Climate Change Dispatch by Pierre Desrochers and Joanna Szurmak on Jul 1, 2021
According to many environmentalists, coal, petroleum, and natural gas, together with the fuels, lubricants, and myriad other products these fossil fuels make possible, help drive widespread environmental problems.
As the journalist and activist Murray Dobbin put it a few years ago, the “ever-increasing production and use of fossil fuels will, over time, kill billions of us and irreversibly change all life on the planet.”
Taking its cue from the likes of Dobbin, the Trudeau government wants to designate all plastic manufactured items — not just straws! — as “toxic.” Surely such a bold move is justified in light of how terrible things have become for humans and their planet.
Yet, one has to wonder.
As many people have pointed out, plastic materials have many benefits. They’re versatile, cheap, lightweight, and resistant. They protect our food, reduce food waste and help produce a lot more food a lot more efficiently — and therefore more cheaply — than was possible a few decades ago.
Before 1850, approximately three-quarters of all products used by human beings came from living plants or animals competing for resources on the Earth’s surface.
As Harvard geologist Kirtley Fletcher Mather observed in 1944: “Today only about 30 percent of the things used in industrialized countries come from things that grow; about 70 percent have their sources in mines and quarries.”
Indeed, refined petroleum products (fuels, lubricants), synthetic products (plastic, fiber, cloth, rubber, sweeteners, vitamins, medicines), metals, sand, clay, silicon, potash, and phosphate have gradually reduced the demand for: wild fauna such as whales (for whale oil, baleen, perfume base), birds (for feathers), elephants, polar bears, alligators, and other wild animals (for ivory, fur, and skin), trees and other plants (for lumber, firewood, charcoal, rubber, pulp, dyes, and green manure), agricultural products (for fats and fibers from livestock and crops, leather, dyes, and pesticides from plants), work animals such as horses, mules and oxen and the large quantities of food they consume and, finally, human labor in various forms (mainly agricultural work).
More:
https://climatechangedispatch.com/banning-plastics-will-make-the-planet-worse-off-heres-why/
