Industrial-Scale Insanity
How ever-more-impressive technologies enable us to be crazy on a global scale
As people slowly become aware of the drawbacks associated with massive over-use of plastics, we’re encouraged to recycle — even though nearly everything put into recycling bins is either dumped in Western landfills or sent to poor countries where it’s dumped on landfills. We could cut back on the amount of plastic wrapping that’s generated, but companies know that consumers love receiving their purchases swathed in layers of “protective” plastic. So instead of doing the sane thing (reducing plastic use) we do the idiotic thing (pretend that recycling is the answer).
As people become more aware of the realities of climate change (regardless of the probable causes), we see halfwit egomaniacs declaring their “solutions” to the problem: electric vehicles and billionaires’ panic rooms on Mars. We could spend more on insulating houses, cut back even further on pointless commutes to energy-wasteful offices, and impose higher taxes on hydrocarbons to encourage far more fuel-efficient vehicles, but companies know we’d rather buy energy-intensive EVs that don’t actually reduce CO2 outputs (where do you think the electricity comes from?) and dream of sci-fi fantasies; governments meanwhile know we’d vote against increased taxation on hydrocarbon use (US…
