Energy, plastic, water, products?

Everything that is advertised and marketed. The abuse of energy, resources, climate change, etc are all just emergent symptoms of a system based on blind competitive consumptionism: the philosophy that a life is bought, rather than lived or created in a place. It's the assumption that everything people do is not impacting the ground under their feet that future people will need in order to survive. We don't need government to balloon itself into managing every resource: it only has to put the overhead costs of civilization into sales tax so that consumers see those costs at their decision point: the checkouts.

We already have some versions of this: gasoline taxes to pay for roads, registration fees for automobiles, hotel taxes, etc. They just aren't coordinated with the actual needs of future life on the planet (not just imagined 'consumers'). In practice, we have the opposite: advertisers are subsidized (tax-deductible expense) for stealing our time and attention as well as brainwashing children to be 'good consumers' of things they don't need.