The Shrine

https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/30/us/40-to ... index.html

The gist is that a group of guys went on a boat and picked up about 40 tons of plastic waste. Now, here's what I don't get about the environmentalist attitude. The article mentions that this effort barely made a dent since there's like a million pounds of waste out there. However, as far as I can tell there's nothing special about the boat, and we'll assume that sending a boat to pick this stuff up is net beneficial to the environment so that it's not the case that its greenhouse gas contribution or whatever is worse than what it recycles. The expedition took about a month, so if you have 1000 such boats doing this for a year you'll pick up 480000 tons of garbage, which is about 1/3 of the total out there. Now as you pick stuff up it'll probably be harder to get the same efficiency, but we're only 1/3 of the total so I'm guessing it can't be very hard to find more garbage out there to collect, and even if you take a 50% efficiency hit that's still about 20% of the estimated garbage out there. I think we can all agree that having a lot of plastic junk floating around out there can't be good for anybody so cleaning up is a pretty noncontroversial thing to do in terms of benefit for the environment. There appears to be no exotic technology involved in this, and while having 1000 such boats won't be cheap, it seems like it's a number you can easily propose and put a budget around it. Besides, you don't have to do this all in a year. Yes there will be new garbage coming in each year too but doing something is still better nothing.

Yet I have rarely heard of any proposal that would sound remotely plausible. Yes it's true governments around the world are cheap so if they hear you need $50 million dollars for some boats they'll reject it, but you should still be able to come up with a proposal. It's certainly more realistic than say hoping a bunch of flying taxis that seems to almost certainly have net negative environmental contribution (take off/landing uses a ton of energy, and hovering too if needed which would be quite likely if you got a ton of flying taxis around) running on technology that currently do not exist. I get that it sounds a lot sexier to need $5 billion dollars for electric flying cars that will totally solve the problem, but I think that's also why we're in this predicament in the first place. If you're always asking for outrageous amount of money on exotic technology it's hard to take this seriously. You hear about how the snow melting makes things worse since snow reflects more sunlight due to being white. Well, you could just paint a very large area white too. Clearly since we already use paints of all kinds of color it can't have a negative effect if we all just paint our roof white. That's going to cost money but again everyone painted their house at some point so it's not like this is some kind of crazy money we're talking about. Again, it's pretty uncontroversial that having something that reflects more sunlight will mitigate heat-related issues better, and if this somehow turned out to be a bad idea we can quickly repaint all the roof black or something. Of course, I'm not aware of any local let alone national level to paint roof in a certain color. It's true these action likely has a minor effect, but you got to start somewhere.

Drumming up fear and hysteria is profitable. For this group -- they rely on funding. I generally scale down any alarmist claims and estimations to 25% -- I figure that's usually closer to the truth. So that would mean, by your calculation, you could solve the problem in a month likely, with 1000 boats. But then what would these people do?

Climate change and environmentalism are industries. They can't survive without a problem to address. It's amazing where industries will pop up and seek to perpetuate the problem through non-solutions. We are seeing that a lot lately in homelessness and drug use (poverty industries). I find they push "solutions" that maintain or even increase the underlying issue (such as advocating exclusively for harm reduction, instead of treatment or whatever).

I doubt this problem is that easily solvable but assuming they didn't make up about what they picked up (40 tons), you make enough trips picking up 40 tons of junk it's got to make a difference at some point. I'm guessing even if they did this in the grand scheme of things it probably matters not very much, but so what? I don't think I've ever heard of anyone saying we need to keep plastic garbage in the middle of oceans for reasons, so there shouldn't be any reason to oppose this. Assuming this group didn't secretly got a few million dollars of funding to pull this off, at worst you end up being somewhat wasteful on money for something that didn't do much beyond tidying things up. Still, it's not like people haven't figured out ways to waste money and energy on totally stupid stuff so if you waste some money so that that Earth as a whole is tidier, it's not the worst way to use money. And yeah, I suspect it's because there isn't that much money to be had in doing things like this which is why they remain just random projects. It's true a lot of novel ideas have scaling issues, but I sure don't see one for the technology involved in this case.