November 17, 2023

IBM and te EU have stopped advertising on X/Twitter.

This after Musk re-posted/Tweeted antisemitic content.

Also, because:

Media watchdog Media Matters said it found that corporate advertisements by IBM, Apple, Oracle and Comcast's Xfinity were being placed alongside antisemitic content. (Reuters)

The platform's revenue from ads has declined significantly this year:

Reuters reported in October that monthly U.S. ad revenue at X has declined at least 55% year-over-year each month since Musk bought the company in October 2022, citing third-party data provided to Reuters.

There is no reason to be on X anymore. The analytics cannot be believed, no one is likely seeing your content, and it is a cesspool of stupid right-wing trolls and bots.

Plastic's share of global emissions will increase to about 1/5 by 2040, up from 5% today.

Less than 10% of plastic is recycled or is planned to be recycled. This is because most "recycling" plastic results in a degraded product that is not useful for what we use plastics for.

Only $17.5bn has been invested in recycling. Compare this with the OECD's estimate that the needed investment $1tn by 2040 to mitigate a plastics nightmare for health.

Even if that investment were to be made (and it will not be), there is no way to recycle our way out of the mess. We can only reduce the use of plastics in our lives. This will only be done through regulation.

Of course, we are not really focused on that.

In Canada, putting plastics into the list of "toxic" substances was overturned by the top court yesterday. Putting plastic on that list allowed the—mostly irrelevant—banning on some single-use plastics. That ban was supposed to come online as of December. But, the lawsuit launched and won by the chemical and oil industry seems to have squashed that.

Not to mention that most companies have been getting away with polluting our environment with plastic by-products for decades. Recently there has been a collection of lawsuits aimed at not the byproducts but the plastic waste itself:

PepsiCo sued by New York state for plastic pollution

• PepsiCo, maker of Pepsi, Doritos and other snacks, is the world's second biggest food company after industry leader Nestle.

This action is aimed at the fact over 17% of plastic waste in the Buffalo River is Pepsi product packaging.

This is as PepsiCo has spent billions in advertising itself as a very environmentally conscious company.

The only way to deal with this kind of pollution is to address it at its source and provide alternatives. This will take significant re-investment.

Sound familiar? Yes, capitalism is very bad at avoiding catastrophes of its own making—even when we know that we are doing it.