Category Archives: Environmental Movement, general

Unknown's avatar A. E. 3:46 pm on February 11, 2020
Tags: #ShutDownCanada,   

The ‘Social Contract’ Goes Up In Flames

If you’ve not yet seen the recent coverage of anti-pipeline road barriers being dismantled by angry locals off Highway 19 on Vancouver Island, B.C., you may want to give it a watch before reading this.

First off, let me express my pride, for want of a better term, that this happened in my old stomping grounds. Many, many hardworking families on Vancouver Island have been hammered by the damage done to our nation’s natural resource sector — first, by the massive layoffs in forestry around the time of the Great Recession, and now, again, by the federal government’s open warfare against the oil and gas industry, which many Islanders had looked to as an alternative. We used to joke that the population of Campbell River (my hometown, just north of this incident) doubled and halved every two weeks with all the folks flying in and out of Fort McMurray.

I was around 14 years old when the local paper mill, the town’s biggest employer, shut down. Over the months that followed I remember seeing groups of friends at school, embracing one another in tears, saying their last goodbyes before some of their families would depart for Alberta’s then-greener pastures. Others still would remain, their households having elected to send dad to the aforementioned oil sands to be away from his family for weeks at a time just to provide for them.

My father, for his part, lost his business in the recession. Not wanting to leave his home of over a decade behind, he spent the next few years working two, sometimes three jobs to keep our heads above water. By the time I graduated high school, there was still little work in Campbell River — so I, too, made my way to the “promised land” of Alberta.

We were all idiots, I suppose.

I’m telling you all this to give an idea of the context in which the events of this video occurred. For every dirty, screeching hippy planting their asses behind an illegal highway barricade, there are surely dozens of ordinary people who are sick to death of this kind of interference in their daily lives. Sick to death of watching their friends and families become so thinly spread across the breadth of this country, desperately tracking down the few remaining parts of it in which there is still work to be found. Just as the recession was not the fault of those who were most drastically affected by it, neither is it their fault that multiple pipeline projects remain trapped in regulatory hell.

And, clearly, it is not their fault that anti-pipeline protesters have upped the ante by blockading the same highways and bridges that every other Canadian needs to get from one place to another — whether or not they themselves are employed in the industry currently slated for death. Hell, even if they were, it is hardly the “fault” of any given O&G worker that any given pipeline might be built — yet, they will be made to suffer the consequences of these blockades all the same.

It’s not their fault that this is happening. It’s not their fault that the RCMP has chosen to do next-to-nothing about it. Nonetheless, when a handful of those sick-to-death people come together to do the work that the police refuse to do, they are the ones who are treated as criminals.

At one point in the video, a protester becomes aggravated by the sight of their carefully-placed barricade materials being tossed rightfully into the roadside ditch by a local who’s clearly had enough of this shit. “He’s removing garbage,” says another local to the weepy protester.

“My sacred items are not garbage,” she counters, with the kind of passion to suggest that the man was throwing a live infant into the ditch as opposed to old tires and rotting plywood. “My sacred items are special!”

Hear that? Those old tires are ‘special’ — sacred, even! Much, much more special or sacred than silly things like — I don’t know — having a job. Feeding your family. Just trying to live one’s life, even as the world around them comes tumbling down in a grandiose hissy-fit.

Unfortunately, I suspect that these protesters — and by extension, their police detail — might be on to something. It doesn’t look like we’ll be able to just “live our lives” anymore, not while they have anything to say about it. As noted by a local in this video, paying your taxes and minding your business doesn’t seem to be good enough these days — not to the police, and certainly not to the protesters. Taking matters into your own hands, however, is also not allowed: that’ll get you arrested.

But hey — the police will be receiving their paychecks as usual, despite their active refusal to protect the public from a minority of extremists. What do they care if hundreds, if not thousands of others will be physically prevented from earning theirs? In fact, missed days of work will be, for some, the least of their concerns — God forbid anyone has an important medical appointment waiting for them on the other side of a blocked-up bridge.

The protesting and road-blocking is still ongoing. CN Rail has just announced that it will be forced to close “significant” parts of its rail network if the protests continue. As the world’s second-largest country, Canada is extremely dependent upon its transportation infrastructure to provide goods across the country. The shortages that could result from this are far from trivial: food, medicine, propane, the list goes on. Already our supplies of these and various other necessities are threatened by the mass quarantine of China, and our ever-creative pipeline protesters have somehow managed to find a way to make the situation even worse. Quite ironically, we can expect the isolated and predominantly Indigenous communities of our rural north to be among the hardest hit by these antics conducted in their name.

With the current state of play, it is only a matter of time before someone gets hurt — physically, as opposed to financially, or indeed “spiritually”, hurt. Hence the ominous quotation now making its rounds across Canadian social media:

“If the government will not uphold the rule of law, it becomes incumbent on citizens to do so.”

Canadians have a reputation for being ‘polite’, often to our detriment. As I’ve argued before, this ‘polite’ demeanor is more likely the result of not wanting to rock the proverbial boat than it is a genuine consideration of other people’s feelings. At any rate, my theory is about to be put to the test once more.

If you don’t want to get involved, that’s too damn bad: these protesters, the police, and indeed the upper echelons of government, have all decided that you don’t get to have that choice anymore. As big as our country is, there is simply nowhere left to run: the roadways are littered with trash. We are now sitting in an un-seaworthy vessel without life jackets, watching some of our fellow passengers crowd themselves onto one side, threatening to flip the thing over. Forget not wanting to rock the boat, because it’s already about to capsize.

Will we rock it back the other way, or will we let them drown us all?

Unknown's avatar A. E. 5:05 pm on January 2, 2020
Tags: , COP25, iisd,   

COP25: A Canary in the (Decommissioned) Coal Mine?

Just before Christmas, as COP25 wound down to a close, a fun little bit of light reading found it’s way into my inbox, courtesy of the International Institute for Sustainable Development’s mailing list. The article, titled “Deciding What to Think of the First Four Years of SDG Implementation,” tells us all a person really needs to know about the slow-motion car crash that some have taken to calling “climate politics”.

So — four years and several billions of dollars later, now appears to be the right time for our Green Overlords to take a step back and assess whether or not anything of value has resulted from these efforts. Thus, after decades of doing seemingly little more than publishing an endless slew of ‘reports’ on how nothing is getting done, it was apparently necessary to commission yet another of these reports for it to be recognized that this is not exactly what most might call a “winning strategy.” Of course, we need not get our hopes up that this particular report will have any more of an effect on the execution of said strategy than any of its predecessors.

Provided the reader is at least somewhat familiar with the type of people we’re dealing with, here, the results — or rather, lack thereof — ought to come as little surprise: “[W]ith a few exceptions,” we are told, “[the] SDGs have very rarely been used to challenge practices, and have not triggered the transformative project they promised.” Say it ain’t so!

Moreover, “It must be acknowledged that the adoption of such an ambitious agreement was possible only because it does not require concessions or a change in behavior from anyone in particular.” Indeed, it is much easier to talk a big game than it is to play it — an important lesson that most of us have internalized before puberty. One has to wonder why those who seem the least familiar with the basic tenets of human nature nevertheless see themselves fit to micromanage all of humanity.

It isn’t all bad news, though — the report notes that the SDGs have been name-dropped by various politicians and diplomats more frequently in 2019 than they had been in previous years. If only we lived in the fictional universe of Beetlejuice, and all you had to do was say “sustainable development” three times fast and then — Poof! — results! We’d have reached the promised utopia decades ago!

In all seriousness, the bulk of the report is seriously unimpressive. As jaded as I’ve become over this last year of closely following the implementation of Agenda 2030, it is difficult to read its contents as anything but the typical, desperate attempt to blame its numerous failures and setbacks on the scarecrow issues of “lacking commitment” and “reduced financial flows.” Perhaps they have yet to realize — or, perhaps, have yet to accept — that it is difficult to retain much of any commitment, financial or otherwise, to a project that is fundamentally impossible to implement.

If no other lessons have been learned these last four years, it’s that there is a limit to how quickly and radically one may attempt to alter a given society without facing considerable consequences for having done so. Emmanuel Macron may be willing to chance massive protests, walk-outs, even rioting directed against the many unfavorable policies he has imposed upon the French people, but even he seems capable of determining which lines are better left uncrossed. UN bureaucrats, of course, none of whom were properly elected to their positions and all of whom remain entirely unaccountable to any authority not under the UN banner, clearly have yet to come to a similar understanding.

As such, it is somewhat poetic that not only did the COP25 proceedings end up being moved from their original location Chile, partially (albeit not entirely) as a result of UN-backed fiscal shenanigans in the region, but as well that the conference ultimately ended in a colossal failure. Not only did the attendees fail to produce any form of agreement on the conference’s biggest issues, such as the Green Climate Fund; it would appear that both worldwide CO2 emissions and coal extraction are — get this — increasing still (if you enjoy watching the climate cartel circling the drain as much as I do, see Francis Menton’s takedown of the situation here)! In either respect, we largely have the Chinese to thank: after a long period of courtship between the People’s Republic and the UNEP, particularly in the field of mass surveillance technology and methods of behavioral control (previously covered here), it seems now that the PRC has lost interest, at least temporarily, in maintaining this long-standing charade of ‘consensus’ — at least, as far as shuttering the nation’s resource industry is concerned.

And why would the Chinese government do such a thing? Clearly, because they seem to think this whole ‘climate crisis’ business — increasingly, a ‘business’ in the literal sense — is to some extent a crock of nonsense. Where would they get such an idea from, I wonder? Maybe from the Indian government, which has similarly made clear its intent to worry about things like infrastructure development and the provision of electricity first, climate mitigation second — “conditional on higher financial support from developed nations,” of course. At any rate, both India and China are joined by a handful of African nations in declaring themselves to be far more concerned with the real and immediate concerns of their own nations than they are with some sinking, sparsely-populated islands in the middle of the Pacific. And fair enough, some might say — after all, China and India are home to the first- and second-largest populations on the planet, and current projections have the African continent set to double its own population by 2050. It therefore seems difficult to really blame any of these actors for not wanting to shoulder the burdens of any more people than they already have to deal with — this, of course, goes directly against the core pillars of globalism, which would greatly prefer to see every single person on the planet equally suffer the consequences incurred by the actions of just a few.

Predictably, much of the moaning emitted from UN HQ thus far has instead had to do with the United States’ dropping out of the Paris Accords; likely, I would imagine, because it is easier from a public-relations perspective to accuse America of calculated sabotage than it is to admit to having been played for fools by China. But no matter which particular country (or sets thereof) we’d like to point our fingers at, all roads of inquiry lead back to the UN. Perhaps the real question to be asked is this — just how much longer can this show go on?

***

I first started this blog as something of a ‘companion’ outlet to a book I was (and still am) writing about the development industry, particularly regarding the attempted implementation of Agenda 2030. Naturally, the ‘unholy’ institutional trilogy of said industry — the UN System, the IMF, and the World Bank Group — featured quite heavily throughout, as did the innumerable hair-brained schemes and scams concocted by them in the grand pursuit of an allegedly-better world. Over time, my sights were trained on exactly how these organizations came into being, both materially and intellectually; later still, I became quite concerned with understanding why such a clearly corrupt and self-interested network of bureaucracies ever came to be seen as a legitimate force for ‘good’ in the eyes of the public in the first place, considering all the many reasons said public has been given not to trust them, practically since this whole mess started back in 1945.

And now, I am beginning to realize what a mistake it was to believe that all of this really started as late as 1945. Today, it seems to me that in order to truly understand the many problems that we presently face — as individuals, as societies, and indeed, as a species — it may well be necessary to wind the clock of inquiry back to the onset of the Industrial Revolution. Much like Rome, this self-cannibalizing system of ours was not built in a day; rather, it was slowly constructed over the course of at least a century, maybe even two. “Thankfully” — depending on one’s personal outlook on things — it can all come crashing down much more quickly than that.

Soon after beginning this project, I came to the belief that the UN et al. would never live to see the completion of its driving vision. This was based in the sincere observation that it is literally impossible to attain a number of their stated goals — as just one example, the World Bank’s latest initiative to score a given country’s rate of “learning poverty” based on its proportion of literate ten year-olds goes completely against everything we presently understand about both literacy and our present (in-)ability to test such things in a reliably standardized manner — as well as that it is logistically impossible to carry out a majority of the others. Thus, my main concern was with regards to the lengths to which the UN et al. and its supporters might go in the pursuit of carrying it all out anyway — in other words, I was more worried about the journey toward this utopia than I was about ‘discovering’ we’d been lied to about it on arrival.

My initial research for this project began around October of last year; the actual writing of it began the following January. Thus, around a year after having started all of this, the passage of time and the revelations accompanying it have necessitated that I revise my outlook.

In essence, I no longer believe that the UN will live to see the year 2050, let alone the completion of any projects that they might’ve liked to see done by then. As a matter of fact, I’m not convinced that the UN will live to see the year 2030: if it does still exist in ten years, I find it highly doubtful that the organization will retain anywhere near the same level of authority and influence that it enjoys at present. Indeed, since 2015 the entire UN System has been rattled by a dramatic decrease in perceived legitimacy; should this trend continue over the next five years, that the UN would become essentially defunct (or at least powerless) at some point during the next ten years seems practically inevitable.

By all accounts, such a thing would be a blessing. Yet there still remains the aforementioned problems of figuring out how and why we got ourselves into the position of cheering on the UN’s decline in the first place. I am greatly concerned that, without proper insight into the mistakes we’ve made in the past and present, we run the risk of repeating those same mistakes in the future. The absolute last thing I’d want out of this would be to see the UN shuttered, only to be replaced by an ideological carbon-copy differing only in the level of enthusiasm displayed by its proponents. Put simply, if the UN is going down, I want to make sure that it’s down for good.

Going into the new year — and a new decade — my plan is as follows: I am presently sitting on more than two-hundred pages worth of research and analyses conducted for the purpose of trying to “take down” the UN. Now that I see the UN might very well take down itself (and, accordingly, that my attention may be of better use elsewhere), it would be a shame for all this time and effort to have gone to waste. As such, my goal will be to transform this research into blog and/or video-friendly formats, as I work on re-writing the book through a more ‘philosophical’ lens.

At the same time, I would like to branch out a bit in terms of the topics covered on this blog. Specifically, I would like to focus somewhat less on the material aspects of our situation — the economics, the statistics, the projections — and more so on the immaterial, perhaps even ‘spiritual’ wasteland that presently characterizes Western life, particularly in pop culture and media. Whether we like it or not, in this day and age it is indeed through this medium that a majority of people come to understand the nature of the world around them — thus, the cultural landscape appears, to me, as a wide, open threshold, simply waiting to be crossed. Given that my own educational background and training is, in fact, in culture, ethnography, and semiotics — rather than in green energy or digital finance, which has nevertheless characterized much of my content to date — this is an important discussion that I feel quite capable of meaningfully contributing to. Indeed, I feel as if I have something of a duty to do so.

In closing, I want to thank everyone who has been reading, sharing, and (hopefully) getting some use out of my content to date. It has been your overwhelmingly positive feedback that has given me the drive to keep going with this project, and I am truly, immensely grateful for all your support. This past year has been quite the wild ride, and I very much look forward to seeing where it takes us next.

Best wishes to you and yours in the New Year,

A. E.

Unknown's avatar A. E. 1:37 pm on October 3, 2019
Tags: carbon credits, carbon tax, clean energy, clean tech, green tech   

Organic Energy, The Rich Man’s ‘Idiot Tax’

Just last night, a considerable amount of controversy erupted over the revelation that the Liberal campaign has used not one plane to transport their staff from sea to shining sea, but two — one for people; the other, allegedly, for their luggage. Not to fear, however, as the LPC swiftly issued a press release stating that they had “purchased carbon offsets” to cover their air travel emissions; the Conservatives, meanwhile, they were quick to point out, had not. I’m not entirely sure how this explanation has worked out for them thus far, considering the vast majority of the responses I have seen on social media have been very much along the lines of, “What the f**k is a ‘carbon offset’?”

And, in all fairness, it’s a pretty good question.

In order to find an answer, I had a browse through the website for the company the LPC is alleged to have purchased these “carbon offsets” from: Bullfrog Power Inc., which bills itself as “Canada’s leading green energy provider.” As it turns out, however, Bullfrog does not itself provide energy of any sort — rather, they take your money and use it to pay actual green energy producers to generate it. So, more like green energy retailers, right?

Nope, not even that.

Bullfrog does not change anything about the energy consumption practices of its clients: it will not somehow make your home run entirely on green energy, nor will it even have any effect on how much “dirty” energy you’re currently using. Starting at just $11 a month, you can simply pay Bullfrog to pay for green energy to be sent to the electrical grid, “on your behalf”.

That’s it. Moreover, this appears to be their entire business model.

Now, you might be asking yourself, “Why on Earth would I pay extra for energy that I will not personally be consuming?” Great question! Using the analogy of a sink being filled with two taps of water — one “dirty”, the other “clean” — they say that, as you are adding the dirty water from the one tap and draining it through the sink (consumption), you can pay to also have the other tap turned on; this will fill the “sink” (grid) with a higher ratio of clean:dirty water than it had held before. Supposedly, the idea is to get to a point where we don’t need as much water from the dirty tap, because the clean tap has enough to fill the entire sink.

The analogy works, but perhaps not for the reason they think — they leave out the part where the sink, much like an electrical grid, has a limited capacity to hold water/energy and will hit capacity much faster if there is more water (of any sort) flowing into it than before, and it is not accordingly being drained at a higher rate. In other words, increasing supply without increasing demand. This is a bit of a problem, as the entire premise rests on the idea that there will be an increase in demand for green/renewable electricity — but once the water is in the same sink, it’s not possible to scoop out a portion and determine how much of it came from either tap, and exactly the same holds true for electricity in the grid. If you’re on the grid to start with, you don’t get a choice as to how the energy you draw from it was produced. Thus, in order to ensure that it was all produced in a “clean” manner, you would have to prevent the dirty water from getting into the sink in the first place — i.e., stop using fossil fuels entirely. But until we are in a position where we can feel safe shutting down all of our “unclean” energy sources without really throwing a wrench into the works — and we’re not — the entire exercise is pretty much pointless.

In the meantime, you’re basically sending Bullfrog money to help subsidize the massively inefficient and unreliable production of energy by renewable means, and in return you’ll receive a monthly bill that maybe makes you feel better after having been relentlessly shamed by the media for the fact that you exist. Crucially, your actual electrical bills are not going to be impacted in any way that benefits you: again, since you don’t get to choose where the energy you use comes from, it’s not as if you’ll get to pay less carbon taxes in exchange for having also payed for low-carbon energy production. If anything, your bills will probably increase as time goes on, considering that renewable energy is much more expensive to produce than it is via fossil fuels — after all, if it were cheaper to produce, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. All in all, you’re paying more money now for the opportunity to pay even more money later.

But don’t take my word for it — even a representative of Greenpeace has spoken out against the use of carbon offsets as a “get out of jail free card”, owing to the obvious fact that you cannot justify increasing (or maintaining) your emissions simply by paying extra to do so, any more than you can justify beating your wife because you donate money to a battered women’s shelter. If the theory behind reducing CO2 emissions holds that a build-up of the stuff in the atmosphere is bad, it follows that you would actually have to reduce the amount being emitted in order to keep it from building up. Regrettably, it is not yet possible to cut a cheque fat enough to stop the first law of thermodynamics in its tracks.

Essentially, this is the same marketing tactic used by companies who offer to donate X amount of proceeds from a given product for each item that is sold: the ‘donation’ is contingent upon your purchase. They don’t just donate the money outright because they want you to buy the product so they can make a profit — even if they donate 5% of the proceeds to charity, they get to keep the other 95% of profit that they wouldn’t otherwise have. Carbon offsets/credits appear to function in much the same way: Bullfrog isn’t going to just invest in clean energy and tech with their own money (and given the non-profitability of the sector, I can’t say that I blame them); they want you to give them money so that they can invest X amount of it on your behalf, while keeping some undisclosed amount for themselves. The only product that they’re really selling here is, by all appearances, the opportunity to “feel good” about doing something for the climate, while not actually doing anything for the climate.

My mother used to refer to lottery cards and scratch tickets as the “idiot tax” — a non-mandatory tax paid by people dumb enough to think they have a reasonable chance of winning more money than what they’d paid for the tickets in the first place. Now, with all due respect to lottery players (I’ll grab a card or two myself sometimes), what I’m sensing from this whole carbon credit scheme is very much along the same lines: it’s an extra carbon tax paid by people dumb enough to believe that it’s OK to drink a cup of cyanide if you chase it with a cup of water. At the very least, I can understand why people play the lottery: there is a chance, however infinitely small, that one may receive a tangible reward for doing so. With carbon offsets, you are only compensated insofar as you believe that you’re doing something to help.

The whole thing sounds so unbelievably stupid, it’s hard to believe the fact that carbon credits/offsets have managed to become an industry at least profitable enough to have won the favour of the leader of a G7 country, who is perfectly willing to donate what is probably taxpayer money to companies like Bullfrog “on our behalf.” Until, that is, you remember that said leader has a higher net worth than he does functional intelligence; perhaps the same can be said for every other person buying into this scheme. At any rate, I’ve become increasingly convinced that, given a well-written and convincing enough proposal, I could probably get the federal government to send me money to find a way to transmute nickel into gold — only one way to find out!

Unknown's avatar A. E. 2:18 pm on August 21, 2019
Tags: plastic industry, recycling, recycling industry, yyc   

The Recyclables Market Just Ain’t What It Used to Be

Here’s some sustainability madness from my neck of the woods: $330,000 in two years of storage expenses later, the City of Calgary has been forced to admit that they have thus far been unsuccessful in finding willing markets for the garbage we’re selling; as such, they will now need to spend an additional $130,000 to have 20 thousand tons of recycled, ‘clamshell’ plastic containers shipped off to a landfill, thus bringing the tab for this particular fiasco up to $460,000 with nothing but embarrassment to show for it.

This news comes after the City chose to find $60 million dollars’ worth of budget cuts in emergency services (fire, police, ambulance — you know, important things); public transit, including the low-income discount for monthly passes; “lower disaster preparedness at the emergency management agency”, whatever that means (doesn’t sound good!); affordable housing programs, and much more — not, however, in their own pockets, with (taxable) compensation for City Councillors still frozen at $113,352.63 annually. Instead, they laid off 115 of the city’s other employees, though how many of those were among the 30% of hired employees whom also rack in more than $100,000 a year has not been disclosed.

I could go on — we could talk about all the boring at best, downright ugly at worst public “art” pieces that the city has paid hefty price tags on to commission; we could, of course, have a look at the failed 2026 Olympic bid that still managed to cost us several millions of dollars just to entertain the thought, before voters (thankfully) shot the proposal down. But this time, the city’s blunder isn’t exactly unique to our particular, rag-tag team of mostly useless politicians. This problem happens to be one that has been repeated in numerous other cities, both in Canada and elsewhere, many many times over. And, so long as the people holding the reigns continue to maintain a different interpretation of reality as does the rest of the planet, we can be sure that this problem will keep cropping up, here and elsewhere, as it has been doing for the last decade or so.

If you ask the City of Calgary, of course, this is all China’s fault. As the city’s website on the subject explains, “China’s decision to tighten their recycling markets [in 2017] left many cities including Calgary in a tough spot.” Up until then, you see, China had been just one of a handful of North America’s designated dumping grounds in the Asia-Pacific region; of the 15 billion tons of recyclable material exported by the United States in 2016, 9 billion tons of it ended up in China. Other countries selected for the honour have been Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Taiwan; all of which have, like China, since taken steps to restrict the quantities and qualities of recyclables that may be exported to their shores.

You may be wondering why we were ever imposing our bits of plastic, glass and scrap paper on our neighbors across the Pacific to begin with, and rightfully so. As it turns out, the reason for this is very much the same as that behind why all the aforementioned nations, and China in particular, have begun to draw the line: most of the recycled material that ends up in a sorting/processing facility, here or abroad, is unfit for reuse without considerable amounts of processing; not only that, there is far too much material being recycled for these facilities to reasonably handle, and not enough market demand for even those materials that do meet the standards set for resale. [1] It is therefore quite understandable that these countries, who do not appear to be in possession of any technologies better than ours are at turning trash into treasure, would be unwilling to manage the problem for us.

So, we’ve been sitting here all this time, diligently recycling all that we could under the false belief that these materials were being taken somewhere — even if that somewhere happened to be China — to be magically transformed into whatever it is a given material can be reused for. Instead, it’s been shipped across the ocean to be picked-through for valuables, with much of it ultimately being burned in Chinese landfills, thereby releasing surely large amounts of CO2, along with all of the other toxic chemicals that are released by burning plastic, into the atmosphere. Were someone to do the math on it, I’m sure we’d find it comparatively better, in terms of limiting CO2 emissions, to have burned these materials right here in our own landfills, than to have additionally burned all of the fossil fuels needed to power a fleet of cargo ships across the Pacific so that some other country could do it for us. Great work, everyone!

Considering just how long all of this has been going on for, it beggars belief that we, in the West at least, would not have at least tried to find some form of use for these materials long before we ended up with the present surplus. Quite obviously, there’s no point in hoarding them in storage facilities, as the City of Calgary has done for the last two years on the taxpayers dime, if there’s not really any particular way to be rid of the materials in such quantities that doesn’t entail their burial in a landfill or being put to the torch. According to a study commissioned by the Canadian government, just nine percent of the country’s plastic waste was actually recycled in 2016; virtually all the rest of it ended up in landfills. “Innovation” in the sector, as far as what we actually do with the recyclables is concerned, does not appear to have caught up to manifest reality — again, why no one thought to figure this out back in the 70s, when the whole “reduce, reuse, recycle” mantra really began to kick off, is beyond me.

One way or the other, something’s gotta give: either we figure out a way to generate less first-use plastic, paper and glass; or we figure out a way to use these recycled materials at home, rather than shipping them off to Asia while patting ourselves on the back and pretending like we’re actually doing something of any tangible benefit. If it turns out that neither can be done, then we need to take a good hard look at the state of the recycling industry — or perhaps even at the very notion of recycling, in its entirety — and make a decision as to whether or not we’d be just as well off throwing most of our recyclables in the trash, if they’re just going to end up in a landfill anyway. As it currently stands the recycling situation is, as many of its proponents like to say, unsustainable.