hathchip

I'm not arguing in favor of the GP's specific proposals, just pointing out that we should consider the displacement of fuel burning when we consider the carbon cost of plastics.

I assumed that his suggestion was not meant to be taken literally - that we should construct plastics for no use - but rather that we should think differently about the value and cost of plastics which are produced anyway.

Interesting, thanks

We could instead assume that you are either very ignorant or just talking crap.

No. Doctors who qualified in a different country cannot simply start working. They have to do expensive and time consuming training to convert their credentials. This is partly because it's very important your doctor has appropriate language skills and understands the local system - and partly because local trade associations of doctors insist on it to protect their own jobs.

I don't think the limit on trainees has any effect on salary

This is far from true. On the margin, doctors can work in the private sector or leave the country. Only a few choose to do so, but this is (among other reasons) because the NHS always has to respond to price pressure to keep that small number from growing to where it causes shortages.

Recently a change in how pension contributions are taxed was pushed through almost entirely because it affected senior doctors. If the NHS had pricing power as you suggest, why wouldn't they just tell doctors to pay up?

I don't recall much if any opposing new coal plants.

I can't argue with your subjective recollections, but this is not by any means an accurate picture of environmentalism historically. Acid rain in West Germany (caused by burning coal) is pretty much ground zero of environmentalism as a politically organized force.

But if you have a web client and app store apps, which are frontends to the same thing, doesn't that mean that your site is still constrained by the app store rules?

You can't assume losing half of staff is a downside.

Said Elon Musk about Twitter. How's that working out for him?

Corporations decided to give away the single-use plastic bags for nothing when this was allowed. If they wanted to increase their profits like this, they could have just stopped giving them away for free.

Do you wash your clothes after wearing them? Maybe you should start wearing single-use plastic clothes since it's obviously much better for the environment.

I don't really agree with the point about anti-nuke environmentalism. In the past many environmentalists were opposed to both nuclear energy (because of the risk of Chernobyl-style disasters or because of the implicit subsidy to nuclear weapons proliferation) and they were opposed to fossil fuel extraction and burning.

The people who were opposed to the environmentalist worldview were in favor of nuclear, but also in favor of fossil fuel generation and extraction (and CFCs, and leaded gasoline, and deforestation, and DDT, etc). They often very publicly argued that all these issues were bogus, that global warming could never happen, that we had nothing to worry about, that all these concerns were motivated by hatred of money or progress.

The environmentalists, on the other hand, tried hard to make a more abstract point - that we need to protect our environment and treat it as a precious good to be shared. This was obviously right.

Why should we cherry-pick one aspect of an environmentalist strategy from a very specific time and use it to blame them for "the continued and expanded use of coal, oil, and natural gas for power generation". Why aren't the numerous vocal cheerleaders of fossil fuels (who may have happened to be in favor of nuclear, but only because they generally argued that we should ignore all safety and resource depletion concerns) held to account here?

I mean, if you use it less, it will wear down slower. Nothing to worry about.

What about yard waste?

Your original claim was 'almost all' so if you're just talking about plastic I think I'm quite right to question what you 'heard from the garbage guy'.

The headline says 'plastic recycling' whereas the GP's claim was about recycling and yard waste in general.

Much of Europe

Single-use plastic shopping bags are banned or levied in much of Europe.

This is very dubious. Unless paper bags are produced using timber from first-growth forests, growing and then cutting down the trees that were used to make them took carbon out of the atmosphere. When the paper bag decays or is burnt, they become roughly carbon neutral. But things that take carbon out of the atmosphere for a while as part of a cycle are generally good - by the time one particular paper bag has returned its carbon to the atmosphere, others have been made, and so there is some greenhouse gas reduction long term.

But fossil fuel production is also hideously polluting, and ends us with the carbon from the oil in the atmosphere. Producing plastic from oil means that those molecules won't (typically) end up as greenhouse gases.

That's not the right analysis. If the hydrocarbons in the ground don't get used for making plastic, they are very likely to be burned for energy. So waste plastic reduces the CO2 emitted by that process.

How do you know?

I really don't think those graphs make that case, although it seems they are trying to.

Organic cotton is ahead of plastic for greenhouse gases after 149 uses. That's a small number of uses for a cotton tote bag, which should last several years of daily wear. That means that from the 150th use you are reducing greenhouse gases every time you take the bag out, while potentially still net polluting in a couple of other ways.

But greenhouse gas emissions are by far the most critical and potentially catastrophic environment issue. If we can effectively and reliably lower greenhouse gases while causing a few extra rhino deaths or depleting the ozone layer marginally, we should enthusiastically seize that opportunity.

Given this, the "average over all pollution types" seems particularly useless and intentionally misleading here. That number literally cannot be coerced into meaning anything that should affect your decision making process.

surely the more of these they send, the less likely you are to click on them

So they are trying to get the law passed, despite the obvious objection that message filtering is impossible, by saying "we know it's impossible but we would like to have the legal right to do it in case it becomes possible in the future"?

Why don't they use a more obscure domain for internal corporate communication and keep the widely recognized one for messages to end users? Is it just the vanity that people who work there like to be mark.zuckerberg@facebook.com?

The email allows you to enter a new password, it doesn't validate some other access to your account by clicking yes.

The GP is talking about a situation where you are not asked for an email address. You ask for a password reset for the username @coolanonguy. The website tells you that the reset email was sent to an obscured email address. The obscured email allows you to confirm (with high likelihood) or deny (with certainty) that @coolanonguy is your friend whose email address you know.

same plastic as regular Lego

I just had my mind blown by this a few days ago, you're one of today's 10,000: https://bricknerd.com/home/every-type-of-plastic-used-by-leg...

A reduction of only 2x between July and November is actually super positive for renewables. Wind and solar energy is almost free on an ongoing basis and installation of new capacity isn't expensive. Your number suggests that simply installing 2x the capacity needed in favorable weather would be sufficient for unfavorable weather. Actually it's more like 3x but that's still often very doable.

France went from choosing between new nukes and renewables (renewables were the obviously cheaper choice) to choosing between extending the life of the nukes it already has and renewables (no surprises, old nukes were cheaper). This doesn't contradict the suggestion that the high cost of new nukes is prohibitive when set against renewables.

"5 months GDP is a reasonable cost" is not the argument in favor of nuclear power that you think it is.

Regardless of what I believe, those stories are clearly not compelling evidence on which to build any kind of political argument.