A más plástico para reciclar más aumento de la basura marina

En un informe escrito por el experto en salud pública finlandés Dr. Mikko Paunio se revela que los esfuerzos para reciclar el plástico son una de las principales causas del problema de la basura marina y propone su incineración en lugar de tratar de reciclarlos.

La mayoría de los desechos plásticos provienen de unos pocos países. Solo 10 ríos, 8 de Asia y 2 de África, son los responsables del 93% del plástico que los ríos del mundo vierten al Océano. El orígen del mismo no solo procede del consumo interno en China sino también y sobre todo de las grandes cantidades de desechos que los países de la UE exportamos a las plantas de gestión de residuos de Asia, aparentemente para su reciclaje. Desde que China prohibió las importaciones de desechos a principios de año, los envíos se han desviado hacia otros países asiáticos con controles ambientales aún más débiles.

El autor del informe, el Dr. Mikko Paunio, dice: "Está claro que la contribución europea a los desechos marinos es el resultado de nuestros esfuerzos por reciclar. Sin embargo, varios países ya han demostrado que pueden reducir esta contribución casi a cero, simplemente incinerando los desechos". Sin embargo, la UE está redoblando los esfuerzos para aumentar el reciclaje y cerrar la vía de la incineración, creyendo erróneamente que esto reducirá las emisiones de carbono.

El reciclaje forma parte del adoctrinamiento de la ciudadanía en la ideología del ecologismo político, asumida ya por todos los partidos. La utilidad material del reciclaje es mínima, cuando no contraproducente como en el caso del plástico. Sin embargo, su liturgia es muy eficaz para 'educar' a las masas en la moralina de la 'corrección política'.

Hay mucho de farsa y de hipocresía el reciclado. Ya termine en los ríos de Asia o empiece en la recogida de basura de nuestra calle. Como en el reciente caso de Mataró -hay muchos de anteriores- en dónde se ha descubierto, vídeo incluido, que habitualmente los camiones del servicio de recogida de basura mezclan los residuos que previa y laboriosamente los ciudadanos han separado en sus correspondientes contendedores.



Lean esta carta del Dr. Mikko Paunio:

The title may sound odd to ordinary people, but the sad fact is that the global “recycling” industry has significantly added to the marine plastic litter problem.

I have put recycling in quotes, because only a small fraction of plastic recovered from consumers is actually recycled: the material collected is dirty and so mixed up that it is impossible to produce the high-quality raw material required by, for example, the food-packaging industry. Most recovered plastic is simply burned or dumped: on land, in rivers, or even directly in the oceans.

Unable to recycle waste in line with the targets imposed on them, rich countries have chosen to dump it — plastic, paper and cardboard — on poor ones, especially China. Lower environmental standards in much of Asia has made it cheaper to manage waste there and low-quality recycled plastic can sometimes be profitably produced from these waste streams, albeit in highly polluted conditions.

In recent years, the stream of waste delivered to China expanded vastly. Annual imports reached 85 million tons, including 8 million of plastic. The quantity was so huge that inspection at ports became impossible, and the unscrupulous found that even mixed or hazardous waste could profitably be sent, disguised as “recycling” to avoid landfill tax or high management costs in rich countries. Unable to handle this tsunami of refuse, the Chinese were forced to either burn or dump vast quantities. An unknown amount found its way to the oceans.

The consequences for the environment and for public health of this “recycling” madness have therefore been horrendous, and have ultimately proved too high for the Chinese, who have now banned waste imports entirely. Recent figures suggest that recycling businesses in the UK have responded by simply shipping waste to Asian countries with even weaker environmental standards. So even more waste will end up in the oceans in future.

Meanwhile, the EU is doing almost nothing to reduce the flow of waste. It is sticking to its idealistic environmental dreams, claiming to be in the forefront of efforts to save the oceans through a “circular economy” strategy. History tells a different story — efforts to focus on recycling have led to one environmental disaster to another, with the ocean plastic crisis being just the latest. Readers may recall the waste crisis in the Italian region of Campania, which was overwhelmed by so-called “ecoballs” — the two-thirds of plastic waste that was rejected by its sorting facilities. The streets were awash with rubbish, dioxins spread across the region, and the eventual breakdown of public order.

It should be understood that all recycling schemes – including paper recycling — leak either plastic litter or microplastic to the environment. If we truly care about saving the oceans, then recycling of plastic and paper should stop. And there is a clear and sensible alterative available, namely incineration. Incineration was the way Campania put its waste management system back on an even keel. It is also the basis of the waste management strategy of many EU countries, and as such has proven to be hugely successful on all measures. Yet despite this clear superiority to other approaches, incineration is being dismissed and discouraged, by EU politicians and bureaucrats, but most importantly by the unholy alliance of “recyclers” and green NGOs, who together lobby for ever-more complicated recycling schemes. If the EU was serious about its war against marine pollution it should consider banning the export of plastic waste rather than banning plastic straws.

As someone once said, “Where there’s muck, there’s brass”. Unfortunately, as far as recycling is concerned the price is paid, not just by ordinary consumers, but by the oceans and the rest of the natural environment.

Dr Mikko Paunio is a Finnish public health specialist and an adjunct professor in general epidemiology at the University of Helsinki. He is the author of the new paper Save The Oceans – Stop Recycling Plastic

'La absurda cruzada de la UE por reciclar plástico solo empeora la contaminación'

Las actuales políticas climáticas son altamente ineficaces dado el fuerte componente natural del cambio climático

“The future is unknowable, but the past should give us hope” Winston Churchill (1958)

Karl Popper’s falsifiability criterion for science requires that hypotheses not only explain known evidence, but also must be testable by evidence still unknown. However, a problem arises when any failed ex-ante prediction made by a hypothesis, can be post-hoc explained in multiple ways leaving the hypothesis nearly intact. An example is the pause in global warming that took place between 2001-2013, while accelerated warming was the CO2-hypothesis outstanding prediction for the 21st century (IPCC-FAR, 1990). The pause was explained in multiple ways (see: Nature Climate Changevol. 4, issue 3, 2014, and Nature’s “Focus: Recent slowdown in global warming“). To meet Karl Popper’s scientific criterion, the CO2hypothesis of climate change must make predictions that cannot be post-hoc explained when they fail. When demanding urgent action on CO2emissions, the predictions that can falsify the hypothesis are being made for a period ending in 2100, more than 80 years away. Its falsifiability is being removed until it no longer matters for present policy decisions.

This article deals with scientific forecasting of future climate change and its consequences. As with any other activity, forecasting has been the subject of systematic studies, and three of the foremost experts in forecasting principles have established the golden rule of forecasting: “be conservative by adhering to cumulative knowledge about the situation and about forecasting methods”(Armstrong et al., 2015). Research has shown that ignoring the guidelines deduced from the golden rule greatly increases forecasting error. However, climate forecasting is dominated by radical predictions, many of which are absurd, yet they are given disproportionate positive attention. Two of the authors (Green & Armstrong, 2007) analyzed the IPCC-Fourth Assessment Report, concluding that its forecasts were not the outcome of scientific procedures, but “the opinions of scientists transformed by mathematics and obscured by complex writing,” and warned that research on forecasting has shown that experts’ predictions are not useful in situations involving uncertainty and complexity. Previous research by Philip E. Tetlock had already demonstrated that expert forecasting is usually worse than basic extrapolation algorithms, and that there is a perverse inverse relationship between fame and accuracy in forecasting (Tetlock, 2005). J. Scott Armstrong went further and in 2007 challenged the IPCC prediction of 3°C/century (IPCC-TAR, 2001) with a no-change forecast for the next 10 years (2008-2017). Using the UAH dataset and judging by cumulative absolute error, the no-change forecast reduced forecast errors by 12% compared to the IPCC projection, showing that the IPCC projection had no value, since it was beaten by a no-change forecast (Climate tipping alarm vs scientific forecasting).

The first eight articles in this series analyzed the cumulative knowledge about climate change necessary for conservative forecasting.

1. The Glacial Cycleis necessary to understand our interglacial evolution and the role of Milankovitch forcing.
2. The Dansgaard-Oeschger Cycle researches the causes and consequences of the most abrupt climatic changes in the past.
3. Holocene Climate Variability (A and B) analyzes climate change during our interglacial.
4. The 2400-year Bray Cycle (A,B, and C) describes the major solar cycle that has determined important climatic shifts in the past, impacting human societies.
5. The 1500-year Cycleadds a much studied and little understood non-solar climate cycle, of a proposed tidal-oceanic origin, and its relationship to the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle.
6. Centennial to Millennial Solar Cycles fills the gap of shorter solar cycles, of which the millennial cycle shows a big climatic effect on the Early and Late Holocene.
7. Climate Change Mechanisms analyzes the way the planet responds to different climate forcings and internal variability, including the 60-year oceanic oscillation that has characterized climate change for the past centuries.
8. Modern Global Warming describes the features of climate change since the Little Ice Age and the perceptible effect of anthropogenic forcing for the past seven decades.

With that knowledge we can attempt to conservatively forecast future climate change for the next decades.

[...]

Claims of sinking nations, hordes of climate refugees, and a new normal every time there is an extreme weather event, are wildly exaggerated and agenda-driven. The highest return for our limited resources is very likely to come from adaptation policies, and no-regrets policies. Policies to prevent or reduce climate change are destined to be highly ineffectual given the strong natural component of climate change, as the past demonstrates.

Projections

1) Human CO2emissions are stabilizing. Peak coal and oil, and current trends make a decrease in emissions very likely before 2050. Atmospheric CO2levels should reach 500 ppm but might stabilize soon afterwards.

2) According to solar cycles, solar activity should increase after the present extended solar minimum, and 21st century solar activity should be as high or higher than 20th century. A mid-21st century solar grand minimum is highly improbable.

3) Global warming might stall or slightly reverse for the period 2000-2035. Cyclic factors suggest renewed warming for the 2035-2065 period at a similar rate to the last half of the 20th century. Afterwards global warming could end, with temperatures stabilized around +1.5°C above pre-industrial, and a very slow decline for the last part of 21st century and beyond.

4) The present summer Arctic sea ice melting pause might continue until ~ 2035. Renewed melting is probable afterwards, but it is unlikely that the Arctic summer will become consistently ice free even by 2100.

5) The rate of sea-level rise can be conservatively projected to a 290 mm increase by 2100 over 2000 levels. Most rates published are extremely non-conservative and very unlikely to take place.

6) Climate change should remain subdued and net positive for the biosphere for the 21st century. Adaptation is likely to be the best strategy, as it has always been.

References

Leer el artículo completo, aquí

¿Cómo podemos reducir la alta tasa de paro y la dualidad laboral en España?

REVISTA DE LIBROS.- Mi tesis es que la dualidad laboral que caracteriza al mercado de trabajo español obliga a unos trabajadores, los empleados temporales, a proporcionar la mayor parte de los ajustes del empleo y de los salarios requeridos por un sistema económico en continuo cambio. Estos ajustes serían más pequeños si se repartieran de forma más equilibrada entre todos los trabajadores.

La dualidad laboral tiene también otras secuelas que conviene mencionar. La dualidad genera una rotación laboral desaforada. Actualmente, del conjunto de contratos cuya duración es predeterminada, que son alrededor del 60%, la mitad dura una semana o menos. No hay una buena justificación económica para semejante rotación, más allá del uso de una vía de ahorro de costes fomentado por la ley.

Vayamos ahora a efectos más generales. En primer lugar, la inserción laboral estable de los jóvenes tarda mucho en producirse: en el período 2008-2016, el primer contrato indefinido se consiguió, en promedio, tras haber transcurrido ocho años desde el inicio de la vida laboral. En segundo lugar, la temporalidad contribuye a reducir la productividad de las empresas y la adquisición de cualificación de los trabajadores, al reducir los incentivos que tienen las empresas para invertir en los empleados temporales. Y, en tercer lugar, hay razones para pensar que la dualidad también redunda en una mayor tasa de paro, debido a la renuencia de las empresas a aceptar el mayor coste esperado del despido que se produce tras la conversión de un contrato temporal en indefinido.

Si este diagnóstico es correcto, entonces podemos derivar dos tipos de posibles remedios de forma inmediata. El primer tipo de medida persigue luchar contra la dualidad, lo que puede hacerse por varias vías: 1) Introduciendo un sistema «bonus-malus» −como el que se utiliza en Estados Unidos− que eleve las cotizaciones a la Seguridad Social de las empresas que presenten un exceso de rotación laboral con respecto al promedio de su sector (independientemente de los tipos de contrato que utilicen); 2) Creando un fondo de capitalización −que existe en Austria y que se introdujo en la legislación española, pero nunca se activó− a través del cual la empresa realizaría cada mes una aportación a la Seguridad Social por cada empleado, que se acumularía en un fondo y que podría luego utilizarse para pagar una parte de la indemnización por despido al rescindir su contrato; 3) Implantando un «contrato único» indefinido, con indemnizaciones que aumenten con la antigüedad del trabajador, a la vez que se suprima la mayor parte de los tipos de contrato temporal, salvo algunos justificados, como los de formación y de sustitución temporal de trabajadores.

El segundo tipo de medida pretende elevar la flexibilidad salarial por dos vías: luchando contra la dualidad y fomentando una mayor respuesta de los salarios a la situación de las empresas, tanto al alza como a la baja. Un importante freno para ello es la extensión automática de las condiciones laborales fijadas en los convenios colectivos a todas las empresas del sector. Esta extensión coadyuva a que la desigualdad salarial sea menor, pero entraña unos costes significativos en términos del empleo. Una medida adecuada sería, por tanto, que sólo se extendiesen esas condiciones si las organizaciones empresariales y sindicales alcanzaran unos umbrales de representatividad altos, lo que no se exige actualmente (ahora el umbral es muy bajo para los sindicatos y a las organizaciones empresariales ni siquiera se les exige umbral alguno).

Estas propuestas no bastarían para aliviar todos los problemas que sufre el mercado de trabajo español. Como apunté en la introducción, otros asuntos de primera importancia son el aumento de la desigualdad salarial, el paro de larga duración y el bajísimo crecimiento de la productividad. La mejora de estos problemas también requeriría cambios en áreas como el sistema educativo y de I+D+i o las políticas de defensa de la competencia, por mencionar dos áreas cruciales.

Sin embargo, las citadas medidas sí contribuirían a la reducción de la tasa de paro estructural y de la volatilidad del empleo. Su efecto se vería potenciado si se combinaran con otras medidas de reforma institucional. En concreto, sería deseable un aumento significativo de la eficiencia de las políticas activas de empleo y la vinculación a estas de la percepción de prestaciones por desempleo. En la actualidad, las políticas activas de empleo son totalmente inoperantes. Por otra parte, contamos con evidencia empírica sólida de que la percepción de prestaciones por desempleo alarga la duración de los períodos de paro.

En un mundo de globalización y cambio tecnológico acelerados, se requiere tanto una mejora continua de las capacidades de los trabajadores como una red de protección suficiente durante los períodos de paro. Por ello, no parece oportuno reducir la generosidad de las prestaciones por desempleo, sino más bien tratarlas como prestaciones para la búsqueda de empleo, vinculando su percepción a la participación en programas de formación −si son necesarios− y a una supervisión por parte de las agencias de colocación del esfuerzo de búsqueda de empleo de los parados. La cooperación público-privada en este ámbito, habitual en otros países, podría ser muy beneficiosa.

Samuel Bentolila es economista y profesor del Centro de Estudios Monetarios y Financieros

Leer el artículo completo, aquí

La envidia permitió superar el igualitarismo feroz de las sociedades primitivas ayudándonos a conciliar el egoísmo con la sociabilidad

SAPIENS.- Selfish traits such as envy have a bad reputation. They are, after all, “deadly sins,” “impurities of the heart,” and, according to the Summa Theologica (circa 1265–1273) of Thomas Aquinas, their “object is contrary to charity, whence the soul derives its spiritual life.” And it is not just Catholicism that has it in for them. All major religions decree that a special kind of damnation awaits those in thrall to the green-eyed monster.

Yet, as socially corrosive as it might appear, there is an awful lot of envy about. Social media is saturated in it. So much so that it has spawned a flourishing new line of business for therapists, as well as a range of new diagnostic terms such as “Facebook envy.”

Reflecting its amplification in social media, envy has now moved from the shadows of the corridors of power to center stage. But beyond headline-grabbing squabbles about inauguration turnouts and sniping on social media, envy plays a far more profound role in shaping our choices and actions than most of us would care to admit. This is not just because it often masquerades as ambition. Nor is it because so many of us now conflate self-worth with impossible expectations.

Rather, it is because envy served an important, if surprising, evolutionary purpose—one that helps us to reconcile this most selfish of traits with the sociability that was so critical to the extraordinary success of our species. If the behavior of 20th-century hunter-gather societies is anything to go by, over and above its obvious selective benefits for individuals, envy formed part of the cocktail of traits that ultimately assisted Homo sapiens to form and maintain strong social groups.

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