It has always been a mistake for conservatives to focus only on economics and politics while ceding important cultural issues to the left. In every case, be it social justice, public health, or the environment, leftists inevitably will reduce these complex matters to a simplistic Marxist-inspired dichotomy of oppressors against the oppressed. This, in turn, enables their leaders to weaponize the culture and impose their parasitic agenda on others.

We need to understand how the left came to dominate cultural issues in the first place. It’s not always through government coercion and relentless propaganda campaigns, though this definitely happens. More often, the left will simply win hearts and minds by employing a potent kind of sophistry that appeals to the more “educated” classes.

A perfect example of this can be found in a recent book Wasteland: The Secret World of Waste and the Urgent Search for a Cleaner Future by British journalist Oliver Franklin-Wallis. On the surface, the book is an earnest exploration of the world’s various systems of waste disposal. Franklin-Wallis travels the globe visiting landfills, recycling centers, mining operations, toxic waste dumps, thrift markets, and even a nuclear waste storage facility. Throughout his account of these travels, he examines statistics and studies but also provides the occasional ironic quip and funny anecdote. Think of the of the book as a mixture of Dirty Jobs and a BBC documentary.

In that vein, Franklin-Wallis gives his progressive readers the nice warm feeling of being informed. They can now walk confidently into the public square, take ownership of the topic, and edify their peers on the dangers facing the planet. Those who disagree or raise objections to his argument can be safely ridiculed and excluded since “they haven’t read the book.”

Well, I have read the book and can now confidently declare that below its glossy surface, Franklin-Wallis’s account of the world’s trash disposal efforts reflects the same problem afflicting most leftist arguments: It is factually correct in most parts, but incredibly misleading throughout.

This becomes apparent with his core premise that waste must be a problem of overconsumption. Like a typical environmentalist, Franklin-Wallis agonizes over the amount of waste people produce and continually blames Westerners for buying too much stuff, using too much energy, and taking up too much space. In his telling, it is the myriad demands of consumers that lead to the mountains of trash in India, toxic e-waste dumps in Ghana, and child laborers sorting through trash in Malaysia. And if 300 pages of heavily suggestive reporting isn’t enough, he hammers home his proposed solution: “Buy less stuff.”

While this moral lesson may satisfy his leftist publishers, it is woefully inadequate as an answer to what ails the planet’s waste disposal issues because it is largely untrue. What Franklin-Wallis leaves out is the critical fact that most waste is the result of industrial manufacturing, government regulation, and environmentalist lies. Unscrupulous manufacturers in the Third World (or to use the idiotic leftist term, the “Global South”) dump their waste into rivers and population centers. It is typically government regulations that cause farmers to kill off their livestock or allow so much of their crops to fester. Government subsidies enable the so-called green industries that are actually wasteful and polluting in their manufacturing processes, such as renewable energy and electric vehicles. And it is popular environmentalist hokum (what Franklin-Wallis calls “greenwashing”) that distracts people with futile recycling campaigns while their local factory poisons them with toxic chemicals in their food and water.

In other words, pollution and waste are fundamentally not problems of consumption, but of production. Franklin-Wallis likely knows this since he clumsily reveals towards the end of the book that “one regularly cited estimate states that 97 percent of all waste is produced by industry, not households…. for all the effort we spend washing out yogurt pots and collecting bottles, the vast majority of waste happens upstream, before our products ever get to us.”

After making this huge concession—one that effectively disembowels his argument—Franklin-Wallis quickly moves on to his few next chapters, hoping no one notices. Most readers probably won’t notice, since he regales them with his time at a nuclear waste storage facility, bamboozles them with studies and statistics on radioactive waste, and launches to a long sermon on reducing consumption to conclude his book.

Of course, if Franklin-Wallis avoided these tactics and allowed the facts to speak for themselves instead of infusing them with his preexisting partisanship, his book would arrive at some uncomfortable conclusions: Outsourcing manufacturing to the Third World is the main source of global pollution by far; governments (both in the West and beyond) are key players in creating pollution and preventing cleanup; and the real solution to reducing waste is modernizing production rather than pretending we can make large-scale changes to consumer behavior that could do anything other than put a small dent in the problem.

It just so happens that these are the positions of President Trump and most conservatives who study this subject. By contrast, the environmentalist left senselessly clings to narratives of exploitation so they can continue to blame their preferred villains. Somehow, all the world’s problems (be they pollution, poverty, war, corruption, or crime) are caused by rich white Westerners exploiting poor black and brown people around the world. Even when the facts prove otherwise, they feel compelled to feverishly polish this ideological excrement with as much skill as they can muster.

Not only does this do a disservice to the readers who are deluded by this tired story, but it also is a waste of the skills of talented writers like Franklin-Wallis who, if he tried, might use his powers for good. The issue he tackles is critical to the current and future prosperity of humanity; everyone should be educated on what happens to today’s waste and its impact on individuals and communities. But because this issue has been so heavily coopted by dishonest brokers, it makes people hesitant even to discuss it. It now falls to the right to untangle this ideological mess and set the record straight. We must make better arguments and call out the false claims that pollute the public discourse on the environment.