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The European Commission has proposed new rules to ban certain plastic products in order to reduce the waste filling our oceans, it announced Monday.
The EU's measures tackle the top 10 plastic products that wash up on Europe's beaches and fill its seas, including a ban on the private use of single-use plastics like plastic straws, plates and utensils and containers used for fast food or your daily takeaway coffee.
The measures would also have each country in the EU come up with a system that would collect 90 percent of plastic bottles by 2025.
"The proposed ban in the European Union of single use plastics, notably plastic straws and cotton buds, is welcome and very promising news," said Dr. Paul Harvey from Macquarie University in a press release. "Single use plastic pollution is one of the biggest environmental catastrophes of this generation."
You can see why the EU is making the proposal. Single-use plastic objects and fishing gear account for 70 percent of waste in the ocean, according to the EU. In 2017, researchers found 38 million pieces of plastic waste on an uninhabited South Pacific island. Figures from the same year showed that a million plastic bottles are bought around the world every minute, a number predicted to jump 20 percent by 2021.
Fortunately, others are tackling the plastic problem, including scientists and environmentalists who've come up with one solution involving mushrooms that can eat plastic.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @03:19AM (1 child)
Ah! A fellow member of tautology club! As you're well aware, comrade, the first rule of the tautology club is the first rule of tautology club!
The definition of responsibility hinges on their economic position. You're begging the question.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31 2018, @02:19PM
If the definition of one's quality of responsibility hinges on one's economic position, then one's economic position implies one's quality of responsibility.
Yet, counter examples are readily available; a very rich person can be incredibly irresponsible, and a very poor person can be incredibly responsible, etc.
That is, your premise may be thrown out, and you are therefore just plain wrong.
You might counter by saying that this also destroys the original argument: What you meant is that taxation is applied to not the responsible, but to the rich; and, that subsidies are given not to the irresponsible, but to the poor. However, there are 2 points here:
By the original logic, this just means that you'd get fewer rich people and more poor people (which is exactly what the Welfare state has delivered, in terms of relative proportions).
The original conclusions still make sense in the grand scheme, because of the following:
In a society of voluntary association, if you are responsible, then you have a high chance of achieving a productive economic position.
In a society of voluntary association, if you are irresponsible, then you have a low chance of achieving a productive economic position.
Therefore, by Bayes's rule: Assuming a society of sufficiently voluntary association, the responsible are over-represented among the rich, and thus taxing the rich is a good approximation of taxing the responsible; similarly, the irresponsible are over-represented among the poor, and thus subsidizing the poor is a good approximation of subsidizing the irresponsible.
Taxation decreases one's economic position without decreasing one's quality of responsibility.
Subsidy increases one's economic position without increasing one's quality of responsibility.
You might counter by saying that taxation could increase everyone's economic position by putting those tax monies to good use, but that depends on government being a necessarily good steward of capital, in which case one might as well have Mussolini's "Everything in the State; nothing outside the State", which history has shown doesn't really work—people want some things in the State, not because it is the best idea, but because it is the quickest way to get things done.