… what? Are they just copying musky hype slop?

The far right is popular because it is allowed to exist while criticizing powerful institutions, because their proposed solutions and actions do not meaningfully threaten those institutions. Any criticism and proposed solutions that might actually fix issues are often buried or demonized as soon as it gains traction independently.

But this behavior is hurting the long term viability of media institutions, the narratives and ideas they push are so detached from real world experiences of viewers that they losing meaningful viewership.

For oil and gas producers, plastic is a very important part of the industrial system. Significant amounts of what is extracted is not usable as fuel after refining. It would just have to be dumped or burned off, which would hurt margins, just throwing away 1/3rd of what you pull out of the ground.

The profitability and market viability of fossil fuels depends pretty heavily on plastics production as a way of profitably despising of byproducts. Take that away and they’re much less competitive with other energy sources.