Remember that time some rich white people with too much money funded a treasure hunt for the mythical floating island of plastic? As with most alleged green endeavors, they were doing it wrong. Looking off the coast of Vancouver will get you some ridicule (I was happy to oblige), but if you want to get meaningful sums of plastic out of the ocean, you need to trawl almost any Asian Sea west of Japan. You won’t find an island made of plastic, but you might at least find more sea litter.
And no, using more carbon-intensive paper straws in Milwaukee won’t do anything to prevent that. As with coal emissions (if that’s something you care about), America is not the problem, but America is where many rich white virtue-signaling environmental posers can be found, and many of them are in the government or own a piece of it, so we have to put up with this.
President Biden is committed to taking ambitious actions throughout the lifecycle of plastic to end plastic pollution and is working with the global community to do the same. Today the Biden-Harris Administration is releasing the first comprehensive, government-wide strategy to target plastic pollution at production, processing, use, and disposal. Mobilizing Federal Action on Plastic Pollution: Progress, Principles, and Priorities outlines existing and new federal actions to reduce the impact of plastic pollution throughout the plastic lifecycle and calls for sustained and coordinated work with state, local, Tribal, and Territorial governments, local communities, the private sector, and other stakeholders to address the scale and breadth of the plastic pollution challenge.
There’s nothing in there about preventing progressives from holding demonstrations, protests, or riots, which would significantly reduce plastic waste and other forms of refuse. Fewer burning black businesses, after all, result in fewer emissions. They should put that on bumper stickers and hand them out to Antifa members. You could also reduce transportation emissions by not bussing or flying your protesters to cities where you’d like to start something (a helpful hint for this November). Come to think of it, we could reduce a lot more transportation emissions if the UN and the Biden Administration stopped bussing and flying former South American prisoners (or anyone else who queues up) to Midwest cities.
Additionally, the Biden-Harris Administration is announcing a new goal to phase out federal procurement of single-use plastics from food service operations, events, and packaging by 2027, and from all federal operations by 2035. This commitment builds on President Biden’s Executive Order on Catalyzing Clean Energy Industries and Jobs through Federal Sustainability and the President’s Federal Sustainability Plan, which directs the federal government to achieve net-zero procurement by 2050, including by phasing out procurement of single-use plastic products. Meeting the new goal by selecting reusable, compostable, and highly recyclable products in lieu of single-use plastics in food service will further agencies’ obligations under the Executive Order.
Do you know what else would reduce waste and lower emissions? A significantly smaller federal government. If you phase that out, you phase out the offices, paper, electric, water, sewer, food service operations, (personal and work-related) travel to and from, and plastics. And not for nothing, but syringes with unsafe and ineffective mRNA juice are single-use. You could stop forcing stuff like that on people who don’t want or need it. And since I’m getting silly, what is the carbon footprint of the replacements to plastic flatware and its subsidiary single-use brethren? Want one more? If I make an offset payment (donation) to the Democrat party, can I get a plastic papal dispensation?