Happy Black Friday, everyone. Click open those apps, stack those digital baskets to overflowing and wait for the Amazon man to stagger to your front door with your purchases all the way from China. Today let us eat, drink and shop ‘til we drop because tomorrow we die along with our planet.
Today is Insatiable Consumption Day, a marketing wheeze dreamt up in some Madison Avenue brainstorm to kick-start the Christmas rush after Thanksgiving. Instant gratification is guaranteed, along with mountain ranges of polluting rubbish. Forbes magazine reported after last year’s Black Friday that trucks transporting packages around Europe raised CO2 emissions by 94 per cent above the level of an average week. That’s not counting the cargo planes and ships, the on-second-thoughts returned items, the blizzard of hard-sell emails and texts, the acres of packaging, the booty that falls apart after a single outing or the multitudes of plastic toxins absorbed into the atmosphere
November has been a darkly comedic month. Black Friday comes hot on the heels of Cop30, the save-the-planet summit destined to go down in history – if the history books survive – as Flop30. Lobbyists for fossil fuel corporations accounted for one in 25 participants. The absence of Donald “it’s all a con job” Trump dominated Cop news to the virtual exclusion of commentary on women’s scant visibility in the photo-ops and the pathetic failure to agree a gender action plan.
Trump’s no-show was expected. Anyone who grabs a gift of a Boeing 747 jetliner and concretes over the White House rose garden would rather be anywhere else than discussing climate-mitigation measures. The apposite question was not where the US president was, but what he was plotting while other state leaders were, ostensibly, trying to save the planet. Poring over a world map of rare earth resources, I bet.
Dublin City Council will not remove Tricolours erected by anti-immigration groups
Mother of missing boy Benjamin Spot (14) pleads for him to return
‘Christ, I’m angry’: Ciara Doherty’s striking interview with Andrew McGinley
Mother of former conjoined twins Hassan and Hussein Benhaffaf named Carer of the Year
He may be a lying, hyperbolic, incoherent peddler of empty threats and promises but – give the man credit – Trump never misses an opportunity to make a buck. He harangues India and Europe for not buying enough American oil and gas when what he really wants is everyone else’s rare earth metals and minerals because he recognises that therein lies the new Klondike. He has signed a whirlwind of deals for them with Japan, Malaysia, Vietnam and Cambodia, negotiated a supply flow with China and extracted mining rights in Ukraine as a quid pro quo for military assistance. His covetousness of metals-rich Greenland is unlikely to be driven by an ambition to construct a Mar-a-Lago-on-the-tundra permafrost.
Rare earths are the 21st century’s gold. They are in our smartphones, televisions, laptops, laptop bags, desktops, wind turbines, electric vehicles, fighter jets, lasers and drones. Lithium and europium are the matrix of our individualised age when there is no need to go to the shop because the shop will come to you. In Ireland, two-thirds of Black Friday purchases are transacted online, their convenience increasing road traffic and further reducing any need for human contact. Mining their ingredients can turn prospectors into overnight oligarchs in our technological age. And Mother Nature is the friendly-fire casualty.
“Capitalism depends on making our environment pay,” writes former dot.com entrepreneur Gerry McGovern in 99th Day, his new book unearthing the dirty facts of clean energy. An early smartphone might have contained 10 of these materials, he says. The latest device could have many more. No wonder Trump scoffs at climate change activists when there are spondulicks to be made from mining rare earths. Mining being the operative word; a process that erodes great chunks of the planet and fills it with the sludge of waste. Once mined, the products comprising them need a marketplace. Ergo, we have Black Friday, followed by Cyber Monday, Christmas, New Year sales ...
Are “green” industries healing Earth or are they killing it? The question is moot when obsolete wind turbines have to be dumped after their use-by date, homes are getting e-car chargers quicker than water pipes and AI is adding to the cloud’s demand for energy-gobbling data centres. According to the gospel of capitalism, gaps in the market are there to be milked like cash cows.
Trump is not the only opportunist. Most governments face the conundrum of cheerleading climate mitigation policies while protecting jobs that accelerate the environmental damage. The dilemma is visible in poorer countries where foreign-owned mines are busy depleting ore stores and a jumper that was recycled in Termonfeckin ends up in Karachi, but Ireland has its own paradoxes. The Government is charged with protecting employment created by IT behemoths while, at the same time, providing for their massive electricity needs.
The Aughinish Alumina refinery in Askeaton graphically illustrates the political quandary. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 and the EU imposed economic sanctions on Russian businesses and oligarchs, the Irish Government lobbied Brussels for special exemption for Limerick’s Russian-owned plant that turns bauxite, shipped from other countries, into alumina and employs about 450 people. That is an awful lot of families and an awful lot of spending money flowing around the region.
State bodies are exacerbating society’s vulnerability to the digital culture, which is increasingly beset by scams, hacks and breakdowns. Their communication with citizens is mainly by electronic means. They send texts and emails telling us to check their websites for their correspondence. They offer discounts to those who do their transactions online. Anyone without the means or nous for digital engagement is regarded as a Luddite. When Ryanair announced that henceforth it will only accept e-boarding passes, there was no protest from Merrion Street.
As individuals, we do not have to face Hobson’s choice. We can walk, take a bus or cycle without inviting an economic crash. We can post a letter or a card, keep cash in our wallets, go to the takeaway instead of the takeaway coming to us, buy local, maybe even visit a shop, talk to the stranger at the till, carry our own purchases home, resist the capitalist pressure to surrender to the robots and Amazon man.
[ Black Friday is followed by Returns Tuesday. It’s bad for the planetOpens in new window ]
That may sound crazily radical but we might find life is better for it. Our planet certainly would be.
