In the early 1990s, diesel fuel was promoted as the environmentally friendly choice for passenger cars as diesel engines use less fuel to match the performance of a petrol engine. Diesel, however, contains more pollutants than petrol.
At the time, policymakers justified their acquiescence, and industry its actions, by claiming a reduction of carbon dioxide emissions. The impact of the other toxic diesel emissions such as particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, nitrogen dioxide, nitrous oxide and nitric oxide, were ignored.
The 2015 scandal exposed diesel car manufacturers that had been installing software, called ‘defeat devices’, in millions of diesel-powered cars to blindside regulators. It was revealed that the ‘cleaner’ diesel was, in fact, polluting 20 to 40 times more than it was meant to.
The petrochemical industry sold the public the idea that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled, even though it knew that to be untrue. It was recently revealed that the industry’s and policymakers’ claims that plastic garbage is valuable because it can be cleaned, separated and recycled were lies.
Plastic waste is not valuable and it never has been and the industry has known this since the early 1970s.
Of all plastic produced worldwide, less than 10 per cent has ever been recycled. Recycling plastic is costly and separating waste is not feasible. Most plastic cannot be recycled at all and only some can be down-cycled once or, at most, twice. After this, it remains what it, in fact, always was ‒ polluting trash.
In recent years, the fact that millions of people are dying prematurely worldwide from pollution has hit public awareness. In some cases, pollution is the ultimate cause of what is being diagnosed as cancer, heart failure and other terminal illnesses.
Most, if not all, public health services and the medical profession worldwide are strangely silent on this situation. Documents have emerged that the industry was aware that the burning of fossil fuels would lead to unhealthy emissions and global warming. So far, 1,500 climate-related lawsuits have been brought before the courts around the world holding the industry to account.
The exploitation of natural resources spiralled into overexploitation, climaxing in a planetary mass extinction event
Greed has led industry leaders and the political class to follow the economic growth model based on the overexploitation of nature. We are now in the middle of the sixth mass extinction of life on earth that may well lead to the extinction of the entire human species and, still, we persist in this destructive economic policy. No industry representative or policymaker have ever warned the public of the dire consequences of such reckless behaviour.
The ingredients of all medicines have been taken from nature. Pharmaceutical companies regularly research indigenous peoples and wild habitats in order to develop new drugs that can be commercialised. The profit motive means that inexpensive or even free natural remedies are sidelined.
In order to perpetuate growth and increase profits, the industry pushes pharma-based solutions. It appears to regard our natural immune system as competition.
Their actions betray an agenda that aims to make humanity pharma-dependent rather than promoting a healthy environment that would allow our immune system, that has evolved over hundreds of millions of years and survived five mass extinctions, to function optimally.
The digital industry uses non-ionising radiation to move invisible programmed electric currents in the space all around us. This is the technology of wireless communication known as WiFi or radio frequency or 4G or 5G.
We are now all living in an environment with non-ionising electromagnetic radiation exposure that is tens of thousands to a million times greater than that normally occurring in nature. Our body’s transmission of information from cell to cell, without which we would quickly die, relies on electrical currents. Our bodies and biological processes have not evolved within such a high radiation environment.
We are told that all this electricity in the space around us does not impact the electricity flows in our bodies. The international standards that guide the ICT industry only recognise the possible thermal effects (burning) on humans of this radiation. Studies and petitions by thousands of scientists and doctors warning that more long-term research is needed before rolling out this technology across the globe are regularly ignored, denied or vilified.
The historic colonisation of the planet by developed countries and the industrial revolution facilitated the globalisation of trade. The scale of international trade fuelled the exploitation of the ecosystems and indigenous peoples, caused air, land and marine pollution. It decimated biodiversity and destroyed natural habitats that create our food, clean air and fresh water.
The exploitation of natural resources spiralled into overexploitation, climaxing in a planetary mass extinction event that will, failing urgent actions, result in the uncontrollable die-off of millions of species.
Later this year, the UN will host world governments at COP15 to discuss biodiversity losses and COP26 to discuss climate change. These initiatives started in the mid-1990s.
In the last 25 years, world governments have met 39 times to discuss biodiversity losses and climate change. In all this time, and for all the rhetoric, the situation, year on year, continued to deteriorate without restraint.
To make matters worse, religions appear powerless in the face of the belief system called technological innovation.
Our faith in the political class and amoral technology has been misplaced and our trust betrayed. All we ever get is incompetence, indifference, denial, half-truths, falsehoods and spin. Nothing is what it seems anymore. We need to challenge and question everything.