Saving The Planet Will Cost Lives
Opinion: We need to be honest about the cost of 'saving the planet'
Warm Fuzzy Feelings vs Cold Hard Reality
Going Green (working towards an environmentally friendly sustainable future) is a noble goal which everyone should get behind. However, we must remain alert for initiatives that are claiming to be ‘green’ whilst having ulterior motives (profit or power).
The purpose of this article is not to poo-poo those lofty goals as they are well meaning and building a more sustainable future is beneficial to everyone. What we do want to do though is raise awareness of the collateral damage behind some of these grand ideas and the time scales being demanded of us. The damage done is so often brushed under the carpet for convenience and for profit. If you ignore the ‘Eco Noise’ and dive into the data you can see that the state of affairs is a long way from what we are told to believe.
The 2020 Covid Cost
Regardless of how you feel about the response to Covid, the decision was made and many of the world’s countries banded together and opted for lockdown, masks and a variety of testing solutions. These decisions had a clear environmental toll:
Lateral Flow Tests
The National Audit Office (NAO) has found that, since mass testing was rolled out by NHS Test and Trace (NHS T&T) in October, just 96 million of the 691 million Covid-19 tests distributed in England have been registered.
Labour called the findings “damning” and said it was “astounding” that 595 million tests had gone unaccounted for.
That gives us 595,000,000 plastic boxes (each the size of a lighter) sitting in kitchen draws before being tossed in the bins and eventually going to a landfill or the ocean.
It took 15,500 tonnes of Carbon (C02) to produce those 595,000,000 Lateral Flow Tests. That’s before the carbon cost of shipping them around the country
What’s worse is the lack of consideration that went to the physical make up of these devices.
The LFD test itself (swab, cartridge/device) is not recyclable and should be disposed of in your residual (‘black bag’) waste bin. (taken from Scottish government website)
Having “rushed” to make these tests and spending untold billions in tax payer money to do so one would have expected them to be biodegradable to some extent.
Apparently not.
The tax payer will eventually pick up the tab at some point, no doubt with a Green Tax or something to clean this all up.
The above is also just the stats for the UK, the total number globally of Lateral Flow tests ending up in the Sea or Landfill must be astronomical.
Face Masks
“If you walk around any street now you will see disposable face masks being blown around with leaves in the gutter – they are the new cigarette butt – people are chucking them after use,” she said.
“We know that 53m are being sent to landfill each day – but just how many end up elsewhere is the very scary part.”
Charlotte Green, from waste company TradeWaste.co.uk
Even if half of those masks make it into the ocean that’s still 9,500,000,000 a year.
At The Wealth Gap we find ourselves wondering why we banned plastic straws so aggressively… 🤡. We doubt it’s anything to do with punishing the country that made them all.
Why Are We Annoyed?
We understand the need to act quickly in an emergency but this lack of planning and analysis is not unusual from government. It is of course easy to spend other peoples money and make lofty promises.
We don’t want to discourage or squash efforts when extreme actions are required to save lives. However when we start to look at the “waste” and “excess” from piss poor operational planning and add to that large dollops of cronyism masquerading as “measured” action, we tend to get a bit jaded.
It may feel good to buy an energy efficient light bulb but we feel it is pointless in the grand scheme. The emotive and societal value in virtue may be warm and fuzzy and you may feel you are doing your bit but it is the equivalent of trying to empty the Pacific Ocean with a spoon. The “not” free market around the green subject is stifling the value chain from allowing your purchases to have affect because of the incentive models surrounding logistics, profit and low cost manufacturing. More on this below.
The narrative has made us feel good every time we turn our lights off, switch to a smart meter or make an eco-conscious decision. It is all for nothing. We are inevitably being ushered into a new age of environmental taxation which we do not expect will lead to careful and efficient spending of our taxes.
We Are All At Fault
Until the main perpetrators of the largest amounts of Climate and Pollutive output are brought into this action the whole thing is a giant waste of time.
China alone (who is the world’s largest polluter and energy user) is not aligned with the global green agenda. Without its inclusion it would render all efforts somewhat pointless in the west. Yes, every little helps but only if we all doing it together!
We are addicted to cheap goods from China. If we are serious about tackling climate change we need to wean ourselves off the cheap products that we buy from China.
Between A Rock & A Hard Place
Being eco friendly and conscious is great, but believing that going vegan, walking to work or using your compost bins is enough is absurd. Tackling climate change will require serious sacrifices. Sacrifices no one actually wants to make.
Stop Buying Cheap Plastic Rubbish From Abroad & Accept Expensive Locally Produced Goods
If we want to slow or prevent further global warming and pollution then it starts with the money and incentive value flow. If we all stopped buying cheap plastic shit from China then the incentive model to factory mass produce wouldn’t bet there. Prices would go up (yup) for everyone but the focus could be placed on cleaner activities to give the market what it wants.
Opt Out of Fast Fashion
Stop buying cheap clothes that you throw away after a year and buy locally produced high quality gear that will last decades (you know the brands)
Have You Seen a Children’s Toy That Wasn’t Made In China?
We haven’t. You know the answer
If you want to continue buying cheap stuff then this problem will never go away. We cannot be Green and continue to buy cheap mass market products from the existing supply chains. Something has got to give.
As consumers we are totally hypocritical and/or uneducated on the subject. We consistently want more for less. We are happy to buy mass produced, pollution heavy products from the world warehouse (China) but then also decide to pick one item and hypocritically attack it for its non green positioning. You see we just can’t be trusted as a collective to make the right choices. We need a central authority to make the right and the hard choices. Delegating the responsibility for this to a central authority will come with some serious ramifications.
So we have left it to central governments to fix the problem and we all know how efficient and great governments are at delivering on promises without overspending and taking forever to achieve a goal.
Be Prepared To Throw The Chinese People And Others To The Wolves
China is the manufacturing centre of the world. If by an act of god we as a people stopped buying polluting products what would happen to China?
Most Likely China would stop polluting the planet
Their economy would be devastated by the demand dry up
With no money coming in the people would probably starve.
There are no humane answers, only cruel Darwinian ones.
Technology Can Help
Amnesty International has written a heart wrenching article on child miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo which can be read here.
I worked in the mines because my parents couldn’t afford to pay for food and clothes for me. Papa is unemployed, and mama sells charcoal.
Arthur 13, who was a miner from age 9 to 11
Source: Amnesty International
Around 1.7 billion people globally are unbanked (unable to access financial services). Bitcoin and the greater blockchain industry is in the process of addressing this. If the worlds unbanked become richer they will be less inclined to work for minimum pay. This would drive up prices and force the market away from low cost mass produced products as they would be unavailable.
Technology flourishes to fix problems with more efficient solutions. This would be timely as a global dry up of “jobs” would arise from the developing nations lack of incentive to make cheap products. This would force the Western nations into finding technological solutions to these issues because the demand would still be there (incentive). Already we can see the start of this happening in automation, 3d printing, synthetic foods, robot workers and AI.
If we are truly committed to ‘saving the planet’ we should at least be honest with the cost of doing so.
Great Friction usually brings innovation to address it. The industrial revolution couldn’t happen without the collapse of the agrarian society. We at the Wealth Gap see the same happening here and now with the move from the modern age into the Information Age.
Till next time
The Wealth Gap