Saving the Planet Without the Bullsh*t E-Book

Assaad Razzouk

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 388

Beschreibung

'Fast paced and energetic' Financial Times 'Punchy, provocative and wonderfully readable' - David Shukman 'Eye-popping and essential' - Rowan Hooper 'A must-read' - Peter Stott Have you heard that you should plant trees to save the planet? Or buy carbon offsets when you fly? Or recycle plastic? Go vegan? Or not have children? What if all these actions were a distraction, no matter how well-intentioned? In this provocative manifesto, Assaad Razzouk shows that for too long our ideas about what's best for the environment have been unfocused and distracted, trying to go in too many directions and concentrating on individual behaviour. While some of these things can be useful, they are dwarfed by one big thing that simply has to happen very soon if we're to avoid major environmental breakdown: curtailing the activities of the fossil fuel industry. Full of counter-intuitive statistics and positive suggestions for individual and collective action, this ingenious book will change how you view the climate crisis.

Leseprobe

Assaad Razzouk is a Lebanese-British clean-energy entrepreneur, author, podcaster and commentator. He co-founded and runs a clean-energy company, headquartered in Singapore, financing, building and operating renewable energy projects in Asia. He also runs a not-for-profit Singapore start-up, digitizing and democratizing renewable energy. With his hands-on experience in renewable energy, combined with his other roles, Assaad is a high-profile thought leader on climate change, clean energy and the UN climate talks, with several hundred thousand followers on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and occasional widely read newspaper columns.

First published in hardback and trade paperback in Great Britain in 2022 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Assaad Razzouk, 2022

The moral right of Assaad Razzouk to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 83895 462 8

Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 83895 463 5

E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 464 2

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

Non, ça ne me suffit pas

Contents

Introduction

  1 Plastic Is Your New Diet

  2 Who Put Palm Oil in My Toothpaste?

  3 The Fashion Show at the End of the World

  4 Your Cat Doesn’t Need to Eat Fish

  5 Your Fresh Air Is Asphyxiating You

  6 We Don’t Have Time to Overthrow Capitalism

  7 Hydrogen Makes Up 70 Per Cent of the Universe; I Didn’t Know That Either

  8 Nuclear Power Is So Over

  9 Stinky Gas

10 Never Buy Carbon Offsets for Anything, Especially Your Car Gasoline

11 Please Don’t Plant Trees

12 Have as Many Babies as You Like

13 Ride a Bicycle, Save the World

14 Fly Without Guilt

15 A Luxury Cruise Liner Is a Stinking Floating Dumpster

16 The Nasty Ninety

17 The Social Media Axis of Evil

18 Dial Down That Air Conditioning, But Not Too Much

19 Going Vegan to Go Green? Don’t Bother

20 Drive Electric Shamelessly – the Green Energy Revolution Is Here

21 Green Bonds Do More Harm Than Good

22 Tinker, Lawyer, Banker, Fry

23 The ESG Con

24 Don’t Worry (At All) About Bitcoin’s Energy Use

25 Love Thy Insect

26 The Royal Baby Versus Biodiversity

27 Sue the Bastards

28 It’s Raining Renewable Energy

Epilogue

Sources

Index

Introduction

It was the blackened teeth and poisoned skin of coal miners in China’s coal capital, the city of Taiyuan, that gave me my first brush with sustainability. I had never seen anything like it before. The sight of those embarrassed smiles (instinctively covered with one hand) and awful complexions stopped me in my tracks and forced me to pause, think and question everything that I had until that point believed was important.

I first landed in Taiyuan in the spring of 2006. Flights there were unreliable and often cancelled. During the winter, chimney smoke enveloped the city. In the warmer seasons, the population was spared the smoke but it still had to contend with other scourges: pollution caused by coal-dependent industries, sand and dust from the surrounding countryside, slow-moving traffic and endless construction works as the city’s unrelenting tentacles spread wider and wider. The air tasted gritty and the mountains on three sides helped trap air that looked yellow and felt like it was asphyxiating all those breathing it.

The coal mine and associated buildings lay to the east of the city. As I approached, the roads crackled, the heavy traffic became increasingly demonic and the air thicker. A sulphureous odour permeated the dusty atmosphere, generated by the poor-quality coal burned and breathed by the miners. The route to the mine itself was tortuous and hazardous. A narrow dirt track rose steeply up the side of a rubble-strewn valley and into the scrub-covered mountains. The buildings were dilapidated, and pavements were covered in dirt and debris thrown up by passing heavy trucks that also gouged ruts in the road. Groups of coal miners occasionally appeared as dark silhouettes in the dusty distance, as if rising from the land where their makeshift homes were buried.

I’d spent my formative school years in Lebanon, in the midst of a civil war where neither safety nor school schedules, roads, electricity or clean water were a given. After managing to get into a US university, I had no choice but to excel academically to land a job and therefore a work permit: the alternative was to return to a bitterly divided and burning Beirut. After university, it was all about competition and survival, first in the United States, then the United Kingdom and finally Singapore. I had little time to be aware of the environmental issues around me.

I was in China in 2006 on a business trip. At the time, I was trying to build a company that reduced quantifiable amounts of pollution from certain industries. We would then obtain proof that pollution had been reduced, in the form of certificates that we would sell into a market created especially for this purpose under a United Nations agreement called the Kyoto Protocol, a gallant effort focused on achieving net reductions in worldwide pollution. We also had to prove that we wouldn’t have intervened to invest the necessary money and technology to decrease the pollution if it weren’t for the Kyoto Protocol. The goal was to drive a sustained reduction in emissions from greenhouse gases everywhere.

Pollution is agnostic when it comes to its global impact. Climate change in particular is caused by emissions that are man-made: greenhouse gases, and pollution generated when we burn oil, gas or coal or anything made with them (like plastics). It doesn’t matter where that pollution is generated; it all ends up in the same place: our planet’s atmosphere.

In Taiyuan, we saw an opportunity to stop methane, a potent greenhouse gas around 85 times worse for the environment than carbon dioxide over 20 years, from leaking from Chinese coal mines in vast quantities. Our engineers helped build drainage pipes that captured the methane, prevented it from escaping into the atmosphere and redirected it instead to generate electricity.

However, what started as an abstract commercial opportunity became very real at the sight of the coal miners in Taiyuan, who had been visibly and permanently scarred by one of the unhealthiest activities in the world. It didn’t take long to figure out that irrespective of how many vegetables they might eat, their health wasn’t going to recover from mining and burning industrial quantities of hydrocarbons.

Over the next few years, I developed my business focusing on greenhouse gas mitigation in multiple countries, including the United States, China, India and South East Asia; then a business deploying renewable energy (solar and wind power projects as well as biogas to energy and biomass to energy projects) across Asia. Over the course of 16 years (and counting) in carbon tech, clean tech and developing greenhouse gas mitigation and renewable energy projects from the ground up, I was at the front line of climate change-fuelled destruction. I witnessed the incredible vulnerability of Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, China, India and Pakistan to floods; the discernible warming trends in Asian cities; the plastic pandemic; the destruction of our oceans; the insect apocalypse going on in our midst; and the deforestation of the remaining rainforests in Indonesia.

I was also at the table at multiple United Nations climate meetings, sometimes as a government negotiator and other times as an observer or independent participant, as well as at a vast number of conferences convened by the United Nations, other governments and the private sector.

Every one of these meetings and every visit to vulnerable communities helped develop my awareness of the climate catastrophe in our midst. Over time, I started shouting more stridently from the rooftops about the climate change crisis, using social media, my podcast and occasionally newspaper articles and blogs. Throughout, I also tried to showcase solutions and actions we can all take to make a real impact.

The world has hosted 26 annual climate talks since 1995, at which practically every country has been represented. These talks were convened because human activities (principally burning fossil fuels) have dumped an enormous amount of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere. This has had the effect of warming the planet to levels that increasingly threaten our survival, by shifting the frequency and violence of climate extremes such as droughts and typhoons, as well as causing the ice sheets to melt, the seas to rise and temperatures in some areas to become intolerable to humans.

During each of these annual climate talks, thousands at first, then tens of thousands of representatives from government, industry and civil society have held countless meetings, none of which bent the curve. Greenhouse gases continue to increase inexorably, and as they do, promises of decarbonization recede further and further into the future. What is, however, sometimes less appreciated is that a very slow decarbonization path is a set-up for much more absolute harm than a very fast one. We can think about this the way we think about a mortgage loan: if you reduce the capital of the mortgage quickly (in the case of climate change, the capital would be total greenhouse gas emissions), you would save a lot in interest (i.e., climate effects), and as a result, the overall amount you pay out is greatly reduced. Every fraction of a degree of warming matters. The 2015 Paris Agreement agreed by 192 countries is aimed at limiting the average increase in global temperatures to well below 2° Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and preferably to 1.5°. The warming implications of 1.5° versus 2° Celsius are very different. For example, if rapid decarbonization limits warming to 1.5°, then coral reefs around the world would be projected to decline by 70 per cent, whereas at a 2° increase, they would decline by more than 99 per cent. In a 1.5° warming scenario, heatwaves will affect 14 per cent of the world’s population every five years, whereas 37 per cent (that’s close to three billion people) would be affected in a 2° world.

Yet we must not just talk about failures, as we seem to do – overwhelmingly – in the climate change space. Yes, we have failed to control emissions or to even bend their upward-sloping curve. Yes, extreme weather and climate disasters are now a fact of daily life for many. But every moment spent dwelling on these setbacks is a moment lost to effecting change. What’s required is a focus on strategies in our daily lives that deliver outcomes.

While informed individual efforts to be eco-friendly are important in galvanizing others, this book argues that they largely miss the mark. I’ll show that individual action, while good and important from a moral standpoint, makes little actual difference and may even be counterproductive in some cases. We are in critical need of major systemic changes: 89 per cent of emissions come from burning oil, gas and coal, and just stopping subsidies for fossil fuels would cut global emissions by a third. Yet cash subsidies for fossil fuel consumption alone amounted to $440 billion globally in 2021. Once we include all assistance to the industry, we paid out $11 million every minute, according to no lesser authority than the International Monetary Fund. All this to burn up our planet faster.

How do we make these systemic changes happen? And what is the most effective role for individuals as we switch to clean energy to fuel global lifestyles?

All over the world, people are confronted with complex daily choices in the name of saving the planet: can I avoid using this plastic bag? Should I fly less? Should I get an electric bike? Am I buying too many clothes? Are electric cars really good news? Should I bother to recycle? Is it ethical to eat my favourite burger or must I go vegetarian?

This book is an attempt to clear a path through all the clutter surrounding our daily efforts to do the right thing, while also trying to care for our loved ones and to survive and thrive.

It is structured to cover large segments of what we all do on a day-to-day basis, including eating and drinking, going about our daily lives, travelling and investing. In each chapter, I try to debunk the myths peddled by many – including lobbyists for oil companies and for the status quo, but also by well-meaning citizens. I seek to replace these with a dose of common sense in order to put together a manifesto of how to live in the midst of a climate catastrophe and how to effect real change. As citizen consumers, we are scraping together mere pennies reducing, reusing and recycling (for example), while oil companies burn hundred-dollar bills.

A recent social media stunt by oil giant Shell illustrates this. In November 2020, the company asked the public via a poll on Twitter: ‘What are you willing to change to help reduce emissions?’ The campaign backfired spectacularly when hundreds of thousands pushed back, some responding with their willingness to hold Shell accountable for obfuscating the truth about their products and their impact on the environment for over 30 years when it secretly knew the entire time that fossil fuel emissions would destroy our habitat.

The fact that Shell, after all that has happened in the last few decades, still has the gall to try and mislead the public shows that the road ahead continues to be paved with the bad intentions of wealthy and destructive corporations. Regulators can barely keep up. In the Netherlands, for example, the Dutch Advertising Code Committee ruled that Shell was misleading automobile drivers in its advertising campaign of 2020 and 2021 that told them that if they paid an extra cent per litre of fuel, they would be driving in a carbon-neutral way (in reality, we don’t know they are until every tree planted to offset their emissions – if in fact it was planted at all, which isn’t always the case – has survived decades). But this was a single advertising campaign and regulatory action was only possible because nine students filed a legal complaint backed by climate campaigning organizations. Civil society doesn’t have the resources to keep up with the torrent of greenwashing all around us and take action, because Shell is not alone. Since the 2015 Paris Agreement, and in spite of numerous announcements about how they were committed to fighting climate change, Exxon, Shell, Chevron, BP and TotalEnergies collectively spent $200 million a year on lobbying to expand fossil fuel operations, and more on advertising.

Enough is enough. It’s time to change the conversation.

1

Plastic Is Your New Diet

There are scientific papers with titles like ‘The human consumption of microplastics’. Wait, what? Surely we can all agree that plastic isn’t food and that we shouldn’t be eating, drinking or breathing it? Maybe not. Right now, worldwide, we eat, drink and breathe plastic with every meal, every drink and every breath we take. We do so at the rate of about 200,000 plastic particles for every human being on the planet every year.

The word ‘plastic’ is manipulative in the extreme. Plastic’s building blocks, called polymers, are in 99 per cent of cases made from coal, gas and crude oil. It’s a very comfortable word, however, not least because advertising campaigns over decades have extolled its virtues. It definitely beats ‘made from oil’ as a label. Imagine if consumers worldwide looked at fast fashion, for example, and instead of ‘made from polyester’, they saw ‘made of plastic derived from crude oil and produced using harmful chemicals, including carcinogens’? That would dampen sales. It’s a tour de force of branding.

Microplastics are generated when common household items like bags, clothes and cosmetics made partly or wholly from plastic break into tiny particles and enter our environment. These particles then circulate and slowly, inexorably make their way into our rivers, our oceans and our groundwater before coming back to us via our drinking water, our vegetables, our fish, our meat and our air.

Microplastics are found in over 83 per cent of the world’s tap and bottled drinking water. Not surprisingly, they’ve been also confirmed in the placenta, in newborn babies and in children, and in 2022, in our blood and organs.

We have contaminated everything with plastic to the extent that periodically, dead whales wash up ashore with up to 40 kilos of plastic in their bellies. They die of dehydration and starvation after eating plastic fishing nets, plastic rice sacks, grocery bags, banana plantation bags and general-use plastic bags that have been thrown into the ocean.

It’s a sustained carpet-bombing campaign. In the pristine Pyrenees mountains of France and Spain, microplastics land at the rate of 365 particles on every square metre every day. New York? Paris? London? Karachi? Beijing? Delhi? Cairo? They’re coming down at the same rate. We’ve also discovered plastic particles in the rain in the Rocky Mountains, and even in the falling snow in the Arctic. I don’t know about you, but I dislike intensely the thought of eating, drinking and breathing plastic in order to line the pockets of those who make and sell the stuff (or, more accurately, force it down our throats).

The companies that make microplastics are the same ones responsible for the climate change emergency: the oil, gas and petrochemicals companies. They are enjoying a free ride by dumping plastic on us with little thought or control, in collaboration with some of the biggest companies in the world: Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé, Danone, Kraft, Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Mars, Colgate-Palmolive, all brands that make loud claims on their websites about how much they care about nature, sustainability and the environment.

These companies are wild about plastic principally because it’s mispriced. The oil, gas and petrochemicals companies make money from what is otherwise a waste product from their principal activity (extracting and burning oil and gas). They’re not paying for any of the damage caused by plastics, and neither are consumer companies like Coca-Cola or PepsiCo or Nestlé or Unilever, which use plastic bottles and plastic containers with minimal restraint or respect for the environment. As a result, they can all sell their products far cheaper than they should, and make money where they shouldn’t. It really is an extraordinary gig: unleash poisonous pollutants everywhere, completely free of charge, and make lots of money doing it.

If the destructive impact of producing plastic was priced into products, society would not be able to afford it. Most single-use plastic would disappear relatively quickly (after we’d figured out how to transport, distribute and sell products that depend on plastic for their shelf lives), replaced by a myriad of alternatives that would become cost-competitive, such as plastic from recycled polymers. Unfortunately, today it’s cheaper to buy new plastic than to pay someone to manage and sort recyclable plastic, which is a tiny proportion of the massive amount we produce.

We all have a role to play in tackling plastic pollution, but right now, individual consumers are the ones carrying the burden. There’s only so much that citizens can do if companies don’t step up and provide sustainable choices and governments don’t tax or regulate plastic out of the system. We don’t need at least 90 per cent of it – we have substitutes – but here again, individuals can’t get the job done on their own.

Take bioplastics, which could be used for products ranging from food packaging to medical devices. Bioplastics are plant-based plastics made from sugar extracted from corn and sugar cane; grown from algae; or engineered from scratch using bacteria. I am sure most of us would love to replace the plastic products we use with their bioplastic equivalents, but that would work only if local and central governments invested in the infrastructure required to recycle them: most bioplastics don’t break down naturally and require specialized composting facilities.

The data are shocking. In 1973, each person on earth used two kilos of plastic a year. Fast forward to today, and each one of us uses 46 kilos of plastic. That’s 23 times more, mostly for no good reason. We can think about these 46 kilos of plastic in a different way: the amount of plastic produced in one year is roughly the same as the entire weight of all 7.7 billion people on earth. Since we invented the stuff, we’ve produced the equivalent weight of 100 billion people. That’s right. One hundred billion people.

How could we possibly need the one million plastic bottles bought worldwide every single minute? These bottles last 450 years when they make their way into the oceans, which they do all too often these days. Once there, they kill 100,000 marine mammals and turtles each year, because these animals can’t distinguish plastics from food. Scientific studies have documented that so far, 701 marine species have ingested plastic, while 354 species have been seen entangled in it.

Back on dry land, at least 400 different species of animals have either ingested plastics or become entangled in them. The microplastic then makes its way back into our food chain, our drinking water and the air we breathe. So we’re eating plastic. We’re drinking plastic. And now we also know that we’re breathing plastic. But why?

First, it’s because we don’t actually recycle plastic. Plastic manufacturers have convinced the public that plastic pollution is not their problem, because their product can be recycled. Unfortunately, plastic recycling is a sophisticated con, a device used by manufacturers and distributors to make us feel good about what they are selling us – and therefore sell us even more of it. In reality, there is no plastic recycling infrastructure at scale anywhere in the world. We just assume there is because those who make and sell plastic talk about recycling, and because they made sure that this pretend recycling makes us feel virtuous. In fact, most of the plastic we use in our daily lives is either not recyclable or no business bothers recycling it.

We’ve recycled less than 7 per cent of the plastic we’ve ever produced, and at least another 5 per cent has been dumped into the oceans. That’s equivalent to the weight of five billion people. The rest? It’s either burned in the countries of consumption or shipped to developing countries in Asia such as the Philippines or Thailand or one of several African countries, all of which lack recycling infrastructure, most likely to be burned or left in landfill.

Recently, the desperation of the we-just-pretend-to-recycleplastic industry was such that a US industry lobbying group, the innocuously named American Chemistry Council (a front for some of the world’s largest oil, gas and petrochemical companies), was pushing to ensure that an emerging trade deal between the United States and Kenya required Kenya to reverse its strict limits on plastics (Kenya bans single-use plastic) and to continue to import plastic trash from the US. Their ambition was to flood Africa with plastic garbage, using Kenya as the bridge.

Thankfully, pretty much all of the places mentioned above are now trying to stop countries like the US and the UK dumping trash on them, and hopefully Kenya will do so too.

The pretend-recycling brouhaha is in reality only about recycling stuff that allows factories to make money. For example, high-value plastics like fizzy drinks bottles, which come stamped with a number 1 on them if you look closely, are probably recycled. Stuff stamped with a number 2, like milk cartons or shampoo bottles, may be getting recycled, at least some of the time. Everything else, stamped from 3 to 7, is neither sorted nor recycled.

There’s another problem. Consumer goods companies don’t always want to use recycled plastic. That’s because new plastic is a lot cheaper: its manufacturers don’t have to invest in the infrastructure needed to recycle it, nor pay for the climate and pollution and environmental damage they’re causing.

We eat, drink and breathe plastic because it’s a waste product of the oil and gas industry and because of the obscene money that has been made available to petrochemical companies to manufacture a lot more of it, insanely cheaply. Plastic is made from either ethane, derived from natural gas, or naphtha, which is distilled from crude oil. All that stuff goes into multi-billion-dollar petrochemical plants (note that word ‘petro’: these are chemicals derived from petroleum or natural gas), and out comes plastic.

Petrochemical plants are typically owned by mega corporations; for the most part, the same cast of characters responsible for 70 per cent of all global emissions since industrialization began, led by companies like ExxonMobil, Saudi Aramco, Chevron, Shell, ConocoPhillips, and Chinese companies like CNPC and Sinopec. If you think that each of us using 46 kilos of plastic each year is a lot, you’d be right. But the leadership of these companies are trying to multiply that number by 40 per cent over the next five years.

Since 2012, oil, natural gas and chemical companies have poured around $200 billion into 300 petrochemical plants across the United States. There are another 108 petrochemical plants scheduled to come online in Asia and the Middle East by 2023. All these exist to do only one thing: sell us more milk cartons, shampoo bottles, supermarket bags, straws and food packaging.

For a while, this boom was driven by fracking. Particularly popular in the United States, fracking involves pumping an enormous amount of mostly unregulated chemicals into the ground, along with sand and water, in order to provoke gas to gush out. Then we grab it. This activity resulted in the US in an over-abundance of fossil gas, which collapsed prices, giving American petrochemical companies a huge advantage over foreign producers, but only if they could build new plants and expand market share. Which is exactly what they’re doing. Low natural gas prices also made it economical to liquefy that gas and ship it around the world.

To add oil to the fire, these bad actors have easy access to vast amounts of capital. The fracking industry loses billions each year, yet in the last few years, petrochemical companies have had no problem financing $300 billion of new kit. And that’s despite the global push-back against plastic, and even though the banks and capital markets know precisely how incredibly destructive it is.

The formula of the US shale fracking industry is to borrow billions of dollars at low interest rates, lose an enormous amount of money, force oil and gas from marginal fields, and then leave the public stuck with the financial losses and wanton environmental destruction. After all, someone has to pay to clean up all these abandoned oil and gas wells. According to the US government, there are three million of them already. These fracking companies have a cash-flow deficit of $20 billion per year, which means they make $20 billion per year less than their operating costs and capital expenditure. And this has been happening for a long time, with limited exceptions when oil and gas prices spike.

Why does the fracking industry and therefore the petrochemicals industry continue to receive investments from Wall Street despite rarely making any money? Wells Fargo, J. P. Morgan, Citi, Barclays, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs are all in on it. The answer lies in the sheer size of the sums involved. Petrochemicals and fracking are big-numbers businesses, and that’s how the banks make money. Whether the fracking companies are profitable or not doesn’t matter to the bankers. They’re getting rich in the short term, making huge loans to an industry that likely cannot pay them back in the long term. That’s because bankers are incentivized, through their bonus systems, to care over the 12-month period in which the bonus is calculated. If a company they backed goes belly-up three or four years after they’ve lent them the money, they probably won’t even be around to see it.

ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, Saudi Aramco and others are going all in on petrochemicals because they know that demand for oil in the transportation sector is going down, and they’ve promised their shareholders that they’re going to keep demand at the level it’s at today – and even increase it – by flooding the world with more and more plastic. In their forecasts, the International Energy Agency, BP and ExxonMobil expect 2 to 4 per cent annual growth rates for plastic demand, from the stratospheric levels it is at today, which means a doubling of demand in 18–24 years. That’s what the industry is tooling up for.

But they know, and we know, that people around the world want to reduce their hydrocarbon usage, whether it’s fuel for cars and buses, or plastic. Will they succeed?

I don’t think so. Single-use plastic is under attack in over 40 countries, either through surcharges, restrictions or outright bans. What we really need is a universal ban.

Baby steps are under way to agree a proposed international treaty on plastics. In 2022, the United Nations Environment Assembly adopted a resolution calling for a legally binding treaty to combat plastic pollution. This still needs to be drafted and agreed, but with luck, it could be in place later this decade to help end the flow of plastic into nature and hold polluters to account.

Meanwhile, all countries should do what the European Union, Canada, Kenya and the city of Mumbai all mustered the courage to do: ban single-use plastic everywhere.

It’s not that difficult. An unexpected global trailblazer in the area of plastic bans is Rwanda. Despite still recovering from genocide and war, the African country has nonetheless outlawed the import, production, use and sale of plastic bags and packaging since 2008, with exceptions for specific industries such as hospitals and pharmaceuticals. This ban makes eminent sense. Governments everywhere, especially in poorer countries or smaller cities, lack the funds to build resilient sanitation and an effective recycling infrastructure to deal with mountains of plastic trash. Often plastic bags are burned instead, releasing toxic pollutants into the air and contributing to clogging waterways, pipes and drains, sometimes leading to devastating floods.

The contrast between Rwanda and Singapore, one of the richest countries in the world, is stark. I recently purchased cut papaya fruits in Singapore, which came in a plastic bag inside a plastic container that checkout staff subsequently tried to place in another small plastic bag. Surely such a highly organized country could ban single-use plastic overnight?

Other single-use plastic items like straws, coffee cups and cutlery also need to be replaced by biodegradable ones. Alongside simply banning single-use plastic, we also need to tax all other types, to stop them being dumped on us (in the form of fast fashion, for example). We need to price plastic out by pricing in its pollution. Only national governments can do this.

It’s also critically important to ensure that petrochemical companies invest in recycling infrastructure. All plastic producers should be required to provide the equipment required to recycle plastic or dispose of it properly. If that happened, most plastic would become uneconomic because its price would increase. High-end plastic – the stuff we need for medical equipment, for example – would remain, but the pollution from non-recyclable or un-recycled plastic would completely stop: recycling only happens when the plastic itself is recyclable (which most of it is not) or when companies agree to pay for recycled plastic (which is not the case for most plastic products, including fast fashion). Put another way: if you can’t recycle it, you shouldn’t be allowed to produce it.

Recycle plastic if you want, but when you do, bear in mind that if the plastics industry recycled even half as much as the aluminium industry, we would never need any new plastic. Ever. Recycling is completely against the interests of the petrochemical giants, which can only increase revenue and profit by selling more. Entirely new industries are growing that offer consumers an alternative. Support them with your spending. Find these new industries and invest in them. They are the future.

Limiting plastic demand is great, because this would devastate the oil and gas industry’s plans to bury us in garbage and slash demand for oil and natural gas. As a bonus, it would also make a huge dent in greenhouse gas emissions. Despite all the talk about climate, despite climate change conferences going back nearly 30 years, emissions continue to rise and we have still not yet turned the corner, as we must: we have until 2030 at the latest for emissions to start dramatically declining.

Local governments too, inundated with plastic waste, are growing desperate. They are doing what they can, but again they are focused on the pollution, not its causes. In two countries very far apart, Indonesia in South East Asia and Ecuador in Latin America, local governments, threatened by uncontrolled amounts of plastic, introduced innovations to help their poorest inhabitants while trying to do something about the scourge. The cities of Surabaya in Indonesia and Guayaquil in Ecuador, both with around 2.8 million people, introduced schemes to pay your bus fare with plastic bottles.

The queues for buses in Surabaya were a sight to behold. People could ride for an hour on public buses with an unlimited number of stops and could pay to do so with either three large plastic bottles, five medium plastic bottles or ten plastic cups. In Guayaquil, 15 plastic bottles bought you a ticket on the city’s bus transit system. But then what? The cities collected lots of plastic trash, which they can’t do much with. They either burn it, worsening air pollution, or the plastic finds its way to the ocean.

Ultimately, it is dramatically reducing the supply of plastic, not its demand, that will make the biggest difference.

If oil companies paid for the environmental impact of their products, or if petrochemical companies were obliged to invest in recycling infrastructure, plastic would be a great deal more expensive. Governments must step in to accurately price its environmental impact. It’s imperative that we all make our voices heard in order for things to change.

See also:

Chapter 9: Stinky Gas;

Chapter 23: The ESG Con

2

Who Put Palm Oil in My Toothpaste?

There’s a tree called the oil palm tree and it has a magical fruit. If you squeeze the fruit, it produces a very special kind of oil called palm oil, which we’ve used for thousands of years. Originating from West Africa, palm oil was already a staple food 5,000 years ago. It was ascribed such a high value in ancient societies that we find it in casks alongside people buried in tombs at Abydos, a city in pharaonic Egypt, and in the royal cemetery of the pharaohs of the First and Second Dynasties.

Palm oil does an amazing number of things. It makes cookies healthier; it makes soap bubblier; it makes crisps crispier; it makes lipstick smoother; it even keeps ice cream from melting. Palm oil is in an astonishing 50 per cent of the packaged products that we find in a supermarket. It’s in everything from pizza to doughnuts; chocolate to deodorant; shampoo to toothpaste; lipstick to animal feed. It’s even used as biofuel. It’s endowed with amazing advantages.

Palm oil is semi-solid at room temperature, which means it can be used to make spreads and keep them spreadable. It resists oxidation, which gives products a longer shelf life. It’s stable at high temperatures, which means it keeps chicken nuggets crispy and crunchy. It doesn’t have any smell or colour, which means it doesn’t affect the look or taste of food products. It provides the foaming agent in every shampoo, liquid soap or detergent you can think of. It’s truly a magical substance. For these reasons, the reach and footprint of palm oil is amazing. It uses 9 per cent of global cropland devoted to oil production. Every year, 3 billion people in 150 countries consume 8 to 10 kilograms each of the stuff. The best part? Almost no one appears to know how ubiquitous it is in our everyday lives.

Palm oil production at scale arrived in South East Asia in 1917, when the first commercial palm oil plantation was established in Malaysia by Frenchman Henri Fauconnier, a young entrepreneur seeking to build his fortune in the Far East, like many other Europeans at the time. Fauconnier had seen the increased demand for palm oil after the Industrial Revolution, because of its versatility and the ability to use it in multiple products such as soap, candles and industrial lubricants.

Today, two Asian countries supply 85 per cent of the world’s palm oil: Indonesia and Malaysia. Another 42 countries also produce it, albeit in much smaller quantities. Under the hood, however, there are very serious problems with palm oil, its magical properties notwithstanding. First of all, a lot of palm oil companies have been burning rainforests in order to plant oil palm trees. The scale is incredible. While cattle ranches and soybeans drive Amazon deforestation, palm oil plantations win the deforestation prize in Indonesia. Deforestation alone pushed Indonesia into the top tier of global emitters of greenhouse gases powering global warming, alongside the US and China, just because rogue palm oil companies are torching rainforests to replace them with palm oil trees.

Neighbouring countries are also affected and periodically asphyxiated by the haze that pollutes cities like Singapore and Malaysia’s Johor Bahru, where the health impact costs in the tens of billions of dollars. Palm oil companies are also killing wildlife. Half of the Bornean orang-utan population has been wiped out in two decades because the palm oil industry is destroying its habitat. Elephants are also being annihilated, and another 193 species are classified as critically endangered or vulnerable, primarily as a result of palm oil production. Palm oil companies also have a documented track record of exploiting workers, children and local communities.

Despite all these problems, we won’t switch to alternative vegetable oils because palm oil is incredibly efficient. If we stopped using it, we would need 4 to 10 times more land to produce substitutes, and in the process, we would threaten other habitats and species. For example, soybean oil – a substitute vegetable oil and the second most important oil crop in the world after palm – requires six times more land per unit of oil, and its cultivation is linked with harmful biodiversity and deforestation impacts in Argentina and Brazil. In addition, palm oil creates a lot of jobs in Indonesia, Malaysia and elsewhere. Millions of smallholder farmers depend on it, and the wages it generates feed a huge number of people.

For these reasons, boycotting palm oil does not work, even if a typical consumer knew which products to avoid in a boycott. It also wouldn’t necessarily be effective, because 40 per cent of palm oil is consumed in China, India and Indonesia, where Western consumer boycotts make little impact. India has seen the fastest growth in consumption. We can expect that to continue, which means that in all likelihood we’ll need more palm oil, not less.

What we’re doing with palm oil is not remotely sustainable. It’s a scandal, but it doesn’t have to be this way. However, the solution is not in the hands of consumers: effective climate solutions can only come via systemic change, and citizens shouldn’t waste energy on ineffective actions unless these make them feel better, in which case that’s just fine! Practical, implementable and comprehensive solutions are available, and that’s where our efforts need to be focused.

Number one, we need palm oil production to be sustainable. This means that big buyers, not only those in the West, need to purchase the product only from sustainable sources, by tracking where their palm oil comes from and refusing any that is demonstrably linked to deforestation, human rights abuses and wildlife destruction. But that’s hard to police or monitor.

The second solution is much more powerful. Some of the biggest users of palm oil are large multinationals like Colgate-Palmolive (soaps, toothpastes, deodorants and house cleaners, among other products), General Mills Hershey (chocolate), Kellogg’s (cereals), L’Oréal (cosmetics), Mars (chocolate), Mondelez (chocolate), Nestlé (chocolate), PepsiCo (snacks) and Unilever (soups, ice creams, home and personal care products).

Some of these companies are trying to do something in terms of ensuring their palm oil is from sustainable sources, but there’s a lot of pretend-doing going on because of a lack of accountability: directors who sit on their boards are not personally liable for environmental destruction. If the directors were held legally responsible for the environmental harm caused by their supply chains and as a result insurance companies stopped covering environmental destruction in their policies, everything would change overnight. Suddenly palm oil would become sustainable.

Moves are afoot to make this a reality. In the European Union, for example, the executive branch has already tabled a law requiring companies importing soy, beef, palm oil, wood, cocoa, coffee and certain derived products such as leather, chocolate and furniture to conduct mandatory human rights, sustainability, forest and ecosystem risk due diligence to ensure their imports into the region are not linked to deforestation. The proposed law has teeth, imposing penalties of up to 4 per cent of sales on companies found to be non-compliant. In other words, companies will be forced by law to ensure that their products (and how these are procured), don’t capitalize on human rights abuses or environmental destruction on the way to the consumer. When the law is adopted, member states of the European Union will subsequently implement a civil liability regime to give effect to the legislation.

This type of legislation already exists at individual country level in selected jurisdictions such as France and Germany and is making its way through the UK Parliament as well. Because of its nascent nature, it will need to be tested in the courts before its boundaries are established, including its precise impact on directors’ liabilities. This is under way currently in France, for example. Finally, a draft UN Treaty on Business and Human Rights has been mooted since 2014, and while six rounds of discussions and negotiations have already taken place, it is in desperate need of political momentum.

Great strides in fighting deforestation can be accomplished if these efforts were given a strong push by direct citizen action modelled on Extinction Rebellion, the non-violent global environmental movement using civil disobedience actions to force governments to do the right thing on climate. Laws must be enacted everywhere to require companies to clean up their supply chains, by holding them responsible for knowing where they get their palm oil from (as well as other parts and products they use in what they sell consumers) and ensuring their suppliers aren’t violating human rights, labour and environmental standards applicable in the company’s country of incorporation.

For example, the directors of a German company selling products containing palm oil would be liable under German law for establishing that their Indonesian palm oil suppliers were not destroying rainforests to source that palm oil, abusing their workers, employing child labour or displacing indigenous people from their ancestral homes. Such laws would force these companies to conduct effective due diligence on their suppliers worldwide, pretty much instantly solving the problem associated with palm oil, because senior executives running multinationals would no longer be able to boost their companies’ profits and reward themselves with fat salaries while taking shortcuts that cost lives and accelerate deforestation.

Analysis by the Commonwealth Climate Law Initiative, a UK-based non-governmental organization focused on analysing board directors’ legal obligations regarding climate change, shows that company directors and officers in more than 21 countries could be held liable for failure to address climate-related risks. Nongovernmental climate action organizations such as ClientEarth, an environmental law charity, are also taking action. They are trying to enable plaintiffs to begin pursuing directors for breaches of fiduciary duties (the legal obligations on directors to act in the best interest of their stakeholders, including shareholders and society at large) in cases where they are found not to be addressing climate risks, including deforestation risks.

Financiers backing climate-destroying corporations shouldn’t be spared. Bank directors, as well as the trustees of pension funds and directors of investment management companies, should be held liable for harm to biodiversity caused by their funding. Research into the deforestation activities of 200 major banks and institutional investors showed that they had backed companies linked to deforestation to the tune of $279 billion since the adoption of the Paris Agreement in 2015, overwhelmingly without robust due diligence procedures related to human rights, labour and deforestation impacts. Yet these banks and institutional investors (and their directors) suffer no adverse consequences for now, while reaping rich profits from the resulting climate destruction.

Sometimes complex global problems have easy solutions.

See also:

Chapter 22: Tinker, Lawyer, Banker, Fry;

Chapter 27: Sue the Bastards

3

The Fashion Show at the End of the World

Every time you buy a piece of clothing, you should remember that the fashion industry is an environmental horror show. Yet the thought rarely, if ever, crosses people’s minds. That’s because fashion brands – from Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Prada to the more affordable Zara or Gap – are highly adept at manipulating our feelings. They rarely use taglines or slogans. When they advertise, they target your emotions with images and simple phrases. You imagine yourself wearing the $1,500 dress and carrying the $800 bag. You are transported to the fancy hotel, the perfect beach where the beautiful people are photographed.

The industry does a brilliant job positioning itself outside of rational questions over sustainability or environmental impact. It’s with feelings