You may have noticed with dismay that in public affairs the defeat of one trendy folly just clears the way for another. So while sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, it also pays to look ahead. For instance, consider that the gradual abandonment of Net Zero, whether by frank repudiation or just slinking out the back way, seems to have set the stage for yet another war on petroleum and the Western way of life via an attack on plastic. As a widely-reprinted Associated Press story led off, and it would be there, “California just gave plastic producers until 2032 to make all their packaging recyclable or compostable – the most ambitious deadline in the country. Advocates say it doesn’t go far enough. Producers say it goes too far. At least one of them is threatening to sue.” And if you thought California progressives might want to take a quick break from wrecking their economy if only to give it time to recover so it will smash more dramatically, well, you don’t know those zealots like we do. Sigh.
The story is actually revealing, including about the enduring errors that underpin the parade of fleeting ones. For instance, it’s a curious feature of omnicause radicals that they think all good things come in one big lovey bundle and talk endlessly about win-win. But because they are scornful of real-world difficulties and trade-offs, their actual policies are remarkably often no-win. For instance here. As AP continues bluntly:
“The sweeping regulations, finalized at the start of the month, put producers in a bind that has no obvious solution. Plastic clamshell containers, for instance, protect berries from being crushed and keep them fresher, longer until they reach a refrigerator. Plastic producers say there’s simply no substitute – yet under the new rules, they’ll have to find one.”
The radical 1960s graffito “Smash reality” put it more bluntly. But the basic idea is that by an effort of our wonderful, self-absorbed will, we can just make things appear or disappear as we like.
As G.K. Chesterton warned long ago, “We must see things objectively, as we do a tree; and understand that they exist whether we like them or not. We must not try and turn them into something different by the mere exercise of our own minds, as if we were witches.” But alas, he was ignored by too many as too often.
Thus many years ago, when the specific dangerously mistaken left-wing ideas in vogue were very different while the spirit behind them was much the same, a mayor of New York City declared belligerently in his 1965 “budget message” (quoted in Milton and Rose Friedman Free to Choose) that:
“I do not propose to permit our fiscal problems to set the limits of our commitments to meet the essential needs of the people of the city.”
But of course the fact that you cannot spend money you do not have isn’t something you can banish by the mere exercise of your mind so a decade later NYC hit the fiscal wall, hard. Nor can you ban the usefulness of plastic in such manner.
The plastic ban is instructively amusing in another familiar way too. Because this wacky step getting California sued not by sensible people but their erstwhile radical allies confirms Edmund Burke’s long-ago jibe about leftwing factionalism, specifically in the French Revolution, that “Birds of prey are not gregarious.”
This problem too has a compelling logical structure. People who want the world and want it now, and believe they can and should get it by the shrill righteousness of their demands not the reasonableness of their proposals, are liable to fall out viciously even over minor things because they think everyone can have everything immediately and if it doesn’t happen, someone evil is deliberately preventing it. It’s a take and take attitude, not give and take, and necessarily leads to ferocious squabbles.
Of course you also got the same-old gooblahoy about true transcendent far-seeing government competitiveness not the crass short-sighted commercial kind:
“‘California is the United States, but 30 years in the future,’ said Joe Árvai, director of the University of Southern California’s Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies. ‘What’s happening now is emblematic of trends that we are seeing worldwide … and the U.S. needs to adapt in the way that those countries are adapting in order to remain globally competitive.’”
And if it would amuse you, we invite you to look for similar statements a decade or two ago about California and climate policy.
What amuses us is to speculate, as you may well have, about how “efficient” recycling actually is, environmentally as well as economically. Have you never thought, as you carefully sorted blue bin items, that at the other end they’d be chucked into one big trash bin? Well, adapting yet another venerable maxim, this time that those who love laws like sausages should not watch them being made as those who love regulations should not watch them being implemented, the AP item continues:
“Most of the plastic packaging Californians throw away isn’t recycled – and that’s not your fault as a consumer. For decades, the revolving green arrows symbol has urged consumers tp do a better job of reducing, reusing and recycling. But the system itself started out broken, and got worse. When people toss items into recycling bins, workers at recycling centers sort through them. Contaminated items – like a peanut butter tub with residue still inside – go straight to the landfill. Manufacturers buy clean, valuable materials like water bottles and detergent tubs and turn them into new products.”
Now at the risk of channeling the Friedmans, actually make it in the hope of doing so, we point out that if the idea is to save the “environment” then taking the time and trouble to wash out peanut butter tubs with heated water and chemical detergents will almost certainly use up more material and create more waste than simply tossing the dang thing to begin with. But it gets worse because, AP goes on, “But a slew of other trash isn’t valuable enough to sell. It ends up in landfills, too.”
We will admit here that we do not entirely understand why it is not economical to mine old landfills. Surely their metal content is far higher than raw ore. But we are not the kind of arrogant nitwits to order people to do it whether they think it’s wise or not. Indeed, we realize that almost every country on Earth, and certainly the big ones, have enough space for landfill that the sensible thing to do with a whole lot of trash actually is, as it always has been, to chuck it into a hole in the ground and never think about it again.
In our view people don’t throw out busted plastic thingies because they’re stupid. They do it because they’re every bit as worthless to others as to us. And it is governments who insist that we instead sort them, ship them, resort them and then throw them out and pretend you didn’t who are stupid. So we would be out of place in California, it seems.
Especially when we point out that the real losers here when all is said and done, and more is said than is done, will be ordinary people, especially those struggling to make ends meet, who will find products including food more expensive and less available because arrogant six-figure bureaucrats, politicians and activists decided efficient packaging was inefficient and vice versa.
For instance:
“Kevin Kelly, the chief executive of Emerald Packaging, sells film plastic packaging to farmers, who use the plastic to bag items like salads and baby carrots. Paper packaging that could replicate plastic’s ability to regulate oxygen and carbon dioxide levels – keeping produce fresh – is still in early development, he said, and mass production is decades away.”
So companies that make useful forbidden packaging will flee the state, food will rot, and politicians will eat hors d’oeuvres.
Eventually there will be a voter/consumer revolt. This nonsense will pass. And then more follies will follow. But given the very real harm it will do, and the very real danger that California will indeed lead the way into yet more madness, let’s stop this one and then worry about the next… and the one after it… and…
The most economical and clean method of disposing of plastic, paper, wood and cloth waste - in fact more or less everything except metal and glass - is to burn the dang stuff. Do it at sufficiently high temperature and what you will be left with is largely water vapour and carbon dioxide, which can be vented into the atmosphere, together with a small amount of solid ash. The amount of CO2 thus produced would be miniscule in relation to what is produced by natural processes and by fossil fuel combustion so there would be no need to fret about it.