Reply To: Climate Crisis: Our Last Chance
To return to plastics, BP would say that wouldn’t they? Though I don’t suppose too much of their profits comes from selling oil to make plastic bags (only about 4% of oil production is currently used to make plastics). Actually, using it to make plastics is a more rational use of oil than burning it to generate electricity or power transport. Just because oil is a villain in global warming doesn’t mean it should be blacklisted from being put to other uses. A lot more things are made of plastics than throwaway bags. Pipes, solar panels and wind turbines contain plastics. And when we’ve all got 3D printers we’ll need them. They will survive into socialism. We can no more do without plastics than we can without metals. Just because some of them are a source of pollution under capitalism is no reason to abandon them nor oil, their main raw material. Just cut back and eventually phase out burning oil (in socialism).