With a final round of negotiations on a global plastics treaty set to take place later this year in Busan, South Korea, an autopsy is premature, especially with the dynamics changing daily. For a while, the international regime to combat plastic pollution was looking dead, and deadly, on arrival, looking to far underperform even the one we designed for the climate: every month, we have new announcements about the latest, hottest month on record and the world’s top scientists expect global heating to blast past 1.5°C, causing famines, conflicts and mass migration driven by far more intense heatwaves, wildfires and storms. You would think the countries of the world would stop taking marching orders from the fossil fuel and petrochemical industry. Think again. At the fourth round of negotiations last April in Ottawa, Canada, almost two hundred fossil fuel and petrochemical industry lobbyists showed up. Major players like Exxon and the American Chemistry Council, who have been actively lobbying the Biden-Harris Administration to do nothing to limit their ability to produce gross amounts of plastic, were casting a watching eye. A giant otter with a discarded single-use plastic bottle. Image by Paul Williams via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0). It worked in Ottawa. U.S. rhetoric around measures to address plastic pollution settled on parroting industry talking points, focusing on waste management and recycling while sidestepping any measures that would actually reduce the production of plastics itself, also referred to as primary plastic polymers. That put the U.S. on the side of…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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