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Jeff McFadden

2. Consider this photo, which has been floating around Twitter for several years, and is loose in the Federation as well.

The reason those pears went to Thailand was to be put in that plastic.
If they went into glass instead the package would weigh as much or more as the product and shipping energy would more than double.
Because when you double the mass it takes more than double the energy to accelerate it to and maintain it at a given speed.
Our current economy would collapse.

3. Plastic packaging is the heart and soul of America's food system.
Before plastic wrapped hamburgers, grocery stores got half a steer at a time and cut up in-house.
I grew up in that world. I remember it. In Kansas City, MO. I'm 76.
Plastic as we know it was invented in my lifetime.
Without plastic we could not grow almost all America's vegetables in California.
We couldn't ship them. We couldn't handle them. We couldn't sell them.

4. I do not defend the system we have designed and built, in fact I condemn it as the heart and soul of hubris, but I can see how it works.
The same thing applies to demanding we just stop oil.
If we stopped oil tomorrow without some serious prep work, millions really would die.
We cannot have a global food supply chain without oil. Face that. Admit it.
Want to stop oil?
Create local supply chains. Grow food everywhere. Step 1.
Quit shitting in the water. Step 2.

5. We have shit up the entire planet with plastic, from big chunks to molecule-sized pollutants in our brains, with plastic, in my lifetime.
When I was a kid phones were bakelite and weighed as much as a dictionary, which was a big book printed on paper.
I'm not saying, Oh the good ol days, I'm saying LOOK AT ALL THE FUCKING PLASTIC!
We may have already excreted so much plastic we're going to die on it like yeast dying for my hangover, but if not, we have to admit why we use it, before

6. We even discuss reducing our production, as wicked consumers, of the plastic waste these motherfuckers wrapped our food in so they could ship it from poor farmers in Argentina to peasant women in sweat shops in Asia to run machines that stuff peaches in plastic so we can fly them across the Pacific and rail truck them across the US to take their place in the shelves of the Big Box grocery store which is so far away we have to have a car to get to it.
Then we talk about reductions.
Too late.

7. It's like talking about the beef industry. Yes, it's a crime against humankind and nature, but it does not exist in a vacuum. The beef industry and the corn industry are all one industry. All the corporations have interlocking directorates. The ancient Senator from Iowa is on half of them. Grassley.
And - lots of that beef, much of it, winds up wrapped in plastic.
When we butchered our steer we put the hamburger in plastic.
It's what you can buy. The only thing you can buy.

8. There is no part of the global ecosystem catastrophe currently taking place in full public view worldwide which can be fixed or ameliorated under current global energy usage rates.
Talking about carbon as though fixing it without addressing the rest of the collapsing ecosystem would help is disingenuous at best.
Yes we have to reduce carbon emissions, but we have to reduce energy drastically, wildly, so that we don't continue to make such demands on the global ecosystem.
We don't have to.

9. The plastic is not incidental to the global food and product supply chain, it is so integral to it that without the plastic the whole current system of globally distributed production and consumption could not exist.
Personally I don't think we need it. But if we do, we're signed up for the plastic forever.
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When you have put your hand in the scorpion's nest it is foolish to dread the sting.