Splinter is your home for news and opinions that challenge power in our political and economic system that's becoming more unhinged each and every day.
If you look at it on a case-by-case basis, it’s harder to catastrophize. Would the world economy collapse if petroleum-derived food additives vanished? No. Plastic bags? No. The vast volumes of cheap plastic packaging? No. Shipping? That’ll take a while. Fertilizers? Partial substitution can happen immediately, but a full changeover will take years. And so on through the list. You can rack and stack each case by its social value, how hard it will be to eliminate or replace, and the lead time needed to transition. Beyond that it’s engineering, planning and politics.
The problem is crashing the economy will kill a lot of people right now, no need to wait or come up with a better solution
If you look at it on a case-by-case basis, it’s harder to catastrophize. Would the world economy collapse if petroleum-derived food additives vanished? No. Plastic bags? No. The vast volumes of cheap plastic packaging? No. Shipping? That’ll take a while. Fertilizers? Partial substitution can happen immediately, but a full changeover will take years. And so on through the list. You can rack and stack each case by its social value, how hard it will be to eliminate or replace, and the lead time needed to transition. Beyond that it’s engineering, planning and politics.