'Drowning in plastic trash'

Plastic bottles are seen in a recycle factory

Petrochemical industry lobbyists claim plastic pollution is a recycling problem, not the fault of soaring plastic production

(Image credit: Getty Images)

By Harold Maass, The Week US

published 17 November 2023

'Of course the petrochemical industry wants to make this a recycling issue"

Heather Souvaine Horn in The New Republic

The United Nations' push to curb plastic pollution has been poisoned from the start, says Heather Souvaine Horn in The New Republic. Negotiators gathered in Nairobi this week are making a third attempt to "broker a treaty to reduce plastic pollution," but the meeting is full of petrochemical industry lobbyists claiming the problem is recycling, not soaring plastic production. This "bureaucratic performance art would be funny were it not for the deadly seriousness of the crisis."

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The Israel-Hamas war has "triggered a true clash inside the Democratic Party," says Susan B. Glasser in The New Yorker. "Traditional liberal internationalists such as Biden," who are firmly backing Israel, are at odds with "the Party's left flank," which views "Israel as an apartheid state that has left Palestinians little choice but violent resistance." If the war doesn't end soon, the divided party "will only have a harder time standing up against Trump."

How "sweet" to hear House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) taking on the left's twisting of Thomas Jefferson's meaning when he wrote about the "separation of church and state," says Carmel Richardson in The American Conservative. Jefferson coined the term in a letter to Connecticut Baptists to ease their concerns about religious liberty, not to provide a "blank check to bar Christianity from the public square." Johnson is restoring hope we might still rebuild this "once-Christian nation."

Iran-backed militias are declaring support for Palestinians without jumping into Hamas' war with Israel, says Lina Khatib at Bloomberg. Hezbollah in Lebanon and Houthis in Yemen have fired some missiles at Israel. For now, though, the danger of Iran-backed groups in the region "sacrificing their domestic gains" for "the sake of Hamas is low." But the longer the war drags on "the greater the risk of a catastrophic miscalculation that sets off a wider conflict."

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Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.