Building a Better World™ doesn’t come easy. It takes a well-financed army of technocratic Experts™ working hand in glove with coercive government regulators to successfully impose performative virtue practices on the ignorant masses.
Fortunately, MIT has a copious supply of Experts™ ready to deploy The Science at the drop of a grant.
Want to make people recycle more plastic whether or not it makes economic or environmental sense? No problem, we’ve been hiding inconvenient facts about recycling for decades.
Not enough manufacturers want to use all that crummy recycled plastic as feedstock? No problem, we’ll make them take it just like we made gasoline suppliers blend in all that crummy corn ethanol.
Burying plastic waste in modern landfills safely sequesters the carbon contained therein for eons? Phooey, we’d rather spend billions of dollars and burn gigawatt-hours of power trying to suck trace CO2 out of the air. Thanks to the fungible virtue market, we can get governments and greenwashing corporations to pay for it!
Recycling plants have been fingered as the major source of microplastics polluting the environment and getting into the food chain? Uh … look, squirrel!
The important thing is to get the public accustomed to the idea that computer models can take the place of observing real markets, real human behavior, and real-world results when designing and assessing policy. Think of all the jobs and peer reviewed papers this creates for academics that get to program those models! And when policies based on unrealistic academic models don’t work, as has been evident across the entire sorry history of plastic recycling, the only possible answer is … build more models!
Read it and weep.
Story suggested by MIT News