Incremental progress or dangerous incrementalism? The case of tire wear pollution in global environmental governance
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Tire wear and tear is among the largest sources of global microplastic pollution. Interviews conducted in 2024 appear to indicate ‘incremental progress’ toward improving governance of tire wear. Knowledge of the ecological and health consequences is increasing. Pressure is growing for greater producer responsibility. Global standards to limit tire abrasion are forming. Regulations are being implemented to address chemical contamination, such as in California. And some manufacturers are supporting higher standards and reengineering tires to undercut competitors and capture emerging markets for lower-abrasion tires. Yet, as a deeper analysis reveals, regulations remain highly uneven, piecemeal, and inadequate on a global scale, with new risk-taking as firms delay actions and introduce new chemicals as ‘solutions.’ Moreover, I argue, a ‘dangerous form of incrementalism’ is taking hold, where modest changes to state policy and corporate conduct are conferring legitimacy on governance processes unable to prevent tire wear pollution from escalating globally.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it