You guys talking about leaving behind an unimaginable planet. Let me tell you a story.
Humanity developed around 2.5 million years ago. At 1.5 million years ago, and ever since, we have been burning carbon from wood. No appreciable damage has been done to the Earth.
Timeline of human evolution - Wikipedia
In case you missed it, this is nearly 1.5 million years of blowing smoke (
mostly water and CO2, though websites I asked about this somehow give it lead and all sorts of other vile chemicals, probably to get you not to burn it) into the air. Far from choke us all to death, plants adapted to this, and
CO2 is actively converted back into oxygen by plants.
What about global warming? Well, there are
25 reasons why carbon is not actually a factor in global warming, and #25 actually states outright that global COOLING is now happening, and this could have something to do with why they are are now calling it "climate change."
So, no, none of that stuff had any impact on the environment. But I'm gonna tell you a different story. This is the story about how in 50 years, our oceans have become filled with pollution. You see, I have a dad who was born in the 1950s, and he describes what recycling was like before the recycle, reduce, reuse movement.
- Most things were made from metal, paper, wood, and clay. Very little was made from plastic. These things biodegraded, or just sit there inert.
- There were local people called rag and bone men who would take the scrap metal you had and sell it to someone to forge it again.
- Milk was in glass containers, and would simply be reused.
Okay, here's what happens now.
- Thanks to concerned people mostly in LA and NYC and other out-of-touch big cities, we have now convinced most people not to give their trash to private collectors, but to a recycling center.
- This center uses fossil fuel to run their electrically powered automated sorting system, blowing smoke into the air. We are going to assume this smoke is the same carbon smoke used for burning for centuries (as would be the case in a forge above where they burn wood or coal), but it may not be. In any case, this uses resources to do so.
- This is assuming they are local. In many cases, we instead use diesel trucks (yay, lead into the air) to ship this trash across country, then we ship this over to China to be recycled. Not only does this also send boats to pollute the waterways, but in many cases, the plastic sent there doesn't make the trip and ends up in the water. And sometimes they're sloppy and it winds up as run-off. And here's the result.
You "concerned" people, are exactly the ones most responsible for destroying the planet! We could have just melted down plastic or
burned it (it's just oil), but no, it's important to recycle!