The Great Sustainability Mirage: How Western Governments Are Engineering Failure

The Great Sustainability Mirage: How Western Governments Are Engineering Failure

The word sustainable once meant something solid. It meant durable, dependable, built to last. It meant systems and machines that could carry on through generations, requiring care but rewarding it with longevity. Today, however, Western governments have hollowed out that meaning and replaced it with a shallow fixation on carbon metrics and regulatory checklists. What we are told is sustainability is in practice the opposite: a cycle of disposability, overregulation, and deliberate fragility in the very machines and infrastructures that support our lives.

This is not sustainability. It’s a mirage.

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The Automobile: A Case Study in Engineered Obsolescence

Take the car — a machine that once embodied reliability, self-reliance, and engineering craft. Older vehicles were designed with robust transmissions, engines that could be serviced by their owners, and parts made to be repaired rather than replaced. A four-speed transmission from the 1980s may not have been flashy, but it was simple, rebuildable, and lasted decades with minimal upkeep.

Now look at what Western government policies have forced onto the industry. CVT transmissions, for example, are touted as “efficient” and environmentally friendly. In practice, they wear out faster, cost far more to repair, and in many cases cannot be economically rebuilt at all. This isn’t progress — it’s regression hidden behind an environmental slogan.

The same goes for modern direct-injection engines. They burn fuel slightly cleaner at the tailpipe, which ticks the regulators’ box. But direct injection causes carbon buildup in the engine, shortening its lifespan and increasing maintenance costs. Some manufacturers are forced to use both direct and port injection just to undo the problems caused by chasing the regulatory “solution.”

In short, governments claim to demand sustainability, but what they actually deliver are lemons: fragile, costly machines designed to break sooner and be replaced more often.

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Governments as Engineers of Failure

It is not simply that governments have meddled in technology they don’t understand. It is that their meddling has become the driver of unsustainability. Instead of setting broad guardrails — don’t build unsafe products, don’t poison the air with unchecked toxins — they micromanage design decisions. They dictate how engines must burn fuel, what transmissions must look like, and how vehicles must be rated.

The result is a perverse incentive structure. Corporations no longer innovate for durability or reliability, but for compliance. They chase the cheapest way to meet the regulatory marker, regardless of whether the outcome makes for better machines. The government sets the stage, corporations exploit it for profit, and consumers are trapped in the cycle of paying more for less.

This is not a bug in the system. It’s the system itself.

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The Energy Question: The Foundation of True Sustainability

If there is one truth to sustainability, it is that nothing in society can endure without abundant, cheap, and reliable energy. Yet in the West, governments have “sold the farm” when it comes to energy. They close off supply, drive up costs, and treat energy not as a national security necessity but as a political bargaining chip.

In a strategy game, no player would survive this way. The first priority in any sustainable system is energy — because energy is the multiplier of all other activity. Without it, you cannot manufacture, you cannot build, you cannot even maintain a consumer society. Cheap energy is what gives people disposable income to purchase, maintain, and improve the goods of life. Strip that away, and everything collapses into scarcity.

Instead of securing energy abundance, Western governments deliberately pursue scarcity: shutting down power sources before replacements are viable, taxing energy use as though it were a sin, and promising a utopia powered by windmills and solar panels without the infrastructure to back it up. This is not sustainability — it’s a controlled demolition of reliability.

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Carbon as Distraction

Carbon has become the singular metric through which the West defines sustainability. But this fixation is itself unsustainable. The world has vast carbon cycles already — oceans, forests, soils. The obsession with carbon numbers distracts from more immediate and material issues: whether products last, whether they can be repaired, and whether the energy system can support them.

A car that lasts twenty years but emits slightly more carbon over its lifetime may in fact be more sustainable than a car that breaks in eight years, requires massive resource-intensive manufacturing replacements, and consumes more energy in its own production cycle. Yet under today’s government policies, the short-lived car is the one celebrated as “green.”

This is upside-down logic, and everyone but the regulators can see it.

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The Hollowing Out of “Sustainability”

The irony is sharp: governments speak the language of sustainability while creating the exact opposite. By enforcing short-term fixes and micromanaging industries they don’t understand, they have birthed a culture of disposability and fragility. By inflating energy costs and restricting access, they hollow out the foundations of economic security. By turning “carbon neutrality” into a religion, they blind society to the actual measures of sustainability: durability, reliability, and abundance.

What the West now calls sustainability is nothing more than a political branding exercise. It is not sustainable for machines. It is not sustainable for industry. And it is not sustainable for society.

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What Real Sustainability Would Mean

Real sustainability is simple and obvious:

Machines that are built to last, not fail.

Systems that are repairable and serviceable, not disposable.

Energy that is abundant, cheap, and reliable.

Policies that safeguard durability and security, not sacrifice them to ideology.

Until Western governments remember this, their talk of sustainability will remain a mirage — a hollow word masking the slow erosion of true resilience.

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