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In a new paper published in the journal Science, researchers found that using “all feasible interventions” would reduce the amount of plastic humans are zealously distributing throughout the planet by 78 percent by 2040. That sounds pretty solid, until you get to the part where, even with “immediate and concerted action,” a total of 961 million tons of plastic pollution enter the environment between 2016 and 2040.
That’s the weight of 145 million African elephants. Give or take.
It is a feature of a number of environmental issues from plastics to climate change that even a spectacular improvement in whatever bad thing we’re doing still leads to spectacularly bad outcomes. Call it a horseshoes and hand grenades problem—”close” doesn’t really do the trick.
This is not always the case. Take toxins in drinking water: the EPA (well, not now, but generally) is tasked with setting limits on how much of a given thing can be in the water without it being a significant problem for human health. For example, for arsenic, it’s 10 parts per billion. If there is too much arsenic in drinking water, make fixes to the water supply and delivery system such that the number drops, and then we’re good to go. Obviously, this isn’t trivial with all contaminants and in all places (*cough* Flint *cough*), but it’s a relatively straightforward concept: reduce the contaminant, things can go back to normal.
But not everything is so easily reversible. Plastics in the environment will last for thousands of years, accumulating in oceans, sediment layers of rivers and coastal regions, and so on. Sure, less is better, but there is no threshold to cross whereby suddenly the plastic that is out there isn’t a problem.
The same is true for climate change, for a couple of reasons. First of all, like plastics, carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere lasts a really long time; anything we emit today will stay up, gleefully trapping heat and helping drown Bangladesh, for somewhere between 300 and 1,000 years. And second of all, the warming we’re inducing is more or less irreversible, at least on reasonable human civilization time scales.
This summer, the Arctic experienced its warmest temperature ever recorded, at 100.4 degrees. From January to June, temperatures in Siberia were more than five degrees Celsius hotter than average, an increase that has only about a one in 80,000 chance of happening without human intervention. Arctic sea ice is at its lowest extent ever for this point in the year—by 193,000 square miles. The 12-month period ending in June was tied for the warmest such period ever recorded.
Things are going great.
All of this is happening, of course, in a year when the entirety of the world’s economy more or less shut down for months. The COVID-19-related reductions in emissions are going to show us just how far off we really are from dealing with this properly—globally, we’ll probably only see a five to eight percent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, and, as that plastics paper tells us, even massive reductions of a thing that lasts effectively forever aren’t enough.
In a sense, these sorts of issues require a re-imagining both of the “how” of mitigation and of how we measure success. With climate, this year is clearly illustrating just how much of a red herring the calls for personal responsibility are—sure, try and reduce your footprint, but all the individual action in the world won’t make a dent compared to a full, top-down, global, let’s-all-blow-up-the-asteroid-together style approach. And even if that could happen, crowing about 10 percent reductions seems a tad misguided when we’re still a far cry from avoiding the climate equivalent of those albatross chicks filled with plastic.
“Substantial commitments to improving the global plastic system from business, governments, and the international community to solve the ecological, social, and economic problems of plastic pollution and achieve near-zero input of plastics into the environment,” the authors of that paper concluded.
In other words: change everything, to fix anything.
[random bits]
The New York Times is maintaining a Vaccine Tracker to follow the hundred-plus efforts toward a coronavirus vaccine. It fills me with some vague combination of hope and dread.
Comet NEOWISE is visible in some parts of the world these days, and it won’t be back for around 6,800 years, so give it a shot.
The first active leak of methane from the Antarctic sea bed has been discovered. Which, uh, isn’t great.
Don’t you hate when you accidentally create a new hybrid species of fish? Meet the sturddlefish.
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