It is good to see environmental concerns voiced by someone with “Skin in the Game”, of a commercial company, even if initially I was a little disappointed on finding the article wasn’t really about software, this is a much bigger issue not normally talked about by folks with any stake in the profit driven economy.
Personally, I think the generation of pollution will never be fixed as long as our world is profit driven.
Many folk reading what I just wrote will have switched off at that point, thinking “Here we go, more socialist ranting”.
Hey-ho. The smartest folk are the ones still curious, and they are the ones who will make a difference. The health of our planet is not about socialism or capitalism, it transcends politics altogether.
Waste is shipped to poorer countries in exchange for payment for one reason; it is more profitable than paying for the waste to be processed at source. This will never change as long as an imbalance in wealth exists between countries.
I do not believe we will see this change as long as business, and thus the world, is driven simply for profit. Any decision to “Do the right thing” with any impacts on profit, will always be over-ridden by shareholders who, if put to an anonymous vote, the majority will always choose to maximise what they put in their pockets, above all other things.
Just take one look at those very elderly, extremely wealthy people in positions of power in the world, who seem literally hell-bent to make yet more personal wealth. What drives people already “Knocking on death’s door”, to keep busting their asses trying to make yet more money, when they already have personal wealth on the scale of a small country? That mentality has to be compared with one still breathing in an otherwise airtight coffin, who would choose to have the last hole plugged, as long as it is by a tightly rolled wad of banknotes.
They are the ones setting the behavior everyone else aspires to.
Western governments are really just more profit driven businesses, the shareholders are the taxpayers. If a government was to take responsibility for dealing with the waste, and the question is put to the people, to choose whether or not to do the right thing with the waste, again the majority will choose to pay less tax, and keep shipping out the waste.
It is an ideological problem with no solution as long as a majority of people perceive their own personal world being improved by personally increasing their wealth, even knowing the expense to the planet (“not in my backyard”), we will continue destroying our planet.
Somehow, the world’s ideology needs to change, from just being driven for profit, hopefully before it is too late.
There are better ways to do things, and some of us do have real technical solutions, but none of them will happen, as long as people do not realise real wealth for all is possible, by a different mindset than the one that drives every individual to maximise their own personal wealth, relative to others, as their main priority.
