British Prime Minister Gordon Brown wants to force supermarkets
to charge for plastic bags to curtail their use. This is part
of a larger movement to ban the bags over concern that they
cause the deaths of vast numbers of marine animals. Now, however,
scientists tell us that research has never asserted that they
pose a danger to marine life; rather, the facts have been
grossly misrepresented.
Follow this link to the original source: "Series
of blunders turned the plastic bag into global villain"
Upon being asked what wisdom was, the ancient sage Confucius
once replied, "Wisdom is, when you know something, knowing
that you know it, and when you do not know something, knowing
that you do not know it." If this definition is correct,
I would say most politicians are sorely lacking in the quality.
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A great example comes out of England, where the nation’s
illustrious leader, Gordon Brown, has decided that part of
his mission is to slay the plastic bag, convinced as he is
that it imperils the planet. Yet it eludes him that his concerns
are based on an obvious falsehood. Writes the Times Online:
Lest I be misunderstood, I’ve always been a conservationist
(that’s what such a person was called before the left
invented 'environmentalists"). I was raised with the
maxim "Waste not, want not," a prescription for
personal frugality. Thus, I always tried to be a good shepherd
of the Earth, turning off lights and air conditioners when
not needed, trying not to waste food and actually using public
garbage receptacles (I grew up in New York City, where it’s
widely believed that refuse spontaneously generates from concrete
pavement). And I’ll be the first to admit that people
litter recklessly, which is why you can find all sorts of
garbage in every corner of the world. But I have a problem
with environmentalists.
They lie.
I also have a problem with most politicians: They’re
ever ready to remove freedom based on lies.
This is part of the problem with government intervention.
Besides the fact that politicians are quite willing to subordinate
truth to political expediency, they’re also not, as
they pretend to be, experts in the area of everything. Yet
they still feel qualified to legislate on everything.
This is never more obvious than with global warming. Despite
a multitude of reports from experts who question the thesis
that it’s caused by man, and despite uncharacteristically
frigid winters in many parts of the world, politicians persist
in advocating policy based on a sky-is-falling mantra.
Then, the recycling movement also played upon a falsehood.
While it’s now old news, the effort gained tremendous
steam after the much ballyhooed travails of a notorious garbage
barge named the Mobro 4000. Looking for a place to dump its
load in 1987, the barge took a 6000 mile trip from New York
to Belize and back, and environmentalists claimed that it
highlighted how the U.S. was running out of dump space.
The truth was far more mundane. A rumor had developed that
the craft was carrying medical waste, causing successive localities
to turn it away. As for dump space, John Tierney of the New
York Times tells us:
Yet many consider the barge
propaganda akin to a white lie. "Isn’t the fact that
we’re now recycling a good thing?" they may ask. Well,
it depends.
As Tierney also points out, at the time of the garbage barge
false alarm, American businesses were already recycling millions
of tons of refuse a year, voluntarily and profitably. He says
that government mandated recycling is a different matter, however,
as it has transformed recycling into what "may be the most
wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money,
a waste of human and natural resources."
And our politicians are giving us other cures that may be worse
than the disease. At least partially motivated by the global
warming scam, our government has enacted legislation to ban
incandescent light bulbs by 2014. This would leave us with nothing
but compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs), which have been cited
as posing a mercury hazard.
It’s as if our elected puppeteers don’t investigate
what they legislate. Does it elude them that a generation ago
we were warned of the danger of global cooling? As for the bags,
have they forgotten that we were told it was an obligation to
switch to plastic ones to save trees?
Of course, it’s hard to ferret out the truth in these
matters. Some say that the mercury danger of CFLs is exaggerated;
that cutting down trees is less harmful than using plastic;
that the world isn’t really entering a cooling phase,
as some assert; and that recycling really is cost and resources
efficient. I cannot say I know for sure. This is why I don’t
propose to ban CFLs, paper bags or recycling, or re-engineer
our economy based on climate models as reliable as the weather.
When I do not know something, I know it.
I also know something else: lies shouldn’t be tolerated.
If a cause really is just, if it has a basis in reality, it
needs no more buttress than the truth can provide.
And there is one more thing I know: the politicians know less
than I do.
If only they knew it.
