https://climatejustice.social/@breadandcircuses/112303357717712825 Scroll down inside that link for a slightly more extreme version (NSFW).
80s: corporations send hundreds of tonnes of trash to landfills while people are told to reduce the trash they generate
90s: corporations make everything plastic and disposable while people are told to recycle
00s: corporations cover the atmosphere in greenhouse gasses while people are told to reduce their carbon footprint.
10s: corporations buy politicians while people are told to vote.
90s: corporations make everything plastic and disposable while people are told to recycle
It’s worse than that: the plastics industry tells us to recycle – even going so far as to plagiarize the recycling symbol into the resin identification codes – despite knowing from the beginning that recycling plastic was mostly never going to be a viable thing. They did this purely to shift blame to consumers because the only way their business model worked was to not be held accountable for their waste.
I’m fond of saying that recycling is almost exclusively bad for the planet. It’s true and people don’t like hearing it.
Reduce, reuse, recycle. In that order.
If you don’t need to, don’t produce something. Chocolates don’t need to be all individually wrapped inside of yet another wrapper. Transport should be mostly by public and active transport (though we also need better city planning to help enable this), and private motor vehicles can, at this point, mostly be converted to the less-polluting EVs. That kind of thing.
If it’s been produced, rather than throwing it away, find ways to reuse it. Coke should be taking in glass bottles, washing them, and putting more coke back in it, rather than producing new bottles all the time.
If something has been produced and cannot be reused, we should try to find ways to recycle it. You’re right that recycling is bad, but that’s mainly true of plastics. Glass and paper are far more easy to recycle, if collected effectively. Which is also why the move from glass and paper products to plastic is such an environmental disaster, brought on because companies don’t want to spend the larger cost of producing those products, or collecting them in to effectively recycle the glass.
To be honest, we are fucking up the planet at an exponentially faster rate, so it is natural that mitigation solutions seems exponentially crazier.
There are people that believe that doing these crazy things will actually reverse the damage.
Then there are people like me who not only believe we are fucked but also believe that anything we do now is completely pointless as we are fucked either way so why bother.
Stop. Please stop. Doomerism compounds the problem, it is not a neutral stance.
Has irreparable damage already been done? Yes.
Will it be worse if we don’t do anything as soon as possible? Yes. And each moment that we don’t do the thing, it gets a little bit worse.
But each moment we do do the thing, it gets a little bit better.
The Earth will relatively be 1.5°, likely 2°C hotter, regardless of what actions are now taken. But 2°C hotter is far, far preferable to 4°C.
Everything we do as individuals and societies matters. I understand it feels daunting, and I’m not really advocating for you to drive less or eat less meat, because ultimately these changes won’t be driven by individuals making the choices.
However, please please please support and push, protest, fight for societal changes for us collectively to drive less, eat less meat, and corporate carbon taxation.
