Guest Post by John Stossel
Recently, many politicians were in such a hurry to ban plastic bags.
California and Hawaii banned them, then New York. Then Oregon, Connecticut, Maine and Vermont passed laws against them. More than 400 cities did, too.
Why? Because plastic bags are evil, didn’t you know?
“Look at the damage done by plastic bags! It is everywhere!” complained New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.
A Washington state senator cited “videos of animals choked by plastics, tangled in garbage!”
So what should we use instead of plastic? Cloth bags! They’re reusable! “Certainly the way to go!” said New Jersey’s assembly speaker.
But now, suddenly, politicians are canceling their bans. Instead, they’re banning the once praised reusable bags.
It’s because of COVID-19, of course.
Reusable bags already brought bacteria into stores. We’re supposed to wash them, but almost no one does. Studies found reusable bags crawling with dangerous bacteria. After plastic bags were banned in San Francisco, food poisoning deaths increased sharply.
But environmental groups, like Greenpeace, call those disease fears “misinformation.”
“There are no studies or evidence that reusable bags are transmitting viruses,” says Alex Truelove of the Public Interest Research Group, in my new video.
He’s right. There are no human studies, but COVID-19 is so new. Millions of piglets died from swine coronavirus. The agriculture department concluded that reusable feed bags were probably the cause.
Still, even now, some politicians can’t wait to ban plastic again. Boston Mayor Marty Walsh says “as soon as this crisis is over we’ll go back to all paper bags and reusable bags.”
“Politicians are always just looking for something to do,” complains supermarket executive Andrea Catsimatidis.
She points out that paper bags cost five times what plastic costs. “When you’re talking billions of bags, it really adds up!”
And paper bags don’t hold as much. They rip.
Plastic is more convenient. Why must politicians take away what’s convenient?
“Over two-thirds of everything we use is not recycled or composted and ends up in a landfill,” complains Truelove.
So what?
People think America is running out of room for landfills, but that’s not true.
“All America’s trash for the next century would fit in one landfill just 18 miles square,” says environmental economist Ross McKitrick. Landfills take up so little space that “if you look the air you wouldn’t even be able to see where landfills are.”
And modern landfills hardly pollute. They’re surrounded by layers of clay and plastic that keep nasty stuff in the garbage from leaking out.
But what about all that plastic in the ocean?
Plastic bags are sometimes eaten by animals. Some sea turtles mistake the bags for jellyfish and then starve. Islands of floating garbage have formed in the Pacific Ocean.
Green groups have convinced Americans that we are to blame.
But we aren’t! Even if you litter — and today, fewer Americans do — your litter is unlikely to end up in an ocean.
Almost all the plastic in oceans comes from Asia and Africa. Less than 1% comes from North America.
In other words, banning plastic bags in America will accomplish roughly … nothing.
What it will do is inconvenience Americans and make some of us sick.
Truelove says, “We should … set an example for the rest of the world.”
“That’s posturing,” replies McKitrick. “The rest of the world isn’t looking to see what you do with your Starbucks cup.
“If we are concerned about other countries’ waste going into their river systems,” he adds, “there are better things we can do. We can share technology with them so they process their waste better. That’s better than imposing on consumers’ tiresome inconveniences in hopes that it will somehow change behavior on the other side of the planet.”
Politicians “looking for something to do” routinely do more harm than good.
John Stossel is author of “Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media
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where I live plastic bags filled the landscape. they rode in on every breeze, they were tangled in every bush and tree, you could see them a quarter mile in the air wafting on the thermal updrafts. since the restrictions, they’re all gone. I’m glad.
That would be due to irresponsible people.
sure. but it’s hard to implement a solution that goes through irresponsible people, a solution usually has to bypass them.
Always the other guy, never a ‘Patriot’ those types walk on water.
People used to be held accountable for their actions, but the government has implemented a “It’s Not Your Fault” system.
Along with a “Born That Way” system.
“the government has implemented a ‘It’s Not Your Fault’ system”
in some circumstances that simply is the most efficient response. sometimes the only actionable response.
That describes the area around our landfill. Do you live next to the landfill, gman?
no, just windy a lot.
Try some Beano.
GAS-X
If people didn’t waste, there would be no need for so many plastic bags. I reuse the plastic bags and use them for refuse when they are about done. The cognitive dissonance is astounding. Where I live, people are ordering in food deliveries left and right. And I think, they are so afraid to go out, yet they don’t consider maybe the guy making and handling their food could be coughing all the fck over it. The Amazon deliveries have been non stop. WTF are people buying? Why aren’t the delivery guys and cardboard boxes carrying contagion? Many have pets (and I was reamed in the past for even insinuating animals would be deemed carriers…well…guess whhhhhaaaaat) in close quarters. What are they going to do when their pets are tested and animal rescue comes to take their beloveds from them….I wonder what their line in sand will be.
Their line in the sand will be when they go into the showers at the FEMA camps, but it will be too late.
Sad. But true.
All solid waste landfills are surrounded with groundwater monitoring wells of varying depths that intersect water layers (yes, there are many and segregated oops not racist but this is an industry term). All are monitored monthly.
Any migration of concerned compounds is arrested and addressed immediately. The whole crap of plastic bags killing the world is that. We fogged our reusable bags with sanitizer after each use but no longer use them.
Hey, perhaps a public cat-o-nine tails lashing of an CoVidiot would solve stooopidity.
Oh well, back to Jack Benny on SiriusXM Radio Classics.
I’ve sailed all over.
Plastic waste? Sure. In VERY specific places.
Hate to say it, but mostly Hispanic. Got lots of Hispanic friends and FAMILY!
But, nonetheless it’s cultural.
If you look at the West side of the Bahamas, for instance, NO plastic waste.
On the East (Ocean) side, tons of waste. From The Dominican, San Juan, and the cruise ships.
As we have learned, litter (and that’s all this is) is easily reduced by education. NOBODY wants to deface the Earth. Once you make it clear what the consequences are, they clean up their act. This has been demonstrated over decades. So how much does it cost to get the word out??
“NOBODY wants to deface the Earth”
how ’bout the ones that don’t care? or the ones that do in fact want to deface their enemy’s earth?
and when people live in trash, what do you mean by educate them to the consequences of living in trash?
When I was in the U.S.Navy in the early 70’s many times I hauled plastic bags full of trash to the shit chute back at the fantail, plop, right into the ocean.
Indeed, the navies of the world are some of the biggest polluters there are. Yet never an attack on the US Navy or its disregard for the oceans they infest.
“right into the ocean”
(laugh) and the russian spy trawler trailing behind would scoop up all of it looking for intel data.
I have gone scuba diving throughout the Caribbean and many time we would find a disposable diaper hung up on the reef or laying in the sand. Too many people just don’t care.
Your right, ship pilate, good thing America ships its waste plastic to China for recycling, let them dump it in the ocean. At least our hands are clean.