Replacement of petroleum based products with plant-based materials (2025)(onlinelibrary.wiley.com) |
Replacement of petroleum based products with plant-based materials (2025)(onlinelibrary.wiley.com) |
The amount of energy and material wastage in developed countries is enormous and abominable. Large screens being on 24x7 without anyone watching, cities explicitly designed for forcing the use of vehicle, consumer life-style requiring huge supply chains, powerful cars carrying just one person, ... and so on.
Business drivers will continue to drive the greed of people and nations and act against any measures to fix the problem. A business knows nothing about climate or human good.
It's far from an axiomatic truth, but it's a good enough approximation to point out that "Business drivers will continue to drive the greed of people" is an absurd bogeyman here. If it wasn't, everyone would be living in shoebox apartments, would never travel outside their neighborhood in their mega city, and our diets would consist of the least possible energy intensive foods possible- probably a soylent style powder that is shelf stable and doesn't require a great deal of refrigeration or preserving.
We don't live like that because people don't really see how taking a 5 minute car ride round trip to the grocery store instead of a 40 minute bus ride round trip is worse for the environment, and we keep living in our individual houses because we don't like apartments, and so on and so forth. Properly insulating those buildings requires polymers for things like weather sheathing, plus insulation for electrical cabling, and so forth. All of these little inefficiencies and uses for polymers add up to the simple truth: we're not going to hit CO2 reduction goals on the basis of individual action, and we're not going to stop using plastics.
That buys into propaganda from businesses who don't want those responsibilities. ESG (and DEI) were widely embraced by businesses; they groups of humans and humans generally have empahy and care.