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[–] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If it can get the necessary funds, that is. In a press release, the organization claimed that eliminating the patch once and for all would cost a whopping $7.5 billion

And good luck with that, won't happen, ever.

It's the cost of one or two huge stadiums, but politicians rather have large stadiums than wasting their hard earned cash on shit like the future of the planet

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago*

    If it can get the necessary funds, that is.

    It's not going anywhere.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Just the idea that it's possible gives me hope.

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  • 92 comments in c/upliftingnews@lemmy.world view that post
    [–] 205 points 1 year ago (14 children)

    I wish them well. It feels good to be reminded that yes, there are still people out there trying to make things better. ❤️

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  • [–] 24 points 1 year ago (12 children)

    If it can get the necessary funds, that is. In a press release, the organization claimed that eliminating the patch once and for all would cost a whopping $7.5 billion

    If you give me 7.5 billion i’ll do my very best to clean up the ocean too

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago* (9 children)

    That's like 0.8% of the US military budget for 2025. That's basically a rounding error

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  • [–] -3 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    Yup. It’s also 0.042% of China’s GDP, and I’ll bet they never get it.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    China's GDP is going to keeping a billion people housed and fed, and producing more solar panels than the rest of the world combined. The US military budget is going to blowing up brown people.

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  • [–] -3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Awesome way to say you don’t care about the planet by making excuses for China not picking lint out of its pocket to clean the ocean—and then somehow turning this into an ICE problem.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    Nobody said anything about ICE, we're talking about the military known for bombing weddings in multiple middle eastern countries and then bombing ambulances when they respond.

    If you have the money to commit atrocities in a dozen countries at once, you have money to spare.

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  • [–] 71 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    This is very good news! Please don't forget that even if the great pacific garbage patch doesn't exist, that doesn't mean that the ocean is clean. There are still lots of garbage in the ocean!

    However everybody needs to work where the problem originates.

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  • [–] 24 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    There's only four left to clean after this one.

    In 2014, there were five areas across all the oceans where the majority of plastic concentrated. Researchers collected a total of 3070 samples across the world to identify hot spots of surface level plastic pollution. The pattern of distribution closely mirrored models of oceanic currents with the North Pacific Gyre, or Great Pacific Garbage Patch, being the highest density of plastic accumulation. The other four garbage patches include the North Atlantic garbage patch between the North America and Africa, the South Atlantic garbage patch located between eastern South America and the tip of Africa, the South Pacific garbage patch located west of South America, and the Indian Ocean garbage patch found east of South Africa.

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  • [–] 64 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    this might be the only good environmental news i've read since we got rid of cfcs

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    [–] 40 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Seems easier picking up trash by hand than taxing the rich for the project

    So far, the nonprofit claims it has fished out a million pounds of trash from the patch, a mere 0.5 percent of its total. But within a decade, it says, it could ramp up its operations to get rid of it in its entirety.

    Next year, the company will focus its efforts on establishing a "hotspot" map of areas in the ocean with "intense plastic accumulation."

    While $7.5 billion may sound like a lot, it's less than one month's worth of Apple's profits last year, or a sixth of the bonus Tesla shareholders awarded to CEO Elon Musk.

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  • [–] 59 points 1 year ago* (8 children)

    I still got microplastics in my balls.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Finally able to cum silly strings

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  • [–] 29 points 1 year ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (4 children)
  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    Been following them for years. They do great work, but often seem a little overly optimistic in their messaging. What they are doing is a hard challenge and they seem to be slowly getting better and better. I wonder if they also are lacking a bit in funding to be able to efficiently move forward.

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  • [+] 26 points 1 year ago (7 children)
  • [–] 43 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    True, but let's not the baby out with the bathwater.

    98% or 90% or even a verifiable 50% reduction is insanely amazing news

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  • [–] 26 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    So far, the nonprofit claims it has fished out a million pounds of trash from the patch, a mere 0.5 percent of its total. But within a decade, it says, it could ramp up its operations to get rid of it in its entirety.

    :-/

    They're asking for $75B for the full project and currently relying on start up capital with a tiny fraction of that. Apple's "committed" $7.5B tentative to Ocean Cleanup Project raising the rest on short notice.

    This isn't "on track". It's a pilot project that's in the middle of a Series B funding round.

    Also - most critically - it's not clear in the article what they're doing with the waste they recover. Simply moving it around doesn't eliminate the garbage. And the project does not appear to include a budget for recycling or otherwise repurposing what they recover.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I understand the cynicism, but I'm not going to let it distract me from the good that is being done.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    You can hold space for both, and both can be true at the same time and not invalidate each other. Optimism is a hugely important quality, it's focusing on moving forward and seeing the glass half full, and it keeps the darkness out. Pointing out problems is just troubleshooting, and finding ways to be better, that might seem like focusing on the glass half empty, but what if it's just focusing on achieving a better half full, glass. The important thing is to hold onto what keeps you afloat, especially right now. This is awesome news, whether it needs more work or not.

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  • [+] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)
  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    It's the largest individual source, by far. Whether or not it accounts for the majority depends on the exact stats you're looking at

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago

    They’re mostly thinking 10 years, but:

    Better yet, if the nonprofit's latest technological ideas come to fruition, Slat suggests we could even clear the patch in just five years at a cost of just $4 billion.

    Ultimately though it comes down to funding, and I’m not sure this is the administration with the stomach to fund these types of projects.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    finally, i don't have to think even a second about my individually plastic wrapped candies

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    [–] 78 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Finally someone attempts to remove the UK ❤️

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    What's going to stop the polluters doing it again?

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    i can't seem to find a futurism on lemmy. does it exist?

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  • I found a few futurology comms, not sure if that's the same thing as futurism.

    Some comms also have different names but when I search futurism or futurology they are in the results so perhaps the comm description is included in the results.

    Also I don't know if the method of searching I'm using in Voyager is limited to the comms that users on the instance my account is on are subscribed to.

    !futurology@futurology.today

    !futurology@lemmy.ml

    !futurology@lemmy.world

    !Futurology@kbin.social

    !futurology_pocasts@futurology.today

    !futurology_youtube@futurology.today

    !futurism@lemmy.ca

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    the patch is continually being replenished, so....

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I love this, it's great, but it doesn't address the root cause unfortunately

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    i dont know why you would say this unless youre just replying to headlines.. most of the plastic comes from just a handfull of rivers and they're catching the plastic at the source with their river collection programs (lots of interesting solutions they're using including bubble curtains)

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    Absolutely and that is great, but by root cause I mean how much plastic is on every fucking thing we buy, the source is not the rivers feeding into the ocean, it's our usage, and disregard for the environment

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago (10 children)

    Once it's cleaned up we should replace all the garbage with cum, so the fish can eat the cum.

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  • [–] [S] 24 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    I feel like there's a story behind that comment that I'm unaware of.

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (4 children)
  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Sorry, this isn't news.

    They've been towing these nets around for a decade now.

    The article says, if you give them 4 billion with a b dollars they will "clean up" the garbage patch.

    No shit. Give someone a lot of money and things can be done. The problem as we all know is that there is no money available for this type of project.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    If we cancelled the order of ~40 F-35s, we could have that 4 billion dollars.

    If we appropriately taxed the rich, we could do it without even having to cut the precious military spending.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The weird thing is that money isn't real. It's just an arbitrary idea of how much somebody thinks someone/something else is worth. When was the last time we had enough gold to back up all the money promises in the world? That was a long long long time ago.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    How will the aliens know that it isn't worth contacting us?

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)
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  • [+] -3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)
  • 1 comment in c/worldnews@lemmy.ml view that post
    [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    How long till it's back there.

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