Joe PolishFounder of Genius Network and President of Piranha Marketing

The Impacts of Big Polluters

16 Dec 2023 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:40

Short excerpt from a YouTube video ("The Impacts of Big Polluters") criticizing practices of large polluters that treat natural resources as assets to be quickly liquidated for short-term profit. The speaker argues this creates an "illusion of prosperity" while imposing long-term costs—denuded landscapes, health harms, and large cleanup debts—on future generations, framing environmental harm as intergenerational "deficit spending."

Chapters

The big polluters often want us to do, which is to treat the planet as if it were a business and liquidation. Convert our natural resources to cash as quickly as possible, have a few years of pollution based prosperity, we can generate an instantaneous cash flow and the illusion of a prosperous economy. But our children are going to pay for our joyride and they're going to pay for denuded landscapes, poor health, huge cleanup costs that are going to amplify over time, and they'll never be able to pay. Environmental injury is deficit spending. It's a way of loading the cost of our generation's prosperity onto the backs of our children.