I was looking for this post. If someone hadn’t already posted his video I was going to. This is information that people really fucking need to know. The plastics industry is full of lies and those lies are stuffing our landfills with toxic waste.
Like, I can’t deal with these videos. They are literal populism. They tell the people what they want to hear, put forward some “bad guy” to blame everything on, and then move on.
Reality is much more complicated, and especially, much less one-sided and much more interesting than that.
For example, the common narrative among “climate studies” graduates seems to be that oil = bad, and the oil industry is a bunch of greedy old guys who exploit the planet for profit. Thing is, that is a very narrow-sighted thing to say. There’s so much more truth and beauty in it than just that. Plastics is literally one of the best inventions humans have ever come up with. It’s formable into every imaginable shape and literally has the potential to transform our material world in any way that we can imagine, in any way that we want to. That people put so much blame on plastics today sickens me. It’s wrong to blame plastics, just as it’s one-sided to say “well yeah oil companies are just plainly bad entities who only brought harm onto our society and planet”. Truth is that the oil production has been widely supported by both politics and society for the most part of the 20th century because oil is just an incredible substance with incredible value and brings a lot of improvement, benefits and progress to the society. We should be glad that we had it, and we should be thankful for the oil companies for producing it in mass quantities. It is only now that we start seeing the downsides to it, and it has to stop. Still, I can’t stand videos that just simplify things down to saying “oil is bad, plastics is a scam, …”. It is not, it’s just outdated.
Plug for Climate Town’s great video about plastic recycling
Bonus: if you’ve never used Nebula before (or you’re already a subscriber), here it is ad-free from Nebula: https://nebula.tv/videos/climatetown-plastic-recycling-is-an-actual-scam-climate-town
I was looking for this post. If someone hadn’t already posted his video I was going to. This is information that people really fucking need to know. The plastics industry is full of lies and those lies are stuffing our landfills with toxic waste.
Like, I can’t deal with these videos. They are literal populism. They tell the people what they want to hear, put forward some “bad guy” to blame everything on, and then move on.
Reality is much more complicated, and especially, much less one-sided and much more interesting than that. For example, the common narrative among “climate studies” graduates seems to be that oil = bad, and the oil industry is a bunch of greedy old guys who exploit the planet for profit. Thing is, that is a very narrow-sighted thing to say. There’s so much more truth and beauty in it than just that. Plastics is literally one of the best inventions humans have ever come up with. It’s formable into every imaginable shape and literally has the potential to transform our material world in any way that we can imagine, in any way that we want to. That people put so much blame on plastics today sickens me. It’s wrong to blame plastics, just as it’s one-sided to say “well yeah oil companies are just plainly bad entities who only brought harm onto our society and planet”. Truth is that the oil production has been widely supported by both politics and society for the most part of the 20th century because oil is just an incredible substance with incredible value and brings a lot of improvement, benefits and progress to the society. We should be glad that we had it, and we should be thankful for the oil companies for producing it in mass quantities. It is only now that we start seeing the downsides to it, and it has to stop. Still, I can’t stand videos that just simplify things down to saying “oil is bad, plastics is a scam, …”. It is not, it’s just outdated.