The decline and fall.

Electric cars are eating into oil demand, so these companies have decided plastic is their future, and that is why they defend it the way they do. Completely criminal!

Plastic recycling was never a real idea. It was a lie, a strategy to avoid regulation, which is a different thing entirely, and Richard Wiles has Big Oil's own memos saying so. Same PR BS as the climate lying. And this one ends up inside all of us.

We could be building every one of these centers on wind and solar and batteries and pulling the grid forward. That should be the law. Instead, we are handing the whole boom to the methane industry, the most potent greenhouse gas there is.

It is not one plant and it is not one billionaire. There are thousands of these AI data centers going up across the United States, most of them with their own dedicated power supply, and a lot of that supply is polluting methane gas, which they wanna convince us is "clean natural gas".

Electric cars are eating into oil demand, so these companies have decided plastic is their future, and that is why they defend it the way they do. Completely criminal!

Plastic recycling was never a real idea. It was a lie, a strategy to avoid regulation, which is a different thing entirely, and Richard Wiles has Big Oil's own memos saying so. Same PR BS as the climate lying. And this one ends up inside all of us.

So....there's a lot of tea spilled about a lot of media outlets' willingness to be tools of corporate propaganda in my book. In hindsight, I probably should NOT have been surprised that many of those same outlets declined to run op-eds pegged to the book. But I kinda was! What thin-skinned babies!

So here's what I can't put down. Was Ben & Jerry's proof that business can change the world, or proof that it can't survive being owned by people who don't care? Ben has an answer. It's more hopeful than mine.

And none of this is really about ice cream. Ben was arrested at a Congressional hearing over bombs going to Israel while kids here get cut from food programs. Jerry Greenfield quit the company that has his own name on it. Neither of those was a gesture. They cost them.

His advice to anyone starting something: you don't need to please everybody, you just need to please a few people a lot. Every company that dumped DEI the week Trump frowned at it did the reverse. Ben's read is that they never meant any of it to begin with.

Ben still thinks a company is one of the sharpest tools anyone has, and he's specific about it: put the values in the bylaws, the corporate purpose, the B Corp charter. Day one, not year ten.