By Don Urquhart, Times Chronicle
This may come as a shock, but we’ve been lied to.
In fact we’ve probably been lied to continuously since the very first moment an oil company came into existence. They lie about price, they lie about geo-political influence, they lie about pollution, they lie about environmental impacts and they lie about recycling.
As far as vested interests go, you pretty much won’t find one more self-serving, and ‘willing and able’ to spend excessive amounts of money on propaganda and lies, than the oil and gas industry. In fact they make good bed-fellows with the gun manufacturers and tobacco companies.
The writing is clearly on the wall for this legacy fossil fuel sector, but before they go the way of the proverbial dinosaur they will surely continue to squeeze every last drop of profit they can, no matter what the cost.
We shouldn’t even still be driving these gasoline-guzzling, pollution-spewing internal combustion vehicles, yet we do. We shouldn’t still be throwing plastic into garbage dumps and turning our oceans into giant floating garbage patches, yet we do.
We rationalize that plastic gets recycled, after all, years of propaganda campaigns by the oil companies have brainwashed us into thinking everything is ‘gonna be alright’ because recycling has saved the day.
Trouble is, less than 10 per cent of all plastic produced has ever been recycled. Landfills brim with plastic and our oceans are clogged with plastic waste.
Millions of animals are killed by plastics every year, from birds to fish to other marine organisms and nearly 700 species, including endangered ones, are known to have been affected by plastics.
So intertwined has plastic become with our world that micro-plastic is found in our food chains. It’s even impacting male fertility with a downward global trend over the last 30 years. Who knows what links there are between various cancers and this ‘consumption’ of plastic. It can’t be good.
And the whole recycling thing was just a gigantic ruse. Big oil knew exactly what would happen, that the cost of recycling would ultimately defeat that noble ambition.
For years plastic was loaded into empty shipping containers destined for China, a convenient and cheaper option than recycling at home. Too bad it wasn’t proper recycling. In many cases the plastic was simply burned to provide energy, releasing harmful chemicals into the environment.
And then when China put an end to accepting North American garbage under the guise of recycling, other countries in Asia like Cambodia and the Philippines became dumping grounds. This surely suits the oil industry just fine, after all they’re quite happy to keep on producing ‘fresh’ plastics.
Studies have shown that plastic bans do reduce the number of plastic shopping bags used but there is a downside. The need for trash can liners and bags for dog poop, for instance, simply cause consumers to then buy garbage bags.
Luckily there are other options for environmentally friendly alternatives to petrochemical-based plastics that simply need the demand impetus that plastic bans can help provide.
In the meantime plastics are not going anywhere and indeed we can’t get rid of them all anyway because of their importance in various facets of our lives including medical technology.
At least the ban moves us forward and keeps us thinking about all the destructive things we just can’t seem to stop doing to our environment and hopefully it is the first step in weening ourselves off of this incredibly addictive material.
