Heck, if you want poor countries to be accountable for their own pollution then they shouldn’t be forced to trade with developed countries who don’t want to make any concessions about the use of plastics, but I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t be a popular stance with HN either.
> If rich countries banned the export of plastic waste to these countries, we might reduce plastic pollution a bit: perhaps up to 5%.
> But, an end to trade won’t stop plastic pollution. Only a small fraction of the world’s plastic waste is traded – under 2%. And most – two-thirds of it – ends up in richer countries, where it’s very unlikely to end up in the ocean.
I read this as "let's make this transparent".
From my perspective, who to blame and what to do is a second order question.
So you make it transparent, and then you can look and determine what is or isn’t worth doing.
Fool me for 6 decades, I dunno, maybe I could have made an assumption about what you were going to do the next time.
What would you do?
"That means that around 2% of waste is traded"
"Most of the plastic that enters the oceans from land comes from rivers in Asia.1 More than 80% of it."
Someone living comfortably in Western Europe can afford to stick to his principles. He has the extra money and energy to give a damn. He can cut meat, drive less, fly less, consume less.
It's silly for someone who enjoys air conditioning and two international trips a year, to tell people in developing countries to do their bit. It costs far less to do ours.
This is not a paternalistic view of people in developing countries, it's a critical look at our own inaction.
I do see a correlation between amount of litter on the ground and country economical/political development but cannot think of a convincing casual link here.
As it relates to this topic; if you are a “poorer country” and you accept trash, for whatever reason, to someone not racist, it then is your fault and something your society needs to resolve just as “richer countries” were permitted to do on their own, if that trash gets into the ocean, just like if it were the other way around. Or are we to blame the “poorer countries” for providing the natural resources that then end up as trash in the oceans? No, the racism then does a pivot and of course the “poorer countries” are absolved of responsibility in that case too, because the racist sees them as having no agency, infantilized, needing to be cared for by the superior “richer countries”.
If people want to give up racism, which seems to merely be little more than a platitude for self-righteous paternalistic racism, the same argument made for slavery, then they have to stop with the paternalistic Noble Savage racism that denies agency. Stop it!
Essentially it comes down to this, are people of different races equal and therefore equally responsible for their actions or are they not equals? It’s up to you, racist.
If they are equals and one wants to not be racist, then the foregone conclusion cannot always be that nothing is ever the fault of “poorer countries”. That is the mind of abusiveness, constant moving of the target, once referred to as “the bigotry of low expectations”, aka racism.
Let’s try better and let’s call out these types of racism and the racist who promote them.