What does it take to ban a thing?

post by qbolec · 2023-05-08T11:00:51.133Z · LW · GW · 18 comments

Contents

  Ban of chemical weapons
  Ban of child labor
  Ban of Chlorofluorocarbons
  Lessons learned for AI Governance
None
18 comments

Epistemic status: I am not an expert. I just took several things which people banned (child labor, chemical weapons, ozone-depleting substances) and for each just searched for the first article which seriously engages with the question "how did we succeed to ban it?", read it once, and summarized how I understand it. If someone has more examples, or better explanations, I'd be glad to learn.

I think that there's something to learn from examples of bad things that we have banned in the past despite some people benefiting from those bad things. A rosy-eyed, but wrong, image of how that happened is "well, people just realized the thing was bad so, they've banned it". Turns out it is not at all how it has happened.

Ban of chemical weapons

TL;DR: They seem to not be very effective (face masks), may backfire in case of wind ("blowback")

Source: https://www.politico.eu/article/why-the-world-banned-chemical-weapons/

Quotes I've found interesting:

One answer is that while gas attacks are terrifying, the weapon has proved to be militarily ineffective. After Ypres, the allies provided masks to their front-line troops, who stood in their trenches killing onrushing Germans as clouds of gas enveloped their legs. That was true even as both sides climbed the escalatory ladder, introducing increasingly lethal chemicals (phosgene and mustard gas), that were then matched by increasingly effective countermeasures. The weapon also proved difficult to control. In several well-documented instances, gases deployed by front-line troops blew back onto their own trenches — giving a literalist tinge to the term “blowback,” now used to describe the unintended consequences of an intelligence operation.

The world’s militaries are loath to ban weapons that kill effectively, while acceding to bans of weapons that they don’t need.

At the end of World War I, a precise tabulation of casualties showed that some 91,000 soldiers on all sides were killed in gas attacks — less than 10 percent of the total deaths for the entire war. Machine guns and artillery shells, it turns out, were far more effective systems for delivering death.

 

Among the ban supporters was a Norwegian foreign ministry official who issued an impassioned plea for the adoption of a treaty banning the weapon. In the midst of his talk (which I attended), a British colonel leaned across the table at which I was sitting, a wry smile on his face. “You know why the Norwegians favor a ban?” he asked. I shook my head: no. “Because they don’t have any,” he said.

Note, that cluster bombs and mines are still not banned, despite similar "moral" problems with them:

Additionally, key senior military officers believed agreeing to the ban would set a dangerous precedent — that the military could be pressured into banning weapons by what they described as left-leaning humanitarian organizations.

 

The world’s militaries don’t want to ban weapons that are efficient killers. So while it is true that the land mine and cluster munitions bans have gained widespread international support (162 countries have signed the land-mine ban, 108 countries have signed onto the Convention on Cluster Munitions), the countries most likely to use both (the U.S., China, Russia and India) remain nonsignatories.

Ban of child labor

TL;DR: In Great Depression children were considered stealing jobs from adults

Source: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/reboot/how-child-labor-ended-united-states-167858

Quotes I've found interesting:

By the 1870s, unions condemned child labor on the basis that overly young workers competed for jobs, making it harder for adults to obtain higher pay and better conditions – not due to concerns about the well-being of kids.

 

Despite Southern opposition, reformers argued that state-level regulations were rife with loopholes and difficult to enforce. In 23 states, for instance, there was no official way to determine children’s ages. Additionally, many states allowed poor children to work out of “necessity.”

 

In 1913, the minister Owen Lovejoy brought new religious allies to the committee, which by then focused on the sinfulness of child labor in America.

In 1916, they got Congress to pass the the first federal child labor law. Like the Beveridge bill, the new law prohibited shipping products made with child labor across state lines.

 

This 1938 law included provisions banning child labor under age 14 in most industries while exempting “children under 16 employed in agriculture” and “children working for their parents” in most occupations.

Ban of Chlorofluorocarbons

TL;DR: the number of producers was small, the issue was just small fraction of their revenue, one of the players was big enough that when it innovated a safer solution, it was in its interest to ban the old unsafe solutions and for others to adopt the new one - but the push to develop safe alternative at all was forced by consumers encouraged by Greenpeace which even shown a viable alternative PoC

Source: https://www.rapidtransition.org/stories/back-from-the-brink-how-the-world-rapidly-sealed-a-deal-to-save-the-ozone-layer/

This diversity within industry was harnessed and an alliance formed between the environmental movement and those companies that ultimately stood to gain from the increased regulations. Following initial resistance, DuPont, the main industry player responsible for a quarter of global CFC production, backed the initial draft of the Montreal Protocol and its subsequent strengthening, in part because it could benefit from exporting alternatives to CFCs to the European market as a domestic ban on the nonessential use of CFCs as aerosol propellants had been introduced in the US in 1978, spurring innovation.

 

Key to the rapid transition to phase out CFCs was the widespread acceptance amongst the general public, business actors and world leaders of the severity and urgency of the problem; a consensus that was forged following the discovery of the ozone layer in 1985. However, the negotiations around the Montreal Protocol still had to handle the conflicting national interests of participating governments to reach a deal. The United States, a leader in the negotiations, was to a large extent influenced in its position by its business interests, which opposed any ban until 1986 when the company with the largest role in CFC production worldwide, DuPont, had developed successfully developed alternative chemicals. From this point forward, the US took the lead in pushing for a ban. European countries initially resisted this call until their own companies such as ICI had developed CFC substitutes, at which point they also agreed to the need for a ban. 

 

First of all, the limited number of actors involved made it relatively easy to reach an agreement. Eighteen chemical companies accounted for most of the world’s production of CFCs in the early 1980s – mostly concentrated in the US, UK, France and Japan. DuPont was by far and away the most important player, producing around one quarter of the global output. This meant that once DuPont acted as the industry leader in the global negotiations, and once the company’s agreement for a ban was secured, the rest of the industry followed suit. Also important was the fact that, although the CFC market was important, it was not truly ‘big business’ – CFCs accounted for 3% of DuPont’s total sales.

The final, and perhaps most crucial factor, in the speed of the phase out of CFCs following the discovery of the ozone layer was the technological innovations to develop alternative chemicals. Once the science and the gravity of the situation became clear, DuPont began investing heavily in research into substitutes.

 

Civil society action around CFCs extended beyond campaigning into directly driving industrial innovations. In 1992 when chemical companies attacked Greenpeace and their anti-CFC campaign for “criticizing and offering no solutions”, Greenpeace brought together a group of engineers to develop a prototype of a refrigerator that did not use CFCs. Within a few months, the engineers had developed a prototype for the “GreenFreeze” fridge – which used a mix of natural hydrocarbons instead of CFCs and so did not harm the ozone layer. Greenpeace subsequently founded a company to design and market GreenFreeze fridges, which ultimately revolutionised the domestic refrigeration sector – with more than a billion in use today.

 

Also interesting and relevant to the challenges of the climate movement today was the success of citizen-led campaigning on the relatively abstract and remote environmental problem of ozone depletion. Behind the success of the multilateral negotiations was well organized civil society campaigning – both in the US and around the world. Environmental organisations coalesced around the issue of CFCs – and through inventive public campaigns managed to spur changes in consumer behaviour, including widespread boycotts of products and companies that used CFCs. Consumer pressure forced action by some US-based companies even before the government introduced bans on the use of CFCs. By the time the ban was in place, the market for CFCs had dwindled, making their phase out more feasible.

Lessons learned for AI Governance

First of all, it looks like "moral compass" is not enough to get people to do anything even in most "obvious" cases like child abuse or chemical weapons. The actors seem to oppose the ban as long as it would harm their profits, and support it as soon as it becomes profitable - which is usually when they know how to solve the issue, while the competition still doesn't know. Also, it helps if the issue at hand is not huge part of their revenue, or they have more effective ways to make revenue, etc.

Also, it looks like activism to make people aware how the sausage is made can help to create a consumer pressure on producers which in turn might want to switch to more acceptable solutions not even waiting for government action. Interestingly, the first company to do that then has an incentive to push for the ban, to gain edge on competition and pay back the costs of research.

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