Earth Day - Sustainability IS Political

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Today we cover the politics of Earth Day and sustainability, some upcoming environmental lawsuits, and the role of corporations and government versus our role in preserving our planet. And no environmental discussion would be complete without coral reefs, fast fashion, American consumerism, and climate inequality.

Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn, and Anna Callahan chat about Massachusetts politics. This is the audio version of the Incorruptible Mass podcast, season 5 episode 46. You can watch the video version on our YouTube channel.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to incorruptible mass. We are here to help us all transform state politics because we know that we could have a state with policies that support the vast majority of the residents who live here. And today we are going to be talking about Earth Day and climate and all that good stuff.
We will talk a little bit about the things to think about aside from carbon emissions. We'll be talking about the role of corporations and government versus our role. We'll be talking a little bit about coral reefs, some lawsuits coming up, or that have happened, fast fashion, american culture, cover a bunch of that stuff.
But before we do, I will have my co hosts introduce themselves and I will start with Jordan. Jordan Berg Powers. He, him and I live in Worcester, Massachusetts.
And I have, it's been a long time since I've done this honestly, so I'll do it honestly. I have 30 years experience working in electoral politics and I had over ten years working as the executive director of Mass alliance, which I am no longer at and I am now consulting. And that's my real bio.
Nice. Jonathan. Jonathan Cohn.
He him, his joining from Boston at what I call the intersection between back Bay Fenway and the south end and have been active on issuing electoral campaigns here in Massachusetts for a little over a decade. I am Anna Callahan. She her coming at you from Medford. Been doing environmental stuff. Wow. For 30 years.
Maybe it's my oldest policy, but local and state politics for, I don't know, seven, eight years now. And I am a city councilor in Medford. And now let us move right along to talking about climate.
Earth Day just happened and, you know, it's really every day should be Earth Day. But in the spirit of talking about the earth and climate change and all of that, we want to go ahead and cover a number of topics. Jordan, you just look, I can see you're just trying to jump in here and talk, say something general about Earth Day.
Yeah. As people know, I get riled up about this just really quickly. I'll say, uh, that we talk about Earth Day, we talk about all this stuff wrong.
Um, it is not just simply, uh, the earth, although the earth is wonderful and important, but rather just our ability to live on it. Um, we make it sound like it's something else, but it's actually we are endangering our children, let alone ourselves, ability to live here, like now. Um, and all the things we're seeing, the increased wind, the increased, um, uh, uh, weather events, all those things are a result of our actions.
And we, these are our actions, we are doing them. And when I say we, I mean, really, Americans, I think we are doing this . And so, um, there's a lot of things we say that are, um, to try to make it, rationalize it, or make it somebody else’s problem , but it is you, me, my problem.
And it is, um, there are, we all, obviously, there are different people who have more power, so they have more power to actually make change. But we all have the importance to do more and take it seriously, and we don't. Americans do not take climate change seriously.
You right now listening, are not taking climate change seriously, I promise you. Because if we did, we would be doing things totally differently. And we would talk about it like the existential threat that it is, which is to people's lives and not sort of to the world.
And the most shocking stat I recently heard is about overshoot day, which I had never heard of, but I'm really glad somebody put up earth. Overshoot day marks the day when humanity's demanding for ecological resources exceeds what the earth can regenerate in a year. So that means that we are stealing from the earth in a way that we can't redo in one simple year.
And so when the US hits this mark, right, so every year it happens. This year it's something that every year, what day? We have used up the resources for that whole year. That's right.
And so this last year, we, the Americans, past the day where we took from the earth more than it can regenerate in one year . So on March 13, March 13, three months in, we have taken more than the earth can redo. We are ahead of just about every other country.
And the average for the country, the average for the world was August 2. I don't know. That just like, hit me.
A lot of consumption and the world, like, we may be the first to do the crime, right? We're, we're the people who are committing the most in terms of causing climate change, but we're the last to do the time. Because all these other countries where either they're island nations or they're more susceptible to heat waves, or they're just, they don't have as much money as we do, and they cannot afford for every single person to have an air conditioner and all that stuff, you know, they are suffering. They're going to suffer before we do.
But it's really just like, it's also just a consumption. It's like, it's not just, it's like, yeah, there's like, you know, there it is. Like air conditioning, stuff like that.
But it's also just like stuff like we are buried in stuff and we drive a lot. And so like, it's just like, we like those, it's not just like , you know, we could, all of those countries could give every single person an air conditioner and they wouldn't pass the plastic that we put out and we like buy. So like, you know, so Jamaica is the latest [date], December 20 is.
Right. Ecuador, Indonesia, Cuba. Right.
But they're also doing things like solar energy, they like have public transportation, they walk. And also there's poverty.Right.
There's things that we're doing to keep people who aren't in industrial world continually to be there. Like we take from them and don't allow people to grow. So there's all those things mixed in.
But it's a lot of our culture, in our society. Yep. And I think that it speaks to as well, the incredible mention of poverty is the fact that for those who are like, when we see a lot of the excessive consumption that exists amongst, let's say, the super rich, if you want to actually be able to kind of, as we should lift off people who don't have as much without like exacerbating kind of other kind of environmental stresses, that means that the rich people need to consume less, that they need to just fundamentally need to take up less environmental space.
If you're the type of person who has your five homes and ten cars and also even just general car size for everybody, where it reminds me of how if you looked at the stat where the average car sold in the US is about 20% more than the average in Europe. And that's something that has been driven, which I'm shocked it's even just that low because I would honestly think it's larger. 20% more like larger.
Yeah, 20% larger. What was that? Yeah. And that it's something that's been exacerbated both by consumer demand,where people just end up liking.
Liking the larger cars as well as even the way in which a loophole and kind of US regulate, have US regulations on automobile emissions has incentivized the creation of SUV's because they can be labeled as chunks. Right. They can get around that.
And I, you know, you're kind of leading towards something that we wanted to talk about, which is this question of whether, you know, this is really, oh, there's nothing we can do. We just got to try and get government to change things and pressure corporations because it's really none of our choices matter. And blah, blah, blah, or whether, like, we really drive what companies are creating through our consumer choices and how much we can have an effect on the things that are created through our culture, through american culture.
And I want us to touch on that for a little bit. I mean, I certainly. I think all of us probably do believe to accept that, like,we've got to get the government to step in.
We're never going to save this thing without some action from the government, but that doesn't mean that individual actions are not helpful. And, Jordan, I know you wanted to talk a little bit about fast fashion and how much that affects what a carbon footprint that has. Yeah.
So for those who don't know, fast fashion is basically the idea that you would. Things change really quickly. It's really bigon TikTok, and it's really cheap clothing that gets discarded really, really quickly.
And so the companies that you can think of that are big for this are primark, sheen, H&M, ASOS. So these are some of the big corporations that do fast fashion. Zara.
And so, uh, this is a huge carbon footprint, from the production of it to the. Shipping it to you across the world, to Actually , most of it doesn't get worn or created because What they're doing is It's called fast fashion because they're creating their, um. Things end up on the runways more often than they used to,and then people are. And then rich people buy it and then sell it.
A cheaper version gets made really quickly, so somebody could get Kim Kardashian's dress that she wore to something that she put on Instagram, a cheaper version really quickly, or a trend on TikTok. Something gets big on TikTok, and then people be like, I want to buy it, but they don't want to pay. They want to buy a cheaper version, so they buy the cheapest version possible, and then they go through it.
And so this is real, really big impacts just to quantify it. So 60%. So people have just between 2020 and 2014.  
So just not a lot of time. Right. Um, six people bought 16% more garments and wore them half as long.
And in 2000, that was already a problem. It was already a problem in 2000. Right.
So we're. We're just fast tracking the idea that you wear something a few times, and then you toss it. Wear something a few times and toss it.
Um, that culture around it. That sort of H&M culture is. It has a huge carbon footprint, as well as just being completely evil.
Like, it's also slave labor. Right? Yeah. You know, like, you know, we, we often think about the human carnage we see on tv as far away, but our actions are causing a daily grind of human carnage that is invisible to us, but is real nonetheless.
And fast fashion is a huge part of it. So just doing so, just like, you know, the textile contributions to climate change, um,is more than the aviation and shipping combined. Wow.
So fast fashion contributes more to climate change than all the flights and all of the shipping. That's how much it's out of control. And it's just so much consumption.
It is so much consumption. Um, and so that's it just, it's like, again, it's a, it's a. It's in a cultural problem.
It's not a. And I will, I will mention for folks, you know, we want to give people some tools here every day. Folks, you can buy some amazing clothing for like one 10th the price if you're willing to go to goodwill, Salvation army and place.
I am going to savers. Yeah. I'm going to advertise right now for a place that I was a member of last year.
It's called swap it in Medford. And you pay a membership fee. And then every.
You just bring in clothes. Clothes  in and you take clothes and you never charge anything. You can come every single week, bring a couple clothes, take a few clothes.
It is amazing and it's really a wonderful. There's a, there's a good swap, um, here in Worcester that does the same for women. Um, my wife, my, uh, my wife Cara, she only buys used clothing for that reason.
She buys one piece of new clothing every year. But, like, that's it. So I just think, yes, like, thrift, please make thrifting cool.
Like, that's the best thing you want to hit climate. Like, make an amazing way to save money. You know, with all this inflation and everything.
It's so fantastic on the pocketbook. Yeah. And the dynamic that we were talking about, as well as the dynamic of how we both need individual actions and we need upstream actions.
I see. One example I had noted before about bottled water is that, like, we know fundamentally that, like, plastic is bad for the environment. Bottled water create plastic.
It's a lot of plastic waste. Plastic isn't great for recycling to begin with, even if you do recycle it, because there's no market for recycled plastic in the way that there's a market for recycled cardboard or recycled aluminum. I want to talk for 1 second before you go on, because people think that plastic is recycled.
And I think the statistic is that only 9% of plastics are ever recycled each year. Yeah. So, and like, black plastic, for example , never recycled, even if there's something on there.
It's also, when you say recycled, it's also important to note that you need virgin plastic to recycle plastic. So the, there's actually no such thing as recycling plastic. I think it's actually important to say that, like, it's, there are some plastics, some really hard plastics that like, can be recycled.
But basically almost every piece of plastic you touch can, needs more plastic to be recycled. So even the process of recycling requires plastic. Um, you know, for not all, like, don't add us.
Yes, there are some plastics that you can actually recycle, but most of the plastics were engaging and certainly bottled water is not one of them. And so the thing with bottled water then becomes if ultimately what some environmental advocates have advocated for in the past, bottled water just should not be something kind of sold regularly in stores.It's something that's necessary in if you have a disaster situation or you have a sanitation problem, that it's something that's like a clear emergency need, but it is not an everyday, it is not something that needs to exist every day.
We should just have more filling stations and feel free to give everybody some reusable, spend the money and giving everybody a reusable container. That, however, we both need people to stop buying bottled water to actually kind of bring down that market share and we need to regulate it. And if we're never going to get regulations on the availability of bottled water, if we don't change people's mindset into viewing it as something that they should, that they expect to see everywhere, because that you won't have the demand for a legislative change or a store policy change, and you will instead help basically anybody who's trying to fight that change by making people feel like that they're losing something by it not being taken away.
And I want to jump in and talk about microplastics, which, you know, more and more studies are coming out saying that microplastics are in newborn babies. Microplastics are in like throughout our bodies. They don't, you know, really have away to understand, like how they're getting where they're getting.
And a bunch of new studies showing that they're very unhealthy. And, you know, you're drinking a bottled water and you're drinking microplastics. So people should understand that bottled water is just unhealthy for you.
Aside from the fact that it's just tap water. Like, most of the time, it's not even good tap water. I don't want to.
I won't name the company because it's, uh, because, you know, I get sued. But we, um, I. When I was in rural Pennsylvania , um, I lived in rural Pennsylvania in high school.
And, um. And we. And there was a pig farm and a cow farm.
Um, and I don't. If you don't know anything about these farms, they are super gross. Especially pig farms.
They're super gross. Um, they're real. There's a lot of excrement.
They smell terrible. It's awful. And they were on hills.
Um, and down at the bottom of that hill was a stream that a water company that's big that people buy in stores got its water from. And I think about that every time I see people pick it up. And I just think, whatever your problem with tap water is, water.
And like, that's the thing, right? Like, fuji water is some of the worst quality water in the world. And they're, and they've successfully sold it to us as like, oh, look at this magic. And it's just like, awful.
And it's awful quality water. Who's ever heard of good beach water? It's not a thing. And it's just.
And so it's good marketing, right? It's like, good marketing to people, but it's not based in reality. And so, because the thing most people say is like, oh, well, like, my tap water isn't good. And I was like, well, first, do you know that it's not good? Like, have you seen studies? Have you studied it? And then have you studied yourself the bottled water that you're getting? Cause it's probably worse if not from the same source.
Yep. Oh, as a, as a quick aside to speak to the, like, the importance of good regulatory policy. When I was in Florida Recently and the water was disgusting, their tap water was disgusting.
My immediate thought was that this tastes like republican governance because, like, in the Orlando area, they have a high rate of sulfur in the water that they just allow. And so it really does have a light rotten egg after taking that you have to boil it to get it to taste good, which is what I ended up doing. But that's like, it's just clearly a failure of republican governance in the state of Florida, but continue on.
Well, the other thing with plastics, you know, it drives me crazy how many things you buy that are wrapped in plastic. Wrapped in plastic. Like, it's, it's.
We have an insane plastic culture where like everything, you know, I was buying a tea from Trader Joe's and every single teabag is wrapped in plastic. I was like, what is happening here? It's crazy. It's totally unnecessary.
It's bad for your health. And boy, is it bad for the environment. It's so bad for the environment.
Like, it's just so. I think plastic was, was heralded. It's like this magic thing.
But what we're learning through is that the actual is that there are so many pieces through the process, from the fact that it's made from oil to the process of creating it is hard, is carbon heavy to the fact that it, it doesn't go away. Um, and when it does go away, it breaks down into smaller pieces that are dangerous at every level. So it doesn't get recycled.
It has problems in its recycling processes. It, it doesn't, um, when it breaks down, that breakdown process is dangerous to us humans. Like, its breakdown process is bad for us.
And so, yeah, it's just like, I think that's an important thing. And it's in everything. It's in like plastic.
They put, you know, like your receipts now have plastic. Your, like, they just, the plastic is added to so many things that does not need to be added to. But this is the Koch brothers.
This is, you know, if you hate republican governance, all that plastic is paying for it. Yep. Let me pause for a minute before we go on and just say that in case you can't tell, we are not corporate funded and we could always use your donations.
If you think it's important to have progressive media sources talking about these things that you won't hear anywhere else . The link is below. Just drop us, say $5 for your cup of coffee.
Do it once a week. That'd be amazing. Or drop us $1,000 if you happen to have an extra thousand dollars.
It really, none of us get paid, but it really helps to support the young professionals who do our graphics and our editing and our design services and all of that stuff. That would be amazing. Back to.
I'm going to just bring up a little bit of a broad topic and talk about the fact that we talk, not we necessarily, but in American culture, the way we talk about climate change is to tie it almost always to carbon footprint. Right. And that's the way it's discussed.
But there are other things that truly matter. And I think plastic is one of those things. Like the creation of plastic,constantly creating more and more and more and more.
Plastic that has a lifespan of thousands of years. Is very, very bad for the environment. It is tied to another aspect, which is biodiversity.
We are in the 6th extinction and species are going extinct every single day. And, you know, this is dangerous for the planet.Really a huge problem.
And the third thing that I want to bring up, just talking about things that are not just carbon, right. The third thing I want to bring out up is other greenhouse gasses and specifically methane. And, you know, I'm going to say something unpopular .
I did a presentation, man of, this is so long ago, like 15 lot years ago at a job that I was at, I did a presentation on. It was on your footprint, right? Your greenhouse gas footprint. And it was like the ten things to change to lower your greenhouse gas footprint.
And numbers one and two were very unpopular, right? Numbers one and two of the biggest things that you can change are don't fly and don't eat meat. Reduce the amount that you fly. Reduce the amount that you eat meat.
Meat tied very much to methane greenhouse gas, which is like, I don't know, between 50 and 80 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in terms of its greenhouse gas ability to raise the temperature of the earth. I want to bring those things up because people talk a lot about carbon and I think there are other important issues. I'll just say there's some simple decisions you can make that really come up with this.
So I recently went to DC and I was asked how to get there and they're like, oh, we can fly you. And I was like, can I take a train? Like, is there, is there a small decision you can make that would make better? Like, it's not, you know, I think sometimes people here don't eat meat and they. And they're like, oh, my God, I can't eat meat.
And so I will say, like, first off, if you don't eat meat, that's great. Like, I don't eat meat and you, I don't know. I'm ginormous.
Like, you'll be fine. But also, if you want to eat meat, think about, like, what meat you're eating, how often you eat it, if you just consume less meat, if you increase the amount of plant based meat in your life. So my parents are meat eaters, but hey, um, the majority of the time they eat plant based meat and then they eat meat sometimes when they have a.
When they feel like they want to have it. So there's, like, ways that you can, um, you know, the other thing is if you buy plant based meat and bring and put it into your diet more often, then that signals to corporations, we do live in the system that they should produce more of it. So there's lots of, like, it doesn't have to be all or nothing, right? Like, just,you know, moving.
If, um, substituting, uh, uh, chicken for beef and substituting plant based for chicken, those in a meal does a huge part. Right. If we just.
If you just eat less cows, if you interact with cows less, you will dramatically decrease, um, you know, just like that alone.That decision alone will dramatically decrease your carbon. Like, and signal again, to the.
To the, um, to corporations that this is out of control. You know, we, we. I think it's 16 billion.
I think I deleted this thing that had it, but how many animals, I think it's 16 billion are raised to 18 billion are raised a year and killed. Here it is, 18 billion. We raise 18 billion animals a year to die.
And then we, only one in four of them are wasted. So, like, there's just like, you could be making. You don't need to make an all or nothing decision.
You could be making some simple decisions to move in the direction again. These all matter. Absolutely.
And I would say as well, the one thing in particular when it comes to the agricultural industry is that where there are so many problems, and if we can move them in a way that is actually more ecological sound, it's also easier to move them in a way that better treats their workers and better treats other aspects of the environment because particularly the livestock industry in the US is, like, filled with horrible work, like, workplace abuses from, like, big ag to their employees ,bad monopolistic practices that kind of abuse from even like them to, like, farmers, kind of the, like farmers rather than like the farmers that they like the people that they employ, but the person who owns the land and just other forms of pollution because it's poorly regulated and we have such high demand that the high demand and poor regulation fuse together for it to have a toxic outcome. Yeah. Well, before we end today, I have a couple of kind of good news stories I Wanted to bring up.
One is about the coral reefs. I've been hearing for years that they're potentially on the road for extinction in the near future. And I was just listening to a great NPR podcast, and they were talking to some real coral reef experts and saying that they believe that they will be safe.
They believe that with a lot of attention and a lot of scientists kind of on the, you know, working toward ensuring that they survive, it looks like we will likely save the coral reefs. So I know if you didn't realize they were going to go extinct.Maybe this isn't such a happy story, but if you were aware, then hopefully this is a little bit of good news.
The other piece that I wanted to bring up was this amazing lawsuit where a bunch of older women in, where were they? They went to the European Court of Human Rights. Oh, they were from Switzerland. A bunch of older 2000 senior women won the biggest victory possible in a landmark climate case.
They really showed how they suffered emotionally from climate change. And the court said that the swiss government did not do enough to curb climate change and so they have to do more. That was like a really landmark case will probably lead to some governmental policy change for the country of Switzerland, which is amazing.
Jordan, do you have any last thoughts before we end? Yeah, just like, you know, we talked a lot about personal decisions , but I just want to remind people that ultimately the other thing they could do is advocate for their government to do better. Like these, like, ultimately, we won't individual decision. We won't see individual decisions fix this problem .
These are all legislative problems that will have to be fixed. And so, you know, if you're a legislator, take climate change seriously . Like, there's just, we need a wholesale rethinking.
We need to regulate plastic a lot more of than we're currently doing and needs to be treated like the regulate like the environmental damage that it is and regulated accordingly. And so advocate for that. When you call your legislator, there's a bunch of people calling for stuff that's happening around the world and in the country.
Make sure when you call to also say, hey, also, what's my person doing for climate change? Is there more to do? So I just want to encourage that there's a lot more that we can and should be doing on it. There's a lot of individual decisions that we can be making, but ultimately, the legislatures are going to be the one to make the changes that we need to,you know, get us through climate change. Absolutely.
Wonderful. Thank you all so much for listening. We look forward to chatting with you all next week.