One consumer at a time is the wrong approach

Welcome to today's episode of "If only people listened to me!"

For years, I have been ranting writing and saying that mantras like "recycle" or "become a vegetarian" is nothing but individuals feeling good about how they are helping the natural environment, but is really nothing more than, well, like peeing on oneself on a cold night to feel warm for a couple of seconds!

And this rant is from a nature-loving (mostly) vegetarian who is conscientious about his trash and recycling.

The rant against feel-goodism is because it means that "we have accepted individual responsibility for a problem we have little control over."  We consumers have been brainwashed into believing that we created these problems and that we can solve these ourselves, if only we behaved "correctly" in our homes.

Awful bullshit that is.

And that's what this review of  Inconspicious Consumption: The Environmental Impacts You Don’t Know You Have points out about the book's message:

[Tatiana] Schlossberg says, “it is not the fault of the consumer that cashmere is cheap, and it’s not wrong to want nice things or to buy them, sometimes. ... It’s not within your control how some company sources and produces its cashmere, or the size of the herd that they got it from. That should be the corporation’s burden … or governments should make sure they act responsibly.”

Like I said earlier, welcome to today's edition of "If only people listened to me!"

So, does it mean that we individuals cannot do any damn thing?  We merely come up with ideas like Extended Producer Responsibility and circular economy that seemingly go nowhere?

Well, yes, as individuals who recycle and reduce trash while being a vegetarian, we are powerless.  But, get a few of us together and ...

Governments and corporations, of course, don’t do such things automatically — they need citizens to push them. But it doesn’t require every citizen to push in order to make change (since apathy cuts both ways, social scientists estimate that getting 3 or 4 percent of people involved in a movement is often enough to force systemic change, whereas if they acted solely as consumers that same number would have relatively little effect). You can obviously do both, and all of us should try — but fighting for the Green New Deal makes more mathematical sense than trying to take on the planet one commodity at a time.

You want an example?  I can give you plenty from my own blog.  But then who cares for sriram's rants, right?  Here's from the review:

[Instead] of trying to figure out every single aspect of our lives, a carbon tax would have the effect of informing every one of those decisions, automatically and invisibly. The fuel efficiency standards that the Obama administration put forward and Trump is now gutting would result in stunningly different outcomes. And so on.

In a democracy (call it a republic if you are one of those rightwing nutcases!) we collectively deal with these issues via elections and the government.

We aren’t going to solve our problems one consumer at a time. We’re going to need to do it as societies and civilizations, or not at all.

Elections have consequences, as 63 million people reminded us!

BTW, who is the reviewer, you ask?  None other than Bill McKibben.  

Deal with your own shit!

Some of us knew that it was only a matter of time.  It finally happened.

We have to deal with our own crap--it is no longer somebody else's problem!

"We" as in even right here in Eugene: "On Thursday, the reverberations of China’s tough stance reached Sam Miller, owner of Lane Apex."

What does Lane Apex do?  "picks up curbside commingled recyclables such as plastics, unsorted paper, cardboard and metal cans from homes in Eugene."

What has this got to do with China?

China, by far the world’s biggest importer and re­processor of recyclables, has put the United States on notice that this fall and early next year, it will begin turning away all but the most pristine used plastics and unsorted waste paper.

Of course, it is not merely Eugene:

With China’s looming ban, the entire West Coast system for sorting and shipping off recyclables is beginning to slow down, as the industry realizes it may not be able to get rid of the stuff

Back in 1987, when I was new to this country, one of the interesting stories for me was about the barge from New York that was on the sea and for thousands of miles--the gar-barge.  The awesomely rich geographic areas have always used poorer ones as their dumping grounds.  China used to be one of those poorer areas.  Not anymore.  It is now an economic and political power in the world.  And it is no longer interested in other people's garbage.

“It could have a negative impact on recycling in general, as the system has relied on China for so long now,” said Brent Bell, vice president of recycling for Waste Management, the largest waste-service provider in the U.S. If the Chinese market is no-longer available, some experts question whether U.S. municipal recycling programs can remain viable, or if many of the products now considered “recyclable” will be reclassified as garbage bound for landfills.

How did this export of garbage to China come about?

For decades, the market for recycling exports has benefited thanks to the massive U.S.-China trade deficit. With more container ships arriving on U.S. shores then heading the other way, shippers were desperate for anything they could find for the return trip.
“And the thing they chose was scrap materials,” Moore told Bloomberg BNA. “Because of discounts the shipping companies offered, it ended up being cheaper to send that stuff to China than to process it here.”

Let's see.  China makes a whole bunch of stuff, while polluting its air, water, and land, and while treating its people like shit.  We buy the stuff that we really do not need, and generate a whole lot of recyclable trash.  But, we don't want to pay for the processing of the recyclables.  We put them in the empty containers and sent them to China.  Now, it is time to pay the piper!

Meanwhile, we have shifted to online shopping because, well, we don't have enough time to spend on Facbook and Instagram and whatever else and, therefore, we can't be bothered to go to the store round the corner to get a roll of toilet paper.  We place orders online, and they are delivered with a whole lot of packing materials.

“Online retailers like Amazon still need cardboard boxes and most comes from China,” said Jakob Rindegren, the recycling policy adviser of the U.K. association.
One corrugated box retailer on the online shopping site Taobao reached by Reuters, said the price of cardboard boxes had nearly doubled since the end of August to 8.8 yuan ($1.33) each.

As I wrote in this post on recycling, two years ago--almost to the very date:

I am especially drawn to issues like this because we are forced to think through the complications and question our own preferred ideas on how to make this world a better place for tomorrow.  A constant examination, a Socratic questioning, in which there is no sacred cow, so to speak.

The solution to all these is simple, right?  Consume less, and take care of your own shit!             

I worry about climate change. So ... I contribute more to it?

I have been pissing people off all the time.  Throughout my entire life, it seems like.  It is that constant questioning approach that pisses people off.  Back when I was a student doing an internship to pay bills, my supervisor told me I was being a contrarian, which I am not--all because I questioned the ideas behind the project to which I was assigned.

It is difficult to consistently align one's ideas through all walks of life.  Those are the inconsistencies that people prefer to gloss over, which I question.  Even in my own life.

Take for instance my concern over climate change.  Unlike the deniers, I am convinced about the science behind it.  Climate change is for real.  When that is the case, then I have to ask myself what I do to help the cause.

I have blogged about the impacts of eating meat, for instance--the scientific analysis showing that being a vegetarian is significantly less of an impact on the environment unlike the effects of a carnivorous or omnivorous lifestyle.  I can feel good about myself.

I have also blogged about the very little trash that I generate--I barely have two small bags of trash for the garbage truck to haul away every two weeks.  Yep, one small bag of trash per week.

I rarely throw away food.  Because I do not buy a whole bunch and let it rot.  I do not cook a whole bunch and toss them away.  I do not eat out much either.  Good for the environment and good for my health, I gloat.

I continue to use old and outdated gadgets.  The music system that I use is a relic from the early 1990s.  My smartphone is so old that even the YouTube app has stopped working.  I feel smug that I am not participating in the wasteful disposable culture.

But, I also know I am one awful culprit.  I contribute way more than the average meat-eating, gadget-buying, food-wasting, middle-class American.  Consider, for instance, the following estimate of my carbon footprint, based on the average in the zipcode where I live and the income and household characteristics:

Check your footprint here

You see the travel component?  You see how it towers over food?  Over "other goods"?  Especially the air travel:

Flying is a luxury. Just 5 percent of the world’s population has ever set foot on an airplane. Of the almost 20 percent of Americans who have never flown, their household income is much more likely than average to be less than $30,000.

Imagine that!  A fifth of the American population has never, ever flown.  95 percent of the world's population has never, ever flown.  I, meanwhile, add up my frequent flier miles.

And, yes, flying is one hell of a contributor to climate change.  Yet, that source is the least regulated of all, compared to the stationary sources like factories and mobile sources like cars.  Why?

“Boeing is, by dollar value, the United States’ largest exporter,” she says. “The political clout of Boeing is huge.”

Actually it is more than Boeing alone.

Vera Pardee, the senior counsel for the Center for Biological Diversity, a party to the 2007 lawsuit, says recent related action by the European Union to force the industry into reducing its emissions via a carbon-trading platform also fell victim to industry influence. For nearly a decade, the European Union worked to establish an emissions-trading scheme that it wanted to apply to all aircraft landing in EU territory. In 2012, as the proposal was being finalized, Pardee says China, Brazil, and other countries threatened to cancel their orders with Airbus, which is based in France. Likely wanting to protect the bottom line of one of its biggest companies, the European Union agreed to “stop the clock” in 2013 on its enforcement of aviation emissions. According to Pardee, that’s evidence of the “amazing influence that the industry has over this entire process, and continues to have.”

I will continue to fly all the way across the continent for academic conferences, and all the way across the world for family reasons.  Yet, I refer to myself as environmentally conscious and that I worry about climate change.  Bah, humbug!

Oh well.  Soon the world's leaders and their scientists will fly to Paris for the global meeting on climate change.  And they will eat meat. And will drink bottled water. And will exchange notes via the latest electronic gadgets. And will wear fashionable clothes.  They too, like I am, are worried about global climate change.  Aren't we all!

How many will I have pissed off with this post? ;)

India's Mars expedition: A colossal waste!

Actually, the "colossal waste" comes from this news item in The Hindu:

In the next 12 years alone, South Asia — and “mainly India” — will be the fastest growing region for waste generation, says a paper published today (Oct 31) in Nature. Garbage generation in South Asia will increase eight-fold by year 2100 to reach two million tonnes a day, bringing the region at par with the conglomerate of the world’s 34 most developed countries including U.K., U.S., Australia and Japan, which make up Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.
By 2100 “India's total waste generation will be 70 per cent of all the high income and OECD countries put together,” Perinaz Bhada-Tata, co-author and solid-waste consultant in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, told this Correspondent.
While India's per capita waste generation rate will still be lower than most affluent countries, “the sheer size of its population and expected increase in urbanization and a rapidly-expanding middle class,” will account for the colossal amount of waste it generates in total, she added.

Trash is one heck of a problem in India.  Every visit, I am even more shocked than before on the awful conditions on the streets, with garbage strewn everywhere.  And the piles of rotting garbage, including food waste, which is a serious public health risk as well.  As I wrote here two years ago:

I see that there are three reasons for rotting garbage piling up on the streets of Chennai:

• People casually toss them away, especially after eating fast foods at cafes and mobile stands

• Even when they responsibly throw them in the corporation bins, the dogs have a field day digging through the scrap and, in the process, a whole lot of trash ends up on the streets

• The rag pickers toss things out of the bins in their search for anything salvageable.

The net result: there seems to be a permanent putrefied stink in the air.

The Indian situation is, of course, a part of the global trend of urbanization and affluence.  So, is there some point in the future that the rising trash production will peak and then decline?  Well, you might want to hold your breath because of the stink that will be there for the rest of your life!

In 2013, if you’re someone who cares about the environment, your first and foremost concern is probably climate change. After that, you might worry about things like radioactive contamination, collapsing honeybee colonies and endangered ecosystems, among other contemporary environmental perils that fill recent news headlines.
But a number of researchers in the field are focused on a problem that has faded out of the news cycle: the piles of garbage that are growing around the world.
A recent World Bank report projected that the amount of solid waste generated globally will nearly double by the year 2025, going from 3.5 million tons to 6 million tons per day. But the truly concerning part is that these figures will only keep growing for the foreseeable future. We likely won’t hit peak garbage—the moment when our global trash production hits its highest rate, then levels off—until sometime after the year 2100, the projection indicates, when we produce 11 million tons of trash per day.

Given the very visible garbage issues, not to speak of the biosolid issues, one would think that India would then appropriately allocate resources in order to quickly, forcefully, and effectively address municipal wastes.  Nope.  India, instead, is all set to launch its Mars expedition!

India’s space agency has begun its formal countdown to the launch of its unmanned orbiter to Mars, a voyage that India hopes will help contribute to the growing body of scientific data on the far-off planet.
On Tuesday afternoon, if all goes as planned, India will launch the spacecraft — called Mangal­yaan, or the Mars Orbiter Mission probe — from a small island near Chennai on the country’s southern coast.

 The Indian government couldn't care about the criticism either:

Civic groups have criticized the cost, in a country where hundreds of millions of people still lack toilets. “I think it’s so strongly symbolic of an extremely unequal society,” said Harsh Mander, director of New Delhi’s Center for Equity Studies, a think tank, and a former advisor to the prime minister on social issues. “We continue to have something like 230 million people who sleep hungry every night, and millions die because they can’t afford healthcare. Yet these are not issues that cause outrage.”

Consistent with the past practice, this time, too, the space officials have made sure to seek the blessings of the gods (not Martian though!):

For added insurance, the chairman of the Indian Space Research Organization sought the blessings of Lord Vishnu, the Hindu god of preservation, placing a scale model of the launch vehicle, the PSLV-C25, at the idol’s feet Monday at the lavish Tirumala shrine 80 miles from Chennai.
“These temple visits helped destress the mind and offer clarity,” the Hindustan Times newspaper explained.

Oh well ... maybe India's long-term plan is to transport the trash to Mars and burn them there!

Talking trash. No, it is not about university faculty :)

This map from the Economist is three days late as far as I am concerned; I could have made wonderful use of it in my intro class on Monday!

In the US, we are one heck of a consuming population that generates so much trash!

Meanwhile, this report (ht) argues that we are getting ever so close to an ecological tipping point:

In a paper published in today's edition of the journal Nature, 22 researchers from a variety of fields liken the human impact to global events eons ago that caused mass extinctions, permanently altering Earth's biosphere.
"Humans are now forcing another such transition, with the potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience," wrote the authors, who are from the U.S., Europe, Canada and South America.
If current trends continue — exploding global population, rapidly rising temperatures and the clearance of more than 40% of Earth's surface for urban development or agriculture — the planet could reach a tipping point, they say.
"The net effects of what we're causing could actually be equivalent to an asteroid striking the Earth in a worst-case scenario," the paper's lead author, Anthony Barnosky, a professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley, said in an interview. "I don't want to sound like Armageddon. I think the point to be made is that if we just ignore all the warning signs of how we're changing the Earth, the scenario of losses of biodiversity — 75% or more — is not an outlandish scenario at all."
Global population just passed 7 billion and is expected to reach 9.3 billion or more by 2050. "By the year 2070, we'll live in a hotter world than it's been since humans evolved as a species," Barnosky said.

 Party like it is 2025!