That campaign - the little recycling logos on our plastics, the upbeat videos about a future where plastic was part of a circular economy of use and recycling - convinced us to buy, wash, and sort plastic.
90% of that plastic was never recycled. It never will be.
3/
NONE of those splashy campaigns - the announcement that all NYC school plastics would be recycled, the recycling in national parks - ever worked. They all lasted long enough to get some upbeat press, and then they quietly shut down.
4/
This week's @NPR/@planetmoney investigation by @LauraSullivaNPR doesn't just talk to the ex-chief lobbyists, now serving as belated Oppenheimers, lamenting the impending destruction of our planet.
5/
It also talks to the current round of executives who have announced a fresh round of plans to recycle plastics - completely disingenuous, insultingly obvious distraction tactics to convince us that their projections of TRIPLING production by 2050 isn't a form of mass murder.
6/
Then Sullivan circles back to those retired executives, the ones who oversaw the first disinformation campaign, and they confirm that this latest round of promises are literally the same tactic, barely updated for a world on fire.
7/
The world is on fire. My sky has been orange all week. Our family's socially distanced meetings with friends in parks or back yards have been cancelled because we cannot breathe outside.
8/
Exxon - and Chevron, and the rest of Big Oil - knows.
In a secret recording released to the @nytimes, oil execs meet to cheerfully discuss how they will burn the world and murder us all but make a buck in the process.
Their plans for climate change don't involve reducing emissions - they're building bunkers and hiring mercenaries to keep us at bay when we come for them. They know what they've done.
Exxon knows.
10/
Exxon knows.
When I searched for the "Exxon Knew" campaign to find a link for this piece, the top of @Google's search results included a blisteringly expensive ad for a disinformation site, paid for by Exxon.
11/
The sky is orange. The oceans are choking. The air is unbreathable. Your body is full of microplastics.
Exxon.
Fucking.
Knows.
eof/
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
If there's one are where tech has shown a consistent aptitude for innovation, it's in accounting tricks that make money-losing companies appear wildly profitable. And AI is the greatest innovator of all (when it comes to accounting gimmicks).
1/
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Since the dotcom era, tech companies have boasted about giving stuff away but "making it up in volume," inventing an ever-sweatier collection of shell-games that let them hide the business's true profit and loss.
3/
In 2014, I read a political science paper that nearly convinced me to quit my lifelong career as an activist: "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens," published in *Perspectives on Politics*:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
The paper's authors are Martin Gilens, a UCLA professor of Public Policy; and Northwestern's Benjamin Page, a professor of Decision Making. Gilens and Page studied a representative sample of 1,779 policy issues.
3/
When a company sells you something for $2 that someone else can buy for $1, they're revaluing the dollars in your pocket at half the rate of the other guy's.
1/
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Economists praise "price discrimination" as "efficient." That's when a company charges different customers different amounts based on inferences about their willingness to pay.
3/
Private equity firms are the demon princes of the hellspace that is the imploding, life-destroying, plutocrat-generating American economy.
1/
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Their favorite scam, the "leveraged buyout" is a mafia bustout dressed up in respectable clothes, and if you mourn a beloved, failed business, chances are that an LBO was the murder weapon, and PE was the killer:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
> One actual therapist is just having ten chat GPT windows open where they just like have five seconds to interrupt the chatGPT. They have to scan them all and see if it says something really inappropriate. That's your job, to stop it.
3/
My latest *Locus Magazine* column is "Strange Bedfellows and Long Knives," about the secret engine of sweeping political upheavals (like Trumpism) and their inherent fragility:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Stories about major change usually focus on a *group*, but groups rarely achieve big, ambitious goals. Think about all the goal-oriented groups in your orbit, with missions like alleviating hunger, or beautifying your neighborhood, or changing the health-care system.
3/