Environmental Responsibility
A reader sent me this blurb on the left. Sorry for the profanity, but I thought I’d publish it and make this comment.This is cute and funny, but let’s keep it in perspective. No one with any sense is saying that the “older generation” collectively ruined the planet. What we’re saying, and it’s true, is that:
It became clear a few decades ago that the consumption of fossil fuels and the destruction of the rain forests was in the process of causing widespread and long-term environmental damage that would ultimately result in an unprecedented level of suffering to everyone and everything living on Earth.
The moneyed interests behind these activities were the first to learn this, but a) did nothing to stop it, and b) entered into disinformation campaigns to prevent sane and decent people from doing anything about it.
Craig,
Between your conspiracy theories and your readers in inaccuracies, you seem to live on a different planet !
The packaging industry was in full swing in the 1960’s and 70’s, with no recycling worth mentioning. Kellogg’s (and competitors had been distributing give away plastic toys with breakfast cereals, since the early 1950’s.
The sixties were a period of conspicuous consumption across the Western world. The packaging industry reached new levels of complexity with the sophistication of cigarette packaging.
Equally sophisticated was the new method of selling confectionery developed largely during and immediately after WW2, the wrapping became the main point of advertising as labour intensive methods of selling confectionery disappeared.
American cars grew enormously in size, although not in quality, and the suburban air on weekends suffered not only noise pollution but the stench of blue fumes from tens of millions of two-stroke mowers.
Family station wagons belched taxi fumes of lead, carbon monoxide, benzine etc, each Chevy Bel Air SW with a 454 cu in Big-Block V8, created 20 times the pollution of a modern SUV.
The first single use plastic bag was introduced by the Dixie Bag Company of College Park, Georgia, in 1957. By 1965, world wide sales of supermarket plastic bags was over 100 million per month!
One of the defining movies of the 1960’s was the 1967 film, the Graduate.
Released in 1967, the Graduate is based on the 1962 novel by novel of the same name by Charles Webb.
One of the most famous lines in the movie is when the young central character of the movie, 21-year-old Benjamin Braddock, is given the career advice to seek his future in the “plastics industry”.
As we get older our memories tend to become more unreliable. We romanticize and look for blame for things which just evolved.
Thus advocates like Craig seek to “blame’ the oil industry for a conspiracy theory about climate change. That’s okay, but when vast amounts of public money and huge resources tie up the legal in futile pointless and hypocritical ideological lawsuits, it becomes harmful to the public good.