The Charge Against Better: Recycling and X are "Necessary but Not Sufficient"

 The Charge Against Better: Recycling and X are "Necessary but Not Sufficient"

- Holier than Thou

- The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good

- Whataboutism

The title of the shared Linkedin Post is "Climate Scientists: Concept of Net Zero is a Dangerous Trap".  The Conversation piece raises serious concerns, which I share, about moral licensing.

Strap your brass balls on. The crotch-kickers are circling.

Let us concede that things that are NECESSARY might not be SUFFICIENT.  Recycling for example is necessary to reduce mining, forestry, and finite fossil fuel extraction. But Recycling won't be able to replace those completely, because:

- 1 World population is increasing

- 2 Human standard of living, on average, are increasing exponentially

-  3 Recycling is rarely 100% efficient (the "downcycling" argument that PET plastic is recycled into carpents, and office paper is recycled into tissue paper).

Having just completed July's hugely successful partnership with University of Yaounde, Cameroon, I can simultaneously feel pride (see Recycling Today and Waste Today coverage, and France24) - and chagrin. 

Is our success diverting plastic from predictable monsoon stormwater runoff, using labor at $0.36 cents an hour, something to feel proud of? The Conversation is a sobering indictment of pride, focused on the Paris Accord in 2015, which "morally licensed" carbon trading, which will not end global warming.  The European Union Emissions Trading System hasn't made much of a dent in 1-2-3 driven consumption.

But the criticism is haughty and disdainful of the humans who do the work picking up the litter and planting trees and providing recycled content alternatives. 

 

The defeatist messages about carbon offsets or plastic recycling challenges could just as well be made against vegetarians, giving them responsibility for not ending beef farming.

I don't really agree with this criticism of the Paris Agreement on carbon offsets / trading.  "The perfect is the enemy of the good", Descartes said. But we should study it if we are promoting plastic litter "offsets", to build responses.  "Necessary but not sufficient" is not our challenge, we only need to be necessary, not sufficient to solve the ocean plastic problem.

Making toilet paper out of office paper is indeed "downcycling". But if you don't own a Japanese water toilet, or wash your left hand like the noble savages in Global South, its better than not recycling office paper, or spending more (money and carbon) to turn it back into office paper at the expense of forests hewn for more toilet paper.

We just need to extend the time for a future generation to solve the problem, hopefully.  Attacking people who reduce, reuse, and recycle is a cynical privilege.