Cut waste, cut advertisement

Mother Nature has had enough of our constant talking and bickering; today she wants to see us do something to reverse the calamitous situation we have put ourselves in. As Cassius says in Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars/But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
Recently I wrote about the sickness afflicting the global economy, resulting in increased global injustice and terrifying environmental destruction. While this is not news to anyone, we have been totally ineffectual at doing anything about it.
Much goodwill has been expressed and ideas thrown around but the reality is that even the meager promises we try to make are quickly broken and forgotten. It is time for us to deal with this existential challenge head-on, with the necessary clear-headedness, urgency and ambition.
A central problem with our current economic model is the extent to which it encourages waste and overconsumption. An obvious place to start rectifying this would be to begin eliminating waste and the constant barrage of advertisements and artificial intelligence robots urging us to overconsume. We should be the ones convincing ourselves to change our habits, not the manipulative techniques of advertisers and artificial intelligence.
This is not the first time that I have mentioned that one-third of the food we produce is wasted. This means that food waste would be the third largest source of greenhouse gas emissions, if we considered it alongside the emissions produced by countries.
Although humans only require 15 to 20 liters of water a day to meet their basic needs, the average American uses 8,300 liters (or 2,200 gallons) of water each day, taking into account the water used to produce the food and goods we consume each day.

It is time to establish a new order that incentivizes us to protect our planet and our resources rather than destroying and wasting them. 

Hassan bin Youssef Yassin

Meanwhile, we currently reuse only 9 percent of the close to 100 billion tons of minerals, fossil fuels, metals and biomass that enter the economy every year, although 62 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions are created during the extraction, processing and manufacturing of goods. And finally, only 10 percent of the plastic waste that will represent 13 percent of our carbon budget by 2050 is currently recycled. By then, our oceans will most likely contain more plastic, by weight, than fish.
Just imagine the difference we could make if each of us simply decided to waste less food, energy and water in our daily lives. We could be using almost half as many resources as we do today, before even having begun to tackle the rest of our warped economic system. However, our brains are unfortunately being replaced by the injected will of advertisers and artificial intelligence. We are gradually losing control.
The time to act is now. It is not just about cutting emissions but about sorting out our minds and changing our behaviors. Whenever things get messy, we speak of the need to establish a new world order. I believe it is time to establish a new economic, and economical, order that incentivizes us to protect our planet and our resources rather than destroying and wasting them.
If advertising can change our habits, perhaps the environmental disaster we are witnessing can do the same. It is time we offered Mother Nature a pillow and some rest.
Wake up, my fellow human beings. Wake up to the contradictions we are living under, to the destruction we are wreaking and, most of all, to our capacity for change and to act for the common good. This should be our new state of mind: Committing to real solutions and to the collective hard work necessary to implement them.
If we want to cut waste, we need to act. We need to change the system that produces so much waste in the first place. No more distractions regarding insignificant changes in our emissions; this is about changing an entire system of overconsumption and waste. We owe it to Mother Nature. Both she and future generations deserve it from us.

• Hassan bin Youssef Yassin worked closely with Saudi petroleum ministers Abdullah Tariki and Ahmed Zaki Yamani from 1959 to 1967. He headed the Saudi Information Office in Washington from 1972 to 1981 and served with the Arab League observer delegation to the UN from 1981 to 1983.