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........

© The Irish Times