India, Keurig, and real environmentalism

This past week the air was the worst it’s been all year in the capital, with microscopic particles that can affect breathing and health spiking to 75 times the level considered safe by the World Health Organization.

Experts have compared breathing the air to smoking a couple of packs of cigarettes a day. The Lancet medical journal recently estimated that some 2.5 million Indians die each year from pollution.

United Airlines suspended its flights between New Delhi and Newark, New Jersey, for Saturday and Sunday because of the heavy air pollution in the Indian capital, said Sonia, an airline official who uses one name.
She said doctors in recent days have been dealing with a 20 percent spike in emergency hospital admissions from people suffering heart and lung problems. And that’s in a city, she said, where one in every three children already has compromised lungs.

Enter Keurig

The coffee giant sailed into political tides over Sean Hannity’s interview with Roy Moore. Their social media fiasco, some might call it, prompted protests by loyal Hannity supporters and praise from the left. So while Hannity fanatics may be boycotting Keuring, they are unknowingly doing a very good thing for the environment. The premise of Keurig is humanity at its dumbests. Keurig found a way to trick people into paying more for coffee by offering convenience and an expensive machine to deliver that convenience. This expensive machine Keurig 2.0 only takes official K-Cups because it’s more computer than coffee maker. Somehow the pods they made weren’t even a recyclable plastic which furthers how detrimental these things are for the environment. However recycling barely mitigates this problem because, humans suck at it and recycling plastic only creates an inferior plastic. That is why companies use “virgin” material as a value proposition for vinyl/plastic products.
K-Cups are basically the “water bottles of coffee” except less recyclable. But disposable water bottles are evidence of the limitations of recycling. Keurig is simply the same thing as Juicero except, it caught on.

Further Perspectives

Vice: Keurig Coffee Machines Are Hell Devices That Everyone Should Boycott

Keurig manufactures a hell machine that has been disavowed by its inventor. It encapsulates the very worst facets of late capitalism and should be boycotted by everyone for reasons that have nothing to do with Hannity. Besides making a product that is horrendous for the environment in its very premise, Keurig was also a pioneer in creating unrepairable, proprietary, single-use hardware and bringing Digital Rights Management and patent law loopholes to coffee machines.
If you’re not familiar, Keurig machines are designed to make single servings of coffee. “K-Cups” are single-serving plastic coffee pods that are disposable, not compostable, and, for the most part, not recyclable (Keurig introduced its first recyclable K-Cups last year and hopes to make all of its K-Cups recyclable by 2020)
Roughly 10 billion K-Cups are sold each year; a 2015 story by The Atlantic noted that if you laid out all the K-Cups sold in 2014 end-to-end, it would circle the globe roughly 10.5 times. Most of these are not recyclable because only a handful of K-Cups are recyclable as of this writing.
Inventor John Sylvan, who left Keurig several years ago, told The Atlantic that Keurigs are “kind of expensive to use” and noted that “no matter what they say about recycling, those things will never be recyclable.” This is because humans are shitty at recycling in general—how many plastic water bottles have you seen end up in trash cans—and most recycled things are actually down cycled, meaning they become something less useful as they go through its end-of-life.

Forbes: Why Juicero Needs To Be Squeezed Out Of Existence

To the uninitiated, Juicero is a $400 cold press juicing machine that uses $8 packs that, it turns out, you can squeeze by hand (although the CEO does not want you to do this). The tech blogs and Twitter have been having a field day with the machine — some love it while some are calling it out. Why, though? Google Ventures and other investors have poured over $120 million into a company that is effectively redundant.
A product that isn’t needed and should have had the sense to be better priced or had the marketing toned down significantly. The world needs more sense and value right now, and Juicero provides too little of both.

Final Thoughts

The Left constantly criticizes conservatives and Republicans for not caring about the environment. They cite evidence like opposition to the Paris Climate Accord, Kyoto Protocol, and unaccountable EPA regulations, ignoring the core principles of small government conservatism. However, India clearly shows that they don’t care about the environment despite supporting these things. As mention above they will only fulfill their energy ambitions if given discounts and money. Without these things, India will happily continue to pollute the earth with no remorse. India wants OPM to make their energy grid more self-sustainable. Gee, if someone gave me money to buy solar panels, I’d be a fool not to use OPM to buy something that will provide an economic benefit for years to come. This is what India is doing and they are championing the Paris Climate Accord in order to receive OPM. That’s not environmentalism, that’s phonyism.
Now, Keurig is the most socially irresponsible product to exist in this decade. If you truly care about the environment, you would boycott this product regardless of Hannity. If you truly care about the environment, you would avoid/limit your use of disposable water bottles. I hate my city water, but instead of routinely purchasing water bottles, we have a Brita filter pitcher. Problem solved and we go through a lot of water. You might be reading this and think I claim Americans don’t care about the environment, and you’re close.
Americans do care, but we aren’t taught how to care. Liberals preach that the government should solve pollution by regulating corporations and private citizens. But this removes the personal accountability for our consumer choices. We create a demand for irresponsible products, so companies supply it. Instead of relying on government regulation, we should take actions ourselves. We need to care for the environment with our consumption and at local levels, rather than rely on federal and global measures, which historically haven’t accomplished a thing.
It’s the same fallacy as equating welfare to charity. Many people support government entitlements to compensate for their lack of private charity. Likewise, many on the left support government action to compensate for their own lack of environmentalism.