[johnydepp]

Over the past few months I have been trying to figure out a solution for environmental issues in developing countries (like India where I'm from). Conclusion is, because of the democracy, the change is not possible from inside, some external force has to be there.

Here governments take decision for the short term because they have to please the common (& uneducated) men for the next election. Hence the agenda of environment doesn't get much attention. That's why have poor plastic management.

Educating people about these issues will take decades (& it will be too late). Only way forward could be if some constant external pressure is put on their governments using agreements/accords (like Paris Agreement) and some system is setup which will monitor issues like plastic management and carbon-emission. If countries are not following some standard they should be penalized.

Countries like US, Canada, Germany can take initiatives in doing so. Its not only about their carbon-emission & plastic-management, its about the whole planet.

Developing countries should be pressurized(!!) for reducing their population as well. In India, from past 2 decades, no government had an agenda to control population (which is the root of all the problems here). With some external pressure this could also be done I guess.

And most importantly, large & impactful countries like US and China shouldn't waste their time on petty issues like trade-war & focus on big issue here!

[ankitml]

Here in Canada, the provincial government of Ontario is dismantling the environmental protection apparatus piece by piece in the name of democracy and pleasing some section of people. We do have a lot more education, so there has to be something else. I think it is all about what is the general population (or some section of it values more). Right now environment is not at the top because something else is.

[hnphillipj]

I've only heard of them scrapping carbon cap + trade and fighting against carbon tax. If they've also dismantled regulations regarding more acute, pressing types of pollution I'd like to know.

[ankitml]

1. On slashing environmental watchdogs - https://www.nationalobserver.com/2018/11/15/news/doug-ford-s...

http://www.rabble.ca/news/2018/11/doug-ford%E2%80%99s-govern...

2. Cancelled green subsidy program (GreenON) on efficient thermostats and lights (https://www.thestar.com/business/real_estate/2018/06/20/gree...)

3. Ontario electric car subsidy is no more

4. Cancellation of 758 renewable energy projects / contracts. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-municipalit.... (paywalled)

5. Intend to open up protected areas (greenbelt) for developers. This has not been executed yet.

[craftyguy]

> Here governments take decision for the short term because they have to please the common (& uneducated) men for the next election. Hence the agenda of environment doesn't get much attention. That's why have poor plastic management.

No, it's pretty much like this in the US too. It's very difficult to get legislation that takes >2 years to start paying off to pass at the federal level. If it takes > 2 years for constituents to realize any benefit from it, politicians generally have little to no incentive to push for it. You get the occassional rarity, but you need consensus, and the current system is built to reward short term gains, often times with the expense of long term losses.

[jacobolus]

For example, in the USA the Democratic Party’s passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 (which took a few years to show its effects) was initially so unpopular vs. a barrage of negative propaganda and an opposition that rallied against it for political gain that the backlash knocked the party out of power in the House of Representatives for the next 8 years.

And that’s for something (healthcare) with very clear and direct effect on people’s lives, where the remedy was a centrist approach first proposed by Republicans.

Taking larger-scale action against an even longer-term threat where the only visible benefit is “see we prevented calamity” and where some of the richest multinational corporations’ short-term future is directly threatened will be much harder still.

[mrhappyunhappy]

At the bottom most level it really does boil down to education and awareness. One could argue they go hand in hand. Even in western nations being educated is not enough, you must be aware of your actions. This is why I always point at legislation as the most effective means of getting anything done. Lead by example through innovation, investment into sustainable tech, methods and living and pass legislation that does away with the bad and promotes the good.

I guess to even get to this point we need to rewrite laws on lobbying to get special interests out of politics. Why stop there, might as well get campaign funding an overhaul to eliminate conflict of interest. Put in short term limits that do away with politics as a career choice and pass laws that promote it as civic duty.

To add to the recipe, make representatives directly accountable to votes against public majority with the ability for the people to kick them out of the office through expedited voting where a majority can remove a representative within a 48 hour time window. While we are at it, start imposing prison time for corporate crimes and start enforcing it. Add transparency to all political conversation online and offline for any member of the public to review. Face to face meetings are to be accompanied by a third party for documentation.

Creeped out? Yeah... so I think we need a total overhaul of values, economy, social systems, work policies and many laws to get to a point where we can do some good. Of course it al starts with education which is cut short by insufficient funding by said politicians.

Ok, it’s hopeless and we’re doomed.

[_ptgt]

Coming from someone who agrees with supports environmental initiatives on e.g. plastic management and climate change, I always find it condescending and insensitive when people assume political differences will be resolved by "educating" the other side.

It's difficult to know how Indians would behave in an alternate universe where environmental awareness was a higher priority, but I don't find it hard to believe at all that an Indians (or Chinese, or Americans...) would knowingly pollute the environment even if they were aware of that effects. For developing countries especially, the economic gains of dirty industrialization are very attractive even despite the environmental costs. I could certainly understand many people in developing countries understanding both the benefits and the costs and going on to choose the same path that they're already on.

[notahacker]

One of the first things you notice upon visiting developing countries is that household waste is often dumped in very visible places where it tends to spread naturally and easily, including near watercourses used for drinking. With consumer waste it's less the gains of industrialisation (after all, they consume a lot less than us) and more a lack of interest in ensuring it's dumped further away from their homes and water supplies. Pre-industrial European societies generally saw absolutely nothing strange about dumping excrement literally outside their front doorsteps, so it's not as if we can claim any longstanding cultural obsession with cleanliness either.

Having the resources to deal with clearing it up is certainly part of the equation, and clearly there are still many people in developed countries that happily litter and sneer at the concept of recycling, but I think it's a stretch to say that environmental education and campaigning doesn't have a significant effect on attitudes.

[Balgair]

> Educating people about these issues will take decades (& it will be too late). Only way forward could be if some constant external pressure is put on their governments using agreements/accords (like Paris Agreement) and some system is setup which will monitor issues like plastic management and carbon-emission. If countries are not following some standard they should be penalized.

The history of CFCs[0] is a very good sketch as to how these issues play out. Granted, there were very good and cheap-ish alternatives to CFCs. Still, using CFCs as a guideline indicates that real action is about 10-20 years away (~2030 to 2040). Going to Wikipedia and putting in the year 2040[1], we see that large parts of the EU will have banned petrol burning cars by that year and that space based solar power should be coming online.

So, yay!? These things take time, but don't be discouraged. We are making progress and I feel that we will do it 'in time'. We need to work hard and be vocal to try to accelerate these timelines, of course, but have faith in your fellow man's intelligence and labor (please ignore that whole Daylight Savings Time insanity, though).

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorofluorocarbon#History

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2040

EDIT: I figured I should include a link to the year 2030 as well:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2030

[zandl]

Agreed. It’s also that there needs to be cultural changes in many cases, short term views are ingrained in many cultures and pointing out a fault in someone’s culture isn’t something people are open to no matter how dire the consequences are.

[toast0]

Outside pressure and assistance would certainly help, but change can come from within too. Ocean pollution is diffuse and hard to see the effects of, especially when you're participating in a developing economy and you've got a lot more pressing needs. River pollution is easy to see, and results in clear health hazards.

One of the sparks of the US environmental movement was when a river caught fire because of all the crap that was in it. [1]

Agitate towards cleaning up rivers and other water bodies; sewage, solid waste (trash), and industrial waste are pretty common, and they're all manageable; it just takes capital, sustained effort, and some amount of enforcement. Dumping is visible enough that enforcement in the court of popular opinion can be effective enough, when the courts of law are not enough.

Having clean(er) water will help with all sorts of health issues, the economy, and international relations (competition over water sources is lessened if downstream water is cleaner and more usable)

Keeping plastic out of rivers should also keep it out of the ocean; unless you just collect it all, and then ship it out on a barge and dump it; but even then, having built the collection apparatus, you'll be in a better place to deal with the waste responsibly later.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuyahoga_River

[latchkey]

Here in Vietnam (one of the largest produces of plastic waste in SE Asia), unless someone replaces the entire government and educates all the people, I think there really is no hope on the matter. Depressing.

[kamaal]

>>In India, from past 2 decades, no government had an agenda to control population (which is the root of all the problems here)

Problems are solved, only when they are acknowledged to be problems.

In the last elections, the current prime minister talked at length about reaping the population dividend.

Also a lot of population is not exactly bad if you need masses of low paid workers building your roads/highways/sky scrapers. The problem with India is we aren't doing that.

[agumonkey]

Educating takes a fair amount of mystic to make people believe in you. That's the hardest part.

[craftyguy]

And, who determines what the curriculum is? For example, for a while it was practically (or technically?) illegal to teach evolution in some schools in the southern US. Just 'educating people' is not the full answer, and it could actually be more harmful in the end to educate people with wrong information than to not educate them at all.

[agumonkey]

no need for cosmological concepts to raise the education level

[CMCDragonkai]

Perhaps we need a new religion.

[agumonkey]

heh, I wasn't planning on divinity level of faith, but you'd be surprised how much stupid resistance people will put when you tell them things. The minute they validate you, anything you say goes

[pastor_elm]

A pollution tax of some sort seems like the most obvious answer.

[techrich]

This wont be anywhere near fixed, if the worlds population keep going up. We need some event to cull the population down a bit!

[paulddraper]

> And most importantly, large & impactful countries like US and China shouldn't waste their time on petty issues like trade-war & focus on big issue here!

Agreed with much of what you said, but this is a bit irrelevant for Indian environmental policy, no?

[tormeh]

Not really. The attention span of the people with the legitimacy to push through painful reforms is limited. The bureaucracy is just people doing their job. If there's no pressure from above they will take the path of least resistance and minimize personal risk, i.e. keep the status quo and cover their asses.

[patagonia]

I find it insane that the top comment is focused on India. 1) this is a global issue and 2) the US created the template from which other countries are pushing forward. Blaming this in one region or country without calling out the contributions to the problem by the US is nuts.

[whatok]

https://www.dw.com/en/almost-all-plastic-in-the-ocean-comes-...

[patagonia]

I’m not disagreeing about the source of the plastic. I’m suggesting that talking about the source of the plastic without also discussing issues such as western oil and chemical companies operating in the regions this plastic is generated ignores fundamental issues such as the undermining of regulatory regimes by these same companies to keep costs down. CO2 has a similar story. India didn’t wake up and come up with this technology on their own. The infrastructure to produce this plastic is in place to supply more than just their demand. This is geopolitical and not purely technical.

Edit: if it was purely technical then god help us given Silicon Valley’s view on regulation.

[temperfidelis2x]

The problem is generally not that we are producing plastic. The problem is that some people just throw it away when it's broken / old / what ever, essentially dumping it to the flowing water to get rid of it. This behaviour and attitude towards nature is something that I as a westerner just can't understand and I won't accept any blame-shifting games here.

Poverty is also a very bad excuse to dump plastic in nature. I have been poor as f*ck and the thought of dumping garbage around hasn't even once crossed my mind. Urgent action (like severe fines and even jail-time and such for dumping plastic, but also positive reinforcement) is something the developing countries need.

[patagonia]

It is as if you are also not reading my comment.

I’m not shifting blame. I’m sharing it. Look into some of the places the plastic grocery bag you “recycle” get handled. In some cases they are put on a ship and sent to India, sorted by hand, then melted using dirty fuels, again, by hand. So this “America takes care of its plastic, so India should too” is flat out wrong. We may not be as bad, but we do not handle our own issue completely. And if the US is sending your country their trash and doesn’t follow up with how it was handled, how is that not an incentive to do in the most cost effective manner possible, even if that means harming persons and environmental health?

Or let’s talk about clear cutting the Amazon for agriculture. How dare Brazil do that! Have you flown over middle America??? It’s all developed farm land. There are entire states that are basically monoculture agricultural where natural ecosystems used to be. Are you suggesting we return that land to its natural state?

Or let’s talk about electronics. Should we have jail time if you are responsible for purchasing a device without ensuring it was sourced in an environmentally responsible manner? Should people that purchased devices manufactured from raw materials derived by strip mining and processes that leach chemicals be given prison sentences?

[whatok]

What % of the plastic generated from the rivers in India and China are because of Western countries?

[patagonia]

It’s as if you’re not reading my comment.