the ocean. There are significant differences in where each type of plastic enters the ocean and where it ends up so sampling different parts of the ocean results in different observations. Finally sizes vary widely so measuring by volume, piece, or weight gives different results.
On top of this it’s not always easy to say the actual origin of a given piece was.
Seems like you'll only do things that make a significant contribution. Yes, with drinking straws it was a symbolic action, and yes you risk people thinking "ok, done it". But the current alternative is no action at all. We need to start, take the first small steps before chastising ourselves for not having gone any miles yet.
Most of the world is spending huge effort to decarbonize. May well not be enough, but it's very different from nothing.
I strongly recommend that, wherever you get your news from, try looking somewhere else!!
If you're talking about the sub-sub-set of that which is disposable electronics containing lithium cells, we were talking past each other.
Why is there a dichotomy of "fund low impact project that's relevant to this thread" and "do nothing at all"?
It doesnt matter if its 0.1% or 10% -> we should fix all of those cases with sensible laws.
The goal is to reach that 90% in total.
Politics are just corrupted and lazy old farts.
I know several people that vape but all of them use pretty nice reusable ones.
Personally I'd be comfortable seeing them banned - for the same reason we banned the sale of individual cigarettes. Their only role in the market is to make addiction accessible at the lowest barrier to entry.
I hope they are banned. There is no reason for something like this to be disposable.