How come that the most sought after solution to our problems in sustainability is actually NOT REAL?
There are many factors that contributed towards this misconception that sustainable development is possible. TLDR; it is not.
These kind of factors are intentional to force a phenomenon called "greenwashing". Governments, oil companies, and other NGOs that are paid to educate, spread this misinformation about sustainability and provide bogus researches about sustainable development.
Why is sustainable development impossible?§
Think about it, every time a pair of reproductively-capable human beings procreate, a new human being in need of nourishment is added in the population. To get this nourishment, providers such as farmers, fishermen, and other food producers are forced to "scalp" more natural habitats to gain space for food production.
However, sustainable development defenders (let us call them SDDs from now on), show us some graphs, specifically, a logarithmic trend of a graph and population that says that to achieve sustainability, the graph should start to flatline at some hypothetical asymptote (maximum). Unfortunately, this fails to see population growth is always exponential. Even if that graph shows a near flatline, converting that graph to a linear graph will show that food consumption, habitat destruction, and human population is always on the rise. Why is it that we fail to see this?
Because people do not know how to read graphs. Even so-called experts fail to interpret them.
Reduce Reuse Recycle. A Myth.§
Since you were zero years old and your parents where still small children, they have been taught the triple Rs, famously known as Reduce Reuse Recycle. The rationale is to lessen the impacts of trash taking up space in the environment. Well, this is what the SDDs taught you and your parents and your parents' parents.
Unfortunately, all about this reduce, reuse, and recycle, it depends if we have any facilities at all to commit to lessening the impacts of trash. Even developed countries throw their trash to developing countries, albeit, discreetly and hidden from the media.
looks at Canada throwing trash to the Philippines
Until then, as population grows, trash on both land and water, also grow exponentially.
Paper Bag and plastic bag rotation§
This one is funny because it does not really solve the problem. Producing paper requires a lot of energy, harmful chemicals, and lots of trees if recycled paper is not viable. And the waste product is chemicals, and more greenhouse gases in the form of water vapor and carbon dioxide. Plastic requires lots of energy to produce too.
SDDs push this notion that we should rotate usage of both plastic bags and paper bags on some days and on other days. Again, it is bogus, it does not really solve the current problem of trash. Growing population always equates to growing production of these materials.
Segregation of trash. A matter of etiquette.§
Somewhat related to Reduce Reuse Recycle, SDDs taught people that we should segregate trash. In example, biodegradable and non-biodegradable. But this is more of a matter of etiquette.
I agree you should segregate your trash but the growing notion that it helps solve the problem with landfills and ocean trash is actually false. We cannot keep up on reducing trash as population grows. Etiquette does not solve the trash problem.
Food prices are rising and that makes sense§
This is because there are more mouths to feed and more space to acquire. This is another proof that sustainability is false and it is pretty clear that this trend will continue.
Where is the citation?§
Do I need to? It's hard to keep up putting references but it's pretty clear that COP28 is a failure 🙄
Conclusion§
Sustainable Development is a myth.