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Originally Posted by Makarov
Sorry, I honestly don't understand what you are saying here. How does anything I argued support your position that raw totals of waste production (at the national level) is more useful than per capita data?
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Changing where you place the line on a map doesn't change how much waste is created. As you argued, we don't become more efficient in Alberta if we cast off the rest of Canada. The total waste in the region that makes up the former undivided nation of Canada would be unchanged. As would global totals.
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Didn't mean to make a strawman argument. I just presumed that we were discussing this data in the context of a mutually recognized problem of "human beings produce an unsustainable amount of waste". But not everyone may agree with that premise. Fair enough.
This, to me, is a gross oversimplification of the problem and the issues. Although waste is an environmental problem, solutions are not solely environmental. There are obvious financial, economic, and human costs to almost every attempt to reduce waste production. The distribution of how those costs are borne (and by who) clearly engages issues of fairness and justice (in my opinion.) Even just on a practical level, if proposed solutions don't seem fair, they won't get any traction.
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Yup. And that circles us right back to the per capita problem: we use it disingenuously to give the appearance that fully developed economies are virtually the entire problem while developing economies with high populations are not. So while waste creation in India and China grows and grows, we here in Canada (and even, more ridiculously, places like Finland) get to be demonized despite creating a tiny fraction of same.