>Moral self-licensing. I think a lot of the Green movement has the trappings of a religion, with shame and guilt used as motivators, and expensive rituals like trash sorting used to evidence your membership of the group.
Guilting individuals for not recycling was a corporate PR response to getting heat for the byproducts of their businesses littering the streets. This started back when plastic packaging was first introduced (~60s, I think).
Just like guilting individuals for jaywalking was a corporate response to getting heat for too many automobile deaths in the early days of the car. This happened around the 30s I think.
The fact that the most obviously cynical and powerful groups in the world can spread deliberately self serving propaganda and then successfully blame their own disingenuousness on the largely selfless groups who mostly just want to create a better world for everybody is a portent of a very, very dark future.
Thank you for stating what should be obvious: most of the psuedo-green beliefs are the result of direct misinformation from the producers of human-harming pollution. It should make people more rabid to tear them apart, not less.
It can be flipped around a third time. Eco-campaigners that create hate campaigns against corporations doing useful work, without even the faintest idea of a proposal for what they want those corps to do differently, will inevitably produce nonsensical virtue signalling PR responses. What else are they going to do? As the article discusses, plastic recycling is hard.
What do you mean no solution offered? Tax non-recyclables at the source and tax them enough to dispose of those materials effectively and safely. And the markets will respond by switching to truly recyclable alternatives or else pass the cost on to consumers willing to pay more for a non-recyclables option.
That won't solve any environmental problems, as in most cases there are no plausible recyclable substitutes. Or are you proposing we make iPhones out of wood?
All that'd do is act as a general consumption tax, and we already have those.
In fact there are no viable solutions, assuming rolling civilisation back to the stone age isn't considered viable. That's why eco-extremists never get specific about what they want corporations or governments to do, and in the rare case where someone is actually serious enough to consider that problem they end up leaving the environment movement: see the long history of ex-Greenpeace or now ex-Extinction Rebellion leaders leaving the movements and coming out in favour of nuclear power.
At least shaming people for littering mostly worked. Maybe it was misdirected due to corporate interests, but there is definitely a lot less trash on the ground now...
Depends on where you are. I sometimes wish for more draconion enforcement, like in Singapore for instance. Or something more funny, squads of litter spotters, following the litterers back home, kicking down the door, and dumping the litter there.
Nope. In parts it depends on the weather, if for instance there were loads of people/families in a park, or on the beach/riverfront, or some larger sports/show/music event. But even without that, it seems to me there is more littering in general, compared to a timeframe of say 2004 to 2012.
Guilting individuals for not recycling was a corporate PR response to getting heat for the byproducts of their businesses littering the streets. This started back when plastic packaging was first introduced (~60s, I think).
Just like guilting individuals for jaywalking was a corporate response to getting heat for too many automobile deaths in the early days of the car. This happened around the 30s I think.
The fact that the most obviously cynical and powerful groups in the world can spread deliberately self serving propaganda and then successfully blame their own disingenuousness on the largely selfless groups who mostly just want to create a better world for everybody is a portent of a very, very dark future.