Van Jones lays out a case against plastic pollution from the perspective of social justice. Because plastic trash, he shows us, hits poor people and poor countries “first and worst,” with consequences we all share no matter where we live and what we earn. At TEDxGPGP, he offers a few powerful ideas to help us reclaim our throwaway planet.
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While I question some of the information in the presentation, my environmentalism tends toward the anthropic, and much of it strikes a chord with me.
Seems like a nice guy but you shake his head you’ll hear the rattle.
Moving forward…
Former White House environmental adviser and… Truther???
Ok, whatever…
“Do you know what China does with the plastic???…. They burn it!”
Wha?
Lessee…. China pays twice the going domestic rate to ship recyclable plastic back to China so they can…. burn it?
And (omg|gasp) let the cancer out.
Obviously this is bad, right? Right!… So what we need to do is Bio-Mimic. It’s a new thing…. Like a clamshell… You know… Hard. But it’s not just plastic, but people too. Dr King. Do you know that twenty five percent of the worlds prison population is locked up right here in America? Right! It’s a whole disposable ecosystem that embraces each other and feeds on poor people. See… poor people don’t have choices like rich people. Poor people just get cancer plastic and that adds to global warming. Now we in California feel good about our blue bins but do you know our air quality is now worse than it was when it was bad? It is… and do you know why? Bad air coming from China. Fact: You can’t trash the planet if you don’t have poor people. Now people will come up to you and ask to hug the tree or hug the child… pick…hug the tree… or hug the child… pick. But you have two arms. You can hug them both! Thank You.
[Audience: Yeah!]
The UK’s new rubbish dump: China
Former White House environmental adviser and… Truther???
No. Jones claims that he never signed onto the Truther list on which his name appears, and so do many of the other alleged signatories, both liberal and conservative. The only people who say Jones actually believes the list are the self-declared Truthers who produced it and who maintain it with his name attached. Catch-22. It’s not like we haven’t seen kooks fraudulently populate their lists before–remember the Oregon Petition?
Hmm. One of the scienceblogs here posted a video of a Japanese guy demonstrating his machine that reduces plastic back into oil products (and uses the heat in the process to run a water purifier). It takes up about a small table’s worth of space and he’s taking his travel model to impoverished countries because they are the ones who need it most. That plastic is going to be someone’s kerosene stove/lantern fuel, petroleum for their transportation, deisel for another machine.
Our folly is in calling anything waste, really. The future is in finding ways to maximize our gain from every resource.