Fossil-Fuel Greed: As Coal Power Plants Shut Down, Plastics Production Intensifies
By Frank Carini | October 23, 2021 | ecoRI News
Two crises we refuse to address with any sense of urgency — our addiction to fossil fuels and our overreliance on plastics — are conspiring to worsen the climate crisis and, thus, life on this planet. It is all being done so the barons of our extractive capitalist economy can pad their offshore, or South Dakota, bank accounts.
New research connects the climate crisis and plastics pollution in a way that further illustrates our petroleum problem. We will likely shrug our collective shoulders and then grouse about gasoline prices.
Two of the main drivers of the climate crisis, oil and natural gas, are also instrumental in the manufacturing of plastics — much of which is unnecessary, such as wrapping hard-boiled eggs, bananas, potatoes, and cucumbers in petroleum straightjackets.
Plastics are on track to contribute more climate-change emissions than coal power plants by 2030, according to a report published this month. As fossil-fuel companies seek to recoup falling profits, they are increasing plastic production and canceling out greenhouse-gas reductions gained from the recent closure of 65 percent of the country’s coal-fired power plants.
The report, compiled by Beyond Plastics, a nationwide project based at Bennington College in Vermont, analyzed data on the various stages of plastics production, usage, and disposal and found that the U.S. plastics industry is releasing at least 232 million tons of greenhouse gases annually, the equivalent of 116 average-sized coal-fired power plants.
Last year the plastics industry’s reported emissions increased by 10 million tons, to 114 million tons of greenhouse gases nationwide. Construction is underway on 12 new plastics facilities, and 15 more are planned — altogether this expansion could emit up to 40 million more tons of greenhouse gases annually by 2025.
“The fossil fuel industry is losing money from its traditional markets of power generation and transportation,” Beyond Plastics president Judith Enck, a former Environmental Protection Agency regional administrator, is quoted in a press release touting the recent study. “They are building new plastics facilities at a staggering clip so they can dump their petrochemicals into plastics. This petrochemical buildout is cancelling out other global efforts to slow climate change.”
For the defenders of the unsustainable status quo — many of the same people who call journalists enemy of the people and health professionals liars and accuse educators of teaching hate — jobs in the petroleum/plastics sector matter and must be protected. The idea of retraining people to work in an industry that doesn’t pollute, degrade public health, and accelerate the climate crisis is embraced in the same manner masks have been.
The fact petroleum pollution and climate change impact low-income communities and people of color more substantially makes white nationalists giddy — even if they live in one of the impacted communities — and doesn’t move the compassion needle in corporate boardrooms.
Ninety percent of the U.S. plastics industry’s reported climate-change pollution occurs in just 18 communities where residents earn 28 percent less than the average household and are 67 percent more likely to be people of color, according to Beyond Plastics research.