Curious why this is downvoted, as this matches my understanding. We have strong (ish) environmental and worker protections in the US that other countries don't have.

These are good things, but they make it a lot more expensive to do this stuff domestically.

Mining and processing is very dirty.

▲

themaninthedark 4 days ago | parent [-]

Probably because it brings into focus the unconformable truth of what we have been doing.

In a similar vain, I was talking with a friend about plastic straws and the movement at the time to ban them. My friend was all on board and told me about the stainless steel ones they just bought from Amazon Prime. It's very convenient, delivers straight to your house and if you don't like it you just send it back.

So here we are worried about the straw but are having things shipped with 2 day delivery to the door. We live in a reasonable large city, drive to and from work past stores that are selling the same items. 2019 numbers have Amazon's van fleet at 30,000. Assuming 67 tons of GHG per vehicle(https://www.transportationenergy.org/resources/the-commute/l...) gets you 2 million tons.

I don't worry about the straws, I worry about the thinking that gets us to focus on the straws instead of the larger picture.

▲

CamperBob2 4 days ago | parent [-]

The vans are probably a wash, carbon-wise, because they are taking cars off the road.

I hardly ever drive anywhere these days. Pretty much everything we buy in the household comes through Amazon or another online seller, and gets delivered by vehicles that would have been on the road anyway, delivering other things to other people. The "larger picture" may be larger than you think it is.

▲

jopsen 3 days ago | parent [-]

Maybe, but we have how many competing delivery networks? If they all shared the same last mile delivery vans/routes, wouldn't that take many trucks off the road?

I'm not saying it's doable. I'm sure that in Soviet USA there'd only be one delivery service, but it'd be about as fast and reliable as UDP over avian carrier :)

	▲	themaninthedark 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Thank you for understanding! Before Amazon Prime we had 2 major deliver services: UPS and FedEx as well as USPS. Now we have 3. I didn't include in my previous comment but most of the people using Prime that I know still drive everyday, many drop their kids off at school. Going past stores that sell the same sorts of things they are buying on Prime. For them the main driver is convenience of not having to stop and the ability to tell Alexa to put it on a list and reorder periodically. This seems to be the case for most of the customers, look at the rise of Instacart. Door Dash followed suite by expanded from just hot meal delivery to Retail and Grocery. Traditional grocery stores don't want to leave the margins on the table so they are launching their own efforts. I leave some food for thought:) https://web.archive.org/web/20200612211824/https://www.thegu...