Bag It (2) — How They Fool You with Plastic Bans

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Ökoverblödung, the dumbing down of the population by myths about "environmentally friendly acts of virtue" is part and parcel of contemporary culture — in fact, it has crowded out Christian faith in the West, ironically boosted by the Churches. 

It is characteristic of a faith-based ideology that vital evidence is ignored and overriden by magical thinking of a hollow, erratic, and contradictory kind. 

Unsurprisingly, whenever you look more closely at politically correct environmental projects, you discover incongruity.

An advantage today can be a disadvantage tomorrow. Especially, if it has been come by too easily.

Green propaganda is intent on and very successful at making it easy for everyone to to be politically and "environmentally" correct, in the train of which efforts the standards of assuring the quality of an argument have been ridiculously debased, so that the weight of contradictions is growing and will be approaching a critical mass at some stage.

"Cheap talk"-pantheism will always renew itself, but it collects cracks that may make a difference politically, in a welcome way, some day.

The below is excerpted from here:

I have in front of me a 120-page document issued by the UK’s Environment Agency in 2011, pithily entitled “Lifecycle assessment of supermarket carrier bags”. Starting off with the helpful explanation that “the main function of a carrier bag is to carry groceries and goods from the shop to the home”, the report rigorously analyses the environmental impacts of various forms of bag, from the then free lightweight disposable plastic bag to the heavier plastic bag (not then called “bag for life”) and those of entirely different composition, such as paper and cotton bags.

Taking into account the land, water and energy — hence carbon emissions — required in their manufacture, the Environment Agency concluded that a paper bag would have to be used three times before it could be regarded as more environmentally correct than a lightweight plastic bag used only once. In fact those plastic bags are typically reused — roughly 40% of them when they were free — as pedal bin liners. On that basis, said the report, a cotton bag would have to be used 173 times before its “global warming potential” dropped below that of each of those flimsy plastic bags.

In effect, by ignoring the analysis of its own Environment Agency, the government took the side of the viewers distressed by Attenborough’s programme, against those who take seriously the same man’s declaration, most recently at this month’s UN climate change conference in Katowice, Poland, that manmade global warming is the biggest threat to life as we know it.

In so doing, the current British government is definitely in tune with public opinion (and mine). Most people are more concerned with the here and now than what may or may not happen in a hundred or a thousand years’ time. And, by the way, they also want their government to take its own citizens’ wellbeing more seriously than what might happen “to the planet” at some unspecified point in the future.