This is the biggest man-made ecological catastrophe in decades. And now let’s watch our Green friends ignore it completely as they’ve ignored every real threat to the environment.
Real Threat to the Environment
Opinions, art, debate
Opinions, art, debate
This is the biggest man-made ecological catastrophe in decades. And now let’s watch our Green friends ignore it completely as they’ve ignored every real threat to the environment.
Clarissa's Blog 
But how would we make everyone feel sufficiently guilty if we focused on large, immediate, solvable problems, instead of nebulous, global, future problems? Focusing on a solvable problem and then solving it is a fundraising disaster. Once it’s solved you’re out of a job!
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Exactly. It always has to be something nobody can actually see and do anything about. It’s more fun that way.
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Drives me nuts. When I was a kid, there were big, wildly successful, enviro-campaigns: we really did save the manatees, alligators, bald eagles, and Florida panthers, from going extinct. There are more of them now than there were in the 80s. I’m pretty sure we have more whales now– nobody talks about saving the whales anymore. Our waterways are cleaner. People drop a lot less trash out of their car windows. I remember riding through my grandparents’ city and being awed by the roadside dunes made of discarded cigarette butts. The last time I passed through there… hardly saw any. That’s success! There are so many more problems– concrete problems, with clear solutions, big and small– that we could still tackle. Unnecessary plastic trash, say (the straw bans are stupid, but they’re at least tackling a clear thing in the correct direction). Overuse of herbicides. Municipal composting. Runoff prevention. So many things.
But no, it’s gotta be global climate change, whose definition changes every year, that we can never be sure we’re making progress on, but which requires every government on earth to squelch people and give giant subsidies to their favorite cronies (hey Bob! You were thinking of starting up a solar company, right?)
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“we really did save the manatee… alligators”
I remember in elementary school in Florida special lessons on the poor, endangered alligator and how they were in danger and we had to help preserve them….. Less than ten years later we had alligators coming out the wazoo, showing up all over the place.
I’m not complaining, they’re only dangerous to people in very narrow circumstances (like idiots feeding them and IIRC in their breeding season).
Generally western countries have made immense progress which is precisely why the Gretas and Roger Hallams of the world lecture western countries and not the places really prodcuing trash (China, India, Indonesia and other poor Asian countries especially.
“we can never be sure we’re making progress on”
That’s my clue that the agenda is really wealth-transfer and not ecological at all….
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IKR? My best friend’s parents were really gung-ho appalachian-trail-hiking, granola-eating, save-the-whales bumpersticker greenies. I recall they were part of a really twee manatee conservation program, where you’d make a largeish donation, you’d get assigned a particular manatee (they were identifiable by the unique constellations of propeller scars), and every so often you’d get a cute greeting card with a picture of “your” manatee on it, and an update about how he or she was doing, where last spotted, etc. People LOVED that shite. They probably raised a million bucks with it– no self-righteous teenage scolds or public vandalism or anything– it was a successful campaign that made the participants feel great… and even if, like my parents, you just weren’t into that scene… there was really nothing objectionable about it either. If your neighbors want to do the adopt-a-manatee thing, well… it’s cheesy but whatever dings your bell right?
Where’s the adorable-manatee-greeting-card program for “climate change”? Plant a tree for Earth Day? Save the sea turtles?
It doesn’t exist, because there’s nothing in that campaign to be for. Only anti. Worse: no good guys. What kind of game is that? Everybody’s a bad guy, and now we can all scramble around pointing fingers and demanding that someone else sacrifice because they’re a worse bad-guy than I am, and I said sorry. That’s creepy dystopian cult stuff right there.
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I’ve heard this a major problem with bringing back manufacturing. Much of the offshoring was offshoring pollution even more than jobs.
Most of the old manufacturing jobs are gone for good because they have been automated and are done by robots. Building a non-polluting iron smelter or chemical plant will be much harder.
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Yes and no.
Saving the manatees was mostly about getting motorboats to slow down, blocking them out of certain strategic waterways (like to the springs where they overwinter) and maybe use propeller cages IIRC. For the alligators, just had to stop hunting them/killing on sight. They’re tough beasts and bounced back quick.
Pollution is more complex. And it is criminal that we ban it here, and then offshore it somewhere else– the industry pollutes someone else’s rivers where we don’t see it, and then we blow a bunch of fossil fuel shipping it back here.
And yet.
Then I walk through my local Walmart (and it’s not like it’s any better at Target or Amazon or any other big-box anything), and note the plastic, disney-character-themed crust-cutters. Here is a thing that (apparently) people buy, and take home, and rip out of its (plastic!) packaging, and use to cut gross soft white bread into cartoon shapes to make special sandwiches and toast for picky children whose teeth would probably fall out of their heads if they ever encountered a real, crusty, tasty loaf of fresh bread.
Like, what if we could just start with that? That seems like a thing we could make some progress on. Less completely unnecessary plastic crap: don’t make it, don’t order it, don’t ship it. Don’t put it in a plastic-bubble-on-a-card package.
Why can’t we make brown toilet paper virtuous? A lot of the pollution in the paper industry comes from bleaching (yay dioxins) to make white paper. Does toilet tissue need to be bleached? Snot tissues? Pantiliners? Paper cups and plates? Why does everything have to be gleaming white? People pay extra for brown eggs…
Maybe part of the solution to that is to bring more manufacturing back here, and have that discussion about what’s worth the pollution. A certain amount of pollution is inevitable. But is it worth it for plastic crust-trimmers shaped like cartoon princesses, or is that something we could live without, to save a bit of toxic effluent and landfill space? Could we do something about clamshell packaging? The proliferation of unnecessary circuitboards? Un-repairable devices and appliances? Ineffective and carcinogenic “fire retardants” in every carpet and upholstered furniture item? (You know what made a way bigger difference in house fire deaths? Stop smoking campaigns).
I don’t really buy the rah-rah capitalism that says we have to have all these dumb things because “the market”. That’s not a free market. That’s robbery. In a truly free market, the end user would pay the FULL cost of the item: and that would include the cost to downstream communities of contaminating their groundwater and fisheries. A plastic crust-trimmer would cost $100 and nobody would manufacture it in the first place, because nobody would buy it if they couldn’t offload most of the cost onto unconsenting civilians. But you can’t even think about any of that when offshoring to China is an option. Just like with the Garbage Patch… can’t make it a priority for a foreign government.
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China isn’t the option it used to be.
After Mao, the Chinese didn’t have many options apart from taking the dirtiest industries. These days they are far more interested in advanced manufacturing.
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That’s good news!
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