Naively using GDP per capita as a measure of the average level of technology people can afford, this suggests that Bangladesh should be able to employ land reclamation measures similar to the Netherlands in the 1960s, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flevopolder
There might be other considerations (such as differing geography) that make this impracticable, however.
Reducing emissions to zero, scarily enough, is the minimum. We actually need to actively remove carbon from the atmosphere in order to prevent further temperature increases, which lag behind CO2 concentration by years.
Looks like so, weird. I currently see "Bitcoin as a Battery" in the front page, which is older and has less points, with 121 points and posted 7 hours ago.
My experience with react with different: you have to spend a large amount of time upfront in order to get the basic features of a single page app. You burn a lot of mental energy figuring out which forms library, router library, etc to use. When it's time to upgrade, you have no guarantees that your libraries will continue to play together nicely. And quality and standards between libraries can vary dramatically.
I prefer the Angular approach. The initial learning curve is steep, but once you get over that, it becomes a rapid development framework, as all the pieces work together cohesively. The Angular CLI makes creating components, services, updating, etc a breeze, and helps maintain structure as your scale your app up. The core libraries (like routing, forms) are developed and maintained by Google, so you can expect a solid level of quality. The typescript-first approach means that your IDE can help you explore APIs, auto import, and work with third party libraries just as well. And the strong foundation provided by the core framework means that third party libraries have a better starting point upon which to supplement/extend.
Same experience here with Angular - I have heard it described as "batteries included". It has basically everything you need to do 99% of all projects right out of the box (notable missing thing is something cohesive to properly manage application state in a nice way).
Takes a bit of effort to learn, but once you are up and running with Angular things are pretty fast to put together.
Alternatively, you could use Akita, which is built on top of this basic model, but offers a ton of additional functionality and the ability to use Redux Dev Tools.
Finally, you also have NgRX, which is based on Redux--but also adds a ton of overhead and boilerplate. I actually opted for Akita since it is way more ergonomic and offers most everything I need.
Yeah the "inject a state service into everything you need" is one way of doing it, but it gets messy and it tightly binds your components with that particular state handling approach (e.g. re-using components across projects might get difficult if you have a bespoke state service for Project A and you want to use A's components also in Project B & C etc). We also found that there are big concerns about which components are allowed to access and update which state - e.g. why does a tiny inconsequential GUI control used to copy something to a clipboard potentially get access to read and mutate the entire application's state? You can start sharding it up and put in "ACLs" of sorts ... but that is some of the messyness I mentioned :)
Not seen Akita previously - will take a look. Thanks!
I dont know how much has changed in the two years since I last touched it, but Angular's blessed packages and ecosystem were more of a time sink than anything else- the flex layout package in particular was substantially buggier than simply using postcss with what was at the time css-next (I think it is preset-env now?)
Additionally, baking in rx-js felt like a serious mistake- not only was there the roller coaster ramp up of learning angular, but helping others on the team learn rx-js on top of it while trying to be productive probably cut our output in half.
It didnt help that we had a mix of junior developers and experienced .net devs all learning at the same time- half the battle was explaining which feature came from ES2015, typescript, angular or rx-js.
Hindsight may be 20/20, but I am reasonably confident that we could have been significantly better off with react. Ember was never an option because they are only just now getting features react and angular developers have been taking for granted for years.
I never used the flex layout package. That's a third party library, and I think sticking with CSS grid + flex makes more sense. (Alternatively, you can just use bootstrap or tailwind or whatever.)
RxJS is actually one of my favorite parts to Angular, but it _does_ lengthen the learning curve quite a bit. Once you get past that, you can have amazingly reactive apps. One of my beefs with ReactJS is that it doesn't play as well with RxJS. Now that I think of it, you're not actually required to use RxJS with Angular: you can convert observables to promises (`toPromise()`).
I could see how having junior/new developers could make things a lot harder. I remember first learning typescript and having to keep the TS playground open at all times to see how it compiled to ES5.
Yeah when I first started learning Angular I had similar thoughts "Why did they make this so hard?!?!?!" regarding RxJS. To be fair regarding Typescript & ES2015, you'd get that with React too (since in my mind you;d be insane to start something new in raw Javascript these days when Typescript has made our lives so much so much so much better).
Now though I find RxJS to be a really elegant mental model for dealing with asynchronous stuff. I wish there was more Reactive/Rx* stuff around in the things I work with. Its really nice.
I've had the opposite experience regarding RxJava. I really think "reactive" is an anti-pattern. Its made my companies code base much harder to reason about.
> You burn a lot of mental energy figuring out which forms library, router library, etc to use
Why do you need a specific forms or router library? Those are both things you can do with vanilla ES2015+ and React.
The library problem is self-inflicted, but it doesn't help that search engines tend to boost a lot of half-baked Medium posts about why you should use slightly-nicer flavor-of-the-month library to wrap something really basic like the fetch browser API.
Nest.js + Angular on the frontend is a dream. Nest.js was modeled after Angular and they both use a similar basket of concepts/tools (dependency injection, decorators, first-class TS support). You can build a robust full stack app without context switching. They are both opinionated, ensuring a consistent and predictable structure.
If you go the Nest + Angular route, I recommend checking out NX monorepos, which adds another level of seamlessness. NX was created by former Google/Angular team members. One of my favorite features includes the ability to easily share libraries/models across the front end and backend. E.g., if you're designing an API, you can import the same model file to both the front end and back end, ensuring no divergence between both sides as the API is redesigned.
> One of my features includes the ability to easily share libraries/models across the front end and backend. E.g., if you're designing an API, you can import the same model file to both the front end and back end, ensuring no divergence between both sides as the API is redesigned.
To be fair this applies to any case where you have the same language on the front and back, which was one of the main motivations for Node in the first place
I'm a senior engineer and designer with experience in engineering and designing dozens of apps for hedge funds, nonprofits, and leading tech companies. If it's relevant, I have a strong background in climate, having previously cofounded a carbon pricing nonprofit.
If you're looking for a fully featured framework, Angular is a joy to work with. React is great too, but the configuration overhead is enormous due to the fact that it's mainly a view library. I realize you are pining for the days when you just pasted a CDN link in your index.html, but while those use cases still exist, for the most part users are demanding more native-like web experiences, which requires a bit more complexity.
One of the main strengths (and according to some, weakness) of Angular is that it has everything you might need to create a full featured SPA out of the box, and it's all tightly orchestrated by the Angular CLI. Creating a component or a service is a simple command, and many third party packages leverage the CLI (Angular Schematics) to install and configure themselves in your codebase. Core packages--such as such as forms, router, angular material--are all high quality (by Google), updated together, and work cohesively with each other. That means updating even major versions of Angular is an easy `ng update` command. For me, the minimal configuration overhead is a BFD, as I plain hate that stuff.
The fact that Typescript has been a first class citizen of Angular from its outset makes development pretty enjoyable. I'm so used to exploring APIs using intellisense, leveraging types to figure out what data types can be passed in functions, relying heavily on auto-complete/auto-import to pick up my pieces and finish typing a word for me and importing the corresponding library while I keep going.
Granted, there is a significant learning curve. But once you get over the initial learning curve, you become incredibly productive. Arguably, the learning curve in other frameworks is worse, given that you have to research what libraries to use (e.g., which forms library, with its own set of conventions), configure it, and make sure it plays nice with the other patchwork of libraries.
It _is_ a political issue. The technology already exists--courtesy of the scientists/engineers of course. Whether that technology is deployed is a problem of politics.
For example, if the price of fossil fuels reflected its true cost to society--think climate change, extreme weather, stronger storms, droughts, ocean acidification, etc--then fossil fuels would be prohibitively expensive compared to renewable or nuclear energy. This is what a carbon tax is, and it's what many scientists and economists have been pushing for decades now. But they've been fighting a losing battle against the oil and gas lobby, and one party in particular that is wholly captured by them.
In fact, James Hansen, NASA scientist and head of the Goddard Institute, got out of the science to focus specifically on the politics. He urges people to join the Citizens Climate Lobby, which has lobbied for carbon pricing legislation for over a decade now: the Energy Innovation Act has bipartisan support in Congress right now (https://energyinnovationact.org/). Many other scientists are involved in the politics these day as well (Katherine Hayhoe [atmospheric scientist], Michael Mann [climatologist]).
>This is what a carbon tax is, and it's what many scientists and economists have been pushing for decades now. But they've been fighting a losing battle against the oil and gas lobby, and one party in particular that is wholly captured by them.
You missed the forest for the trees. As the OP pointed out, the US going to zero emissions overnight will not even help. US politics will not solve Nigeria's, China's, or India's populations from expanding to modern western consumerism.
Of course we can't instantly solve global carbon emissions. But we can do our (very large) part here in the U.S. By shifting where our dollars go. By moving from carbon to renewable sources, we'll drop the price of renewables, helping small economies afford to do the same.
Progress is virtually always incremental. We need to begin by stopping dragging our feet.
That’s like saying we should try to bail out the boat with spoons because “progress is incremental.” It’s not only pointless, but actively dangerous, because it’s a distraction.
The “Green New Deal” is a great example. A jobs program obviously won’t do anything to seriously address climate change. Worse, it wastes money and political capital on things that could have more utility. If you spent that money on nuclear energy research and gave it away to developing nations, then you could really move the needle.
But is it a distraction? To overuse the analogy, GP is proposing to yes, get most of the crew to spoon, to buy some little extra time while the engineering team is trying to fix the pumps. The alternative is to have the crew drink or pray to deities for the pumps to be blessed and magically start working.
If the development of the developing world is a problem, you can't expect the solution to come from developing world. On our end, like in the example of the ship's crew, most people aren't able to contribute to a proper solution - they lack the necessary skills and opportunities. Unfortunately (in this case), we live in free market democracies, which means there isn't a body that can reallocate huge amount of resources to retraining and retooling towards mitigating climate change. The market doesn't care, so we have to do things the hard way - we have to force our governments to force the market to start allocating resources, so that engineers and scientists and logisticians can deal with the problem directly.
Spoons? The U.S. is responsible for a whopping 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions. China is the only country on the planet that emits more than us, and they have ~4x the population.
This is a problem that has no single, simple solution. If every possible solution is shot down because it doesn't solve ALL the problems at once then we will never succeed.
We need to divide and conquer. The west needs to hold themselves accountable, and then hold stragglers accountable.
> We need to divide and conquer. The west needs to hold themselves accountable, and then hold stragglers accountable.
And then donate some of the tech and resources, too. By virtue of being first, we've cut out the developing nations from the most direct path to improving their living conditions. We do, IMO, have a responsibility to help them leapfrog the "fossil fuel" part of that path.
(Though honestly, we can revisit that point later. First, let's get to zero emissions ourselves.)
Of course it will help. It's progress. Besides that, why won't the solutions which enable the US to go to zero emissions work as well for other countries? Because those countries can't afford those solutions? Well then the rest of us are going to have to figure that out too.
There's a path dependence to everything. Had we started earlier, we would have shaped the curve of possibilities: renewables would be cheaper, storage solutions would have come online earlier, etc. We would have shaped international dialogue and culture around this issue too, with other nations following the US's lead as far as policies and technologies adopted.
Real world example of path dependence: Supreme Court stops recount in FL --> GWB elected --> Pulling out of Kyoto protocols, starting wars --> [...] Trump elected, partially due to government mistrust seeded in GWB era--> even worse climate change policies
But the problem is that the policies are wrong. They start from the premise that what matters is behavioral change, not technological change. We need $100 billion/year of federal money into thorium and battery research, not "green jobs" or Kyoto protocol. We don't need a "New Deal" to avert climate change, we need a Manhattan Project. But I absolutely agree that we needed those things starting 30 years ago.
You didn't address the problem of Nigeria that the OP brought up. How will a carbon tax in the U.S. address the issue of the Nigerian people rightly desiring a better standard of living?
If the tax is small enough to be affordable by these Nigerians, it won't have the required effect on climate.
If the tax is large enough to prevent 400m Nigerians from obtaining a better standard of living that they rightly desire, then they won't agree to it - and there's no way to force them to comply (not that it would be right to force them IMHO) other than a bloody war.
Billions of people in developing countries have justifiable, understandable, fair interests in a reasonable standard of living, achieving which unavoidably (at least in short term) involves increasing emissions, not decreasing them.
People don't support the concept of taxes even when they can directly see the positive impact the tax payment has on their own lives and on the community.
Addressing climate change is an abstract concept and for most people, like 80% of the population they can't grasp the abstract, so it all feels like a scam, one big flea circus. "No, no, the fleas are there you just can't see them, just trust me."
Unless someone can invent a way to capture and sequester greenhouse gases from the upper atmosphere to the tune of 50.9 gigatonnes per year I really don't see humanity making any progress, slowing growth isn't helping.
I see comments pointing out that the majority of plastic pollution in oceans come from Asia/Africa. This is true, but there are two points worth considering:
1) Whenever you pay cheaply for anything made in any third world country, you're externalizing the societal cost of pollution to that country (and if it gets into the oceans, to everyone). In other words, you're not paying the true cost of that item--economically and to society and the environment.
I would also like to assert that non-western countries are very influenced by trends in North America and Europe. (Source: I am from such country in Africa, and am living in another in Asia)
Once the west establishes plastics as something for the uneducated and poor -- that they[the west] got away from, people will rush to use their fancy not-so-cheap bags.
Same with fossil fuels, recycling, carbon-related policies, ... etc
* I don't mean "uneducated and poor" literary, but just generally less fortunate people in the no-so-developed world
Opinion of mine is it takes a while for people to come to a consensus that something is bad and come up with rules to mitigate it.
Three things I think of.
One is a guy talking about visiting really poor part of South American. Used to be 'clean' because people were too desperately poor to throw away anything. And later as they became less poor there was garbage everywhere. And still later and better off, less garbage.
When I was kid in the 1960's in the US there was trash everywhere. People would throw trash out car windows, leave their trash behind at parks. Toss trash in the street and dump refuse in vacant lots. Now that is both illegal and considered boorish.
Another friend mentioned riding the bus in a country in South America. 40 years ago people just tossed trash out the window. 30 years ago they'd wait till the bus was a mile outside of town. 20 years ago the bus had a trash can and people would hold onto trash till the next stop.
I think societies are slow to come to grips with and deal with negative externalities that industrial culture makes possible. The whole thing is a process.
> Whenever you pay cheaply for anything made in any third world country, you're externalizing the societal cost of pollution to that country
That's true maybe when it comes to atmospheric pollution, but not with plastic waste in rivers and the ocean.
The majority of plastic found in rivers and the ocean are not industrial waste but post consumer waste... things like cigarette butts, plastic bags, and food wrappers.
I've seen this tossed around a lot the last few months, but I've yet to see any evidence of its truth. Do you have a link to a study or some other source for this?
"China has been a major destination for Australia's recycled waste, with around 1.3 million tonnes exported in 2016–17. This accounted for 4 per cent of Australia's total recyclable waste, but included significant amounts of recyclable plastics and recyclable paper (35 per cent and 30 per cent of Australia's totals)."
There was a Dutch journalist who went to Poland and saw those recycling centers just burn the plastics in open pits.
This is why countries need to clean up their own mess and not sell their waste to a foreign company to be recycled offshore. But out of sight out of mind I guess.
If that is the case then again, the issue is on the receiving nation.
Richer nations are not externalizing their garbage, they're literally paying for it. If the receivers are not doing their job and putting it in the Earth, then that's not just some industrial by-product problem, it's point blank corruption.
Also, if it's consumer items in the Ocean, then the issue will be about where most consumers are, and how much they pollute, given that the issue might be Asia.
But the West obviously has enough of it's problems so it's not like anyone can point fingers really.
>Richer nations are not externalizing their garbage, they're literally paying for it
They are externalizing it, selling what they can, paying others to take it but not paying the true costs of properly recycling it in the first place.
> If the receivers are not doing their job and putting it in the Earth, then that's not just some industrial by-product problem, it's point blank corruption.
If we know this and continue to sell it to them, are we any less at fault? the answer is no.
>Also, if it's consumer items in the Ocean, then the issue will be about where most consumers are, and how much they pollute, given that the issue might be Asia.
Its thrown away consumer items, which as explained are shipped to asia from western countries as waste.
>But the West obviously has enough of it's problems so it's not like anyone can point fingers really.
everyone sucks, everyone needs to do better. No exceptions.
1. How do we know if we paid extra it doesn't go into the pocket of a middleman? We may pay $150 for Nike shoes but at the end the person who stitches the shoes might get $0.25. This will only work if there is accountability with consequences along the entire chain.
2. I've certainly disappointed by this one but I put the blame on our city and county politicians who allowed this to happen while charging us extra on the claims that they will be properly recycled.
"you're externalizing the societal cost of pollution to that country (and if it gets into the oceans, to everyone). In other words, you're not paying the true cost of that item"
It's not the responsibility of buyers a long way down the value chain and 1/2 way across the world to manage the social policies of other nations.
Do you want colonialism? Or not?
The 'pollution' is 100% the fault of the people doing it.
Also, I don't see why the manufacturing/creating process should be necessarily considerably more 'plastic waste intensive' than the end product itself - in fact, this would be economically wasteful and more expensive possibly.
So ... we could start putting big tarriffs on importers with bad environmental practice and human rights laws ...
It's the same inane naysaying that pops up on anything about environmental concerns. "Look those other people are bad too, therefore we don't have to improve".
That logic is bullshit and lazy, and we should call people out when we see it.
Western countries already do so much to protect the environment from plastic that there's not much room to improve. It almost all gets buried in landfills or burnt, not spilt into the ocean. Since we've pretty much solved the problem already, why not invest that money into something we're not doing well, like CO2 emissions? Even if we were to reduce plastic waste in the ocean, perhaps there are less costly ways, like fining people for littering, putting nets on the stormwater drain outfalls, or, shockingly, stop trying to recycle if that's how it's getting into the ocean.
All environmental efforts have a cost and it's a mistake of hyped-up media consumers to assume that the latest popular cause must be fought at any cost. There may be other, more effective, uses of that money on things that aren't in the news right now.
The damages has been done. It could take hundreds of years and an order of magnitude's financial resources to clean it up land and underground water pollutions. But the air/ocean/atmosphere/carbon footprints are shared and affecting globally.
They still have tons of it to dispose of, and still have lower regulations/controls on how it gets disposed of.
And now there is a backlog of recycling plastics in north america that is increasingly likely to get thrown in landfills, some of that may make it to waterways.
Past 10 years, Europe is increasing burning waste for generating electricity, and heat for district heating. Especially Sweden is burning 50% of the waste they generate. Waste plastic makes pretty good fuel.
Sweden (5.1) is very close to the world average (4.9 tCO2/capita/year) in fossil CO2 emissions, so they're doing really well for a developed country. (2017 data from Wikipedia.)
There is a caveat in per country carbon accounting. It doesn't include imported goods, nor shipment of those goods. Having said that, Sweden is indeed doing relatively good compared to other developed countries.
Yes, it emits CO2, but is that really a problem? If they didn't burn plastic to produce heat and electricity, they'd likely be burning fossil fuel, which is going to emit probably about the same amount of CO2. Is trash burning really offsetting the use of non-carbon energy sources?
Imagine you live in a place that has no waste collection services. You have the same kind of inorganic waste such as plastic food packaging as people in the US, albeit a bit less.
What are you going to do with your trash? You could burn it, but that would release a lot of noxious fumes and make your neighbors unhappy. So you just throw it in the river, and it floats away, out to sea. Problem "solved".
I don't know what the solution is, but the problem cannot be solved by the west at a distance.
I see these two points made often yet I've never seen a comprehensive meta analysis that shows how true any of it is. Yes as you linked ppl will often give an article that supports that these things happen, but relative quantity is important. Otherwise this is just empty rhetoric, and environmentalism doesn't need any more of that.
> Whenever you pay cheaply for anything made in any third world country, you're externalizing the societal cost of pollution to that country
Much of the disposable stuff I've seen here in California were made in the US. The Solo cup company, and its parent Dart Container, are both in the US, for example.
Bangladesh, similarly, is a very low lying nation without the capital to build seawalls and other protections (as the Netherlands can).