Study Pinpoints Source of Banned Gas That Saps Ozone Layer: Eastern China

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/climate/china-cfcs-banned-chemicals-ozone.html

by pulisse • 7 years ago

227 129 7 years ago

stevespang• 7 years ago

Not only banned flourocarbons, China and Asia are the main source of plastics entering the oceans through their rivers.

Some are calling for environmental mercenaries, like Earth First! or GreenPeace, who will reek havoc on those who pollute or endanger the planet, ourselves included.

mc323• 7 years ago

Greenpeace etc have their hearts in the right place... sabotage though doesn’t help. Japan pays lip service and mostly ignores them. China will not take kindly to any interference. I can’t see them even trying.

wavefunction• 7 years ago

If people won't respond to reason, should they be reasoned with? The danger of ego and the id.

Yet still the danger grows nearer.

internet_user19• 7 years ago

how does Japan pay lip service? I can only see that in terms of whaling, otherwise they seem to be a fairly clean country? Please point to more information.

xfitm32• 7 years ago

Yet lawmakers want to take away my plastic straws. Sad.

internet_user19• 7 years ago

Which are probably made in China.

cltsang• 7 years ago

Every revolution starts small. Just because it's a baby step doesn't mean we shouldn't take it to move forward.

bArray4• 7 years ago

As much as I hate to see the environment getting destroyed, eco-terrorism is not the way forwards.

Every normal person is empowered to help: purchase from people whose ideals you agree with, win the hearts and minds of those around you, re-use everything you safely can.

internet_user19• 7 years ago

How much choice do you really have if literally all of your choices are from China?

slowmovintarget• 7 years ago

And perhaps there should be tariffs on Chinese goods to prevent them from dumping poisonous products on the market.

Some of these things like lead and cadmium in children's pencil cases made me wonder if this was intentional.

internet_user19• 7 years ago

So how do you propose we deal with psychopaths that dump radioactive waste into steel that then goes into your napkin box?

Ask them nicely again?

kjar• 7 years ago

I agree we can and should do what we can to prevent the worst outcomes and labeling direct nonviolent action as terrorism is a bit much / counterproductive

anigbrowl2• 7 years ago

How's that been working out for the last 40 years?

refurb• 7 years ago

Oh god, I’d love to see some environmental mercenaries go after China. Look at how they treat their own Muslim citizens! You think they’d hesitate to lock up/beat/kill them?

internet_user19• 7 years ago

Should they be under international sanctions for polluting our commons and destrying the planet?

llukas• 7 years ago

Simpler is to return production to countries that have proper environmental regulations. Right now we outsource pollution production to China.

internet_user19• 7 years ago

Really, moving a supplychain is easier than punitive tariffs/sanctions?

anthuman• 7 years ago

"International" sanctions by whom? Most of china's pollution is manufacturing for the west.

The biggest polluters ( in total and per capita ) in the world today are still europe and the US.

Almost all the pollution and environmental destruction the past 200 years were by europe and the US. Should there be "international" sanctions on us?

There ain't no saints this world. And those who claim to be saints are the worst villains.

docker_up• 7 years ago

I mean, let's be honest here: is this really a surprise?

There's a business culture of dishonesty throughout the country that is unprecedented. Their food supply is poisoned by factories that simply don't care about life and only care about money. There have been articles about how cooking oil is recycled from waste, and how fish are fed feces instead of food and packed in ice from polluted waters. Fake milk, fake baby formula, fake eggs for crying out loud. They add poisonous chemicals to pass tests, but those chemicals killed hundreds of pets in the US. And when the FBI went to investigate, the factory has already been burned to the ground to eliminate evidence. My friend worked at Uber and she said that the amount of fraud perpetrated within China was staggering, more than any other country on a per capita basis.

There was an article on HN recently talking about how some Chinese products on Amazon have 40x the safe amount of lead and 30x the safe amount of cadmium in children's products. How does lead and cadmium get into a Spider-man pencil case for fuck's sake?

It's so bad that even Chinese citizens simply don't trust the products made in China. When Chinese citizens go abroad they buy things like baby formula because they know they can't trust Chinese baby formula. It's sickening. I'm teaching my children to completely stay away from cheap Chinese products because we seriously have no way to know if it's safe, and our government has cut funding time and time again so it doesn't have enough resources to test the goods coming in.

It's reprehensible.

internet_user19• 7 years ago

And not to mention dumping radioactive waste into steel/other metal. That's how cadium and lead end up in pencil cases - dump waste into consumer goods, and then ship them to your house.

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/the-growing-global...

"India and China were the top sources of radioactive goods shipped to the U.S. through 2008, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Bartley, a metallurgist who has tracked radioactive contamination since the early 1990s, said there’s no evidence the situation has improved."

It's not just reprehensible. It's down right psychopathic.

Sick.

roywiggins2• 7 years ago

A lot of awful things happen because people are just negligent, desperate, and ignorant.

Perhaps a lot of the radioactive scrap is being created knowingly, I don't know. When there are well-documented incidents like this, I can imagine this happening in small ways all the time and stuff just entering the supply chain by accident.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident

Of course when organized crime gets involved your diagnosis of psychopathy is not too far off:

https://gizmodo.com/the-mob-is-secretly-dumping-nuclear-wast...

jonhendry18• 7 years ago

No, if cadmium and lead are turning up in pencil cases, it's probably because they were used in the paints or inks used for decoration.

Cadmium has been used for reds, yellows, and orange pigments since the 1840s. White lead pigments go back to the 4th century BC. Red lead pigments were used in ancient Rome. Yellow lead pigments (lead(II) chromate) were developed in the 1810s.

For the most part these have been phased out due to toxicity, but perhaps in China they are available cheap and in the case of cadmium pigments are really good, strongly colored, durable pigments, if you ignore the toxicity.

firethief• 7 years ago

America has the same business culture; what's saving (most of) us is our better-functioning regulatory culture.

internet_user19• 7 years ago

and legal system too.

_bxg1• 7 years ago

For now at least.

killjoywashere2• 7 years ago

This is actually something Hank Paulson comments on in his book "Dealing with China": the Chinese have a huge government, but they actually have something like a half to a third as many government workers per capita. And their comms infrastructure, despite the Huewai bruhaha, is severely lacking in comparison, so those additional people don't stretch as far.

jlawson• 7 years ago

Really not. Spend some time in China. It won't take long (hours to days) before you notice the utter callousness with which people habitually treat strangers and the environment around them.

It can't be believed until it's experienced.

rum3• 7 years ago

Usually if something is made in America it is a product of very high quality (except for food). This must be a deeper cultural thing and not just regulatory culture.

ars2• 7 years ago

America has the same business culture; what's saving (most of) us is our better-functioning regulatory culture.

The difference in America is it's not good business practice to hurt your own customers. i.e. reputation matters. You mess up just once, and it takes years for your brand to recover (this includes non-brand brands, like store brands or generics).

In China it seems like there's a never ending supply of new names constantly.

latchkey• 7 years ago

Unsurprisingly given the proximity, Vietnam is just as bad in this respect. It is crazy, anything to make some money.

roywiggins2• 7 years ago

There's plenty of precedent for this sort of thing in the West's industrial past. Being a fast-growing economy and also keeping a strict eye on product purity, has it ever successfully been done before?

Not to say that as an excuse, but it's not at all an uncommon pattern.

nikkwong2• 7 years ago

I think it's pretty much what we'd expect when markets are allowed to operate unhinged; it doesn't necessarily speak to a point in time in an economy's development—it moreso speaks to the fact that less developed economies are less strictly regulated because they've yet to develop the case law and obituaries on which protective regulations are formed.

With that in mind it's a bit hard to ignore the irony in the regulatory uncoupling that's happening in the US right now. We have learned from our own past and from the aforementioned stories that greed and self interest will always produce externalities that trump a society's well-being; it seems that the lawmakers have too perverse an incentive structure and their constituents have too short a memory to realize which regulations are necessary to protect the greater good.

sundvor• 7 years ago

This is real. Try buying the good types of baby formula in Australian supermarkets or pharmacies; you quickly learn the need to have a buffer of several lest your baby goes hungry.

Scalpers go in and get what they can, then sell to China for a massive profit. If they're hit by the "max one per customer" they'll come in again and again until they're kicked out of the store.

I feel bad for parents in China who can't trust the products in their own stores.

A2017U12• 7 years ago

And yet Australian dairy farmers constantly complain about low prices and going bankrupt. This has been going on for years. The complaint doesn't add up.

There's more than enough milk powder to go around, people are fighting over the premium ones.

SubiculumCode• 7 years ago

I have no evidence of this, and I am not proposing it is true...

more like a plot for a novel or something, but

What if a nation that produces almost everything purposely contaminates their products with slow poisons and heavy metals so that the enemy consumer population slowly becomes stupid and ill, and unable to compete effectively on the international stage.

Gatsky• 7 years ago

I’ve read these articles as well. However, I don’t think one can infer generalisations about the culture of > 1 billion people by reading a few articles online.

I also don’t think that a ‘culture of dishonesty’ is an actual thing, or at least an appropriate application of the word ‘culture’. More close to reality is that China has a system of incentives which, perverse or otherwise, make ‘dishonesty’ more likely. This operates in Western culture as well, for example the activities of investment banks in the subprime loan crisis.

The distinction is important because it is difficult to change a culture but incentives can change overnight.

mrob• 7 years ago

fake eggs

I haven't seen any evidence that these were ever sold to the general public. It seems very unlikely to me, because eggs are cheap, and the alleged manufacturing process is labor intensive. If you're willing to take the risk making fakes there are many other more profitable options. See:

https://web.archive.org/web/20070518092606/http://www.tian.c...

https://www.hoax-slayer.net/fake-eggs-from-china/

chewz2• 7 years ago

It's reprehensible.

You mean something like this - Exxon knew that fossil fuels were influencing the climate in 1978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19986910

mrnobody_67• 7 years ago

We also know the source of the plastic in the ocean... turns out it boils down to a very small number of rivers, in a very specific region of the world. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti...

internet_user19• 7 years ago

Tarrifs proportionate to percentage of pollutants in river outflow should work great.

I've heard they say you tax things you don't want to see? why not tax pollution at the source, the rivers?

raxxorrax2• 7 years ago

Tried that but the river had no money.

tty2300• 7 years ago

Likely to change soon. Those areas have stopped buying plastic waste from the rest of the world.

sephamorr• 7 years ago

Having seen the trash coming down several of these rivers in person, everything I could identify seemed to be of local origin. I certainly didn't see non-local languages written on plastic bottles, for example.

ars2• 7 years ago

Why would that change anything? This is local trash in the rivers not recycling.

heybrendan4• 7 years ago

TFA made me think of Dr. Mehmet Oz' interview of Dr. Jordan Peterson [1] from last year (2018). I've transcribed part of the interview below:

Dr. Jordan Peterson:

"I've always been obsessed with totalitarianism and authoritarian governments whether they're on the Right or the Left for years--decades really. I spent almost all of my free time thinking about what happened in Nazi Germany and in Russia during the Soviet era; but also when Mao was [in] China--there were other places as well. [I was] trying to understand how it was that we could have got off the rails so absolutely terribly. I started studying that at the collectivist level, looking for political or economic reasons. But as I investigated further those levels of analysis [...] weren't providing the answers that I wanted--I think partly because I was really interested in the notion that there's something to learn from what happened, say in Nazi Germany: but there's something to learn at an individual level. That's my estimation. I don't think that there were innocent masses of people led astray by a single malevolent leader. I don't think the fundamental motivations for what happened in Nazi Germany were economic and I don't think they were in the Soviet Union either. As I read more and more about the situation, I realized that the proclivity of individuals to avoid responsibility and to lie, especially about their own lives and about their own experience, were really the reasons that those systems went so far astray."
"[...] The lessons there for me were psychological and that taught me an awful lot about the role of the individual: people like Viktor Frankl, for example, who wrote Man's Search for Meaning, a perennial classic and a great book--insisted that a large part of the reason that Germany went off the rails so badly was because individual Germans were so willing to falsify their own experience. Alexander Solzhenitsyn who wrote the Gulag Archipelago, the best document on what happened in the Soviet Union, also made exactly the same argument."
"So I got interested in the psychological causes of catastrophic governance and that taught me a lot. It taught me about responsibility. About the responsibility of the sovereign individual. We have an idea in our [Western] culture, it's a very powerful idea: that each of us is of intrinsic value. But associated with that value is a responsibility: we have a responsibility for our own integrity and for that of our families but also of the state."

This begs the question: are Chinese business men and women willing to falsify their own experience at the expense of the {environment,personal integrity} to make a buck and/or survive?

The business culture of dishonesty (borrowing from HN user docker_up) can't persist forever.

[1] https://youtu.be/AscPHmLWo-M?t=322

inferiorhuman• 7 years ago

Dr Oz[1]? That quack? Please. He's an astrologer not a doctor.

1: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/06/07/a-...

heybrendan4• 7 years ago

The transcript (and linked video) is only Peterson speaking.

Your feelings regarding Oz and any associated controversy are irrelevant, unless you're indirectly implying that Oz is unfit to conduct an interview, in which case, I think you've got your work cut out for you. It would be impertinent and premature to dismiss an interview simply because you dislike the host: I can easily name any number of hosts I dislike or have a general disdain for yet found the discussions interesting and/or thought-provoking.

That being said, if it's not crystal-clear at this point: it's discussion around Peterson's ideas I'm interested in, in the context of China (and the TFA). Would you care to respond to Peterson's thoughts directly?

frequentnapper2• 7 years ago

This quote reeks of self-righteousness. Western corporations have done as much harm as they could get away with to make a quick buck as well.

Jordan Peterson is an individual who seems like he struggled to make sense of the world according to his Christian/Pure-Capitalistic view of the world and decided to concoct wild self-righteous theories to justify his bias rather than change his viewpoint. The only thing he has going for him is that he speaks with extreme confidence. My advide to you: choose a better messiah to save you from whatever disillusionment you are going through.

reallydude2• 7 years ago

decided to concoct wild self-righteous theories to justify his bias rather than change his viewpoint

To what? Is there a "right" answer that would serve someone better? It's always going to appear self-righteous when you justify your own worldview. The utility of JP's views, is why other people adopt it, not some fictional "messianic cult". JP's reasoning has flaws and gaps as with all people. Even the utility is from other historical wisdom, not his own, repackaged into a story. Easily digestable and as rational as any other I have seen.

heybrendan4• 7 years ago

Western corporations have done as much harm as they could get away with to make a quick buck as well.

I'm in agreement (for the most part)--historically speaking. I never said that this was purely relegated to China, although the topic of the article is indeed China.

I'll also take this opportunity to remind you about HN commenting guidelines [1], specifically when disagreeing to try to "reply to the argument", as opposed to calling names--or in your specific case implying emotional states or assumptions on worship.

I will share that I find it unfortunate that you seem generally opposed to Dr. Peterson's works: his Maps of Meaning (1999)[2], for instance, contains powerful ideas that cannot be easily dismissed.

Finally, humans are complex creatures. We can easily find an argument intrinsically stimulating and academically fascinating whilst simultaneously not feeling disillusionment.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html [2] https://www.amazon.com/Maps-Meaning-Architecture-Jordan-Pete...

daodedickinson4• 7 years ago

"I realized that the proclivity of individuals to avoid responsibility and to lie, especially about their own lives and about their own experience, were really the reasons that those systems went so far astray."

That connects so directly to social media and contemporary "fake" "news". Not just in the obvious ways, but in how people lie through Pinterest images to make their life look more glamorous, or lie on resumés, school applications, exams, dating sites, faked hate crimes, faked crime reports, faked police reports, faked government investigations, faked scientific studies, etc....

We interact with the internet through diverse environments that change so fast that humans can't keep up with an accurate way of figuring out what reality looks like, or, rather, the average difference between the images of reality held in the minds/brains of any two people is expanding.

I think I might see 2 things Peterson didn't address in your quotes:

1. Deteriorating material / or otherwise not originally psychological conditions around a person could also independently increase the chance that they falsify their own experience. He may have cause and effect at least partially flipped.

2. Does telling the truth heal the psychological trauma? Is there an empirical basis for John's claim that "the truth will set you free"? In my memory of Man's Search for Meaning, I remember his theory was that finding a meaning to keep fighting to live often made the difference for survivors of the Holocaust. People who let the situation sink into them did better than those who held onto dreams that could hardly seem possible, given the circumstances. But that could indicate that "Hope", that thing with feathers, is only dashed when abashed by the most painful of truths - and is sometimes shielded from the storm by our so willing to "falsify" our own experience.

Our family and friends used to be a local pocket with its own local social weather sheltered from the tumult of wider society. Social media tore down the ability to keep family and politics and religion as separate spheres woven together by individuals capable of different modes in different spaces in different times. But the internet in the pocket collapses spaces and times together. And so, our local social weather is no longer sheltered into a friendlier micro climate, but just one point in a massive cultural climate zone.

gaze• 7 years ago

Love to see a fraud interviewing a fraud

tozeur2• 7 years ago

Having been an expat traveled to over 25 countries, I can confidently say our natural world is fucked. Modern industrialism has given the third world too much manufacturing power. And they aren’t aware of the consequences and don’t care, because “fuckit I want kids toys and double ply toilet paper for my family too, not just the Westerners”

BurningFrog4• 7 years ago

All currently rich "sophisticated" countries were in a similar phase when they were fighting their way out of poverty.

Once countries get rich enough, they can afford to care about the environment. China seems to advance much faster than others did historically, so I'm hopeful.

whiddershins• 7 years ago

We also assumed as countries became more rich/industrialized/advanced they would become more democratic, and more concerned with human rights, and less zero-sum adversarial in dealing with the United States.

I think those hopes are no longer mainstream thinking in regards to China.

How confident should we be about the prediction that China will adopt similar policies to the US in regards to the things you are mentioning?

A2017U12• 7 years ago

All the rich countries consume a few Earth's worth of resources per person though, while visible things like plastic pollution and environmental regulations are generally solved, other issues like emissions are at unsustainable levels if everyone on Earth lived at the consumption level of the first world.

It's a very real contradiction the West has to face in the next few decades as these places modernize.

raxxorrax2• 7 years ago

But someone in the first world does have a much larger ecological footprint compared to people in developing countries. So the problem isn't solved at all.

tozeur2• 7 years ago

I completely agree. We just happened to do it first.

roboys2• 7 years ago

I don't blame them, we in the developed countries have a duty to develop cost efficient carbon neutral growth strategies for our/their future...

We would be hypocrites if we tried to suppress their development after we've had our turn on the ride.

mschuster912• 7 years ago

Where's the problem with toilet paper? That stuff degrades really really fast even if simply dumped somewhere.

singularity2001• 7 years ago

IDK, you have to clear the whole Amazon if 7bio people want toilet paper?

wyxuan• 7 years ago

Tragedy of the commons. If there is a shared resource, let the people act in their self interest and sap away all of it.

wtdata• 7 years ago

Sincerely, all this environmentalist's manifestations we are seeing in EU, would actually make sense if they where in front of the Chinese embassies here.

Instead they keep demanding local actions from the EU, as if the EU hasn't been in the forefront of environmental protection for almost half a century now. This way they are just diverting the attention away from the real main issue: China.

Study Pinpoints Source of Banned Gas That Saps Ozone Layer: Eastern China

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