Death by Consumption
We’re all dying to hear those holiday sales figures. Literally.
This article is a bit behind my intended publishing date. Since my father’s death, my mother has fallen and broken a hip. Once out of rehab, selling her home, downsizing and relocating her from a few hours away will be a project as well. My productivity here will likely be diminished for a while. The burning, flooding world doesn’t pause for personal challenges. Thank you for understanding.
Another holiday season has passed with our corporate overlords incessantly cajoling us to buy stuff we don’t need. I barely remember it. With Los Angeles burning, it seems like a lifetime ago. However, here is what I bought. Nothing. This has been my holiday policy for at least a decade now, although I too was once was victim of the madness. I don’t miss it.
As I type I’m suffering from an outbreak of psoriasis, little doubt because my body, like yours, is filled with toxic chemicals and plastic. As a result, my immune system works overtime to fight off the invaders (courtesy of Dow Chemical, 3M, ExxonMobil, Monsanto and friends no doubt), mistakenly attacking my body. If I get something wrong, blame it on plastic, as .05 percent of my brain and sorry, yours too, is now composed of the stuff. Even near useless CNN reported this, a network that includes in its advertising disingenuous, screaming Medicaid “Advantage” plans which have no relationship with Medicaid at all, actually privatized health insurance filled with pre-approval hurdles and deliberate confusion to discourage elderly Americans from obtaining benefits. This ugly little duplicity is brought to us by the benevolence of United Healthcare — you know, the company whose CEO was recently gunned down, likely because they lead the industry in claim denials at 32 percent. Compare that to the 16 percent industry average. Hell, they even call surgeons during cancer surgery to responsibly ask, “Is that necessary?”
Annual production of plastics, 1950 to 2023 (in million metric tons)
Talk about digression. My mandate is to write about climate change and overshoot, but I seem to be pissed about so many things these days. I often get asked, “But what can I do to change things?” Yeah, I get it, that feeling of helplessness, of spitting into the wind, but here’s the thing; far less effective than fighting is not fighting. While there are many tactics for fighting, we’re going to focus on one today that’s safe, easy, highly underrated, and effective on many fronts: cutting consumption.
Big people like the now famously passed Brian Thompson aren’t coming to save us. They’re the perpetrators of a system that destroys the habitability of our Mother Earth with every voluntary purchase. They’re predators, a cancer, and our discretionary money is their blood supply. So let’s stop giving it to them. Do me a favor. Boycott big box stores. Boycott Amazon. Even its name is a form of ironic sickness as the wonder, diversity and the health of the Amazon Rainforest essential to the health of the planet is burned to the ground for artery clogging cheeseburgers. It’s flipping to a carbon emitter. When a pro capitalist magazine like The Economist writes this sad truth, that’s extra proof — from the enemy. A guy like Jeff Bezos, who is now kissing Trump’s ass to maintain his billions in government contracts, cares for nothing but money and power. His business is murderous at a planetary scale. Fuck him.
Other suggestions I have made include, strikes, support of unions, organizing locally, joining and participating in existing environmental organizations, and protesting in the streets. Please feel free to add to my list. Protesting is growing more dangerous by the day. Writing is growing more dangerous by the day. Boycotting is the easiest and safest of all. It’s not asking for much.
Consider some statistics on the blinding scale of our consumption. These figures come from the Netflix documentary, Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy, a pretty good watch. From the flat, disembodied voice of Sasha, the computer narrator, consider this: the garment industry alone produces 100 billion pieces of clothing a year for just eight billion people on our overshooting planet. That is but a single statistic of stunning unbridled greed.
If I have beef with this documentary, a climate disaster issue in its own right that I haven’t eaten for at least 15 years, it’s that the dramatic animation throughout appears to be AI generated. Among AI’s problems is massive intellectual property theft, white, corporate, western bias, and limitless potential for exponentially spreading spurious “information.” You know, alternative “facts.” On energy and water use alone, AI should be halted in its tracks (I wrote about that in Artificial Intelligence is Hot), used only for science, not political manipulation and corporate profit. But that is of course exactly what is happening.
Sasha’s emotionless voice asks us to visualize other incomprehensible statistics in our soul sucking, insane consumption. Parenthesized text are my additions for added clarity.
Visualize 68,733 phones produced each hour (1,649,592 a day, or over 600 million a year).
Visualize 190,000 garments produced each minute (11,400,000 an hour, 273,600,000 a day, nearly 100 billion a year).
Visualize 12 tons of plastic produced each second (720 tons a minute, 43,200 tons an hour, 1,036,800 tons a day, nearly 400 million tons a year).
Visualize 2.5 million shoes produced each hour (60 million a day, nearly 22 billion a year).
Obviously, this production fuels massive waste that ends up not just in the land air and water, but our bodies. Throw away society, hardly a new concept.
If we agree critical changes aren’t coming from the top down — in fact the opposite is true as we release more GHGs than ever — then logically we recognize change must come from the bottom up. Land carbon sinks absorbed almost no carbon last year. Frightening, yes, but courage gives us a chance, our only one, as fascism, oligarchy, and climate change deniers seize power in just days. To not fight is to passively accept death, if not yours, those of your children and grandchildren.
At some point, our bodies must be on the line, or at least those with the courage, always a minority. Face it, they already are. People all over the world are dying as a direct result of climate change. California is the fifth-biggest economy in the world. Groundwater on which its agriculture depends is running out from depleted winter snow pack. California is in its worst drought in 1,200 years. As climate change migration grows, yes in America, too, ask the newly homeless in L.A., economic and political insecurity are exasperated, setting the stage for fascism. Wet bulb temperature deaths are on the rise, threatening those farmworkers we depend on, whom Trump wants to deport. Over 1300 succumbed to heat alone on their annual pilgrimage to Mecca last year.
This is the biggest test humanity has ever faced, and just as we need to come together, pervasive lies, ignorance and greed have reached their zenith and undermined our ability to salvage an inhabitable planet. We are being turned against each other by greedy, ignorant fools. Each of us can do something, some of us more, some of us less. I’m putting myself on the line as are others by speaking truth to power, words which are in cyberspace forever (unless removed by fascists), even if I take all of my posts down. Others will risk their lives in the streets. Confronting power bent on evil is cyclical, forever, and demands physical confrontation even in the digital age.
Reducing personal consumption is the smallest ask, a moral, direct, and physically safe action with a breadth of positive effects. We will all find in the very near future anyhow, perhaps just a matter of months, the basics are about to get much more expensive. It’s time to prepare for that. Food, heat, and insurance are going to make disposable income a distant memory as a result of climate change and dwindling oil that is becoming more ever more expensive to harvest. Inflation will not be controlled by economists. It will be controlled by fossil fuels, just as it has been since the advent of the industrial age. It will be controlled by collapse. Our lives will be controlled by the limits of the Earth.
When I look at America, I see our common misery. This is not a fight for right or left, that’s the game to keep us divided. Starting in Chile in 1973 with the CIA assisted overthrow of President Salvador Allende, Chicago School neoliberal economics, previously a mere academic thought experiment, was unleashed. It theorized free and unregulated markets would find natural balance through demand and provide for all. I suspect it was all bullshit, all along, a plot. Rather, it removed the guardrails that achieved a semblance of social equity achieved by FDR after the Great Depression. In Chile and elsewhere, it was achieved by violence. It accelerated the unsustainable rape of the planet by capitalism, and has created two worlds, one of oligarchy and one of deprivation. After spreading like a virus over the world, destroying numerous countries by privatizing natural resources, national industries, and banking, it hit American shores under Ronald Reagan. Since then the standard of living for the average person has dropped, economic security has been lost, and a hopeful future extinguished, creating an environment to nurture ever lurking racism, homophobia, misogyny, and the ingredients for fascist rule. It’s toxic and few see the truth, that capitalism itself is a failed model, and that our short-sighted human machinations will soon be subsumed by an ever more polluted, violent planet hostile to human life or most other life we consider to be beautiful.
Boycott. Get your money out of fossil fuel sponsoring banks. Money feeds the cancer. These are the easiest things to do and don’t carry the increased personal risk that writing this way does, or the risks for those who will take to the streets in desperation in the near future. The planetary crisis is no theory. The evidence has been here for years in numerous, increasingly catastrophic climate change fueled disasters, twenty-seven billion dollar disasters last year alone. Life will never return to pre-Covid “normal.” L.A. should be the final wake-up call. Don’t let the victim's life-altering devastation be in vain. Fight.
Overpopulation is a big factor that really gets some people understandably upset. We could sustain more people with less consumption — in theory. Unfortunately, we will never live in a perfect enough way to live at theoretical maximum population. Underdiscussed as well is longevity. The maximum realistic population from my research has wide variance, 2 to 4bn, but in light of the immediate crises we face I find that speculation pointless. We're heading for an ugly reduction from a wide range of climate, overshoot, and political factors. It's fearful.
I’m sorry for your loss. Take care.
Another brutal article 👌🏻 I’m almost scared to watch that documentary.
I stopped buying stuff I don’t need decades ago. Never understood the allure. Much nicer to work less, not having to pay for it. My fashion is decades out of date and I just don’t care.
Except books. I have quite a few unread books. To my defense, I mostly use libraries and audiobooks 😋