John Oliver kicked off tonight last week with a segment that addressed the tragedy last week in Atlanta, when a 21-year-old white man shot dead eight people, including six Asian women, in an attack that resembled Asian massage parlors .
There has been an outpouring of support, solidarity with Asian Americans and outrage over the predictable horrors of Donald Trump’s fears surrounding the ‘China virus’ along with decades of anti-Asian racism. And there were also ‘terrible reactions’, Oliver said, like Capt. Jay Baker of the Sheriff of Cherokee in Atlanta, who apparently had sympathy for the shooter and the ‘bad day’ that led to his actions. “Absolutely, not fucking,” Oliver replied to the footage from Baker’s press conference. ‘You do understand that this is a press conference on mass murder, right? You can not happen what happened that way. ‘
Details of the shooting were still emerging, but a white man driving through provinces to two different towns went to three businesses in Asia and shot dead six Asian women in a city that was only about 4% sure is from Asia because it looks a lot more like a hate crime than a ‘bad fucking day,’ ‘Oliver said.
“Asian American and Asian immigrant communities have long felt very vulnerable, especially now,” Oliver continued. ‘And for a group whose suffering has historically felt invisible to the media and the country in general, it is important that we acknowledge the pain now.
“But more than that, the dismantling of anti-Asian prejudices must still be an important part of the dismantling of the stings that the white supremacy has over this country,” he added. “Because we’ve seen since the foundation and still see this week, people will bend over backwards to call racism anything other than what it is.”
However, Oliver’s main segment has fueled the scourge of plastic pollution and the myth of recycling. Despite the ubiquity of the chase-arrow recycling symbol, the vast majority of plastic is neither recyclable nor recyclable. Instead, it clogs landfills, landfills and oceans, which permeate our food intake – one study estimated that people ingest microplastics from a credit card every week. “What kind of statement does Capitol One’s new slogan state: ‘What’s in your stomach?’ Oliver joked.
Oliver produced the history of plastic and how manufacturers invented the idea under the guise of environmentalists, that “it is up to you, the consumer, to stop pollution”, he said. “It was an important line in the recycling movement, often bankrolled by companies that wanted to carry the message, that it is your responsibility to deal with the environmental impact of their products.”
This message is embodied by the national myth about the efficiency of recycling; Despite knowing that most plastics – more than 90% – are not recyclable, the industry urged lawmakers to require the recycling symbol for hunting arrows to be placed on all of their products, and urged local governments to launch recycling programs. “Honestly, it was not that hard for them to convince us that all their waste is recyclable because we so want to believe it,” Oliver said. “Lies go down easier if you want them to be true.”
The truth, Oliver said, is that most U.S. plastic waste was sold to China until it banned the import of plastic in 2018; now it is dwindling in domestic landfills or toxic landfills in countries like Myanmar as well as in the ocean. And the scale is staggering: by 2050, there will be more plastic by weight than fish in the sea; the giant garbage can in the Pacific Ocean is now larger than France, Germany and Spain combined.
But frustratingly, the plastics industry responds to all the damage you’ve seen, to make a big show of small improvement and then return to what they’ve always done, which spurs the idea that if we as consumers would just be hard try enough, we can make our plastic problem go away, ”Oliver said. But “our personal behavior is not the biggest culprit here, despite what the plastics industry has spent decades and millions of dollars trying to convince us.”
Oliver advocated for a well-thought-out, targeted ban on disposable plastics (bags and take-off containers), and extensive producer responsibility legislation (EPR) that would shift responsibility and the collection costs from the public sector to the actual producers of plastic waste.
The US is one of the few developed countries without an extensive law on producer responsibility for plastics – ‘because it’s natural’, Oliver said – although the law on breaking plastic pollution will be introduced to Congress again soon. “As plastic production is expected to triple by 2050, we will soon need a version of an EPR law,” he said.
“The real behavioral change has to come from plastic manufacturers themselves,” Oliver concluded. “Without it, nothing significant will happen.”