Recycling was always a lipstick on a pig. Inefficient, subsidized, hypocrisy.
Wanna help the environment? Reduce consumption overall.
Wanna help the environment? Reduce consumption overall.
1. Reduce.
2. Reuse.
3. Recycle.
1. Refuse 2. Reduce 3. Reuse 4. Repurpose 5. Recycle
Arguably Refuse and Repurpose are derivative, but I still like calling them out.
"Refuse" sounds like you're just repeating the point of Reduce (=> Reduce consumption). And "Repurpose" is exactly the same as "Reuse".
I'd like to see far more internalisation of full sourcing, energy, and sink costs, as that's ultimately the most effective way to shift usage patterns, though this seems unlikely.
Make whatever changes in your life you want, "every little bit helps", but remember that individual willpower and grit is taking a cup of water out of an ocean. You don't change the tide that way, you need to recognize the importance of political action to see the situation improve.
For everyone who goes vegetarian instead of attending town halls or petitioning their representatives or staying home from protesting business waste they are missing the forest for the trees on what matters in environmentalism.
Agriculture, manufacturing, and resource extraction all exist to serve consumerism society.
Our personal individual contributions might be just a tiny slice of it, but aggregated individual contributions are 100% of the problem.
Society is us.
I think that getting all these older managers on board with working from home as much as you can may be a colossal savings on all fronts.
Was the temperature ramp-up from 1980-2019 a delayed reaction? Or due to emerging nations getting industrialized?
Graph: http://berkeleyearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/TimeSeri...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transient_climate_response_to_...
Also, if we compare 1980 to today, or even 2010, it's like the stone age re: production and consumption.
Population was just 4.4B -- now it's 7.7, almost double.
Large swaths were in far more dire poverty and much less consumption. Chinese industrial production was not a thing -- now it's the biggest industrial site in the world. The whole of USSR and Eastern Europe were communist (and would be for 10 years still).
And even Americans consumed much much less than today. Consider how little gadgets and stuff the average person had in 1980. Even clothes were much more valued than today's "quick fashion". Malls where just starting to be built everywhere (now the world's a big mall, and the internet can deliver to your door in the next day, so they aren't even needed).
US production here shows more than double too: https://www.macrotrends.net/2583/industrial-production-histo...
tl;dr: the effectiveness of vegetarian diets is dependent on local conditions. Vegetarianism in a globalized world relies on fossil-fuel-based transport or farming techniques.