Plastic pollution is accumulating worldwide, on land and in the oceans. According to one widely cited estimate, by 2025, 100 million to 250 million metric tons of plastic waste could enter the ocean each year. Another study commissioned by the World Economic Forum projects that without changes to current practices, there may be more plastic by weight than fish in the ocean by 2050.

On Feb. 28, 2022, a meeting of the United Nations Environment Assembly will open in Nairobi, Kenya. At that meeting, representatives from 193 countries are expected to consider a resolution that would launch negotiations on a legally binding global treaty to reduce plastic pollution. “[N]o country can adequately address the various aspects of this challenge alone,” the draft resolution states.

I am a legal scholar and have studied questions related to food, animal welfare and environmental law. My forthcoming book, “Our Plastic Problem and How to Solve It,” explores legislation and policies to address this global “wicked problem.”

I believe plastic pollution requires a local, national and global response. While acting together on a world scale will be challenging, lessons from some other environmental treaties suggest features that can improve an agreement’s chances of success.

A pervasive problem

Scientists have discovered plastic in some of the most remote parts of the globe, from polar ice to Texas-sized gyres in the middle of the ocean. Plastic can enter the environment from a myriad of sources, ranging from laundry wastewater to illegal dumping, waste incineration and accidental spills.

Plastic never completely degrades. Instead, it breaks down into tiny particles and fibers that are easily ingested by fish, birds and land animals. Larger plastic pieces can transport invasive species and accumulate in freshwater and coastal environments, altering ecosystem functions.

A 2021 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine on ocean plastic pollution concluded that “[w]ithout modifications to current practices … plastics will continue to accumulate in the environment, particularly the ocean, with adverse consequences for ecosystems and society.”

National policies are not enough

To address this problem, the U.S. has focused on waste management and recycling rather than regulating plastic producers and businesses that use plastic in their products. Failing to address the sources means that policies have limited impact. That’s especially true since the U.S. generates 37.5 million tons of plastic yearly, but only recycles about 9% of it.

Some countries, such as France and Kenya, have banned single-use plastics. Others, like Germany, have mandated plastic bottle deposit schemes. Canada has classified manufactured plastic items as toxic, which gives its national government broad power to regulate them.

In my view, however, these efforts too will fall short if countries producing and using the most plastic do not adopt policies across its life cycle.

Growing consensus

Plastic pollution crosses boundaries, so countries need to work together to curb it. But existing treaties such as the 1989 Basel Convention, which governs international shipment of hazardous wastes, and the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea offer little leverage, for several reasons.

First, these treaties were not designed specifically to address plastic. Second, the largest plastic polluters – notably, the U.S. – have not joined these agreements. Alternative international approaches such as the Ocean Plastics Charter, which encourages governments and global and regional businesses to design plastic products for reuse and recycling, are voluntary and nonbinding.

Fortunately, many world and business leaders now support a uniform, standardized and coordinated global approach to managing and eliminating plastic waste in the form of a treaty.

The American Chemistry Council, an industry trade group, supports an agreement that will accelerate a transition to a more circular economy that promotes waste reduction and reuse by focusing on waste collection, product design and recycling technology. America’s Plastic Makers and the International Council of Chemical Associations have also made public statements supporting a global agreement to establish “a targeted goal to ensure access to proper waste management and eliminate leakage of plastic into the ocean.”

However, these organizations maintain that plastic products can help reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions – for example, by enabling automakers to build lighter cars – and are likely to oppose an agreement that limits plastic production. As I see it, this makes leadership and action by governments critical.

The Biden administration also has stated its support for a treaty and is sending Secretary of State Antony Blinken to the Nairobi meeting. On Feb. 11, 2022, the White House released a joint statement with France that expressed support for negotiating “a global agreement to address the full life cycle of plastics and promote a circular economy.”

Early treaty drafts outline two competing approaches. One seeks to reduce plastic throughout its life cycle, from production to disposal, a strategy that would probably include methods such as banning or phasing out single-use plastic products.

A contrasting approach focuses on eliminating plastic waste through innovation and design – for example, by spending more on waste collection, recycling and development of environmentally benign plastics.

Elements of an effective treaty

Countries have come together to solve environmental problems before. The global community has successfully addressed acid rain, stratospheric ozone depletion and mercury contamination through international treaties. These agreements, which include the U.S., offer strategies for a plastics treaty.

The Montreal Protocol, for example, required countries to report their production and consumption of ozone-depleting substances so that countries could hold each other accountable. As part of the Convention on Long-range Air Pollution, countries agreed to reduce sulfur dioxide emissions, but were allowed to select the method that worked best for them. For the U.S., that involved a system of buying and selling emission allowances that became part of the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990.

Based on these precedents, I see plastic as a good candidate for an international treaty. Like ozone, sulfur and mercury, plastic comes from specific, identifiable human activities that occur across the globe. Many countries contribute, so the problem is transboundary in nature.

In addition to providing a framework for keeping plastic out of the ocean, I believe a plastic pollution treaty should include reduction targets for both producing less plastic and generating less waste that are specific, measurable and achievable. The treaty should be binding but flexible, allowing countries to meet these targets as they choose.

In my view, negotiations should consider the interests of those who experience the disproportionate impacts of plastic, as well as those who make a living off recycling waste as part of the informal economy. Finally, an international treaty should promote collaboration and sharing of data, resources and best practices.

Since plastic pollution doesn’t stay in one place, all nations will benefit from finding ways to curb it.

[Over 140,000 readers rely on The Conversation’s newsletters to understand the world. Sign up today.]

Sarah J. Morath, Associate Professor of Legal Writing, Wake Forest University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The first casualty of war, says historian Ronald Suny, is not just the truth. Often, he says, “it is what is left out.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin began a full-scale attack on Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022 and many in the world are now getting a crash course in the complex and intertwined history of those two nations and their peoples. Much of what the public is hearing, though, is jarring to historian Suny’s ears. That’s because some of it is incomplete, some of it is wrong, and some of it is obscured or refracted by the self-interest or the limited perspective of who is telling it. We asked Suny, a professor at the University of Michigan, to respond to a number of popular historical assertions he’s heard recently.

Putin’s view of Russo-Ukrainian history has been widely criticized in the West. What do you think motivates his version of the history?

Putin believes that Ukrainians, Belarusians and Russians are one people, bound by shared history and culture. But he also is aware that they have become separate states recognized in international law and by Russian governments as well. At the same time, he questions the historical formation of the modern Ukrainian state, which he says was the tragic product of decisions by former Russian leaders Vladimir Lenin, Josef Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev. He also questions the sovereignty and distinctive nation-ness of Ukraine. While he promotes national identity in Russia, he denigrates the growing sense of nation-ness in Ukraine.

Putin indicates that Ukraine by its very nature ought to be friendly, not hostile, to Russia. But he sees its current government as illegitimate, aggressively nationalist and even fascist. The condition for peaceful relations between states, he repeatedly says, is that they do not threaten the security of other states. Yet, as is clear from the invasion, he presents the greatest threat to Ukraine.

Putin sees Ukraine as an existential threat to Russia, believing that if it enters NATO, offensive weaponry will be placed closer to the Russian border, as already is being done in Romania and Poland.

It’s possible to interpret Putin’s statements about the historical genesis of the Ukrainian state as self-serving history and a way of saying, “We created them, we can take them back.” But I believe he may instead have been making a forceful appeal to Ukraine and the West to recognize the security interests of Russia and provide guarantees that there will be no further moves by NATO toward Russia and into Ukraine. Ironically, his recent actions have driven Ukrainians more tightly into the arms of the West.

The Western position is that the breakaway regions Putin recognized, Donetsk and Luhansk, are integral parts of Ukraine. Russia claims that the Donbass region, which includes these two provinces, is historically and rightfully part of Russia. What does history tell us?

During the Soviet period, these two provinces were officially part of Ukraine. When the USSR disintegrated, the former Soviet republic boundaries became, under international law, the legal boundaries of the post-Soviet states. Russia repeatedly recognized those borders, though reluctantly in the case of Crimea.

But when one raises the fraught question of what lands belong to what people, a whole can of worms is opened. The Donbass has historically been inhabited by Russians, Ukrainians, Jews and others. It was in Soviet and post-Soviet times largely Russian ethnically and linguistically. When in 2014 the Maidan revolution in Kyiv moved the country toward the West and Ukrainian nationalists threatened to limit the use of the Russian language in parts of Ukraine, rebels in the Donbas violently resisted the central government of Ukraine.

After months of fighting between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian rebel forces in the Donbas in 2014, regular Russian forces moved in from Russia, and a war began that has lasted for the last eight years, with thousands killed and wounded.

Historical claims to land are always contested – think of Israelis and Palestinians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis – and they are countered by claims that the majority living on the land in the present takes precedence over historical claims from the past. Russia can claim Donbass with its own arguments based on ethnicity, but so can Ukrainians with arguments based on historical possession. Such arguments go nowhere and often lead, as can be seen today, to bloody conflict.

Why was Russia’s recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics as independent such a pivotal event in the conflict?

When Putin recognized the Donbass republics as independent states, he seriously escalated the conflict, which turned out to be the prelude to a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. That invasion is a hard, harsh signal to the West that Russia will not back down and accept the further arming of and placing of weaponry in Ukraine, Poland and Romania. The Russian president has now led his country into a dangerous preventive war – a war based on the anxiety that sometime in the future his country will be attacked – the outcome of which is unpredictable.

A New York Times story on Putin’s histories of Ukraine says “The newly created Soviet government under Lenin that drew so much of Mr. Putin’s scorn on Monday would eventually crush the nascent independent Ukrainian state. During the Soviet era, the Ukrainian language was banished from schools and its culture was permitted to exist only as a cartoonish caricature of dancing Cossacks in puffy pants.” Is this history of Soviet repression accurate?

Lenin’s government won the 1918-1921 civil war in Ukraine and drove out foreign interventionists, thus consolidating and recognizing the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. But Putin is essentially correct that it was Lenin’s policies that promoted Ukrainian statehood within the USSR, within a Soviet empire, officially granting it and other Soviet republics the constitutional right to secede from the Union without conditions. This right, Putin angrily asserts, was a landmine that eventually blew up the Soviet Union.

The Ukrainian language was never banned in the USSR and was taught in schools. In the 1920s, Ukrainian culture was actively promoted by the Leninist nationality policy.

But under Stalin, Ukrainian language and culture began to be powerfully undermined. This started in the early 1930s, when Ukrainian nationalists were repressed, the horrific “Death Famine” killed millions of Ukrainian peasants, and Russification, which is the process of promoting Russian language and culture, accelerated in the republic.

Within the strict bounds of the Soviet system, Ukraine, like many other nationalities in the USSR, became a modern nation, conscious of its history, literate in its language, and even in puffy pants permitted to celebrate its ethnic culture. But the contradictory policies of the Soviets in Ukraine both promoted a Ukrainian cultural nation while restricting its freedoms, sovereignty and expressions of nationalism.

History is both a contested and a subversive social science. It is used and misused by governments and pundits and propagandists. But for historians it is also a way to find out what happened in the past and why. As a search for truth, it becomes subversive of convenient and comfortable but inaccurate views of where we came from and where we might be going.

[Understand key political developments, each week. Subscribe to The Conversation’s politics newsletter.]

Ronald Suny, Professor of History and Political Science, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

No one likes tax season. It’s complicated, it’s stressful, and it’s getting worse.

Last year was already the “most challenging year taxpayers and tax professionals have ever experienced,” according to the Taxpayer Advocate Service, an independent part of the Internal Revenue Service. According to the agency’s annual report, taxpayers had trouble reaching the IRS, tax returns took months to process, almost a quarter of refunds didn’t go out until 2022, and collection notices were sent out even after the tax owed was paid.

The pandemic deserves some of the blame, but so do years of underfunding the IRS, antiquated computer systems and a dwindling workforce.

And with millions of returns from 2021 still waiting to be processed, 2022 may be worse. That prospect has prompted lawmakers and others to press the IRS to offer taxpayers relief, as it did in 2021, in the form of suspended penalties, delayed collections and extended tax deadlines.

As a tax expert, I believe taxpayers will face at least three main challenges this year. While the onus for solving these problems should be on the federal government – not the taxpayer – I do have a few suggestions for getting you through tax season 2022.

1. Backlogs and delays

The IRS started the 2022 tax season already significantly behind.

Over 15 million returns and 5 million pieces of taxpayer correspondence from 2021 sit untouched – including 6 million original 1040s. Amended 2021 returns are taking more than 20 weeks to process.

And it’s not just complicated returns that are getting delayed. Even simple individual returns are caught in the backlog.

As a result, expect a long wait before you receive this year’s refund.

This is a big problem for almost everyone. In 2020, over 75% of taxpayers received a refund, and the average refund for e-filed returns was $2,549.

Most people are eager to get their money. Often, refunds make a big difference to a household’s finances. One out of 4 recipients report that they will use their refunds to cover everyday expenses. One-third will try to catch up on debt. Others may use the sudden infusion of cash to make big purchases that they have put off all year, such as dental work or a down payment on a new car.

IRS delays mean businesses must wait longer for forgiveness of pandemic-related loans or credits for keeping their workers on the payroll. The same goes for workers who erroneously paid federal taxes on their unemployment insurance and can only be reimbursed at tax time.

2. Erroneous letters and actions from the IRS

That brings me to a second challenge.

IRS actions are often triggered by automated systems that generate notices and letters to taxpayers. For example, if the IRS system shows that a taxpayer owes the government money but doesn’t show payment by a given date, the automated system triggers a notice demanding immediate payment and assessing penalties. These IRS communications can leave taxpayers petrified.

Because of the antiquated computer system and dwindling personnel, you might very well receive a notice reprimanding you for a failure that you took care of months ago.

The IRS recently announced that it would suspend some automatic notices until its backlog clears, but others are required to go out within a certain time frame. It’s important to note that regardless of whether you receive a notice, you may still be on the hook for interest or penalties if the IRS thinks you owe money.

3. Hello? Anyone there?

But this challenge is compounded by the fact that taxpayers and preparers are finding it nearly impossible to get help from the IRS, whether in person, by telephone or via mail.

Face-to-face meetings have naturally become more limited due to COVID-19 precautions. IRS offices remain open but require appointments, while all Taxpayer Advocate Service offices are closed to in-person visits.

But don’t expect much more luck getting help over the phone. Last year, the IRS received a record 282 million phone calls, but answered only 11% of them. In other words, 250 million calls went unanswered.

And, as old-fashioned as it sounds, people still seek help from the IRS with snail mail. But the 2021 backlog is around 5 million letters, which suggests if you need help this year, mail may not be your best bet.

What you can do

And that brings me to what, if anything, you can do to steer through some of these challenges. Fortunately, there are a few best practices that can help.

File as early as you can. And if possible, file electronically – for example, by using the IRS’ free fillable forms, which allow you to prepare and file your own return without using any tax software.

Do your best to ensure your return is accurate the first time you file. Filing an amended return is sure to stretch out your wait.

It is also a good idea to keep copies of everything and not freak out if you get an IRS notice. There is at least some chance that the notice is wrong and the problem is already solved.

Calling the IRS seems like a nearly fruitless activity. If you must pick up the phone, you might have more luck calling in the morning when there’s less demand rather than in the afternoon. But expect a long wait even if you’re lucky enough to be among the 1 in 9 callers who get to talk to a human being.

For some taxpayers, such as those who are low-income or disabled, you could try reaching out to your local Volunteer Taxpayer Assistance Clinic, which may have more bandwidth to help. There is also the Taxpayers Assistance Center, which makes appointments and helps with more complicated matters.

Of course, the problem with all this advice is that it puts the onus on you, the individual taxpayer, to figure out how to sort through the mess created by years of severely underfunding the IRS. Annual funding for the agency has declined about 20% from 2010 levels, after adjusting for inflation, resulting in severe staffing shortages. I believe the only way to truly rectify the situation is for Congress to reverse the cuts it made and shore up the IRS with enough funding to do its job.

You shouldn’t have to be skilled or savvy in order to honestly pay your taxes.

[More than 150,000 readers get one of The Conversation’s informative newsletters. Join the list today.]

Beverly Moran, Professor Emerita of Law, Vanderbilt University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.