Environmentalists have an Emily Litella moment
First we had paper grocery bags.
I liked them, not the least because they were versatile. Good for wrapping packages for mailing and, long ago, excellent as textbook covers.
But then the news came that they were environmentally wasteful. Too many trees had died so that our bags might live.
The recyclable plastic bag became the new recommended way to take groceries home (cheaper for the store, too, which no doubt factored heavily into the mix). Then the ante was upped and the really righteous got into BYOB—-bring your own bag.
But for the fallen among us, the plastic bag has been the order of the day. The things are so small they can only hold a few items at a time, so that even a lightly loaded grocery cart makes for a host of bags. Luckily, unlike paper bags, they have handles, so it’s possible to hold many at once, although a great strain if trying to carry anything large such as liter soda bottles.
But we have a choice; for the heavy things, paper is still available. One has only to get up the gumption to ask.
But now there’s a growing effort to ban or discourage (two different things) the plastic bag as we know it. It began a few years ago in Ireland when a law was passed placing a twenty cent tax on each bag distributed, and their use dropped precipitously. Recently San Francisco has actually banned plastic grocery bags that are non-compostable.
LIke most environmental issues, it’s hard to discover exactly how bad the situation is. Plastic bags are petroleum products, for instance, but how much of a problem this really causes is hard to say. Compared to our other uses of petroleum they may be a drop in the proverbial bucket for all I know. They break down slowly in landfills, it’s true, but so do many things that we’re not banning. And recycling is not without some difficulty and cost, as well.
Human beings being what they are, getting all of us to haul around those canvas bags each time we shop would be a very tough sell. I don’t, for instance, although I recycle my plastic bags (it’s easy; they’re light), for what it’s worth.
But It turns out that paper bags, one of the recommended substitutes, have their own drawbacks, just as we were told at the outset. Be careful what you legislate:
Paper bags, meanwhile, generate 70% more air pollutants and 50 times more water pollutants than plastic bags, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. This is because four times as much energy is required to produce paper bags and 85 times as much energy is needed to recycle them. Paper takes up nine times as much space in landfills and doesn’t break down there at a substantially faster rate than plastic does.
And it turns out those compostable bags haven’t really been widely studied, either. They sound better, but who knows? In the conditions of an actual landfill over time, strange things can happen that don’t occur in a lab.
Whatever the real scope of the problem with plastic bags, it stands to reason that the more we reuse our bags the less of a problem there will be. And there’s also no question that reusing bags is a pain in the butt, and that economic incentives to do so rather than outright bans would at least retain people’s freedom of choice in the matter.
But it also turns out that a large and important part of the campaign against the ubiquitous plastic bag was based on a false premise (why, somehow, am I not totally surprised?). One of the major arguments against the bags has been that they hurt marine life. Here’s a typical quote:
One of the most dramatic impacts is on marine life. About 100,000 whales, seals, turtles and other marine animals are killed by plastic bags each year worldwide, according to Planet Ark, an international environmental group.
Now, in what can only be described as an Emily Litella moment, it turns out that bags don’t significantly threaten marine life after all. Here’s how the error occurred:
The central claim of campaigners is that the bags kill more than 100,000 marine mammals and one million seabirds every year. However, this figure is based on a misinterpretation of a 1987 Canadian study in Newfoundland, which found that, between 1981 and 1984, more than 100,000 marine mammals, including birds, were killed by discarded nets. The Canadian study did not mention plastic bags.
Fifteen years later in 2002, when the Australian Government commissioned a report into the effects of plastic bags, its authors misquoted the Newfoundland study, mistakenly attributing the deaths to “plastic bags”.
As these facts were distributed around the world, environmental groups latched onto them and are having trouble letting go. They might do well to heed Emily herself:
[ADDENDUM: To clarify: there is a lot of plastic debris in the ocean, and some of it is harmful to wildlife. The only thing is, it doesn’t seem to prominently feature plastic bags, as far as I can tell from skimming a voluminous amount of verbiage on the subject. Plastic bags seem to end up mostly in landfills. The ocean plastics are a combination of the following: cups and containers people use for snacking in beach areas and then dump nearby; plastic items (such as containers) that ships dump into the water; fishing equipment, which is now mostly made of plastic (such as plastic nets); and plastic objects washed out to sea through storm drains. Most of this plastic ends up as floating particles of different sizes that have been broken into pieces by wave action. Here’s a PDF to wade through if you’d like to try.]
I lived in Germany for years. You always brought your bags with you. If you wanted a plastic one, you paid for it. At the time I think the Germans were thinking economically rather than environmentally. Aren’t disposable bags just wasteful, and isn’t there something negative about wastefulness? Sort of like the SUV driver who only commutes from his suburban house to his suburban office park. Why waste the gas, unless you use your SUV on the weekends to hit the backroads where you actually need all that power and 4 wheel drive? I won’t oppose a good idea, simply because some whacked out environmentalist also thinks it’s a good idea. I just think it’s a good idea for a different reason.
I too get teary-eyed at the thought that my 17 mile commute is done in a V8-powered Yukon XL.
Then I remember that hauling my boat, going on long camping trips, transporting four kids and a dog to Grandma’s, moving furniture for friends or finding space for my son’ and his teammate’s hockey gear just wouldn’t be as easy in a politically correct Prius.
Just like a gun that can be used for things other than slaughtering your neighbors (GASP! Really, no kidding), SUV’s really do have uses other than hitting the trails in the Grand Tetons.
Did I mention the snow we get here in Northern Minnesota? Often even 4×4 power isn’t much help.
What was the topic again?
kungfu: as I said, it’s still a good idea to use as few bags as possible. The question is how to do that, what the alternatives should be, and how negative is the true impact of these bags. I’d rather have our decisions be based on facts than distortions, and I’d rather we make them as non-coercively as possible.
of course, environmentalists will not be satisfied until we all live in caves and consume nothing – and WE is the key word here.
THEY will continue to live in mansions, take private jets everywhere, enjoy a level of consumption denied to the peasants.
Like Al Gore or Laurie David…
There’s a store near me that uses the German-style method of encouraging grocery bag re-use.
That is, if you want a bag, you pay a 5-cent cost per bag.
This store caters to the bottom of the economic ladder, and does this to cut costs.
(After all, if the cost of the bags isn’t rolled into the operating overhead of the store, the store can offer a marginal price advantage. Similarly for the costs of unpackaging the groceries from shipping containers before placing them in the sales area…or the cost of paying employees to round up shopping carts in parking lots. Customers use a quarter to unlock the shopping cart from its storage area, and get their quarter returned when they lock the shopping cart back into the line-up in the storage area…it’s a wonderfully efficient method of keeping the parking lot free of stray shopping carts.)
Anyway, the difference between this and city-mandated costs is that the store and customers are doing it voluntarily, partly because they live and work at the margin.
I also have to second Shaldag. My Jeep Cherokee makes snowy-weather driving in Detroit much safer. Not that I’m planning on avoiding any opportunities to go 4WD-exploring where that option is available.
I’ve gone to Aldi myself. Aldi is a German chain, and it is focused on cost cutting. Cash only, reusable plastic bags, deposits for carts, you name it.
OmegaPaladin,
There’s an interesting thing about Aldi. The Albrecht brothers who own it (actually them because ther is an Aldi Northa and an Aldi South, one for each brother) are very high on the world’s richest list. They are very, very publicity shy, and they never get mentioned when the Germans complain about The Rich who don’t share their wealth.
The greens are very poor at assessing unintended consequences . They leap from one save-the-world measure to the next and hope that everyone will forget their last ill-conceived idea. I am at the point that I assume they are wrong when they open their mouths.
I have everything individually wrapped in plastic bags. Then place everything in larger bags for carry out purposes. Then I switch everything from the bags into an igloo cooler in the parking lot and discard the bags onto the ground. Other times I’ll throw them out the window. I dont care what liberals think. I really dont.
Environmentalists have caused a lot of damage and raised prices on everything, particularly hurting the poor. However, when we were in Finland, we found that they have very efficient ways to handle plastic bags, and most people carry their own bags to the store.
http://collectingmythoughts.blogspot.com/2008/03/rising-food-prices-caused-by-rising.html
Vilifying plastic bags are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to environmentalists’ sophistry.
The greenies are another net. You can’t catch everyone with one net, so you create different nets that sell the same thing in different packages.
The greenies want to depopulate the planet (while the people motivating them sit back and get the good life back). Yes nihilism makes you hate yourself that much. (Dr. Planka, depending on whether you believe Mims, gave a speech that Ebola was perfect to reduce the population by 90% and meet population goals — he got a standing ovation from doctors at the conference.)
One only has to go here to know what ‘green party’ stands for… you CAN say that they are not the same, but softer versions of the same thing that are more palatable is not the same as being 180 degrees different.
If you search for this:
Libertarian National Socialist Green Party
You end up with this:
http://www.nazi.org/
Bet you didn’t know that… bet most people in the west think the green party is something else. Then again… who defines things, the people who have personal versions in which the bad is weeded out so they can belong, or the people defining it in full at the top?
If you search for green party on its own, you’re flooded with the US versions.
The “green movement” is a fascist movement. The absolute intolerance against other ways of thinking, even if they are held by the majority of people; the emphasis on “the people’s common-sense feelings”; the mystical ennobling of nature; the Romantic flight from the world to a pre-industrial life on the Eco-farm; the apotheosis of a transcendent mystical intoxication about life; the Dionysian character of the rock-drug culture–these are all entirely typical markers of the fascist mass movement.
To be sure, every “Green” is not a hardboiled, conscious fascist, but potentially, tends in that direction and under conditions of a worsening economic crisis, the unfortunate Green proceeds there rapidly. Punks carry swastikas quite blatantly, and the radicalized part of the Green movement long ago seized upon the methods of the stormtroopers. On this point, the street battles in many German cities, the atrocities and attacks against advocates of technological progress, and the terrorist methods with which the political activities of their opponents are disrupted, speak volumes.
“Can you not twist all values? And is good perhaps evil? And God only an invention, and refinement of the Devil? Is everything perhaps false in the last analysis? And if we are perplexed, are we also in the same sense deceivers? Must we not also be deceivers?” – Nietzsche
And here the justification for terrorism
“The most extreme form of nihilism is the understanding that every belief, everything taken as true, is necessarily false; because a true world does not exist. But a perspective appearance…. We think these thoughts in most terrifying form; existence, such as it is, without reason or goal, but inexorably repeating, without a conclusion, into nothingness; the eternal repetition. That is the extreme form of nihilism: eternal nothingness (the meaningless).” – Nietzsche
And if I have enough bags left over, Ill open the sun roof stand up in my car while its still moving, lite the bags on fire and throw them at every mini-van I see.
screw’em.
The greens are about self extermination. Their policies are harmful, and in the tradition of Marx, they see the world as static. They have a horrible record as to having any real scientific knowledge, and often their green suggestions are much more harmful and less green when analyzed, but seem green up front.
If you want to see a movie with the most propaganda combining all the left propaganda, then see “PATHFINDER”. The propaganda in it is as thick as some of the heaviest nazi or communist stuff.
But its green, its feminist, its Marxist, its anti west, etc.
The plot is simple. It takes place before Columbus came and ruined America. They say before him, other white men came first. And so it creates the myth of the western white man in the guise of Vikings from a record cover for molly hatchet.
Its just one lie after another lie after another lie. From the opening scenes linking Indians to horses, which didn’t appear till 1600s with the Spanish, to a penny whistle warrior that reminds one of Pan. And don’t forget the white western Vikings who want Indian women, and enjoy killing babies for sport.
Their policies follow the polices of the current lords over socialism, so they are anti nuclear (so we are not independent from oil to which our econmics is bad). they are anti progress, they promote things as good that are harmful. They deny common sense.
Take for instance the idea of running out of natural resources. What a joke or farce..
The minute that they are too expensive to dig, or too rare, the garbage dumps will be gold mines as we go to the oldest most wasteful ones to mine raw materials.
If they didn’t drag science, we might have had more progress, but the laws they push tend to slow things down.
The nuclear waste thing is a farce. We wouldn’t have to store it for a thousand years. Within a hundred if they don’t socialist tax us or halt progress entirely. (since the minute you invent something new that improves, you incur huge social justice cost because everyone doesn’t have, say insulin, that needs it. this tends to dispromote inventing. But you can be sure that they will continue those things, just not for their pets)
With regular space flight, we would send nuclear waste to the sun… (which they would claim was being littered).
The copper that came out of the ground is being replaced by sand. The US is actually the LEAST polluting as is most western nations. Take a look at the recent report on pollution and china, Russia, and the socialists states are all spewing crap. The US is getting cleaner and cleaner, and we will have carbon dioxide scrubbers soon (if the 840 billion obama signed away for us doesn’t cause us to halt that).
The point is that our progress got us to the point that we can afford green. And the other countries will benefit as they don’t have to do what we did when there was nothing else to do. And before we even knew.
However, socialism is so poor at efficiency, that there can be no choice between a $2 something and a $10 ecofriendly something. One has to have disposable income to make those choices. And no socialist planner is going to accept a product to make for 5 times the other when he can hide the garbage as the news is controlled.
In 5 years the US could put how many nuclear reactors online?
100?
As of this year (I think) Indian point puts out 1040 megawatts electric power.
What would 100 plants do to the use of coal and oil?
What would Americas productivity output have been if we build these 20 years ago and we didn’t spend all that money on oil?
In a span of twenty years, electricity generated by nuclear power plants averted the cumulative emission of 1.6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, 65 million tons of sulphur dioxide, and 27 million tons of nitrogen oxides.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Because the fuel used in nuclear power plants exist in abundant supply, the price is very cheap, unlike for fossil fuels where the supply is finite and slowly diminishing. A typical fuel pellet cost about $7. This one fuel pellet has an equivalent energy of three barrels of oil, which cost $84, or one ton of coal, which cost $29. In 1993, the fossil fuels displaced by nuclear energy totaled: 470 million tons of coal and 96 million barrels of oil which translated to about $17 billion. By using nuclear energy at $7 per pellet, a savings of about $13 billion was generated in just one year.
Remember with regular space flight, we can dispose of all we want. With regular space flight we can also make stuff that is harmful in space, and only ship down the good stuff.
We are on the verge of a sustainable future that would include space.. but that would then open everything up to the similar situation that happened between the US and England.
The fight of the few to dominate the many has been going on ever since with the many losing slowly by fighting themselves and trusting the few.
It should then be pointed out that from the Chernobyl accident, countries from the European Community can expect 1000 extra deaths over the next 50 years. But what is that statistic compared the 10000 deaths per year due to coal and its associated black lung disease. What should also be pointed out is that the Chernobyl reactor had no containment structure, unlike the reactors in the United States where all reactors are required to be kept in containment structures. Containment structures could have prevented this accident.
And the new designs are much much safer.
Now here is a big eye opener…
http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-power-plant-world-wide.htm
how many are there running world wide if they are so dangerous?
The us has only 100… there are 439 world wide.
Almost 400 trillion watts…
Take a look at the numbers those things offset…
One fuel pellet is $7.. say its $20… it does the same work as 300+ dollars of oil!!
The best for green is battery technology fed by nuclear energy…
Anyone wants to guess what happens to water patterns when a million or more cars in an urban area are spitting molecular water? You know what will happen at dew point?
So why aren’t they doing this? Because they want to use hydrogen or methanol. And the US oil companies own the largest of the local metal halide fields in the ocean. Lets just say they don’t handle that right, your talking a burp, and we are all gone back to bacteria.
So if the game is to visit ill on us, then perhaps that’s why they are pushing us to those choices.
Ultimately they are trying to murder capitalism to prove that the other is better.
That’s sociopathic reasoning, no?
Steve is so rude.
So why do they always ask?
Because baggers can’t be choosers.
Longtime lurker — love the blog (wish I could get more folks here in Boston to read it and pay heed). Thanks for the balanced view on plastic bags. I’ve been discussing the bag issue with some friends who are very concerned about their civil liberties being taken away along with their plastic bags. I’m pretty libertarian on most issues but have no trouble with the BYOB policy. Kungfu wrote almost exactly what I would have, including spending time in Germany where it’s BYOB and you just make it part of your routine. There are all sorts of very lightweight, smushable bags available — I can put three in my jacket pocket when I got to Hannaford’s, which offers a five cent discount for bringing cloth bags which I appreciate.
BYOB makes sense to me from an economic and waste standpoint but I’m not sure how to get around the issue of how to persuade others to go plastic bagless — legislation goes against my libertarian grain. Hannaford’s is a good example of a positive incentive. And I believe that IKEA in the US started charging for plastic bags to be in line with their policy in Europe. Obviously one can choose not to shop there if that’s a problem.
This reminds me in A way of what occurred at our shotgun range. We used pitch targets for, well, about 60 years (well before I was even born) and they were shot a lot. The govt decided that this was not environmentally friendly (we are on DoD controlled land) and had to switch to bio-degradable targets. At this point we had to mow the field at leas twice a week during the summer because the grass would grow too high for you to find your empty shells after shooting a round.
They tried to remove the old “dirty” pitch targets and dug around 5 or 6 feet of the stuff out of the ground before they found dirt (the pitch targets had done something other than bio-degrade into the dirt – no one ever explained why the process they used was unacceptable and the resultant dirt was bad). They then replaced it with topsoil and re-planted the grass.
Now, five years later and the bio degradable targets only go about 2 foot deep before you hit dirt so they do decompose faster. However whatever they break down into has cased a barren wasteland – it is a solid mat of broken targets and is starting to kill the surrounding grass/plants. Nor are we the only ones that have had it happen – every single shotgun range we have talked too has had it happen if they use the bios and some even worse than us.
But hey, they did bio-degrade, they just didn’t do so into stuff that was good for the environment. Like here I note that the whole focus on that they degrade quickly and never a word as to if it has a lower environmental impact. It is as if “bio-degrdable” has some magical property that causes fluffy kittens and rainbows to sprout everywhere.
It is as if “bio-degrdable” has some magical property that causes fluffy kittens and rainbows to sprout everywhere.
Like affirmative action and Israel’s “occupation” of Palestinians, the entire effect is for local politics, not long term benefits to the human species.
Plastic grocery bags. What a wonderful product! They’re light, easy to manufacture, ship in a fraction of the space of paper bags, and take up little space on the checkout stand.
They can be reused–sometimes several times. When they are discarded, they take up almost no space in landfills (not that landfill space is a problem–but that’s another Greenie myth).
But you ain’t gonna send in your checks so that the earth-hugging nonprofit (run by lawyers) can go on making money UNLESS they scare you and show you how important they are. They do that by creating bullshit campaigns against things they don’t like.
About the SUVs, let me clarify. I said we should do what makes good sense. I’m not against SUVs, if they make sense. But as I mentioned, if all you are doing is driving from your suburban home to your suburban office park, then what’s the point. On the other hand, if you need to get up to the mountains to ski, you pull a boat, etc., then that makes sense.
Here’s a story for you. I pull into the parking lot at work in my 96 Honda Civic and there is a prime space up front. The lot is full of SUVs but this prime space is skipped over. Why? Because of a giant pot hole. I drive my Honda over the hole and get the sweet spot. All these guys with 4WD skipped it! Dumb.
By the way, I have a Honda not because I’m an environmentalist but because I’m cheap.