News Shocker: Plastic Grocery Bags are Not Destroying the Earth
If you live long enough and pay attention to the news long enough, these sorts of stories become routine: Series of blunders turned the plastic bag into global villain:
Scientists and environmentalists have attacked a global campaign to ban plastic bags which they say is based on flawed science and exaggerated claims.
The widely stated accusation that the bags kill 100,000 animals and a million seabirds every year are false, experts have told The Times. They pose only a minimal threat to most marine species, including seals, whales, dolphins and seabirds.
Gordon Brown announced last month that he would force supermarkets to charge for the bags, saying that they were “one of the most visible symbols of environmental waste”. Retailers and some pressure groups, including the Campaign to Protect Rural England, threw their support behind him.
But scientists, politicians and marine experts attacked the Government for joining a “bandwagon” based on poor science.
But how could this be? Only a few years ago “everyone” “knew” that plastic bags were a scourge on the planet. Now the fearmongers say, “Never mind.”
Could this have some connection to global warming? Is it conceivable that the current eco-scares will be debunked in ten years, just as the eco-scares of 10 years ago are being debunked today (and those of 20 years ago were debunked 10 years ago, and so forth)?
No, don’t believe it. Sure, the eco-scaremongers have a long track record of drumming up fake scientific consensus that is later demonstrated to be false. Sure, they’ve done it with nuclear power, alar on apples, radon in basements, the spotted owl, the vanishing rain forests, plastic bags, and many others that I could find with just a few minutes of Googling. But surely this time the eco-fanatics are right, and we should immediately make ourselves miserable with the knowledge that doing so will somehow make the future better for someone else. Maybe. Or maybe not.
(And isn’t it strange how selectively those people become concerned about future generations? I mean, these are the same people who love abortion and hate procreation. In fact, they hate humanity generally. And yet they always claim to be deeply concerned about future generations.)
I understand how youngsters can be fooled by these hoaxes. They just haven’t lived long enough to see the pattern. But I don’t understand the grown-ups. Even someone who pays minimal attention to the news ought to notice that yesterday’s panics quietly go away, while the new panics are reported with breathless excitement.
The internet may slow these hoaxes down, though. When I was a kid, the only information most people had was whatever the mainstream media fed them. Now the truth is out there, just a few clicks away. Continuing ignorance becomes steadily more difficult to justify.
I’m not sure what you mean by “debunked.”
1) Nuclear power has genuine waste/contamination issues that, should anything go wrong, could be catastrophic, and you can bet that any nuclear facility is a top military or terrorist target.
2) Alar is carcinogenic.
3) Radon does collect in basements.
4) The spotted owl is endangered.
5) The rate of deforestration continues to increase, about half of all mature rainforest is already gone.
I agree that plastic bags are less important to marine life than other forms of discarded plastic, such as nurdles. These things aren’t hoaxes, the problem is sensationalism in reporting but I don’t see the internet curing that; if anything it’s getting worse.
Comment by jez — March 13, 2008 @ 6:06 pm
For you, Jez, I’ll spend a few minutes with Google and Wikipedia, which should be all it’ll take:
Nuclear power is extremely safe under modern designs, and the amount of waste produced is ridiculously small, though the cost to dispose of it is ridiculously small due to over-the-top regulation. The only reason we don’t have it is the same reason we don’t have DDT: It was the victim of a wildly successful scare decades ago (Three Mile Island), and now the subject is impossible to discuss.
Alar is only carcinogenic if you ingest enormous quantities of it. That’s how most of the carcinogenic health scares worked in the seventies and eighties. If you pump enough of just about anything into a rat, it’ll get sick.
The story is similar with radon. Google “radon scare”. Yes, enough radon will make you sick, but the EPA minimums were absurdly low, and the costs wildly disproportionate to the risks.
The spotted owl scare was the most transparently political one that I can remember. The enviro-fanatics had decided that the logging industry was their new whipping boy, and the spotted owl was their whip.
You’re right that the spotted owl is endangered, but it has nothing to do with logging. The spotted owl competes with the barred owl, and the barred owl is winning.
The rain forest scare was another attack on logging. But even back in the early nineties it wasn’t too hard to find out that the people cutting (or really burning) down the Amazon were poor South Americans trying to make some farmland from which to feed their families.
Oh, and now the latest eco-passion is to demand biofuel. This drives up the cost of food, which both starves the poor and raises the value of farmland, encouraging more destruction of the precious rain forest. The eco-fanatics can’t decide which way to go one year to the next, but they’re sure that everyone should be forced to do whatever they happen to want at the moment. I for one am sick of the nonsense.
Comment by BenBateman — March 16, 2008 @ 4:51 pm