The United Nations has received “credible allegations” that more than 100 former members of Afghan forces have been killed since the Taliban took over the country.

A United Nations report found children aged between 10 and 17 years are being lured into battle.

Twenty years ago today, President George W. Bush delivered a State of the Union address that would instantly become one of the most bitterly controversial in U.S. history. At its core were short indictments of the aggressions and human-rights abuses of North Korea, Iran, and Iraq.

Then the kicker:

“States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.”

I was part of the speechwriting team that drafted those words. We’d lived together through the trauma of 9/11: not only that horrific day itself, but the nerve-jangling aftermath. The trauma redirected the perceptions and the judgment of national leaders. Bush had won office in a period of seeming peace and prosperity. Now it felt as if death could strike anywhere, anytime. Would suicide bombers attack movie theaters? Would teams of terrorist gunmen open fire in shopping malls? It all seemed horribly possible.

Beginning September 18, packets of anthrax were received at political and media offices in Washington and across the country. At least 22 people were infected; five of them died. On November 12, 2001, a passenger jetliner leaving John F. Kennedy International Airport crashed into the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens, killing all 260 people aboard and five on the ground. The crash proved accidental, but initially we had to wonder: Had al-Qaeda landed a second strike inside the United States? About that time, I doubled the life insurance I carried to protect my young family.

Before 9/11, terror threats had been an issue for specialists inside the national-security apparatus. Now they physically reshaped the government. The Eisenhower Executive Office Building occupies a block in Washington bounded on the west by 17th Street, a busy roadway. For fear of car bombs, all the offices on that side of the building were emptied. E Street, to the south, was closed to traffic, and before authorized cars could enter, they were elaborately searched: trunks popped open for inspection, a Secret Service mirror run under the chassis, a dog sniffing for explosives.

The fervid atmosphere in the country biased citizens and officials alike to overheat rhetoric and overestimate dangers. I succumbed to that temptation myself; more senior people in government were no more resistant.

Meanwhile, the news from the combat zone in the war provoked by the terror attacks was disappointing and frustrating. In December 2001, U.S. forces and Afghan allies had cornered Osama bin Laden in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan. Bin Laden completed a last will and testament dated December 14, 2001. Yet somehow bin Laden escaped. The year ended with the Taliban overthrown, U.S. or coalition forces in control of all of Afghanistan’s cities, but the prime mission for which the United States fought the Taliban unfulfilled.

America had suffered much. It feared worse ahead.

The 2002 State of the Union address responded to those fears. It tried to specify where the next danger might come from—and to offer plans to guard against it. Bush’s answers would instantly come under ferocious criticism. The criticism reverberates to this day. And yet four core ideas in the speech have survived as enduring foundations of U.S. security policy.

[David Frum: The Iraq war was a failure. War with Iran would be worse.]

The speech’s first key idea was that even after 9/11, the most important threats to the United States still came from hostile states. Terrorists could pose a first-degree threat to the U.S. only if supported by a government. The 2002 State of the Union address is known as the “axis of evil” speech. But those were not its most important words. The most important words of the speech were: “States like these, and their terrorist allies …”

In 2002, that seemed a radical thing to say. September 11 had supposedly changed everything. Violence between states was so 20th century, and to worry about it was to expose oneself as backwards-looking, out-of-date.

What was backward then is forward now. The Islamic State terror group overtook al-Qaeda as a security threat precisely because it occupied territory in Syria and Iraq and formed a state of its own. By 2019, that state had been destroyed, and although ISIS the concept and murder franchise still exists, it has dropped far down the list of U.S.-government security concerns.

A second idea was that these hostile states and their terrorist allies presented an overlapping threat. Again, this idea was much scoffed at in 2002. But in the years since, the commonalities have come to light: a Syrian nuclear reactor, ultimately destroyed by Israel, that was built with help from North Korea and, according to a defector, money from Iran; Shiite Iran funding Sunni Hamas; Iranian–North Korean nuclear cooperation; North Korea providing Syria with supplies that could be used to manufacture poison gas, as reported by United Nations experts. These episodes of cooperation were not acts of friendship or alliance. They were opportunistic deals among states and groups joined by their shared hostility toward the United States. The national-security threats facing America were not simply one damn thing after another; just as the United States tried to build collective security for its friends, so too could U.S. adversaries work together to build collective insecurity.

Bush’s third big idea in the 2002 speech was to downgrade the importance of Afghanistan to the United States. A major question after 9/11 was how deeply the U.S. and allies should commit to Afghanistan. In many eyes, Afghanistan was “the good war,” the security project that should have first claim to U.S. resources. Against that view, Bush treated Afghanistan as one theater in a war on terror that would probably be decided elsewhere. Any large U.S. force in Afghanistan would have to be supplied either by road from Pakistan or by rail through Russia or through Russian-influenced Central Asian republics. Building a stable replacement government would depend on Afghan elites with agendas of their own, agendas that included massive self-enrichment. The deeper the U.S. commitment, the more expensive the ultimate U.S. failure would be. It would take almost 20 years before President Joe Biden would agree that the time had come to call it quits in Afghanistan. By then, the former good war looked more like the most hopeless of all the post-9/11 conflicts.

The fourth core idea in the speech was a determination to regard terrorism as a tool of power. Previously, some policy makers had an instinct to treat terrorism as an almost impersonal result of huge and abstract social problems. Compress enough poverty, grievance, and despair together, and terrorism would result. By this light, terrorism becomes almost a predictable consequence of social conditions, an involuntary, even mechanical, response, like an electric shock or the collapse of a bridge. In this view, the terrorist or terror agent is barely an agent of history at all. The political choices have been made by others, notably the terrorist’s victims and targets. Bush’s speech, by contrast, presented terrorism instead as a strategic choice that could be accepted or refused. “My hope is that all nations will heed our call and eliminate the terrorist parasites who threaten their countries and our own.” He argued that American action could alter the strategic calculus that enabled terrorism. “Some governments will be timid in the face of terror. And make no mistake about it: If they do not act, America will.”

Almost from the day Bush delivered the speech, his critics have blamed him for creating the problems the speech attempted to describe. Iran would have been friendly if Bush had not called it names! Yes, Iran had clashed with the Taliban in the 1990s, and was certainly glad to see the United States drawn into a fight against them. But it didn’t want to see the U.S. win that fight, and establish any kind of stable pro-Western regime next door to Iran. Iran was never going to stop backing its main terrorist proxy, Hezbollah. Iran began building a new enrichment site in the city of Natanz, north of Isfahan, in 2001, before the “axis of evil” speech. The site was revealed to the world by an Iranian resistance group in August 2002, just after the speech.

[Dominic Tierney: America keeps accidentally helping Iran]

Iran’s support for terrorism proceeded nonstop too. It might not much care for al-Qaeda. But Iran was more than willing to outfit other Sunni terrorist groups, and to offer supervised sanctuary to bin Laden relatives. In January 2002, a ship carrying 50 tons of arms and explosives was intercepted at sea by Israel, which accused Iran of sending them to Gaza. Hezbollah, which was present and operating inside the United States, according to testimony to Congress by the FBI in February 2002.

Bush’s speech is now remembered as a major milestone on the path to war in Iraq. But in January 2002, the president had not yet declared a decision to topple Saddam Hussein. Even now, it’s still not clear to me when Bush made that decision. From the fall of 2001 through the spring of 2002, war in Iraq was always discussed as a possibility, a hypothetical. That’s how the speechwriting team got the assignment that led to the State of the Union address: If the president wanted to talk about Iraq, what might he say?

The journalist Robert Draper painstakingly reconstructed the timeline of the decision to invade Iraq in his 2020 book, To Start a War. Draper’s reporting depicts Bush as deeply hostile to Saddam Hussein from the start, but uncommitted to any single policy against the Iraqi dictator until late into the summer of 2002. In an April 5, 2002, interview with Trevor McDonald of Britain’s ITV, Bush said, “I’ve made up my mind that Saddam needs to go.” That very evening, Bush had dinner with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and told him that he had not yet decided when or how Saddam would be made to go.

Yet well before the summer of 2002, the preparation for war had acquired a momentum of its own. The previous February, Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley organized a series of meetings to study the issues that might arise from an Iraq war. Hadley himself was not at all an ardent advocate of war against Iraq. But by some fateful impetus, the attempt to think through the war before it started only accelerated the decision it was meant to ponder. “By institutionalizing such discussions, Hadley had … created bureaucratic locomotion for a policy that had yet to be debated, and in fact never would be,” Draper observed.

By the end of the summer of 2002, the moment of decision—once assigned to an unspecific future—had somehow shifted into the unrecorded past. In September 2002, Bush addressed the UN and presented the Iraqi regime with a sequence of ultimatums that closed almost all his own exits. Yet he still had no real plan for what would happen if Iraq refused the ultimatum. The Pentagon wrote a deployment plan to get Americans into Baghdad. Nobody inside the administration had clear responsibility for planning for the day after the Americans arrived.

The January 2002 State of the Union speech had cited Iraq as only one danger among many. But over the months ahead, those other dangers would be displaced by the singular focus on Iraq. North Korea would stage a first nuclear test in 2006, then a second and more successful test in 2009. Iran too was closing in on a bomb around that time, a threat that the Obama administration tried to negotiate away but that haunts U.S. policy to this day.

The list of threats that Bush itemized 20 years ago was not imaginary. If anything, the ranks of hostile anti-U.S. regimes have multiplied since 2002. Back then, Vladimir Putin’s Russia sometimes cooperated with the United States on important strategic issues, including the war in Afghanistan. China was accepting major economic reforms to qualify for entry into the World Trade Organization. Neither regime was liberal toward its people or friendly to the West. But 20 years ago, optimists could reasonably hope that Russia and China might soon evolve in better directions. Those hopes have long ago been disappointed. Both regimes turned to the worse, and to each other.

Putin’s invasion plans for Ukraine offer China a “new world order” made safe for autocrats. As Putin threatens Ukraine, Chinese warplanes menace Taiwan. Earlier this month, Putin welcomed Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi to Moscow. Raisi is an outspoken advocate of Iranian-Russian cooperation against the United States. Last week, China, Iran, and Russia held joint naval drills in the northern Indian Ocean. Maybe axis of evil is too melodramatic a phrase for our polarized and disillusioned era. But we need words to describe when the bad guys cooperate against the United States and its democratic allies.

Like the Vietnam War, the Iraq War casts a long shadow. It did not deliver the results promised, for Iraq or the United States. Perhaps even without U.S. intervention, Iraq would have collapsed into civil war, as Syria did. That cannot be answered. But there is still wisdom to be gained from the post 9/11 moment. President Bush’s 2002 warnings contain insights that can be repurposed for a changed world.

The United Nations says January will likely mark the highest number of civilian casualties in Yemen in one month.

Developing countries turned away some 100 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines because they were about to expire, the United Nations said.

The wedding ceremony held in November on a verdant farm in the Philippines was for the daughter of a senator. Most of the guests’ attention, though, was paid not to the bride and the groom but to another duo in attendance.

Ferdinand Marcos Jr., the son of the country’s late dictator, escorted Sara Duterte-Carpio, the daughter of the current president, Rodrigo Duterte, past guests sitting in white trellis-backed chairs. Marcos wore a dark suit with a boutonniere pinned to his lapel, his face partially obscured by a mauve-colored mask. Duterte-Carpio sported a gray dress and clutched a bouquet of white flowers. They interlocked arms as they walked. Amid weeks of unrelenting speculation about their respective political futures, their stroll down the aisle, predictably, and likely by design, added to the hype. Was the event, attended by numerous members of the Philippine elite and closely watched for hints of the country’s political direction, one headline wondered, the “wedding of the century”?

The pair proved at least one of the rampant rumors true a few days later, when they announced that they would be running mates in the presidential election in May 2022. The decision has brought together two of the country’s most notorious political families at a moment when its democratic institutions seem particularly imperiled. Marcos is the presidential hopeful; Duterte-Carpio, the vice-presidential candidate. (In the Philippines, the president and vice president are elected separately. This split-ticket voting allows for the president and vice president to come from different parties and have differing political views, as is currently the case.) The decision to team up was both deftly strategic and highly symbolic of the state of politics in the country.

The dominance of political dynasties in the Philippines has brought “adverse effects on the country including the perpetuation of poverty and underdevelopment, the propagation of political and socio-economic inequality and the prevalence of massive corruption,” the academics Teresa S. Encarnacion Tadem and Eduardo C. Tadem wrote in a 2016 paper examining the phenomenon. Among the challengers to Marcos and Duterte-Carpio is the current vice president, Leni Robredo, who is running for president and previously defeated Marcos in the 2016 vice-presidential race. As a legislator, Robredo co-wrote an anti-dynasty bill, one of the numerous failed efforts to curb the rampant nepotism within the country’s political system, whose outcome Barry Gutierrez, her spokesperson, told me was unsurprising given the vested interests at stake.  

Robredo entered the presidential race late, and although she has seen some notable bursts of grassroots support, she has failed to gain wide support. Other challengers include Manny Pacquiao, the former boxing champion who parlayed his fame in the ring into a second act as a senator (Pacquiao recently picked up the endorsement of Floyd Mayweather Jr., the boxer who defeated him in a much-hyped but ultimately underwhelming 2015 bout), and Isko Morenoan, an actor turned mayor of Manila, the country’s capital. Marcos has a commanding lead in the race, according to two polls conducted in December. Duterte-Carpio is also the favorite for the vice presidency.

The Marcoses have a stronghold in the north, and the Dutertes’ power base is in the south, making the nepotistic duo immediate front-runners in the contest. The two are also looking to continue Philippine dynastic rule. This has been able to flourish, Aries Arugay, a political-science professor at the University of the Philippines at Diliman, told me, partly because of a weak party system and the lasting legacy of American colonialism, which put political power into the hands of a few select elites. In the absence of strong political parties, “the family has become the main reliable collective mechanism,” he said. This “ritualistic kinship,” though, extends beyond blood relations, Arugay explained. Other bonds, such as those forged through godparent relationships and calculated interfamily marriages, create a far-reaching web of incestuous connections. These overlapping fiefdoms help consolidate and control power. In some ways, he said, “it is like the medieval ages.”  

[Read: The paradox of Rodrigo Duterte]

Beginning when he was a toddler, Marcos Jr., better known as Bongbong, served as a political prop for his father, Ferdinand Marcos. A fierce anti-communist and gifted orator who was supported by the U.S., the elder Marcos was first elected president in 1965, but his rule swiftly descended into a kleptocratic dictatorship. He declared martial law in 1972 and, though it was formally lifted in 1981, most of the powers granted under it remained for the duration of his time in power, which ended when he was forced from office in 1986. During his time in power, extrajudicial killings and corruption proliferated. The Marcos regime was “exceptional for both the quantity and quality of its violence,” Alfred McCoy, a historian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, wrote in 1999. McCoy estimated that 3,257 extrajudicial killings were carried out under Marcos. The specter of violence was horrific and deliberate. Many of the victims were mutilated and then dumped roadside for passersby to see, McCoy wrote: “Marcos’s regime intimidated by random displays of its torture victims—becoming thereby a theater state of terror.”

Bongbong dropped out of Oxford University but used his family’s connections to secure a spot in the ultracompetitive M.B.A. program at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, despite not having an undergraduate degree. (On the campaign trail, Marcos struggles to tell the truth about basic aspects of his life and has consistently lied about details as varied as his academic record and his age.) In 1980, when he was 22 and still studying in Philadelphia, he was elected vice governor of Ilocos Norte, a province in the northwest corner of the Philippines’ largest island. Marcos ran unopposed as a member of his father’s party. His uncle swore him into the position at the Philippine embassy in the U.S. After returning to the Philippines, Bongbong became governor of the province in 1983, when his aunt stepped down after more than a decade in power. “The Marcoses were a sultanistic family,” Arugay told me. “It was not simply a dictatorship of one; it was the dictatorship of a dynasty.”

His term was cut short three years later, when millions of Filipinos took part in protests known as the People Power Revolution. Ferdinand Marcos was toppled by the movement, triggered in part by the assassination of his political rival three years earlier. The U.S. Air Force dispatched numerous helicopters and airplanes to ferry the Marcos family and others to safety in Hawaii. Imelda Marcos, Ferdinand's wife, who elevated the hoarding and ostentatious display of ill-gotten riches to cartoonishly villainous levels, has said that she stuffed her kids' diapers with diamonds before departing. The Marcos clan was met at an airfield by the governor of Hawaii, an old friend, who greeted the authoritarian with traditional flower leis. Marcos Sr. lived in Hawaii, stricken with numerous health issues, until his death three years later. The family squirreled away a fortune estimated in 1987 to be $10 billion, hiding it in shell companies, fine art, and dodgy real-estate deals. The large majority of the money remains unaccounted for.  

Yet the Marcos family was allowed to return to the Philippines five years after they fled. Patricio Abinales, an Asian-studies professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, told me that the government at the time was unstable and naively believed that rule of law would prevail and the Marcoses would soon face justice. But rather than facing repercussions for their crimes, the family set about rebuilding. “They are plunderers,” Arugay said of the clan. “Why are they not in jail right now?”

Bongbong was elected to the house of representatives in 1992, beginning a decades-long effort to attain the presidency and whitewash the Marcos family’s history while reestablishing its power. The results have been a resounding, frightening testament to the influence of historical revisionism in the absence of repercussions and accountability. “When people say the Marcoses are back, I often tell them, ‘Have they ever left power?,’” Arugay said.

Bongbong’s sister, Imlee, is now a senator. Previously, she too was the governor of Ilocos Norte. Between the siblings’ terms, their cousin served in the role. When Imlee left the governor’s seat to run for senate in 2019, her son was elected to replace her. Bongbong’s son, a loyal surrogate for his father much like Bongbong was to Ferdinand, is also running for congress. Bongbong had one of his few political setbacks in 2016, when his vice-presidential bid came up just short. His current campaign faces a host of petitions submitted to election officials that seek to have him barred from contesting the polls. Some have been filed by victims of his father’s regime. At least one is related to his failure to pay fines stemming from his 1995 tax-evasion conviction, which was upheld in 1997. The Marcos camp has characteristically brushed off the challenges.

[Read: The limits of Rodrigo Duterte’s anti-Americanism]

Compared with the Marcoses, the Dutertes are relative upstarts in the world of political dynasties; this explains in part why Duterte-Carpio has hitched herself to Bongbong. The family broke through to national office only in 2016, in the most uproarious fashion. That year, Rodrigo Duterte, the motorcycle-riding, foul-mouthed mayor who drew frequent, if not totally accurate, comparisons to Donald Trump, was elected president. Duterte-Carpio is the mayor of Davao, a position her father held for more than two decades. Her younger brother currently serves as the vice mayor of the city, a position their older brother held until he won a seat in congress in 2019.

Rodrigo Duterte is mercurial and prone to erratic outbursts. His administration has overseen a steady decline in press freedom and the killing of scores of activists in raids by security forces (many of whom had been “red-tagged,” i.e., accused of being communist guerrillas or supporting them). At least 61 lawyers have been killed during Duterte’s time in office, according to figures collected by the Philippine news site Rappler. (The site’s co-founder Maria Ressa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize last year. Duterte’s government tried, unsuccessfully, to prevent her from attending the ceremony in Norway.) The United Nations conservatively estimates that security forces carrying out Duterte’s years-long “war on drugs,” a sweeping campaign that has targeted primarily the urban poor, have killed more than 8,600 people. Others peg the figure as considerably higher.   

The International Criminal Court announced in September that it was opening an investigation into the campaign, describing it as “a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population.” Duterte reacted, as he often does, angrily and rashly, unilaterally withdrawing from the court and rebuking his country’s Supreme Court when its judges advised him to cooperate with the investigation. Constrained by a strict presidential-term limit, Duterte announced a bid for the senate last month, but it was a short-lived experiment. In mid-December, he abruptly withdrew.  

Gutierrez, the Robredo campaign’s spokesperson, told me that Robredo had been pulled into the contest in large part because she was fearful about the country’s direction. A staunch critic of Rodrigo Duterte, “she really felt very strongly that over the course of the last five and a half years, a lot of our institutions have been eroded,” he said. With the alliance of the Marcoses and Dutertes, “the danger of that continuing or worsening,” he said, “is very real.”

When I asked Arugay, the political-science professor, about his projection for the race, he was not optimistic. “I want to be an idealist. I want to be on the good side, on democracy’s side, and say that Marcos and Duterte-Carpio will have a tough battle, but that defeats all my training in political science,” he told me. Some pundits, he said, have predicted that the “unholy alliance” will fail, that “they are both greedy, both corrupt, and bad people don’t get rewarded in the end,” he said.

“I wish that was how the world worked,” he said. “I really do.”

Food prices rose sharply in 2021, reaching highest level in a decade, according to the United Nations.

Photographs by Lexi Parra

The monkey entered the casino after midnight. It clung to the arm of a short man with a military haircut. The man stood and watched the action at the roulette tables while the monkey, a capuchin with a brush cut like its owner’s, swiveled its head from side to side. A waiter fed the animal a cold French fry. Once, between spins of the wheel, the monkey leaped onto the baize table and then back into its owner’s arms.

It was a Friday night, in an affluent Caracas neighborhood called Las Mercedes, and inside the casino, which had opened a few weeks earlier, gamblers pulled crisp $100 bills off thick rolls of American cash. The same silent older women who populate casinos everywhere fed $10 and $20 bills into video slot machines. The national currency, the bolivar—named after The Liberator, Simón Bolívar, the country’s anti-imperialist founding father—was nowhere in sight. A group of men roared over wins and losses at a roulette table where the brightly colored chips cost $1 each. What passed for the high rollers in the place convened at another roulette table, where the croupier swept away as much as $1,000 in chips after each spin.

I struck up a conversation with a man who had geometric tattoos on his right forearm. We talked about how the casinos had been banned for years by Venezuela’s self-proclaimed socialist government. I asked why, all of a sudden, in the midst of the country’s catastrophic economic collapse, the government had allowed casinos to operate again. He was a gambling man—perhaps he’d had a bad night—and he gave a wry laugh behind his blue paper face mask. “For our loss,” the man said.  

When I left the casino I stood for a moment on the sidewalk out front and looked up at the three large video screens mounted high on the building’s brick facade. A computer animation played over and over. It showed packs of $100 bills raining from the sky until they filled up the screens.

This is the new Venezuela, where games of chance substitute for oil wells and the image of Bolívar has been replaced by the face of a new liberating hero: Benjamin Franklin.

The late Hugo Chávez, the founder of what he called Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, decried capitalism as a casino economy, and he derided casinos as a social ill akin to drug addiction and prostitution. His government forced them to close; the last one shut its doors about a decade ago. But today, under Chávez’s acolyte and successor as president, Nicolás Maduro, the whole country has become a casino, where millions are stuck in a daily, low-stakes struggle for dollar chips and a few high rollers stuff their pockets with greenbacks.

I lived in Caracas from 2012 to 2016, when I was the Andes region bureau chief of The New York Times, and I returned regularly after that, until the coronavirus pandemic interrupted travel. When I went back in November after two years away, one of the first people I spoke with was a middle-class friend who was, like nearly everyone here, having a hard time making ends meet.

“There are two Venezuelas,” my friend said. “The one where people have dollars”—he meant bank accounts full of them—“and the one where people make $5 a month.” He was exaggerating. Government workers (including his wife) currently receive a monthly salary of seven bolivars, which is equivalent to about $1.50.

[Anne Applebaum: Venezuela is the eerie endgame of modern politics]

Since Chávez’s death in 2013, Venezuela has gone through an extended political and economic crisis. Over eight years, the economy has shrunk by about 80 percent—an unprecedented collapse in a country not at war. The nation has experienced hyperinflation and an outflow of millions of refugees. Hyper-devaluation has left the bolivar virtually worthless. Economic sanctions by the United States, piled on by former President Donald Trump in an attempt to quickly force Maduro from power—and continued under President Joe Biden—have added to the misery. Millions of people go hungry. The United Nations World Food Programme estimated in 2020 that a third of the country’s residents were “food insecure” and in need of assistance to put enough food on the table. About 6 million people (a fifth of the pre-crisis population) have fled the country.

Maduro’s answer to the political pressure has been repression: crack down on protestors, jail opponents, manipulate elections. The most recent example occurred during my visit in November, when the Supreme Court nullified a key governor’s election, in Chávez’s home state of Barinas, that appeared to have been won by an opposition candidate. On the economic front, Maduro started out with gross mismanagement, including immense deficit spending that sent inflation soaring above 300,000 percent a year.

But recently Maduro has embarked on a different course. While maintaining his loud socialist-flavored public pronouncements, he has slashed public spending and social programs. And, with the devaluation of the bolivar, he has embraced the yanqui dollar. Today, dollars are everywhere in the street, and bolivars are scarce. Prices in most stores and restaurants are listed in dollars. Food carts have signs saying: “Hotdogs $1.”

Venezuelans call this “dollarization,” and there is a double-sided irony in the shift from bolivars to Benjamins. On the one hand, a government that proclaims itself socialist—and sees the United States as its No. 1 enemy—has encouraged the use of dollars in place of its own currency. On the other hand, the U.S. sought, through sanctions, to crush the economy and choke off Venezuela’s access to dollars by declaring an embargo against the country’s oil sales, which account for more than 95 percent of export revenue. (Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world.) The result, against all expectations, is a country where the dollar has become the de facto national currency.

Maduro’s decision to bring back casinos derives from the logic of a late convert to capitalism. The country saved virtually nothing during the boom years of high oil prices under Chávez. That was followed by a period of low prices and a drop in oil production, caused largely by mismanagement of the state-controlled oil industry. That devastated the nation’s bottom line and deprived the government of billions in income. Oil-export revenues were less than $8 billion in 2020, down from $94 billion in 2012.

Now Maduro is desperate for any hard currency he can get. In a dollarized country, casinos are one potential source. The first of this new wave of casinos opened about a year ago in a luxury hotel on a mountaintop overlooking Caracas. Then, in August, news leaked that the government had decided to allow 30 more casinos to open, including several in the capital. (As with many of Maduro’s economic policies, no official announcement was made.) The betting palace that I visited in Las Mercedes was among the first of these. I asked a government spokesperson for details of the arrangement with the private casino operators, including licensing fees and taxes. He told me he had requested the information and received no response. (Interview requests sent to three senior government officials also went unanswered.)

As I waited to speak with Asdrúbal Oliveros, a prominent economist, I looked out the window of a conference room in his fifth-floor office. Across the street was an enormous pit with a rusting John Deere backhoe parked halfway down a dirt ramp. I’d seen holes like this one all over the country, construction projects abandoned like the nation’s hopes. To one side I could see the building that contained the offices of Raúl Gorrín, a wealthy businessman with close ties to the Maduro government, who was indicted and sanctioned by the United States in connection with a multibillion-dollar bribery and money-laundering scheme. Behind a high wall, and empty in the midday sun, languished the green soccer fields and tennis courts of a private school that has educated generations of the Caracas elite. And in the distance, the green expanse of the Ávila mountain loomed under a blue Caribbean sky, the city’s eternal backdrop.

Oliveros told me that after eight years of catastrophic contraction, he projects that the economy will have shrunk in 2021 by less than 1 percent. “We are entering a phase of stabilization,” he said.

Dollarization has been the biggest factor in this stabilization. Oliveros estimates that about two-thirds of retail transactions are now in dollars. Many private-sector employees are now paid in dollars. Government workers and others who are still paid in bolivars often have second and third jobs—where they earn dollars. As in the United States, app-based delivery services are booming; you can have everything from takeout food to rum to caviar delivered, usually by motorcycle, and this has provided dollar income to thousands of young men living in the slums. About $2.5 billion a year, according to Oliveros, comes in through remittances sent by refugees in other countries to relatives who stayed home. The dollar has also served as an anchor for inflation. Prices in dollars are still rising but not as rapidly as prices in bolivars.

[Read: How an elaborate plan to topple Venezuela’s president went wrong]

The second stabilizing factor is that a more pragmatic government has made a kind of pact with the private sector. “To the degree that you don’t get involved in politics, the government will let you be,” Oliveros said. Gone are the frequent attacks on the private sector and threats to expropriate businesses and property; the government has eliminated many of the price controls that once choked the economy and has stopped enforcing those that remain.

The government has stuck to its drastic cutbacks in public spending and has shown discipline in resisting the quick populist fixes that were once common. Maduro refrained from ordering an increase to the minimum wage ahead of gubernatorial and mayoral elections in November; he went through with an increase in fuel prices just weeks before the vote. At its peak, in 2016, government spending reached 40 percent of gross domestic product, Oliveros said. This year it could be as low as 10 percent of a much smaller economic output. Oliveros called it a spending cut that “has no historical precedent.” What it amounts to is a classic neoliberal austerity package (but more severe and with essentially no public discussion) of the kind that Maduro and his leftist cohort routinely rail against. It is common here to see images of the leftist icon Salvador Allende, the former socialist president of Chile, but the government’s current approach is more akin to the University of Chicago–inspired economic policy of the man who overthrew Allende, General Augusto Pinochet.

The other model for Maduro’s new economic vision is China. Government ministers and managers have been told that they need to make government agencies and companies more efficient and to work with the private sector, according to a former official I spoke with (who requested to remain anonymous to speak freely). The message to private companies that they are free to grow as long as they steer clear of politics also mimics the Chinese experience.

And then there is dirty money. “There is a whole structure of illicit activities, activities in a gray zone: smuggling gold, smuggling gasoline, extortion, money laundering, movement of illegal merchandise through ports and airports, drug trafficking,” Oliveros told me. This has turned Venezuela into a giant money-laundering machine. As the money enters the economy, it has a “multiplier effect,” Oliveros said, paying for legitimate goods and services and creating employment.

Las Mercedes, with its casino, fancy restaurants (charging New York prices), and flashy cars, is at the heart of what people here call “the Bubble”: Outside, the country might be in ruins, but tonight, we party. The Bubble serves the small elite that has persisted through the crisis, and it is the playground for the enchufados, the plugged-in set that has grown rich from official connections, which often means by paying bribes to get inflated government contracts.

And here is another irony: The effervescent economy in the Bubble, with enchufados partying in clubs, sipping expensive whiskey, shopping for designer clothes in exclusive boutiques, dropping their pets off at plush dog salons, driving new SUVs and sports cars, is partly a consequence of the U.S. sanctions intended to punish those very people. The U.S. government has sanctioned about 150 individuals tied to the Maduro government, most of them living in Venezuela. It has canceled the visas of more than 1,000 people. Many others, who have no ties to the government, have seen their U.S. bank accounts closed as financial institutions, afraid of running afoul of sanctions, avoid anything connected to Venezuela. “The sanctions have definitely made it more difficult for many people to spend their money outside the country,” said Tiziana Polesel, the president of the National Council of Commerce and Services, a private-sector business group. And if you’re barred from taking your money abroad, you have to spend it at home.

One of the most pervasive manifestations of the economic changes afoot here are the stores called bodegones, which sell imported goods in dollars. When I was last in Venezuela, in 2018 and 2019, the country was in chaos, there were shortages of basic goods, store shelves were often empty, and people had no money—most were broke, bolivars were scarce, and dollars were hardly used. When I returned in November after two years, the effect was dizzying. Now there were dollars everywhere and the stores were full.

Wanting to lower prices and prevent shortages, the government has looked the other way, allowing the extensive import of goods without tariffs or customs or sanitary inspections. In the bodegones, you can find giant boxes of Frosted Flakes from Costco. Bags of almonds from Trader Joe’s. Frozen organic cherries from Turkey. Beauty masks from South Korea. Whole prosciutto hams from Italy. Samsung televisions and LG washing machines. Champagne, Rioja, and whiskey galore. In a sense, the bodegones are a middle-class version of the government’s pact with the business community. The message is: Go out and spend your money and buy whatever you want, just don’t protest.

The pricing is often bizarre. Because no taxes are involved, you can buy a bottle of Johnnie Walker Black for almost half the price you would pay in New York. Some stores are known for selling appliances at cut-rate prices. “A lot of this economic activity that you see could be intended to cover up money laundering,” Polesel said. “We see it when we analyze the prices being charged for some products in the Venezuelan market and you realize that they are below what is being charged for the same product on Amazon. There you have two possible explanations. Either it’s money laundering or it’s someone who knows absolutely nothing about doing business—they’re losing money and will go out of business in two or three months.”

Either way, if you don’t have the dollars, it doesn’t matter how many $11 jars of Nutella are on how many bodegón shelves. The same goes for supermarkets, where the relaxation of price controls and the influx of imports have helped fill shelves, but at higher prices.

The result is a vast increase in inequality—the product, over several years, of Venezuela’s economic collapse, augmented by U.S. sanctions, and now the government’s unannounced austerity program. Lots of products on store shelves doesn’t mean that things are better. It only means that they appear better. By opening the floodgates to imports, the government was creating the appearance of abundance. But it is an abundance only for those who can afford it.

“Now there’s plenty of food, the supermarkets are full,” Alexandra Castellanos told me. “But what are you going to do if you don’t have money to buy?”

Castellanos lives with her husband, Ronald, and three children, in a barrio in southwest Caracas called Macarao. Ronald has severe anemia and had to leave his job as a maintenance worker in an office building. The couple receives a monthly box of subsidized food, which lasts a few days, and government benefit payments that add up to less than $10 a month.

[Read: How populism helped wreck Venezuela]

Ten dollars doesn’t go far in the dollarized economy. A carton of 15 eggs costs $2.50. A kilo of corn flour to make arepas, the Venezuelan staple, costs about $1. Ground beef costs about $2 a pound.

As we talked, in a dingy bakery on a noisy side street, Alexandra’s daughter, Zorángelis, sat beside us. She was a month shy of 3 years old, and she weighed 22 pounds; a doctor had told Alexandra that the girl was 10 pounds underweight. Alexandra pushed up the sleeve of her daughter’s flowered blouse and gently pinched her thin arm. “She’s not building up muscle mass,” she said.

Ronald has gotten free treatment at public hospitals for his anemia, but he needs vitamin B12 injections and other supplements that the family has to buy on its own and cannot afford.

For a while, Alexandra would take the subway to a large, open-air fruit and vegetable market and gather scraps for her family from what the vendors threw away. But so many indigent people started going to the market that fights would break out over the scraps. “People are killing each other there over garbage,” she said. She stopped going.

Before the crisis, Alexandra had steady work, and she and her family lived well. We talked about the Bubble in the wealthy, eastern part of Caracas, which people refer to simply as “the East.” She observed that the new casinos were a good thing because they would create jobs. Her eyes got bright when I described the booming restaurants and bars of Las Mercedes. “The East,” she said, “is another world.”

After I left the casino in Las Mercedes (the monkey was still there, now tucked inside its owner’s nylon bomber jacket, curious black eyes poking above the zipper), I drove a few blocks to a restaurant and nightclub called Lupe. The street was lined with muscular SUVs, several with bodyguards lounging beside them. Lupe functions as a kind of wormhole. You walk through the door and suddenly you’re in Miami, and the worries of an economically devastated Caracas are far away.

When I entered at 2 a.m., hundreds of people were crammed into the long, narrow space—men with open shirts, gold chains, and big watches, women with low necklines showing off surgically enhanced breasts. Merenguetón pounded from big speakers. Bottles of imported Scotch sat on tables. A few people managed to dance in the crush. Venezuelans are typically conscientious about wearing face masks in public, but here, other than the servers, almost no one wore a mask.

In the Bubble, a new high-end restaurant seems to open every week. On another night during my visit I attended the opening of a giant restaurant complex called MoDo. It has five kitchens; separate areas that serve French, Asian, and Mexican food; a pizza restaurant; a craft-beer bar, a cocktail bar; and a café and ice cream parlor. It employs more than 300 people, including servers, cooks, and a team of sommeliers, all paid in dollars. Waiters in blue shirts served foie gras, escargot, and duck magret, while on a stage, four young singers belted out Bruno Mars and other pop tunes, accompanied by a woman on an electric violin: You’re amazing, just the way you are.

You can find the same contrast between poor and rich neighborhoods in cities in the United States, of course, but there is still ample ground in between. Here, as the crisis grinds on, the middle class is squeezed ever thinner and the country is left with a small elite and a massive underclass. Venezuelans will tell you that the Bubble is an illusion. But it is a seductive one, like a mirage in the desert. The country has fallen so far that even a small blip seems magnified—a transformation. A slowing of the economic contraction (some economists are even more optimistic than Oliveros, predicting that production will increase this year) is a palpable change after years of free fall.

The Bubble is an illusion because only a relatively small number of people enjoy it; a few hundred people partying at Lupe is not a sign of a broad recovery. And despite their novelty, the casinos—I visited three of them over several days—were far from full. The reason is obvious: There is no tourism, and very few Venezuelans have the extra money to blow at the blackjack table. But the Bubble is also an illusion because it’s a splurge of consumerism built on the government’s willingness to allow cheap imports and on its rapprochement with the private sector. How long that will last is anyone’s guess.

But for now, the party goes on.

I spoke to a bon vivant and influencer who is a fixture on the invite list for society parties, restaurant openings, product launches, and promotional events. After some slow years, the pace of life has accelerated again. He described the recent opening of a new steak house, where top-shelf booze and bubbly flowed until 4 a.m. “They threw the house out the window,” he said, using a phrase for unrestrained spending. “We’re coming from a time when you would go to an event and all of a sudden they’d say, ‘We ran out of booze.’ Not anymore.”

This is hardly the time to talk about plastics is what I think when Dad, hovering over the waste bin at a post-funeral potluck, waves me over, his gesture discrete but emphatic. He has retrieved from the trash a crystalline plastic cup, with fluted, rigid sides. “Polystyrene,” he grins, inverting the cup to reveal its resin code (a 6 stamped inside the recycling symbol). “But not my kind.”

Dad, back in the 1960s, had manufactured a more resilient variety of polystyrene for Union Carbide, one of the 20th century’s major plastics manufacturers, since acquired by Dow Chemical Company. Now, in the parish hall, I recognize he is seconds from crushing the cup. As if on cue, he closes his grip. Being a certain type of polystyrene—and this is his point—the cup splinters into a strange bloom of shards arrayed about the cup’s circular bottom.

No butadiene, I think. “No butadiene,” he says, which, on the production lines he ran, had been added to rubberize the resin, one among 10,000 helpmates that make plastics as we know them possible. Dad shuffles off to find the recycling bin, though he knows the cup has little chance for recovery and likely a long afterlife ahead. This is especially true for polystyrenes, of which there are multiple varieties; plastics, as the anthropologist Tridibesh Dey notes, are a chemically complex lot, designed for performance rather than reclamation.

Dad once believed that plastics could be reused indefinitely. I imagine that, maybe, he thought plastics, like their makers, deserved the chance to begin again. When Union Carbide downsized in the 1970s, Dad took severance and stayed home with my siblings until he could figure out what a life beyond plastics might look like. The answer, it turned out, was public administration: For a time, he ran my hometown’s recycling program. Recycling, though, never lived up to Dad’s ideal. Of all the plastics made over his lifetime, less than 10 percent has been effectively repurposed.

This failure, like so many other aspects of our relationship with plastics, is often framed in terms of individual shortcomings; plastics’ producers, or the geopolitics that have made plastics so widespread, are rarely called out. But to read plastics’ history is to discover another story: Demand for plastic has been as manufactured as plastics themselves. Society is awash in throwaway plastics not because of the logic of desire but because of the logic of history and of integrated industrial systems.

For decades, the industry has created the illusion that its problems are well under control, all while intensifying production and promotion. More plastics have been made over the past two decades than during the second half of the 20th century. Today, recycling is a flailing, failing system—and yet it is still touted as plastics’ panacea. No end-of-the-pipe fix can manage mass plastics’ volume, complex toxicity, or legacy of pollution, and the industry’s long-standing infractions against human health and rights.

All of this has been true for years, but if there is a time to talk about plastics, now might be it. Plastics are poised to dominate the 21st century as one of the yet-unchecked drivers of climate change.

When Dad’s former employer started making plastics in the late 1920s, no market was itching to buy them. But the company, in a sense, had to make plastics.

Its new commercial antifreeze, Prestone, was synthesized from natural gas and created a by-product, ethylene dichloride, a chemical that had no practical purpose and so was stockpiled on-site. Quickly, it amassed in unmanageable, “embarrassing” quantities, as one Carbide newsletter later put it. Its best use, the company decided, was in making vinyl chloride monomer, recognized as a carcinogen since the ’70s, but back then a building block for a rascally class of plastics no one had commercialized yet—vinyls.

This isn’t an isolated example, but rather an illustration of how product development often unfolds for chemicals and plastics. For Carbide and other 20th-century petrochemical firms, each product required a series of multistep reactions, and each step yielded offshoots. Develop these, and the product lines further branch, eventually creating a practically fractal cascade of interrelated products. Everything that enters the system, explains Ken Geiser, an industrial-chemicals-policy scholar, in his book Materials Matter, must eventually go somewhere; matter being matter, it is neither created nor destroyed. And so it must be converted: made into fuel, discarded as pollution, or monetized. After many iterations, Carbide arrived at Vinylite, finally made workable by blending two types of vinyls: polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and polyvinyl acetate.

According to an internal marketing report, Carbide spent years trying to “synthesize” new customers and invent new uses for Vinylite, while a credit department eased the financial burden of adopting it. The company even sent technical teams around the country to teach manufactures how to use the resin, all with limited success. Celluloid, before Bakelite, and polystyrene afterward, had similar troubles gaining purchase.

Then World War II erupted. War contracts expedited the development of emerging resins. For example, the U.S. Navy helped DuPont and Union Carbide secure a license from Britain’s Imperial Chemical Industries to begin manufacturing polyethylene for insulating wire and cable (enabling radar). The Manhattan Project spurred DuPont to industrialize its new fluorinated plastic, what would become Teflon, previously produced in batches measured by the gram rather than the ton. The war also matured existing resins: 32 times more polystyrene was being produced at the war’s end than at its outset.

But polystyrene also shared base ingredients with another material crucial to modern, mechanized warfare—styrene-butadiene rubber, or SBR. Rubber made up tank treads. Bomber tires. The soles of the boots that soldiers wore.

Left: A sound radar used to detect approaching aircraft, 1949. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Getty) Right: A worker in the Chrysler Corporation Dodge truck plant during World War II. Near Detroit, Michigan, August 1942. (CORBIS/ Getty)

Germany’s colossal IG Farben had already been synthesizing Buna S rubber, its coal-derived version of SBR, when disruption of the natural-rubber trade forced the U.S. to catch up. One American alternative, GR-S, or Government Rubber-Styrene, was developed in a crash course of research and development, wrote the historian Peter J. T. Morris, that rivaled the race for the atom bomb. To keep pace with wartime rubber demand, styrene was produced at levels that seemed “almost unbelievable,” reads a Dow advertisement from the 1940s, especially considering how hard it had been to make previously.

Styrene, too, came with risks. Like vinyl chloride monomer, it has the potential to cause cancer. The same was true with synthetic rubber’s other main ingredient: butadiene, yet another monomer later found to be carcinogenic, and a chemical emblematic of how once-discrete industries—petroleum and chemicals—fused into the petrochemical sector.

The U.S. found itself caught between two ways of making butadiene. One involved making the chemical from grain alcohol, the other from petroleum. Oil interests vied with the farm bloc over government contracts to feed the new rubber machine. Grain held its own during the war, but afterward, the federally backed petroleum boom routed any possibility of a carbohydrate-dominated chemical-and-plastics industry. Grain harvests were deemed too irregular, too beholden to the seasons, to floods and droughts, and thus to price fluctuations.

By the 1950s, the government had sold its wartime rubber factories to private interests. Styrene, as Dow advertised, received its “honorable discharge” so it could “serve a world at peace.” Multiple firms, including Union Carbide, could now make styrene and butadiene in quantities that exceeded what a peacetime rubber industry could consume. The outlet for excess styrene: more polystyrene, some portion of which would later be modified into high-impact grades. Dad’s kind of polystyrene.

Photograph by Matthew Porter for The Atlantic

Plastics’ postwar “domestication occurred unevenly, by fits and starts,” the cultural historian Jeffrey Meikle writes in his book American Plastic. To whip up demand, the industry as a whole invested heavily in advertising, in fact becoming one of advertising’s biggest clients. At first, it set its sights on women, to teach them plastics’ advantages and how to pronounce what the Society of the Plastics Industry (SPI) admits were their “jaw-breaker” names. (“Polly and Vinny Who?” reads one 1953 pamphlet the SPI co-published with the women’s magazine McCall’s. Why it’s: “Vine-ills and Polly-sty-rene.”) When the industry couldn’t invent new markets with, for example, the Tupperware party, it pushed into established ones by underbidding leather, cotton, glass, and metals. Still, sales were such that, by the mid-1950s, as the plastics scholar Max Liboiron has explained, the industry looked for growth by moving plastics not into homes but through them. The rosy future of plastics was in disposables—or as Modern Packaging Magazine’s editor, Lloyd Stouffer, put it, “in the trash can”—and polystyrene was one of the go-to resins.

Soon Scott placed a series of ads in Life magazine featuring what the company called the first throwaway “‘glass’ nice enough for entertaining.” The cup, made from “pure porcelain-smooth polystyrene” was, the copy promised, “absolutely, positively, guaranteed disposable.” By the 1960s, the era my dad made plastics, the military was buying polystyrene again, this time to manufacture the incendiary napalm-B, but packaging and single-use applications were becoming plastics’ largest markets. Production rates were headed “up and up with a vengeance,” wrote an analyst whose sentiments were entered into the 1971 congressional record. At the grocery store, plastics picked off paper item by item: the egg carton, the bread bag, the meat tray, and, eventually though not easily, the grocery sack, says the science writer Susan Freinkel in her book Plastic: A Toxic Love Story.

“Consumers,” Meikle explains, “could choose only from among goods presented in the marketplace.” And by the closing decades of the 20th century, what was on offer was plastic.

In my office, polystyrene cups of many shapes, sizes, grades, and hues line my bookshelf. All were gifts from Dad, who has the admittedly obscure habit of bringing them over. To toss them feels unbearable, and recycling, uncertain.

It can be hard to visualize the web that connects commonplace cups to the interlocking global crises of toxics, environmental injustice, and climate change, and even harder to locate where to intervene. True, some plastics make goods and vehicles more lightweight and thereby efficient. And plastic components help make up technologies that capture and distribute renewable energy. But by comparison, more than 40 percent of plastics now goes into containers, cups, packaging, and other short-term-use products. Despite encouragements to refuse disposables when possible and to #bringyourown, most people in most cases have little say over the volume of plastic packaging in their lives. In some places, a sizable proportion of discardable plastics (for example, sachets) has become largely unavoidable, especially in rural and remote regions where alternatives can be either inaccessible or unaffordable.

From Life magazine, 1955. A family tossing paper cups, plates, aluminum foil pans, lunch trays, straws and napkins through the air illustrating how society has turned into a disposable society with throw-away products. (Peter Stackpole/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock)

Moreover, plastics’ ubiquity isn’t always that visible. Google can lining and drain cleaner and watch for yourself how, once a soda or beer can is submerged in drain cleaner, the cleaner digests the metal layer, leaving a clear, plastic sleeve behind. Or better yet: Soak your next takeout paper coffee cup in a bowl of water. The paper will slough off, revealing the thin layer of polyethylene within.

By the early 1970s, 15 states were already considering how to limit the rapid proliferation of plastic containers. The industry shifted from promotion to self-defense. Industry groups stymied New York City’s attempt at a two-cent bottle tax, and in the following decade beat back restrictions in nearby Suffolk County on polystyrene cups and other tossable plastics. Industry trade groups have even lobbied for states to preempt bans on plastic bags. And whenever public-opinion polls suggested slippage, or if the threat of public regulations loomed, industry and its trade associations upped their ad buys.

At no other juncture in its history, though, has plastics faced the scrutiny it does now. This past March, two Democratic members of Congress introduced legislation to address plastic pollution. At least two-thirds of United Nations member states (including, recently, the United States) support negotiations toward a binding treaty to address plastics’ global implications. And this month, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine called on U.S. producers to reduce the volume of plastics entering commerce and, by extension, the environment. Even my dad has been involved in a push to introduce a municipal ban on disposable polystyrene.

All of these efforts call into question plastics’ unfettered production, but there’s another reason, too, to address plastics now—the industry’s carbon-intensive production is driving climate change.

Plastics has been an adaptable industry, at first forming products from raw materials such as gutta-percha and wood pulp, and then from other industries’ discards, including cotton linters, agricultural waste, and the remnant gases emitted from city gas plants or steel’s coal-to-coke ovens. Plastics are now made in a highly integrated network of refineries, crackers, and petrochemical plants—complexes that have been retrofitted or relocated to better tap new or different oil and gas deposits. Today, 98 to 99 percent—that is to say, most plastics—are manufactured from fossil fuels.

Historically, fossil-carbon feedstocks have been something of a distorted market, given the number and variety of government subsidies: assistance with technology transfer, tax breaks, grants, soft loans, price controls, and, as described here, wartime contracts—which has shaped plastics’ pricing and production in turn. The plastics industry hasn’t had to account for the true costs of its operations, either, including the price of what it has burned, drummed, dumped, lagooned, landfilled, injected, spilled, incinerated, sent up the stack, or drained out the outfall pipe.

But the nature of petrochemicals issued its own economic imperative. Plastics had to be a high-volume product to recoup the substantial capital investments necessary to build and then operate such complex facilities, among the largest, most expensive, and most energy-intensive in the process and manufacturing sectors. Yet again, the same problem: more plastics that need more uses and more markets.

The U.S. “fracking boom,” or what’s been called the “shale revolution,” has fueled plastics’ most recent expansion. Fracking has made the U.S. the world’s largest producer of oil and gas, resulting in “a glut,” Kathy Hipple, a senior research fellow at the Ohio River Valley Institute, told me. This oversupply of feedstock drove another round of investments in plastics plants, which in turn, Hipple explained, has forced an excess of plastic packaging onto the market—more than demand can absorb. These plastics, now primarily polyethylenes and polypropylenes made from natural-gas liquids, have reduced polystyrene to a minor player in the packaging and disposables market—about 2 percent. Tongue in cheek, I’ve taken to calling plastics’ latest output “frackaging.”

But the economics of plastics is once again changing. As energy and transportation shift away from fossil fuels, plastics seem to many oil and gas producers like one of the few opportunities to keep growing, to keep going. Some new “mega-plants,” such as China’s Zhoushan Green Petrochemical Base, convert crude oil, rather than refinery by-products, directly into chemicals and plastics.

And this is (partly) how plastics would come to produce a greater share of the world’s carbon emissions. Should U.S. plastics production continue to grow as the industry projects, by 2030, it will eclipse the climate contributions of coal-fired power plants, concludes Jim Vallette, the lead author of a new Beyond Plastics report. Or, by another measure, the current growth trajectory means that by 2050, the industry’s emissions could eat up 15 percent, and potentially more, of the global carbon budget. How much varies by feedstock and type of plastic, but on average, 1.89 metric tons of carbon-dioxide equivalents (a composite measure of greenhouse gases) is produced for every metric ton of plastic made.

Emissions stem from upstream fossil-fuel production and processing. But there are concerns, too, about the potential for even more emissions at the other end of the life cycle, should states green-light industry proposals to expand such carbon-intensive waste-management technologies as incineration, refuse-derived fuels, and molecular, chemical, and so-called advanced recycling. These unproven technologies use high heat and other methods to convert waste into feedstocks for making more plastics. As of now, such technologies shift “the landfill from the ground to the sky,” says Yobel Novian Putra, who works on Asia Pacific climate and energy policy for the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives, which in turn has implications for both air quality and climate.

But petrochemical production itself is also energy-intensive—among the top-two energy users in the manufacturing sector. Even if the industry were to convert to low-carbon energy sources (or to adopt problematic carbon-capture-and-storage, or CCS, technologies), plastics would remain a significant emitter of climate-relevant gases, according to analysts from the Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL).

Yet to date, climate policy has not focused on manufacturing or plastics. And too often plastics’ proliferation can seem of secondary importance as climate disasters accelerate. But plastics and climate aren’t separate issues. They are structurally linked problems, and also mutually compounding, with plastics’ facilities spewing climate-relevant emissions and extreme weather further dispersing plastic into the environment. Research is under way to study their interaction—the way, say, thermal stress affects how species respond to toxic exposures. But they have the same root. “Plastic is carbon,” fossil fuels in another form, CIEL’s president, Carroll Muffett, told me. Or, as the geographer Deirdre McKay phrases it, plastic is climate change, just in its solid state.

Scientists are still learning how deep the layers of damage may go—how climate-altering gases waft from sun-drenched plastics, how plankton take up microplastics, which may well be altering their capacity to supply oxygen and sequester industrial carbon, pulling it down and away and into the sea. “Research into these [climate] impacts is still in its infancy,” according to a report published by CIEL and several other groups, “but early indications that plastic pollution may interfere with the largest natural carbon sink on the planet should be cause for immediate attention and serious concern.”

And so I think back to that funeral, recall the cup in hand, the waves of grief. As wildfires spark, as their smoke wafts across continents, as waters rise and shorelines recede, amid droughts and deluge, cancers and extinctions, deadly heat and deadly pandemics, it might not seem like the right time to talk about plastics—about the excess of war-matured, throwaway plastics foisted onto society that can now be found everywhere, anywhere. But it is. And the world doesn’t have a moment to waste.