The World is Being Murdered

The world isn’t dying, it’s being murdered. It’s being massacred. It’s being beaten and tortured and ruined and stripped bare and attacked and slaughtered and defamed and embarrassed and humiliated every single day by the same exact perpetrators.

421 parts per million in January. 421 carbon particles for every million particles of clean air. This is the highest we’ve been in over 800,000 years (climate.gov). Back when 421 parts per million was more than 3,000,000 years ago where the world was 2-3 degrees Celsius (3.6-5.4°F) hotter than today. Sea level was between 15-25 meters (50-80 feet) higher than today. This is where we are at. With all this talk of progressivism, all this talk of growing, all this talk of fighting for the environment and we are not there. Over the last 60 years we’ve sped up the amount of carbon dioxide production by 100x the rate of previous natural increases.

Plastic Pollution

Cities covered in smog, forest demolished, an entire island of plastic triple the size of France is floating around the ocean currently (abcnews) . 79,000 tons of plastic and 617,800 square miles (1.6 million km squared). This island isn’t in some random place in the middle of the world, no no this is in between Hawaii and California. Our country is to blame, WE are to blame. The United States attributed for 5,416,000,000 tons of Carbon dioxide waste as of March 5th 2020 (climatetrade.com) whereas China attributed for 10,065,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide waste. Up until 2018.

The United States used to import over 700,000 tons of plastic to China alone. China used to be given over 70% of the world’s plastic (npr.org) Companies make this big deal about us citizens (not U.S citizens, us as in we) are the ones to blame and that WE need to recycle more and recycle our plastics better despite only 8.7% of plastics actually being recycled (epa.gov). Major companies such as Coca-cola, Nestle, PepsiCo, and Unilever claim that citizens need to recycle more despite never telling people what they even can recycle or mentioning that their use of virgin (unrecycled) plastics went down merely 0.1% from 2018-2019 (zmescience). Many people don’t even know what the numbers mean on their plastics or even what they can recycle.

State and County Governments get to decide which things they even recycle or can recycle. In Montgomery County, Tennessee (Where I live) the only recyclable plastics are plastics with necks (such as bottles) and plastics with the number 1 and 2 inside of them (mcgtn.org). Those numbers correspond to what kind of plastic it is and how it can be used, numbers 1 and 2 mean that plastics for things such as soda bottles, water bottles, cooking oil bottles, and medicine containers can be recycled for number 1 plastics as well as laundry/dish detergent, milk, shampoo, conditioner, various toys and grocery bags for number 2 plastics (rlmrecycling).

However, as stated these plastics are only recycled 8.7% of the time and most companies still use virgin plastics. Coca Cola is one of the leading polluters, in 2017 the soda company created over 3,000,000 tons of plastic (bbc) That means that of those 3,000,000 tons only at most 261,000 tons was actually recycled.

So rather than destroy these plastics or pollute our oceans and wildlife and trees that fight the production of greenhouse gasses, rather than pollute our world and raise the CO2 levels to even higher than a record breaking 421 parts per million companies should probably try to clean up their act. Coca Cola has pledged to raise the amount of recycled plastics they use, but they make the same promise without ever keeping it.

Deforestation

Everyone’s heard of the dad jokes about buying lumber due to its high price, but of course people don’t focus on why lumbar and wood prices are rising. Deforestation is on the decline. Between 2010 and 2015 deforestation rates were up to 12,000,000 hectares as oppose to the 10,000,000 hectares between 2015 and 2020 (news.un.org) which was always going to happen when Africa and South America are robbed of over 420,000,000 hectares since 1990 and trees take 30+ years to fully mature (localtreeestimates). That means that it would be roughly today for the trees that were taken down in 1990 to have reached maturity, supposing that the trees were replanted immediately after cutting them down.

Here’s the big issue, trees take in carbon dioxide and produce oxygen more than most other plants, so without them we are powerless to the death we’ll cause ourselves with continued pollution. It is possible to use industrial hemp, but there’s no money in industrial hemp so capitalists are refusing to do anything with the hemp (check out the article on industrial hemp I wrote before). A single tree absorbs 48 pounds of CO2 per year (usda.gov), a single hectare is between 1000-2500 trees (nhsforest.org). That means that a single hectare can absorb between 48,000-120,000 pounds of oxygen per hectare. Now multiply that by the estimated amount of hectares stolen from African and South American forests alone and you get 20,160,000,000,000 to 5,040,000,000,000,000,000 pounds of CO2 replaced with oxygen. That's 10,080,000,000 to 2,520,000,000,000,000 tons taken in roughly 30 years.

Why are these forests being demolished and leaving their inhabitants without homes? Capitalism. Trees are used for many different things in the United States alone such as paper, houses, fuel, firewood, tools, certain clothing, home decor, and countless other items. All of these however can be replaced with the cost effective and efficient plant known as hemp. However, capitalists don’t see it as a need. They’d rather massacre the world than try to try to save it. Rather than try to protect everyone, Capitalist Pigs want to protect their wallets and destroy the world for your children and descendants.