Criminally intense lobbying
by the fossil fuel industry in the drafting of a “Paris Agreement” for the Plastic
Crisis should not come as a surprise, but as an alarm of consolidation of abusive
power in treaty negotiations with potential consequence of replicating the
Paris Agreement’s innumerable semantics-based instances of inefficacy and inertia.
By basing itself at the centre of the negotiations, and outnumbering indigenous
peoples and well-intentioned, radical environmental action groups, the
plastics-cum-oil industry lobbyists is repeating its modus operandi of preserving
its financial and extractive interests perniciously, and politically, the
surrounding circumstances could not have exceeded their expectations- with the
godfather enthusing the Big Oil with his “drill, baby, drill” declaration
smoothening the terrain for the latter to project and document skyrocketing oil
production levels. It is also not a surprise that these big fossil fuel giants
have reneged
on their already contestable “sustainability” and “net-zero” commitments, with
now clearly investing more in fracking, drilling and extracting crude from the
Shadow Lands- both onshore and offshore.
Interrogating the pervasiveness of plastic as an
indispensable material commodity will unsurprisingly lead to a refined version
of extractivism- Crude Capitalism as borrowed from the theorisation by
Adam Hanieh. Unsurprisingly, plastic, derived as a by-product of crude oil
refinement processes, is an expansion of the Big Oil’s stranglehold on the
global industrial basics market- while oil and gas provide energy, plastic “creates” and conceptualises new commodities, defined by its diabolical
versatility. Hanieh tracks the evolution of the petrochemical industry in Crude
Capitalism, and centres militarism of World War II along with a subsequent takeover
by US-based Oil giants of a predominantly German invention in the geopolitical story
of plastic and other synthetic polymers including rubber.
“By de-coupling commodity production from nature, there was a radical reduction in the time taken to produce commodities, and an end to any limits on the quantity and diversity of goods produced. This qualitative transformation in the substance of commodity production came with far reaching ecological implications. As synthetic materials began to accumulate in ever-increasing quantities throughout the environment, their disruptive toxic effects soon became apparent – yet another manifestation of the Great Acceleration enabled by the transition to oil.”
- Crude Capitalism
One should take cognisance of
the fact that this is not the first time that corporate interests have hijacked
international discussion on legal mechanisms for ecological protection.
Lobbyists from Big Oil, Big Agriculture and Big Corporate have captured
CoPs of the UNFCCC constantly, and even increasingly, with the host
countries themselves being dependent on crude economy-derived royalties, such
as Egypt, UAE and Azerbaijan. Their overshadowing interests lead to advocacy
for “market-based solutions” such as the massive failure called carbon credit
system, transition from coal to oil (based on the fake claim of oil being a
“clean energy source”) and maintaining oil dependency for perpetuity, inter
alia, rather than system overhaul and questioning of the neoliberal-industrial-oil
complex paradigm. The fact that our environmental treaties are soft agreements
should not be normalised; there is a set of non-legal reasons for that. These
treaties, due to lobbying helped by the principles of international law and a
frail enforcement/judicial mechanism, are also situated in a world where power
is condensed in a few private entities, aided by the governments that are
supposed to fulfil democratic mandate through preserving “public trust” and
“precaution”. And, predominantly, this power emanates from control over Crude,
Coal and derivatively, Plastic. While Busan failed, what happens in Geneva,
unfortunately, comes with a foreboding.
[PS.- be sceptical of the term
“sustainability”. In all likelihood, it is used by Big Corporate to fool you.]
