Indeed! Industry should be covering the cost of the externalities associated with the product.
However, let’s remember that whatever the corporation pays, we’ll almost certainly end up paying in the form of increased prices. And that’s exactly how it should be.
Notice how expensive everything seems to be when one travels to Europe? That’s at least partially because the price actually includes more of the costs that we as a society end up paying. We in North America have been living incredibly high for the better part of a century.
It’s time we take the very painful step of actually adjusting our spending to take into account that huge line of credit we’ve been drawing at the Bank of Nature.
Gas taxes and bag fees are just chump change. Prices of almost everything should probably be 50% higher. That might provide the resources to actually make us ecologically neutral as well as decrease our consumption.
And oddly enough, the only way that can be achieved is by individual action - voting and just as importantly, joining politics to provide others with the choice.
Libertarian socialism predates the Ayn Rand style libertarianism by around 100 years, and has little in common with it. They were the ones who objected to Marxism on the grounds that it would end in dicatorship and were thrown out of the First International by Marx himself, although there are also libertarian Marxists who are now under the libertarian socialist umbrella.
ETA:
Not top down, but bottom up. Local communities, say a village or a city block, decide whjat action to take, if they can’t do it alone then they take it up to the next level in the federation until they reach a point where they can. The top level will be the world who will be concerned about things like ice caps and glaciers melting or droughts and how that will effect neighbouring regions.
The more in depth explaination of how social ecology and libertarian municipalism work together may or may not be off topic for this dicussion.
There is a fine case to be made that we wouldn’t have curbside recycling at all if it wasn’t for Big Soft Drink’s eagerness to divest itself from bottle-refilling.
I use them as trash can liners, and to stop wet tea from pooling water in the bottom of the bag (put in bag then trash) and several other uses. they’re versatile and useful
You don’t need a trash can liner if you wash it from time to time, or even every time!
If you put the tea down your garbage disposal it keeps the disposal clean and smells nicer. Or if you don’t have a disposal just squeeze the liquid out before trashing.
If you take the time to think about how something could be done without a plastic bag you’ll find there are always better options.
Resources and pollution are two very different things. Or are you thinking that the use of some extra water causes more pollution than a land-filled plastic bag?
Hence my question above, it wasn’t a semantic argument at all, it’s conceivable that the deleterious effects of the additional water pumping do exceed that of plastic bag manufacturing, transportation and disposal.
I really, really doubt it, but if you have information to back it up I think anyone here on the anti-plastic-bag bandwagon would be super interested to see it!
I am SO SICK of this “it’s not our fault” crap that has recently started popping up.
The plastics industry is certainly very culpable in the problem. No argument there at all.
But to whine “It’s not our fault” is a load of shit. IT IS our fault. WE are responsible. No blame throwing is going to change that. It’s disingenuous and simply lying to ourselves to try to avoid blame and guilt and feel better about ourselves.
It IS our fault, and WE ARE responsible. WE are the only ones that can change things, through our own actions and choices. IT’S ALL OF US TOGETHER, FFS!!
4 hours ago · A B.C. oceans protection group says new research showing widespread plastic pellet pollution throughout southern B.C. waters is proof the province needs to start regulating the product. Surfrider Foundation claims the tiny pellets — known as nurdles
Not arguing for them in ANY way, but wadded up and stuffed into walls, they make great insulation, as they create dead air spaces very well. That said, how many walls can one insulate in this manner? I once had a three-cupboard hoard of the damn things that I gave to a friend who lived in a very old farm house, for this purpose. He’s a lot warmer in winter now.
They should still be banned. They look terrible flapping while stuck on a barbed wire fence in a stiff breeze. It’s a picture of defeat of the natural world.
Let me ask you a serious question. Think about what you just said, and then:
Why are we having this conversation? If you, Arto5, can, with your personal actions, save the world, why haven’t you done so and let the rest of us about our merry way?
I know if I could save the planet with an hour’s labor, a week’s labor, a decade’s labor, hell; my very life itself- I would have done it by now. But I can’t. I just can’t.
I can’t because we live in a world of systems and all I can do is demand the change of these systems. There is literally nothing I can directly do that will meaningfully help. If I moved to an organic goat farm and never touched another plastic item again and never ate anything not grown on my farm organically and responsibly, it would not make one iota of difference. (Heck, it might actually increase my environmental footprint.)
Will my giving up straws help? Not in the slightest. Nothing I can do directly would.
So stop telling people to do stupid, meaningless gestures and instead encourage them and embolden them to do the one thing that they can do which will actually make a difference: demand that the systems be changed to make a real difference.
Rich people and corporations have way more weight in the political process than any citizen or NGO. Why do you think the Koch spend so much money in politic and lobbying organisations ?
Koch money also funded initiatives to undercut climate science and to counter efforts to address climate change. As Ms. Mayer put it in her book, “The Kochs vehemently opposed the government taking any action on climate change that would hurt their fossil fuel profits.”
This is a disingenuous argument. He isn’t remotely claiming that.
If you aren’t prepared to give up drinking straws without quibbling endlessly over how much of a deal it would make, how sincere is your ‘demanding the change of these systems’? Do you imagine that every single necessary change will have a lower cost in terms of personal convenience than giving up plastic straws, as well as a more clearly quantifiable benefit? Do you imagine that the world will remotely be saved if each of us fuss over every little tiny step, judging on their individual merit every microscopic detail, choosing individually whether to give a shit or not?
You, personally, are almost certainly in the global top 10% of per capita impact. You can demand changes to systems at the same time as well as addressing that. I’m not asking you to save the world on your own. I’m asking you to demonstrate that you are willing to pay even a microscopic price without nitpicking the fuck out of it.
Your ‘demand for change’ is not genuine. Straws won’t save the world, but people seeing the first world refusing to even give up little plastic tubes - well, I think that goes a step or two towards dooming it.
It’s not the land-filled plastic-film bags that bothered me - it was all the ones that festooned the high-water mark on the brush in the local river and waterways. We have an annual dry-season volunteer river cleanup (La Gran Limpieza), and those bags are the most annoying damned things - they’re everywhere, they make the river look like a trash dump, and they’re usually high enough up to require pole tools.
Fortunately, LA no longer permits single-use plastic film bags as grocery bags - paper or reusable plastic bags are available, but cost a minimum of 10 cents each.
Whatever else is true of them, those bags, if littered, won’t blow halfway across town, float down the storm drains, and get hung up in the river foliage. And paper bags at least have the good grace to biodegrade when they get wet.
(I use handled paper grocery bags for several important tasks around the home and garden, and considered buying them wholesale when my freebie stash ran out - but I’d have to pay MORE that 10 cents ea. in any reasonable quantity, so I just ‘forget’ my reusables occasionally and ask the grocery baggers to double-bag.)
