Consciousness of Sheep
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Central to the widely held dream of a “green,” techno-utopian future is the idea of a circular economy. Whereas our current system is described as a landfill economy, in which we generate massive volumes of waste which must somehow be disposed of, a circular economy would develop new materials which can be recycled at the end of use. This is the context for the World Economic Forum’s now infamous “you’ll own nothing and be happy” – rather than owning cars and household appliances (where the manufacturer has an incentive to build in obsolescence) rental would force manufacturers to extend lifespans and to use recyclable materials to offset the cost of end-of-life disposal.
Recycling, however, has always presented problems for those promoting the green techno-utopian future. In practice, only a handful of substances can be recycled – metals like aluminium, copper and steel, along with paper and some plastics. But this is only possible if these materials are not combined with other materials which, at great monetary and energetic cost would have to be separated. For several decades, while western households have dutifully separated their recycling, in practice, it has merely been shipped off to Asia to be either incinerated or dumped in the ocean… out of sight out of mind.
This was exposed prior to the pandemic, when China banned the import of most western waste. Public authorities across the western economies were left with a massive waste disposal problem, made all the more difficult by their own bans on landfill disposal. This has been alleviated to some degree by turning to poorer Asian countries to carry out the incineration and ocean disposal of western waste that China no longer wants to do, and by the building of domestic incinerators which generate electricity and heat (the least polluting form of waste disposal). But true recycling has remained limited to the handful of materials whose energy and monetary cost makes them viable… until now.
There was always hubris in the European technocracy’s experiment with eschewing fossil fuels (and in Germany’s case, nuclear too). The excessive deployment of non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies (NRREHTs) alongside the premature closure of fossil fuel electricity generation, together with the more recent foot-shooting of cutting their economies off from the cheap Russian oil and gas which made them profitable, has left the continent with the highest energy prices in the developed world… with the inevitable consequence that industries – particularly critical industries like steel making and aluminium smelting – have been collapsing in droves.
The big irony though, is that the sacred industries of the technocracy – such as wind turbine manufacturing – were also heavily dependent upon cheap energy. Not that wind turbine deployment is about to come to a halt. China is more than happy to manufacture them for us (at higher cost, using coal power) so long as our deluded technocracy maintains its faith in them… and so long as businesses and households can continue to afford to pay the higher energy bills.
Plastic recycling is experiencing a similar collapse. But in this instance, the industry is being hit by multiple problems. While high energy prices have driven up the cost of recycling, and so the cost of recycled plastic, recycling companies also blame the excessive regulation imposed by the European technocracy. There is though, a difficulty on the demand side. Not just the lower price of recycling in Asia, but because all of the increase in global “oil” production since the peak in 2018, has been in “condensates” – oil so light that its most profitable use is as a feedstock for plastic… if you have felt that the world has become awash with plastic in the last five years, you are not wrong, it is one of the things keeping the oil industry in business.
It is tempting to blame Europe’s feeble-minded leaders for this state of affairs. But with the entire global economy running into material and energy shortages, Europe is just laying down the path that the other economies will have to follow. The Trump administration seems to sense this – as witnessed in its opening up of federal land for oil and gas drilling – even if it doesn’t fully understand it. And doubtless China will continue to consume as much energy – from all sources – as it can to keep its economy from imploding. But without some vastly more energy-dense and versatile fuel source, the deindustrialisation currently occurring across Europe will spread around the world… and, as Europe is demonstrating, without cheap energy NRREHTs and circularity will also fail.
As you made it to the end…
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