Earth Day 2019: The Joke’s on Us

It’s come to pass that many environmentalists groan at the mere thought of Earth Day. Too many of the industries ruining our planet have largely co-opted the day with marketing efforts to demonstrate their commitment to “going green.”

Colgate toothpaste has Michael Phelps pitching turning the faucet off while brushing. Goop offers luxury reusable straws, including a $68 option with a rose quartz crystal at one end. Earth Day seemed like a good time for Carl's Jr to pitch its promo club, and get rewarded with a free small order of fries and a small beverage.

What’s missing in all this a sense of urgency. The planet’s current trajectory has us on course to warm by 4 degrees Celsius by 2100, creating a world that will be devastated by disasters, droughts, disease, and food shortages.

It’s going to take more than one day of press releases, media events, and token actions to change the path we’re on.

Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old from Sweden who’s become a global ambassador for youth anxieties about climate change gets it. She went to the billionaire club at Davos, warning them

“Our house is on fire.“I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day. And then I want you to act.”

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Forty nine years ago (!), the first Earth Day brought people from an estimated two thousand colleges and universities, ten thousand primary and secondary schools, and hundreds of communities across the United States to demonstrate support for environmental protections.

A federal proclamation from Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, served as a primary impetus for the April 22, 1970 birth of an environmental movement. With the notable exception of the domestic far-right fringe (April 22 coincides with Vladimir Lenin’s date of birth), the quest for a cleaner planet was a bipartisan effort.

https://twitter.com/snopes/status/1120386309623820295

The Clean Air Act extension unanimously passed the Senate in 1970. The Environmental Protection Agency was formed in December 1970 after President Nixon submitted a plan to Congress calling for the creation of the agency. The Endangered Species Act and the Safe Water Drinking Act were signed into law during that era.

Corporate pushback against  “regulatory environmentalism” contributed to partisan divisions. The political lessons learned by the tobacco industry were adopted by dirty energy and other polluters, using faux organizations to spreading doubt and confusion about the increasing scientific consensus.

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Now it’s come to the point where “Good environmentalism,” according to the President’s 2019 Earth Day message, is equated with economic prosperity.

Even mostly voluntary efforts at restraining the degradation of the atmosphere like the Paris Climate Accords have been pushed aside. National Geographic Magazine has an ever increasing running list of environmentally unfriendly actions by the current administration, and it’s really depressing to look at.  

Recycling of post consumer packing, long hailed as a positive step to decrease waste and help the environment is turning into a nightmare, as poorer nations refuse to accept our leftovers.

From the New York Times:

While there remains a viable market in the United States for scrap like soda bottles and cardboard, it is not large enough to soak up all of the plastics and paper that Americans try to recycle. The recycling companies say they cannot depend on selling used plastic and paper at prices that cover their processing costs, so they are asking municipalities to pay significantly more for their recycling services. Some companies are also charging customers additional “contamination” fees for recycled material that is mixed in with trash.

The problem is particularly acute when it comes to plastic, as more than 79% of all plastic waste ends up sitting in landfills, or ends up floating out to sea or littering the land. Another 12% gets burned up in incinerators, adding to particulate matter to the atmosphere. Only 9% of the plastic we use is actually recycled.  And the bad news about recycling most plastics is the chemical composition of the finished product is almost always inferior.

Every year, we let roughly the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza in plastic to flow into the ocean, where it breaks down into small chunks or particles and accumulates in sea animals large and small. A pregnant sperm whale was found with 49 pounds of plastic in her stomach along the coast of Sardinia, Italy not long ago.

Plastic is largely derived from petroleum, aka dirty energy. According to the World Economic Forum roughly 8% of world oil production is currently used to make plastic. By 2050, that figure will rise to 20% worldwide.

The active deregulation of pollution controls by the now toothless EPA led the petrochemical industry to announce a $200+ billion in new investment last fall. Factories, pipelines and other infrastructure in the Gulf Coast corridor will expand, enabling a new plastics and petrochemical belt across Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and New York.  These projects are designed to cut costs of plastic and chemicals produced in the U.S. by using raw materials from the region’s fracked gas.

This strategy of expansion flies into the face of increasing sentiment against single use plastic products. The European Union has voted to ban 10 types of single-use plastics by 2021. Plastic shopping bags and drinking straws are under the gun in California and around the country.

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According to a survey by CBS News:

When asked to grade the U.S. on protecting the environment, few Americans give the U.S. high marks. Most give the country a "C" at best, including 22 percent who give a failing grade of "F." Back in 2009, just 6 percent said the U.S. deserved an "F" for the progress it had made in protecting the environment.

From Scientific American:

The decades-long struggle by scientists and environmentalists to build broad-based public support for cutting greenhouse emissions is finally over. Science has won.

According to a December 2018 survey conducted by Yale University, 62 percent of Americans now say that global warming is human-caused, and 72 percent say that global warming is either personally very important or somewhat important to them. When asked, a similar proportion (69 percent) answer that they are at least “somewhat worried” about global warming, and about three in 10 (29 percent) are “very worried” about it, the highest level since the question was first asked in 2008.

Despite the near panic of the dinosaurs at Faux News over the Green New Deal, there is broad agreement among Americans about what needs to be done.

What we as citizens have to do is demand a mobilization of resources — the kind we saw during the New Deal and the Second World War.

Politicians need to be held to a single standard, whether they call their plan a “Green New Deal” or "Alice’s Restaurant:” will it get us to the global goals of limiting the increase in global temperatures to 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius? Nothing short of that will do.

At the heart this discussion there has to be an acknowledgement of how our past actions have gotten us to this point.

The days of wine and roses for unfettered capitalism are over. And if we fail to act, wine and roses as agricultural products are going to disappear for all of us.

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Email me at DougPorter@WordsAndDeedsBlog.com