Feel Good Politics
Nancy Pelosi's home base, San Francisco, has just passed a new and improved, supposedly environmentally-friendly new law that perfectly illustrates the fundamental problem with a lot of hard line environmental "solutions" being pushed right now. The City Council has passed a ban on plastic grocery bags. This is now going to lead to an interesting problem.
All those trees Algore has been touting as "carbon offsets" will now have to be cut down to provide paper bags for the folks in San Francisco.
The law, passed by a 10-1 vote, requires large markets and drug stores to give customers only a choice among bags made of paper that can be recycled, plastic that breaks down easily enough to be made into compost, or reusable cloth.
San Francisco supervisors and supporters said that by banning the petroleum-based sacks, blamed for littering streets and choking marine life, the measure would go a long way toward helping the city earn its green stripes.
"Hopefully, other cities and states will follow suit," said Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi, who crafted the ban after trying to get a 15-cent per bag tax passed in 2005.
The 50 grocery stores that would be most affected by the law argued that the ban was not reasonable because plastic bags made of corn byproducts are a relatively new, expensive and untested product. Some said they might offer only paper bags at checkout.
I'll have to look into the "corn byproduct" bags, but this is one of those feel good political moves that essentially just pushes the problem elsewhere. More trees will be cut down to make paper bags, which stops the use of plastic in one city. But the trees won't be cut in California, so they feel good in San Francisco. Meanwhile, the trees harvested won't be helping to curb CO2. One of the funniest lines in the story is this particular gem:
The new breed of bags "offers consumers a way out of a false choice, a way out of the paper or plastic dilemma," Noble said.
How about the false choice of pushing the problem elsewhere? Where will it eventually be pushed to? Right out of the US and onto developing nations. There is a fundamental, narcissistic flaw in the modern environmental activist groups. Using corn to fuel vehicles instead of feeding people - at a ridiculous loss in efficiency - they tout as "environmentally friendly". Cutting down trees to bag groceries is called "environmentally friendly." Encouraging Al "Gorezilla" Gore to flit all over the world in a massively carbon-emitting private jet, while consuming gargantuan amounts of electricity for his palatially expansive mansion - while cheerfully strip-mining Tennessee - is "environmentally friendly."
With friends like these……
Environment, Insanity, Left Wing | Gaius Tuesday, 27 March , 2007
By TL, Thursday, 29 March , 2007 @ 12:17 am
Not to get in the way of making fun of goofy government in action, but paper bags use scrap wood chips as their primary source of virgin fiber not whole trees. Those scrap wood chips are a byproduct of lumber mills. The rest of the virgin fiber comes from bits of the same trees which were too small to be made into 2×4s or other lumber. Between 40% and 60% of the fiber going into those bags comes from recycled sources (typically cardboard or old paper sacks).
By Gaius, Thursday, 29 March , 2007 @ 5:06 am
An awful lot of trees are also directly processed into pulp. Second or third growth, of course, that aren’t big enough to harvest for lumber. And that will become more prevalent if demand for paper bags shoots back up after being in decline for many years.