JJohn Oliver kicked off Last Week Tonight on Sunday with a segment addressing last week’s tragedy in Atlanta, when a 21-year-old white man shot and killed eight people, including six Asian women, in an attack that appeared to target halls of asian massage.
There was a demonstration of support, solidarity with Asian Americans and outrage at the predictably terrible culmination of Donald Trump’s fear propaganda about the “China virus” combined with decades of anti-Asian racism. And there were some “terrible reactions too,” said Oliver, like Captain Jay Baker, of the Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office in Atlanta, who seemed to sympathize with the sniper and the “bad day” that led to his actions. “Absolutely, no,” Oliver responded to the footage from Baker’s press conference. “You understand that this is a press conference on mass murder, right? You cannot minimize what happened like that. “
Details of the shooting were still emerging, but “a white man driving through counties to two different cities, going to three Asian-owned companies, shooting and killing six Asian women in a city that has only about 4% of Asians safe as shit looks much more like a hate crime than a ‘bad day’, ”said Oliver.
“The Asian American and Asian immigrant communities have been feeling extremely vulnerable for a long time, especially now,” continued Oliver. “And for a group whose suffering historically seemed invisible to the media and the country in general, it is important that we recognize this pain now.
“But more than that, dismantling anti-Asian prejudice should be another fundamental part of dismantling the stranglehold that white supremacy has over this country,” he added. “Because, as we’ve seen since its founding, and we continue to see it this week, people are going to bend over to call racism anything other than what it is.”
Oliver’s main segment, however, has unraveled the scourge of plastic pollution and the myth of recycling fueled by the industry. Despite the ubiquity of the chasing arrows recycling symbol, the vast majority of plastic is neither recycled nor recyclable. Instead, it clogs landfills, dumps and oceans, permeating our food intake – a study estimated that humans ingest microplastic equivalent to a credit card every week. “What explains the new Capitol One slogan: what’s in your stomach?” Oliver joked.
Oliver investigated the history of plastic production and how manufacturers propagated the idea, under the guise of environmentalism, that “it is up to you, the consumer, to stop pollution,” he said. “This has been one of the main lines of the recycling movement, often financed by companies that wanted to convey the message that it is their responsibility to deal with the environmental impact of their products.”
This message is synthesized by the national myth about the effectiveness of recycling; despite knowing that most plastic – more than 90% – cannot be recycled, the industry pressured state legislators to demand that the chasing arrow recycling symbol be placed on all its products and encouraged local governments to establish sidewalk recycling programs. “Honestly, it wasn’t that hard for them to convince us that all of their waste is recyclable, because we really want to believe that,” said Oliver. “Lies fall more easily when you want them to be true.”
The truth, Oliver said, is that most U.S. plastic waste was sold to China until plastic imports were banned in 2018; now he languishes in domestic dumps or toxic landfills in countries like Myanmar, as well as in the ocean. And the scale is impressive: in 2050, there will be more plastic by weight than fish in the ocean; the giant garbage patch in the Pacific is now bigger than France, Germany and Spain combined.
However, “frustratingly, the plastic industry’s response to all the damage you’ve seen is to give a big demonstration of small improvements and then revert to what it has always done, which is strongly pushing the idea that if we , as consumers, if we simply tried hard enough, we could solve our problem with plastic, “said Oliver. But” our personal behavior is not the main culprit here, despite what the plastics industry has spent decades and millions of dollars trying to convince us of. ”.
Oliver advocated careful, targeted bans on single-use plastics (bags and travel containers) and extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws that would shift responsibility and collection costs from the public sector to the real producers of plastic waste.
The United States is one of the few developed countries without an extended producer responsibility law for plastic – “because, of course it is,” said Oliver – although the Plastic Pollution Release Act will be presented to Congress again soon. Since plastic production is expected to triple by 2050, “we will need some version of an EPR law to pass, and soon,” he said.
“The real change in behavior must come from the plastics manufacturers themselves,” concluded Oliver. “Without that, nothing significant is going to happen.”