The demand for plastic has been growing most strongly since 1970 (high confidence). The current >99% reliance on fossil feedstock, very low recycling, and high emissions from petrochemical processes is a challenge for reaching net zero emissions. At the same time, plastics are important for reducing emissions elsewhere, for example, light-weighting vehicles. There are as yet no shared visions for fossil-free plastics, but several possibilities.
—Technical Summary, TS.5.5 Industry, Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change, Working Group III, IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, Priyadarshi R. Shukla and Jim Skea, et. al., eds., 2022.
you watch your students connect the paperclips together. they work jovially in their pairs to link each wire into another tongue. you understand that metaphor is an operation in this exercise; that polymer chains are beautiful; that the red and yellow plastic coating of each clip enforces a poetics of torsion and a politics of tension. you are delighted by the infinite potential of adaptability. your crude alliance with decay makes this moment possible. you tell them this clip is an enantioseme. it is a cleaving that gently cleaves us. . . .
and because this is a poem about joy, it too must have a river flowing / from its greedy jaws. i have only learned how to speak about joy / as an offering to a god i will never understand.
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