The Campaign Against Plastic Is Harming the Planet and the Public.:
"Why do our political leaders want to take away our plastic bags and straws?
This question is even more puzzling than a related one that I’ve been studying for decades:
Why do they want us to recycle our garbage?
The
two obsessions have some common roots, but the moral panic over plastic is especially perverse. The recycling movement had a superficial logic, at least at the outset.
Municipal officials
expected to save money by recycling trash instead of burying or burning it.
Now that recycling has turned out to be ruinously expensive while achieving little or no environmental benefit, some local officials—the pragmatic ones, anyway—are once again sending trash straight to landfills and incinerators.
The plastic panic has never made any sense, and it’s
intensifying even as evidence mounts that it’s not only a waste of money but also harmful to the environment, not to mention humans.
It’s been a movement in search of a rationale for half a century.
During the 1970s, environmentalists like Barry Commoner wanted the government to restrict the use of plastic because it was made from petroleum, which we needed to hoard because we would soon run out of it.
When the “energy crisis” proved a false alarm, environmentalists looked for new reasons to panic..."
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Tucson Sector Border Patrol agents disrupted several human smuggling operations last week, including one involving an armed smuggler. Smugglers locked several of the migrants into the trunks of their vehicles.
