The word CAN is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.

Let's not pretend like the track record of energy production is free of externalities.

We CAN also produce almost all of our plastics from recycled ones. We don't, because those are more expensive than new.

But who cares? Plastic in stabilized landfill is behaving better then the oil in the ground it was manufactured from. It doesn't matter.

One reason new plastic is so cheap is that we wanted the other parts of the oil to run automobiles and planes. So if we stop doing that suddenly recycling the plastic makes more sense too...