If you really cared about ‘climate change’ you’d either stop wearing clothes or just make your own, you know. This comes from the excitable climate cultist mind of Elizabeth Cline, the author of “The Conscious Closet: The Revolutionary Guide to Looking Good While Doing Good.â€
Wear Clothes? Then You’re Part of the Problem
Climate protests drew millions around the world in September. Many of the Democratic presidential candidates have rolled out ambitious plans to cut carbon while making the economy greener. There’s a sense of momentum to solve our planetary crisis. And yet a leading cause of climate change remains persistently overlooked or trivialized: clothing.
And billions didn’t protest, didn’t care. Anyhow, why were all those protesters who care wearing clothes?
The clothing and footwear industry is responsible for 8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, nearly the same as the entire European Union, according to a study by the environmental services group Quantis. Without abrupt intervention, the industry’s impact on the climate is on track to increase by almost half by 2030.
But clothing does not appear to be mentioned in the Democratic candidates’ climate plans, nor in the Green New Deal proposed by House Democrats. And while it’s coming up more in coverage about low-emissions lifestyle changes, it’s still viewed as a problem mostly for fashionistas.
Indeed, caring about clothes is often considered frivolous, at odds with concern about the fate of the planet. The actor and environmentalist Woody Harrelson expressed this view when he hosted “Saturday Night Liveâ€Â the week after the recent climate marches in New York. “I was always anti-fashion,†he said, “because it always seemed to me there were more important things to care about†— like melting ice caps, the Amazon burning, and the pollution of our water, air and food. Many people fail to see how the $2.5 trillion apparel industry is connected to our environment, which means we persistently pay no attention to how it might help us solve our climate crisis.
There’s always something new for climate cultists to complain about, and this is the newest push, having grown over the last year or so. Warmists have protested fashion shows and clothing manufacturers over that time.
Clothes are easy to ignore because they are made far away and have throughout history been made by enslaved, unpaid and low-paid laborers, often by women. But clothing affects every other environmental problem we care about. Let’s say you wear a cotton T-shirt — it required thousands of gallons of water to make. If that T-shirt is viscose rayon, it may well have come from a tree felled in the Amazon (viscose rayon is made from plants). And if it’s polyester, acrylic or nylon, you’re wearing plastic. When those plastic clothes get washed, they junk up our oceans with microplastic pollution.
Those things have nothing to do with ‘climate change’, but, the Cult of Climastrology always takes every real issue and puts it under the banner of Hotcoldwetdry.
Fortunately, some clothing companies are waking up to the climate crisis. A growing number of brands are bowing to grass-roots pressure and consumer surveys that show that sustainability and ethics are top concerns for young shoppers. In August, at the Group of 7 summit, 32 clothing brands got together to set “science-based targets†for emission reductions. Since then, two dozen more brands have signed this so-called Fashion Pact. Kering, the luxury conglomerate that owns Gucci, Yves Saint Laurent and Balenciaga, has set a goal for all of its brands to go carbon-neutral.
So, they’re pretending to Do Something to attempt to get these climate cultists to leave them alone.
The clothing industry, like most industries, is also stubbornly reliant on fossil fuels. They’re used to fire up boilers in textile mills, to make the pesticides dumped onto cotton fields and to produce the gobs of chemicals that dye and finish fabrics. Fossil fuels are also the feedstock of synthetic fibers, which now make up the bulk of what we wear. Getting clothing off oil will not be easy.
No, it won’t. Why would they give them up when most Warmists refuse to give up fossil fuels? What, exactly, are they supposed to replace them with? That cargo ship from China and Vietnam won’t run on wind-power.
Consumers have an important part to play in making fashion sustainable. We can work to extend the life of all clothes by switching more of our purchases to secondhand and online resale, renting for special occasions, and repairing clothes instead of throwing them away. We can choose remanufactured and upcycled apparel like those on offer from Eileen Fisher and Converse.
If the peons are all buying second hand, who’s buying firsthand?
We can turn our washing machines down to cold and consider air drying more of our laundry.
Good luck with that.
We also need activists, journalists, scientists, investors and academics who focus on sustainability to include clothing in their work. We need technological innovation and investment in new fibers and manufacturing processes, deeper research and more cutting-edge ideas.
She means Government needs to spend the money and force this.
And we need government action and innovative policy that accounts for the global impact of the stuff we buy.
See?
But first we need all people who care about climate change to understand that they’re part of the problem and the solution, just by wearing clothes.
How helpful is it to Blamestorm people in this manner?
Read: NY Times: Your Clothes Are A Big Problem For ‘Climate Change’ Or Something »
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