California bleeds money, so it needs jackpot justice to line the bottomless pit into which it tosses taxpayer dollars. Exxon-Mobile is a big target that should be hard to miss, but the Left Coast’s environmental action has consistently failed to deliver.
Exxon-Mobile has better lawyers and arguments but addiction doesn’t countenance common sense so Cali has decided to sue them over recycling. It is something Democrats understand. Creating dependency exacerbates a problem you must tax people (more) to fix. “It turns out that Exxon holds California’s largest contract to recycle plastic. Cradle to grave! They make the oil that makes the plastic, then they get paid again to remove the plastic when we’re done with it, and the plastic cycle of life starts all over again.”
If you wonder how it got to be that way, ask California. In 2019, they increased the minimum wage and drove the state’s most extensive recycling business out of business. But we’re not here to talk about that stupidity; we are on about this one.
Related: An Inconvenient Truth About Recycling
If you are not wearing green eyeshadow or green-tinted sunglasses, you already know recycling is bad for the environment. It is safer and better to bury the stuff than reprocess it. Even Pys.org has concluded that recycling might be bad for us.
However, many states, like California, have elevated recycling to a pilgrimage to environmental Mecca. That demand attracts businesses capable of navigating the state’s vast regulatory maze and attendant costs to eke out some profit. Creating altars to this false god doesn’t hurt either unless your patron state is a bitchy little gold digger with an addiction to other people’s shit.
Exxon-Mobile had the means and, thanks to other totalitarian itches that California Democrats have to scratch, found itself with something of a monopoly, and California is suing them for what amounts to fraud.
[Paywalled] California’s attorney general filed a lawsuit Monday against Exxon Mobil, accusing the oil giant of misleading consumers about the recyclability of plastic products and polluting the state.
The sad tale goes something like this: We made everyone recycle, and you said you’d recycle that plastic, but you didn’t—at least not enough. Give us money. But California has to use what happens to be the default statistics as support for its case, effectively admitting the reality everyone everywhere is faced with and has been for years.
Recycling plastic was a big lie thirty years ago, not just in California. Globally, over 90% of what goes into the recycling bin gets burned or buried. The little triangle of arrows aside, most of it can’t be recycled. What can, about 5-8 percent, is reprocessed into pellets that can be repurposed as post-consumer material (but the processing has a much bigger carbon footprint than burning it or burying it if that matters).
Related: Replacing Single-Use Plastic with Single-Use Paper Is Worse for The Planet™
China takes a lot of the world’s plastic and burns or dumps most of it, which is how that “plastic in the ocean narrative” bobbed into view. You could end this problem by ending plastic recycling—but that’s blasphemy.
California is as likely to get over its addiction to other people’s money as your rank-and-file domestic green is to give up recycling. The truth is unpleasant and unlikely to take hold without a bad case of the sweats and at least a little bit of screaming in the nearest detox room.
The media could ease the transition if they could find time to tell the truth about it, but they won’t do that with gusto or without permission, and not in California, at least while the bitchy little gold-diggers think they have a shot at a payday. But part of that payday requires the admission that most plastic is not recyclable nor recycled, and Exxon Mobile is just operating in the real world, not the one painted by the voices in California’s head.
One closing note: I believe all of the replacements for plastic have a significantly higher carbon footprint, so if recycling isn’t a solution, what is?
