While our politicians and citizens complain about our borders we don’t often, if ever, take a look at ourselves.
For example (from The Guardian )
The US also exports huge and growing quantities of hazardous waste to its northern neighbor Canada – a total of 1.4m tons over five years. The exports, including chemicals like cyanide, contaminated soils, batteries and other metal-containing wastes, have increased by 25% over that time period, according to EPA data.
While Mexico only accepts materials headed for reclamation or recycling, Canada accepts waste for disposal as well.
Experts say they are more confident in Canada’s ability to manage the waste than Mexico’s, but in a number of cases environmentalists worry that the imports are contributing to pollution.
“Why are Americans so eager to send their waste outside of the US?” asked environmental toxicologist and activist Daniel Green, a former deputy leader of Canada’s Green party. “We understand that the laws make it to their advantage when US waste crosses an international border. So the lawyers of these US companies say, ‘If you get rid of the waste, you get rid of the liability.’”
We are being a bad neighbor to Canada right now, and they don’t deserve it. However, this isn’t an example of that since they are willing to accept our waste and we pay them.
One of the many problems with seeing everything as transactional is the shallowness of thought. While a transaction is indeed taking place between consenting adults, that does not mean that the transaction is healthy, fair, or even legal.
Canada does not benefit from accepting our toxic waste. Unlike us, they work to be good neighbors and stewards of the planet.
And Trump is really pissing them off. They are reevaluating their supply of electricity to us. And regarding our toxic wastes:
“We are not the trash can of the United States,” Ruba Ghazal, an opposition member of Quebec’s parliament, said at a press conference. She said it is unacceptable for Quebec’s ruling conservative party to “expropriate a city to give it to Trump’s United States”.
It’s a shame recycling wasn’t been built into the DNA of American manufacturing - we’ll sell you our tires, and then accept and reprocess old dead tires. Simply as a part of doing business. Why don’t didn’t battery producers champion efficient recollection and recycling of the billions of batteries they sell. Because it just wasn’t a priority, not within the wheel house of our mind, it was always about trying to consume as much as possible, who cared about it after closing the sale - and so on and so forth. Earth’s heath simply didn’t seem to matter, how could we have imagined such a mess, …
It’s always been about maximizing profits and increasing wealth - of course we can see the kind of over the top krap, those extra earning go into. Guy’s a great example of the concept of, a SOCIAL CONSCIOUS, being totally anathema to all he believes - I got mine and f you and yours sort of mentality that dominates mass thinking of the affluent and wannabes.
Just have to follow a trash collection vehicle to get a hint of how obscenely, gleefully wasteful the consumer classes and the rich classes have become.
So, your mother never told you that just because other kids are doing something doesn’t mean it’s okay for you to do it?
Again, using tu quoque against Canada is not a valid argument.
And you also brought up the legality of our waste disposal, which brings to mind another way in which we are terrible neighbors. We interpret pacts/conventions with other countries in the most selfish and irresponsible ways possible. Just look at how we react to the Basel Convention.
And to add insult to injury, this pathetic trump administration is proving that it doesn’t even care about our own people or their environment, much less about global climate change.
It is absolutely the subject. I can’t believe you miss that. Anytime a country does something bad that affects others, they are being a bad neighbor.
You write that it is a “fact that shipping toxic waste around the world is bad for the environment” but you seem now to think that doesn’t make a country doing so a bad neighbor.
Wow. It’s just one of many things these days, but yeah. It’s not an incorrect belief - it’s an actual fact and the reason Canada’s citizens are protesting. They see us as a “bad neighbor.”
We never heard that this is a problem for them before the tariffs. Canadians are angry at us because of the tariffs, and when your angry at someone for one thing, you become angry at other, less important things.
Oh, how slippery your arguments. You want to dismiss all of the points made thus far by claiming it’s just because they are angry about tariffs. That’s the trump method of argument - keep so many balls/distractions in the air that it’s impossible to focus.
But you can’t dismiss the fact u.s. waste exports are a big problem - making us a bad neighbor. Nor can you say that they (Canada) haven’t recognized our abuse earlier. And our neighbors aren’t limited to Canada and Mexico. All countries are our neighbors on this tiny blue ball.
Finally, I’ll leave you with an older article reconfirming what bad neighbors we are.
