The same trick is played with recycling. Blame the end consumer for a supply chain completely out of their control.
The biggest polluters are corporations and we stop their pollution by regulation. These mega corps would have you believe that it’s really your fault PFAS are everywhere because you shouldn’t have bought those Teflon coated products. Nevermind the fact that Teflon is everywhere a nonstick surface is needed.
Yep. The personal responsibility gambit (or should I say fallacy?).
It was such a clever idea, starting with Coca Cola’s “Litterbug” campaign (where they campaigned against bottle deposits under the guise of wanting “personal responsibility” over “regulations.”)
It’s “up to the consumer” to make the right choices. It just so happens that the meat from decently treated animals is five times more expensive and that you have to drive 100 miles to buy it. Or that being environmentally conscious has been made into a tiring exercise in futility where you constantly have to inconvenience yourself.
As an added bonus, individuals trying to convince other individuals to inconvenience themselves in the same way can be painted as obnoxious, holier-than-thou and insufferable. A real double win for unscrupulous big business.
The fact that teflon is still everywhere should be proof enough that regulations are worthless in the face of capitalism (a feature of course, not a bug)
Not really, PFAS have been almost completely unregulated. It is just in the last 2 years that we are starting to see PFAS regulations globally. Up until that point, we allowed companies to literally just dump them down the rain or in a lake.
If regulations were so worthless, you should be asking yourself why every single industry fights new ones. Why the supreme court in the US has taken a position to kill Chevron Deference which weakens federal agencies ability to regulate.
The failure isn’t regulations, the failure is a government system that severely neuters the ability of a government to regulate. The failure is a bunch of science denying corporate captured politicians that don’t care how they destroy the planet.
No, the failure is capitalism and those corporations not wanting to be regulated owning the governments making the regulations.
Which is precisely why any regulation under capitalism is toothless bunk, since it is designed by and for the corporations, to make sure they can keep making money despite it.
Once in a while having a regulation actually come in in time for it to have any impact is like a broken clock being right twice a day, not proof that regulation under capitalism do anything (you claim that teflon now being regulated means regulations work, but can you seriously not see that it taking that long to get bare minimum regulation after decades of pollution and poisoning of consumers is proof that regulations are merely a lip service paid by government to the public to pretend like they’re acting in our favour?).
The point isn’t - don’t regulate industry, it’s - at the point where industry has control of government, regulation is meaningless and always in their service, otherwise they wouldn’t concede (a little like greenwashing - the oil companies commit to producing x amount of green energy, but what they don’t tell you is that that x amount is a tiny fraction of their entire production capability, which they’ll continue to use oil for. We’re never going to get them to stop using oil, because they just don’t have to, no legislation will ever be allowed to pass that will stop them. Which is why eating the rich and blowing up their pipelines is the answer, but I digress).
Eh, don’t really disagree with what you are saying. The problem is money and industry influence in politics and it’s something that needs to be eliminated. I don’t quiet take your point that regulations don’t matter. Assuming money and industry influence are removed from politics we’d see laws and regulations more line with the public interest over corporate interest.
Even if we fully ditched capitalism, you’d still need/want regulations setting the bounds on how government can/should operate.
Yup.
The same trick is played with recycling. Blame the end consumer for a supply chain completely out of their control.
The biggest polluters are corporations and we stop their pollution by regulation. These mega corps would have you believe that it’s really your fault PFAS are everywhere because you shouldn’t have bought those Teflon coated products. Nevermind the fact that Teflon is everywhere a nonstick surface is needed.
Yep. The personal responsibility gambit (or should I say fallacy?).
It was such a clever idea, starting with Coca Cola’s “Litterbug” campaign (where they campaigned against bottle deposits under the guise of wanting “personal responsibility” over “regulations.”)
It’s “up to the consumer” to make the right choices. It just so happens that the meat from decently treated animals is five times more expensive and that you have to drive 100 miles to buy it. Or that being environmentally conscious has been made into a tiring exercise in futility where you constantly have to inconvenience yourself.
As an added bonus, individuals trying to convince other individuals to inconvenience themselves in the same way can be painted as obnoxious, holier-than-thou and insufferable. A real double win for unscrupulous big business.
The fact that teflon is still everywhere should be proof enough that regulations are worthless in the face of capitalism (a feature of course, not a bug)
Not really, PFAS have been almost completely unregulated. It is just in the last 2 years that we are starting to see PFAS regulations globally. Up until that point, we allowed companies to literally just dump them down the rain or in a lake.
If regulations were so worthless, you should be asking yourself why every single industry fights new ones. Why the supreme court in the US has taken a position to kill Chevron Deference which weakens federal agencies ability to regulate.
The failure isn’t regulations, the failure is a government system that severely neuters the ability of a government to regulate. The failure is a bunch of science denying corporate captured politicians that don’t care how they destroy the planet.
No, the failure is capitalism and those corporations not wanting to be regulated owning the governments making the regulations.
Which is precisely why any regulation under capitalism is toothless bunk, since it is designed by and for the corporations, to make sure they can keep making money despite it.
Once in a while having a regulation actually come in in time for it to have any impact is like a broken clock being right twice a day, not proof that regulation under capitalism do anything (you claim that teflon now being regulated means regulations work, but can you seriously not see that it taking that long to get bare minimum regulation after decades of pollution and poisoning of consumers is proof that regulations are merely a lip service paid by government to the public to pretend like they’re acting in our favour?).
The point isn’t - don’t regulate industry, it’s - at the point where industry has control of government, regulation is meaningless and always in their service, otherwise they wouldn’t concede (a little like greenwashing - the oil companies commit to producing x amount of green energy, but what they don’t tell you is that that x amount is a tiny fraction of their entire production capability, which they’ll continue to use oil for. We’re never going to get them to stop using oil, because they just don’t have to, no legislation will ever be allowed to pass that will stop them. Which is why eating the rich and blowing up their pipelines is the answer, but I digress).
Eh, don’t really disagree with what you are saying. The problem is money and industry influence in politics and it’s something that needs to be eliminated. I don’t quiet take your point that regulations don’t matter. Assuming money and industry influence are removed from politics we’d see laws and regulations more line with the public interest over corporate interest.
Even if we fully ditched capitalism, you’d still need/want regulations setting the bounds on how government can/should operate.