The only thing that's going to solve climate change is technology. It's the same technology we've had since the 50's. Not turning off our lights, setting the AC to 80, drinking through paper straws, or clearing thousands of acres for solar panels.
Solar is faster in the short term (because people think it's somehow "clean") but not sustainable in long term. It requires too much land and upkeep for not great output. It would be better to go all in on nuclear and surrounding technologies and solve energy once and for all.
I disagree. I'm willing to reconsider though. Here's what I think.
Solar is immensely cheap to the point where it's often cheaper than arbitrary other surfaces. Their maintenance is very low, much more so than nuclear. And land is not an issue for the US or China, the two places where decarbonizing energy is most important. Both have massive swaths of desert that is uninhabited, and where the addition of shade will likely net benefit the local ecosystem.
I agree that solar panel creation produces a fair amount of pollution, but then, so does nuclear power generation. In both cases this can and should be dealt with safely.
The article seems to argue that the goal is very narrowly to reduce the amount of plastic bags created/consumed and then claims a study shows that the bans do indeed achieve that goal. It's hard to imagine this goal not being achieved, but it's too narrow.
I haven't seen any study showing that total plastic trash, incorrectly disposed, is reduced. It could be hard to study, I admit. I'd love to know the amount of the reduction as well. My guess would be there is a reduction, but it is fairly small.
I'd imagine 7% reduction is the upper bound on the impact, but it could be smaller than that if other litter increased. Maybe that's high enough to make the ban worth the inconvenience, I don't know what the right threshold should be.
Broader goals could include reducing total plastic production, reducing fossil fuel mining, etc. I'm more suspicious that these goals are not being meaningfully affected by bag bans.
It's just a redirect, this isn't an issue. The browser will use the final URL to decide which passwords to look up.
The issue is for clients that don't follow URLs and also manage abuse reputation by domain name. For example, if your webmail client knows that "evilsite.com" is bad because it's frequently reported spam, then you just start using links to "google.com/amp/evilsite.com" and the webmail client's reputation score resets.
In another context, I recall someone doing something similar, but they didn't have images in advance. So they would study the list of names, but wouldn't know who is whom. Supposedly made it faster to learn people's names anyway.
Jobs like archeology could probably also be automated further. Somewhat limiting this is possibly the fact that the "market size" for automation here is small.
