Recycling: another idea that isn’t going quite as planned
Recycling depended on China, it turns out, and China has stopped doing its bit. So now a lot of towns are burying their trash again:
Should that empty soda bottle go in the recycling bin or the trash can? Increasingly, it doesn’t really matter.
A large portion of America’s plastic and paper waste used to go from our recycling bins to China, where it was refashioned into everything from shoes to bags to new plastic products. But since the end of 2017, China has restricted how much foreign trash—er, recycling—it buys, including cutting off purchases of waste paper products, like all the junk mail that goes directly from your mailbox to the recycling bin.
As a result, The Atlantic reported Tuesday, some American cities and towns are sending all those recyclables directly to the landfill…
Some places are stockpiling their recyclables in the hopes that things will turn around—in other words, in the hopes that China will start buying more American refuse again—but the sudden shift in the market has less to do with China than it does with the American fascination with recycling. Even as municipal recycling programs became almost ubiquitous in America over the past few decades, the underlying infrastructure remained economically and environmentally flawed.
“Recycling has been relentlessly promoted as a goal in and of itself: an unalloyed public good and private virtue that is indoctrinated in students from kindergarten through college. As a result, otherwise well-informed and educated people have no idea of the relative costs and benefits,” wrote John Tierney in a must-read 2015 op-ed for The New York Times that predicted many of the problems facing the municipalities highlighted in The Atlantic’s story—including the slumping demand for recycled goods brought on by lower oil prices and cheaper manufacturing processes.
Please read the whole thing.
Personally, I hate creating so much garbage. For example, packaging (as compared to during my youth)—especially plastic packaging such as those impossible-to-open hard see-through thingees that seem to surround nearly every small gadget one buys these days—has gotten way out of hand. I receive an amazing amount of unsolicited junk mail and it doesn’t seem to be stoppable; that stuff just goes directly into recycling and isn’t even opened. What a waste, and I don’t remember anything even remotely like it even as recently as ten years ago.
I have figured out a way around one problem, though: plastic soda bottles. I drink a lot of club soda, and I use a Sodastream. Great product! It not only does away with the need to recycle bottles, but it has lightened my load on the way home from the grocery store considerably. I’m pretty sure it’s cheaper, too, so it’s win/win/win.
Not to mention the fact that Sodastream is an Israeli company (shhhh—don’t tell Omar).
The magicians/comedians Penn And Teller had a Showtime show years ago called ‘Bullshit’ where they called BS on various topics and recycling was one of them where they raised many of these points.
Had to be 10-15 years ago. This has been a known scam for ages.
Modern landfills aren’t wasted land anyway. My town has a park which was the local landfill for decades. It meant a scrubby bit of gully was flattened out and sports grounds could be placed on top.
Neo: Thanks way much for the Sodastream mention and link. I will probably try it — although, one question: Does it really produce Club Soda, or does it actually give seltzer? I dislike the former a bunch, but seltzer is a different beast entirely and has become the only “pop” I drink (except for “soft” ginger beer).
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Recycling. First, I too detest the “modern” plastic bubble and clamshell packages that you need a blowtorch to get into. I assume that manufacturers use them to cut down on shoplifting…but they are horrible.
Actually, we older folk at least have always recycled as a matter of course. You don’t throw it out until you’ve worn it out or used it up. As for plastic grocery bags, first we were told we were ruining the environment (Save the Trees!) by using paper bags and henceforth only plastic was acceptable. Then what, 10 years or so ago? we were told That’s All Wrong, you must quit using plastic bags and use only paper! In fact, doesn’t everybody automatically recycle plastic grocery bags (and also smaller ones)? You use them to line the wastebaskets! (And also, if you are so déclassé, to lug your clothes for short traveling trips to visit relatives or stay in motels where you don’t have to worry about “face.”) And the heavier bags are great for bookbags to use when going to and from the library, as well as for travelling.
Empty cardboard or plastic containers that originally housed, among other things, drink mixes — such as hot chocolate mix, and also coffee-cans — have innumerable uses. Empty soda-pop bottles are good for carrying water. And why oh why have the companies quit making proper tin cans with both ends removable and gone to those useless molded-metal bottoms? One always used tuna cans as forms for making English muffins, and slid the cylinder of cranberry relish, jelly type, right out of the can into a lovely whole piece.
I didn’t realize so much of the Recycled trash was being sold to other countries. For a long time there’ve been those who swear that at the recycling station, all they do is dump the stuff “to be recycled” in with the other garbage and send it all to the landfill.
But if in fact there’s no longer anything useful that can be done with, for instance, hard plastics that can’t be re-used (the cute little package your mouse or your Staley knife comes in) then maybe the mfrs. will quit using them. ‘Twould make me happy.
Paper, of course, will biodegrade in the landfill. And a lot of plastics (especially those holed plastic grocery bags) break down quickly if just left outside in the weather, and I assume this is true in the landfill as well.
Well… Everything Has a Downside™. And there’s never jam today. I don’t like the idea of producing all this trash either…. There must be some use for it….
The most humorous recycling trend to me is the plastic/paper bag saga.
First we were told paper bags were killing too many trees (not true of course) so we had to have plastic bags then all of sudden plastic bags were evil and have been banned in many places like my city and now if you want a paper bag you have to pay five cents. We use plastic bags for other things so now we venture to nearby cities for shopping and load up on plastic bags by going to self checkout and double bagging. What a joke.
Why did retailers and manufacturers switch to paper bags? Cost. Plastic bags cost less to manufacture, ship, stock, and thus add less to the consumer’s cost.
Paper and plastic bags do not degrade in a landfill that is properly constructed and operated. Don’t worry though, the red-greenies will sell the public some other lies and solutions for our own good or the good of the planet.
om, I had no idea! Pursuant to your comment, I just consulted the cyberstacks, and there are a lot of results confirming what you say, or coming close to confirming it.
Thank you.
It seems that the landfills are designed so as not to create methane.
So now what? Percentage-wise, not that much of the population is in a position to do serious composting, even though that doesn’t help with a lot of stuff.
My town has a park which was the local landfill for decades. It meant a scrubby bit of gully was flattened out and sports grounds could be placed on top.
There are a number of golf courses built on them.Chicago has one next to Lake Calumet and Big Canyon Country Club ($100k last time I checked) in Newport Beach CA is the former town dump.
My husband has been onto this recycling scam for years. At this point we put only corrugated cardboard boxes and glass into the recycling bin. As we don’t drink soda at all, plastic consists of soap and detergent bottles, not too bulky.
One thing that really bothers me is styrofoam egg containers. I buy eggs in cardboard.
The high cost, low risk to recycle may be an application best processed by gray energy technologies (i.e. renewable drivers; environmentally disruptive converters, intermittent energy producers).
I didn’t get my news from Penn & Teller about the recycling scam, but IIRC from Reader’s Digest aeons ago, and we don’t bother, since our garbage company in Denver Metro charges us extra to pick up recycling tubs (or did at one time).
(The People’s Republic of Boulder mandates at least 4 separate containers, at last count, and woe betide anyone who mixes up their trash!)
In re paper bags: I read some article during the “transition” that claimed paper bags were a net minus environmentally,as opposed to plastic (and yes, mine get “repurposed” at least once if not more unless they were too dirty to keep), because of the way they were made, something to do with chemical treatments of the wood pulp.
On the re-usable plastic bags that were in vogue for awhile: they had to be cleaned properly after bagging groceries or you passed on germs from previous trips (meats were a real offender, but even veggies were a problem). I do buy a lot of them to use for library and vacation and general lugging things around.
I also buy them to use as gift bags; sometimes they are even cheaper than the glitzy paper ones, and especially if they are seasonal and go to mark-down.
(My big “score” was at the end of season last year: got a hundred of the Broncos bags for 30 cents each, and use them like, ahem, plastic bags.)
However, here is a company that does useful repurposing (not recycling) in a BIG way; I like to read their promotional emails just to see what wild thing they are selling now.
https://mailchi.mp/repurposedmaterialsinc/striping-for-dirt-parking-lot-super-bowl-in-minneapolis-more-76473?e=cc5fd2b72f
Read ALL the way down so you don’t miss the link to this post; it’s a hoot an’ a holler.
Redneck Engineering: “Here is a veritable encyclopedia of ‘repurposing’…” –
Julie – this is for your question above, but the writer doesn’t see much difference in seltzer and club soda; I guess it depends on your taste buds. I have had people tell me our tap water is no good, when it tastes fine to me.
https://vinepair.com/articles/difference-club-soda-vs-seltzer-sparkling-tonic/
I have been cutting back on soda pop because of the sugar, but can’t take straight carbonated water or even the fancy mineral waters, plain or flavored, so I brew up some herbal tea double-strength (usually hibiscus, sometimes a citrus type), keep it chilled in a bottle or pitcher, and mix it with the fizzy stuff when I want a glass.
During the winter, most of our paper and cardboard waste gets burned in the fireplace.
Yes, the entire recycling “enlightenment” was a scam all along. There were some big winners, and the politicians all made political hay with it.
Of course, the loser was the public at large.
But, what the hell… “If God had not meant for them to sheared, he would not have made them sheep.”
1. Plastic food packaging is a bargain that significantly reduces spoilage. Plastic packaging saves resources compared to glass and metal. Such as those aluminum/plastic envelopes.
2. Plastic is “organic” – made of carbon. A new generation of power plants liquifies and burns plastic efficiently. The result is carbon that enriches soil or fisheries. So after this decades-long progressive scam we are back to burning our trash.
Several years ago there was a burst of interest in thermal depolymerization. It appeared that it could handle recycling of plastic and organic waste and convert it into usable outputs economically. The implementation that came to my attention was in Carthage Missouri where it was using the waste from a large turkey processing plant. It appeared to run into a lot of political opposition that seemed unusual and the complaints against it seemed contrived and untrue. It didn’t succeed as IIRC. I am not a conspiracy oriented person, but it seemed that the corn ethanol boom and its enablers were trying to kill the project and the whole idea.
FWIW I benefited amazingly from the corn ethanol boom. My share of my Illinois family farm estate, which was worth around $300k pre ethanol, has allowed me to buy well over a million dollars of rental property in the Houston area where I am retired, by selling the land to ethanol farmers. It allowed me to return to the land with some ag land south of Houston where I grow things and commune with my cows after retiring from a life in electronics and software development.
The corn ethanol farming operations take down the fences, fill the ditches, and create fields where the huge equipment can run for miles without stopping and turning around. They can plant and harvest in hours what took days and weeks in the 1950’s and 1960’s world I grew up and helped farm in. There is now a large ethanol plant on the outskirts of the town where I attended school.
I think the corn ethanol thing is a probably environmentally untenable, but it is very financially successful . Some day the ethanol mandate will probably go away, but the transformation of farming will last and provide ongoing benefits in agricultural production.
It is probably cheaper to just bury waste, but it offends my belief that we should not foul our nests. If thermal depolymerization can turn most of the waste back into usable products I would like to give it another chance. I am not a chemist and never studied the process. I could be wrong, but it appeared to be a technology with a lot of promise. Maybe instead of seeing ethanol plants outside towns in the corn belt we could see thermal depolymerization plants outside most cities instead of dumps.
Bacteria to the future?
http://theconversation.com/how-plastic-eating-bacteria-actually-work-a-chemist-explains-95233
https://www.popsci.com/bacteria-enzyme-plastic-waste
Just one more indication that size doesn’t really matter (though one hopes that the critters CAN be herded and that they’ll STOP at plastic…).
The silly “Gaia”-ish faux religion, doesn’t need the science of factual costs and actual benefits.
“Feeling good” is reason enough to pray to the recycling God — and condemn as anti-enviro sinners who fails to recycle!
Still, I do wish there were better economic ways to re-use and reduce waste. My IKEA bag(s) are used for shopping, but we now buy plastic garbage bags as well as plastic plastic garbage bags.
About 10 years back, after having my first whiskey and soda [not whiskey and water] ever, I got the idea I’d check the Internet and see if those old seltzer bottles the Three Stooges used to blast each other with were available any more. They were.
The little scuba shaped bottles used to infuse the tap water with CO2, run about 45 cents each. And used with Bourbon or rye [don’t like Islay style Scotch] they make a terrific drink which has a kind of refreshing quality; which I guess “hi-balls” were originally meant to have. (But that’s a different story and concerns why we drink in the first place, and fits in with the theme that asserts that Martini glasses have grown beyond all reason and proportion the last couple of decades)
For good or ill, there is a supermarket chain called “Krogers” in the Midwest, and it sells 2 liter bottles of their own club soda for a buck, and the same sized seltzer for a little less. So for those who were used to getting a one liter bottle of club soda for about $2.49, it looks insanely cheap. Does it keep once opened? Not really. But …
The only difference I can see between club soda and seltzer, having made it a point to read the labels carefully, is that club soda has a small amount of sodium in it in order to mimic the taste of the old 1930’s and 40’s tablet seltzer charges. It is said that many people thought the minute amount of salt added something to the drink. I agree.
The ancient Romans transported olive oil in mass quantities using amphorae. But since this sort of pottery reacted poorly with olive oil (unlike grain or wine), those vessels could not be used indefinitely. So the Romans ended up creating a huge artificial mound close to their city with nothing but broken-up amphorae, some 53 million such containers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monte_Testaccio
Julie near Chicago — There is a country club/gated community development in L.A (right north of the Getty Museum) which is built on a landfill and produces so much methane they don’t have to connect to the gas company.
DNW — A Sodastream makes seltzer, not club soda: just H20 and CO2. They sell flavored drink additives — cola, lemon, etc., but I’ve never seen an additive of just the minerals that make club soda not seltzer. Even at $1 for a two-liter bottle of seltzer (out here it was $1.89 a two-liter when I switched to Sodastream seven years ago), Sodastream is much cheaper. A refilled cartridge — you turn in your empty and get a new one — costs around 15 bucks and makes 30-40 liters of seltzer.
One other wrinkle — every area that has mandated a shift away from single-use grocery bags has had a subsequent rise in food poisoning hospitalizations. Nothing like having a dripping meat container contaminate your bag and re-using the bag for fruit or salad to really enhance your day……
So….. We were told to save the planet by putting our plastic in special containers where it was collected by smoke belching trucks, put onto diesel burning trains to carry it to ports where it was loaded onto more smoke belching ships to carry it to China where they could recycle it using electrical power created by burning coal.
Brilliant!
My family had a device comparable to the SodaStream as far back as 1964. It was rather clunky and needed CO2 cartridges, but it produced acceptable seltzer. The advantage of today’s improved soda machine is the availability of flavorings that didn’t exist back then.
Sodastream may be cheaper for seltzer, but it is not cheaper for other drinks. The cartridges are too expensive and cannot beat the 30c for 12 ounces price from Big Soda.
Recycling is pety tyranny and should be loathed by all free people.
“A large portion of America’s plastic and paper waste used to go from our recycling bins to China, where it was refashioned into everything from shoes to bags to new plastic products. “
There was some reporting a few years ago about a large landfill in Shenzhen in southern China, located about 15 miles from the ocean. Ocean barges packed with recycled materials from European cities were arriving at a nearby port and their cargoes (mostly of glass and plastic) were being trucked straight into the landfill. This was covered extensively by the BBC. I’m not a big fan of China, but it’s hard to criticize their authorities for stopping this sort of practice.
I still remember when recycling became legally mandated in my college town.
You could get a $50 fine if the local police saw you toss an aluminum can into a city trash can, instead of a recycling bin.
So everyone dutifully started “offering incense to the emperor,” going to silly lengths to try to separate out recyclables and carry them around with them, or store them, until they could be gotten to a bin.
The argument was, “Well, we gotta start somewhere!”
But the dirty secret was: The contents of those Recycle Bins, and the contents of all the Trash Cans, were going to the same darned place.
That’s right: They had no separate system for what to do with the cans and the plastic bottles. They didn’t even have a fixed plan for how to invent that system. Five years later, it was the same: All the trash, whether marked “recycling” or not, was going to the same landfill.
That marked the beginning of my personal conversion from “the Left are people with different opinions” to “the Left are obnoxious, irrational busybodies who want to boss other people around, compelling them to mouth Leftist platitudes and observe Leftist pieties, all so that the Leftists in charge can strut and preen and feel self-satisfied.”
And that was 1993.
In the intervening years, I’ve observed absolutely nothing to make me revise that generalization.
As a follow-up to my prior post:
I really believe that Leftism is the religion* that replaced mainstream Protestantism in America as it drifted away from its faith and became de-supernaturalized.
As “theological liberals” took over the Protestant seminaries in the early 1900’s, the people who still believed in God reacted as conservatives always seem to: Instead of reconquering their own existing institutions through bareknuckle political infighting, they abandoned them, splitting off to form their own new parallel institutions in which they could reassert “the fundamentals of the faith” (like the literal existence of God). They thus became known as “Fundamentalists.”
This meant that the mainline Protestant churches (most especially the Episcopalians, but also the then-differently-named ancestors of PCUSA and ELCA) gradually bled out all their genuine believers, losing them to the newly-launched Evangelical churches and para-church organisations. Two generations later, the mainline leadership consisted almost entirely of persons who didn’t believe but felt that a church was a perfectly fine place to act out their personal inclination for moralizing and social meddling, governed less by Holy Writ than by emotionalism and left-wing politics.
In the last three decades, these churches have seen a profound collapse in membership. The reason is this: Half their remaining members said, “If these leaders don’t believe, why should I?” and started sleeping in on Sundays. The other half said, “If these leaders don’t believe, I’ll go find some others who do,” and departed for other churches: Mostly churches which had started out “fundamentalist” in the mid-20th century but had “softened” and become “more seeker-sensitive” by the dawn of the 21st century: The non-denominational Evangelical churches.
That swelled the ranks of Evangelicals and allowed them an outlet for their religious instinct.
But what about the folk who started sleeping in on Sundays?
They, too, retained a latent religious instinct. They felt unsettled if they didn’t have:
– a cosmology and metaphysics
– an ethical crusade to participate in
– an apocalyptic eschatology
– a set of rituals to practice
– a way to cheaply buy indulgences to alleviate their feelings of moral guilt
– a sense of community
– a diabolical enemy to struggle against
– a set of sermons to attend
So, their own functional religion evolved, in which those needs were met as follows:
– cosmology/metaphysics: reductive materialism coupled to a purely emotional “spirituality”
– ethical crusade: Save the Planet!
– apocalyptic eschatology: Global Warming Will Kill Us All In Ten Years!
– ritual system: Recycling, Buying Priuses
– buying indulgences: By promoting leftist political policies, I prove that I Am One Of The Enlightened White People, and get a pass on the sin of being white
– sense of community: Left-wing political activism and Following All The People On Twitter Who Exhibit My Same Tribal Markers
– enemy to struggle against: Republicans are demons, and Trump is the devil himself
– a set of sermons to attend: TED Talks and attending lectures during Sex Week on campus
I defy anyone to offer a better explanation of the above behaviors than as a surrogate for the religious instinct they inherited from their grandparents, but for which they had no other outlet.
This is why I think Democrats should be excluded from American politics: We want to prevent the establishment of religion.
* = Above, for simplicity, I used the term “religion,” but I think superstition is a better term. An honest-to-God “religion” takes pains to have internally-consistent doctrinal content, and shuns outright irrational fideism. (Witness the detailed thought of Thomas Aquinas and Moses Maimonides in the High Middle Ages, Calvin’s Institutes and the Council of Trent during the 16th century, and today’s various systematic theologians and philosopher/apologists.)
But leftism doesn’t seem overly concerned with any such rigor, and belief in Separating Your Recyclables when they’re all just going to the same landfill falls closer to “lucky rabbit’s foot” territory than to Aquinas’ Five Ways.
Worthy comment, RC.
Stuff in landfills does not break down. Breakdown usually requires oxidation…access to oxygen. Landfills compress and cover everything, thus no oxygen access.
For a time there was an academic endeavor, garbage mining, which showed no degradation of most stuff interred twenty years before.
As to your “irrational fideism”, I trust you have read John Paul II’s encyclical, “Fide et Ratio”. Powerful stuff from that Saint!
A few years ago I happened to look out the window as the trash truck we had to pay for pulled up, and their employee took our carefully separated tub of recyclables and chucked it into the back of the trash truck, right after he had had tossed our other carefully separated “un-recyclable” “trash” in there.
Thereafter, I didn’t bother to look anymore, because I already knew how much the city really cared about recycling.
We do try to be careful about recycling here in this country but, from what I have read, the vast majority of the trash created and not carefully disposed of around the world and that turns up–say, for instance, as the mats of trash that people report seeing floating in our oceans–are the products of just two major polluters–China and India.
Have you read or heard anything about these two major polluting country’s efforts to recycle? I haven’t.
One of the co-founders of Greenpeace was on Tucker Carlson tonight, savagely criticizing AOC’s Green New Deal and, in passing, he mentioned that many people likely thought that the food they bought in the supermarket–wrapped in plastic–was manufactured by that supermarket, and that they did not realize that that food came from farms which were some distance, sometimes many states away, or even overseas, requiring trucks, trains, aircraft, and ships–all using fossil fuels–to transport the food to that supermarket. *
People who don’t know how their food is grown, and where it comes from can, thus ,make very bad decisions, say, fall for a program that requires we give up all fossil fuels (in 12 years, no less), without anything to replace them.
That led to the thought of how many of our people today, especially those in our coastal cities, were disconnected from real life, from the land, from the farming that, at one time, was the occupation of the great majority of the people here in the U.S. and, thus, have no idea of what it takes to support the civilization that they enjoy, and so obviously take for granted.
Thus, their disdain for those who provide their food, and energy in “flyover country.”
This lead to another thought, about just how that remove from nature and–thanks to Disney and Smokey the Bear posters–that ignorance and unrealistic view of nature and of animals can lead to some bad consequences.
See, for instance, the story out in the last couple of days about the woman who crossed a safety barrier at a zoo to get close to a Jaguar to take a “selfie” with it, and who, in consequence, got her arm slashed open, and is pictured screaming in the video below.**
* See https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/03/greenpeace-co-founder-patrick-moore-drops-a-moab-on-aoc-and-her-green-new-deal-it-will-be-end-of-civilization-half-the-population-will-die-video/
** See https://pjmedia.com/trending/no-zoo-animals-dont-want-selfies-with-you/
Apparently only Japan makes recycling work as a society. The rest of humanity is obviously less developed.
why are there none/few recycling processing centers in the US? How much money is spent shipping US garbage to China? Can it really be cheaper to do that than build recycling centers in the US?
I re-use and re-purpose plastic and paper bags, glass jars, and cardboard boxes many times over. I also use cloth/re-usable grocery bags. Scrap printer paper gets re-used as scratch paper.
There is a lot of scope for more environmentally friendly packaging. Styrofoam food packaging can/should be changed to cardboard, like egg cartons.
Unfortunately, it looks like community recycling is just a scam.
Aesop and Richard, thanks very much for the link and the intel on Sodastream.
I like seriously overdiluted Crystal Light and also cucumber water. Seems to me you could make both using Sodastream, or an old-fashioned soda siphon IF that produces plain seltzer sparkling water and not club soda.
A while back I read a news item describing the EU mandated recycling system in the UK, and how, according to this article, it required each household to have 4 or 5 different bins (the newer article linked below says its now up to 10 or 11bins!) that they were to place different categories of recyclables/non-recyclables in.
The story went on to say that, in some more progressive urban locations, these bins were starting to be monitored electronically, and that if you put material into the wrong bin, you were going to be fined by the authorities. *
This is micro level control at it’s finest! Training the rats to jump through hoops, or to push a roller across the table.
Recycling is a laudable goal—is, no doubt, beneficial, all well and good—but, you need to realize that recycling and, on a larger scale, “global warming” are just excuses, vehicles used to ultimately achieve the universal control and obedience that those on the Left want.
(One major indication of this lack of actual belief in the causes these Leftist activists espouse, this falsity, is the lives that those “activists” pushing, say, global warming actually live, their huge “carbon footprints”–their use of private aircraft, not uncomfortable, and full of grubby people commercial, their transportation by car, and not by crowded subway, commercial bus transportation, train, or ship, their huge and often multiple houses–lights ablaze—see Al Gore, see Bernie Sanders, who recently bought a very nice beachfront summer vacation home—his third house.
These activists above living up to and by the rules and lives they prescribe for all the rest of us “little people.”)
This is all really about the ability of those on the Left who want to be in charge to make you–supposedly for a supremely good cause, and to avert this or that “existential threat”—into a puppet—increasingly unable to question, to think, say, or do anything that is not regulated or licensed by them, not channeled into a very precise orthodoxy and direction–into a series of beliefs, statements acknowledging and adhering to their dictated theology, and actions that those on the Left dictate.
All about taking away your freedom, your free will, your ability to think for yourself, and to believe what you wish, to express yourself freely, your decision making power, and your control over your lives, how you live them and, very importantly, over your assets.
It’s all about convincing you that there is an “existential threat,” a huge Crisis, an EMERGENCY so huge, so urgent, that everything has to be dropped, normal procedures scrapped—no time for normal investigation, thought, debate and rumination—“the science is settled”—and you have to fall in line, to obey, or die.
Thus, we saw—the thoroughly propagandized, and no doubt scared sh!tless—gang of little 10 and 12 year olds who descended on Senator Feinstein’s office recently, yelling that “we only have 12 years to turn this around,” (or we will all die), and demanding that the Senator, commit, right then and there, to vote for AOC’s “Green New Deal.” **
* See https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/773376/brexit-eu-rules-recycling-schemes-billions-saved-european-union
** See https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/02/24/sen_dianne_feinstein_argues_with_children_over_green_new_deal.html
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