Environmentalists have been wrong about many things: their date-setting, their climate models, and even their paper bags. And now (drum roll please), we have reached the reductio ad absurdum in the grocery bag debate. The dog caught the car.
If there is a shred of common sense left there (stop laughing), the California governor should cease and desist the left's constant attempts to command and control shopping. It's not as if there aren't more important things to tend to in the state with most of the nation's homeless camping on the streets, a multi-billion dollar record deficit, fleeing wealth, and the death of the middle class.
This week, the California legislature passed bills to outlaw the heavily recycled "multi-use" plastic bags because they claim they're bad for the environment.
These are the same bags that the same environmentalists, in an aha! moment in 2016, claimed would solve the problem of the "single-use" plastic bags (you know, the ones you used to line your trash cans and pick up dog poop with) that environmentalists said were horrible for the environment.
And those "single-use" plastic bags replaced the paper bags that environmentalists claimed were horrible for the environment.
Instead of using the trees and managing growth, they preferred to worship them and then watch them burn in lightning strikes or by fire setter weirdos in the summer, which emitted more CO2 into the air.
Then, somewhere in between banning plastic and paper bags, we were ordered to use cloth bags from home which it turns out are bad for the environment. Or, they offered, we use the norovirus bags that came over on a slow boat from China.
Indeed, the enviro extremists are who got this party started.
And now they're in the legislature.
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“Plastics are the next front in our fight against Big Oil. By 2050, plastic production will exceed 20% of global oil production,” Assemblywoman Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, D-Orinda told the Sacramento Bee, who obviously walks to work.
She said, "AB 2236 is a critical step to eliminate plastic pollution, and eliminates an opportunity for the oil industry to continue destroying our planet.”
An equally inane comment came from the representative of my old neighborhood, Encinitas, who pointed to problems on the other side of the globe as the reason for Californians not to responsibly use whatever the hell bags they want as long as they don't throw them from their van down by the ocean.
"We need to do better," State Sen. Catherine Blakespear, D, Encinitas, emoted to the Bee. "Shockingly, some 18 billion pounds of plastic waste flows into the oceans every year from coastal regions alone. California must do its part to eliminate this scourge that is contaminating our environment,” she said.
Blakespear might want to check at the border areas around her state or check out the waste the panga boats filled with illegal aliens are leaving behind in her district.
Is this her?
We want a clean environment. Cleaner is better. But compared to what cost? The Nixon Administration created the EPA to clean water and air. Both of those crucial things were cleaned up. Cars are cleaner, gas is cleaner, and coal is cleaner now, but these people won't stop until they've crushed industry or made things so expensive that Californians can't thrive.
The bills, which now go to the opposing houses of the legislature to be approved, would, ban grocery stores and other retailers from offering "multi-use" bags at stores and other outlets because they haven't gotten rid of plastic entirely. Then they'll go to Governor Newsom who is of one accord with these mandate and ban tyrants.
In the meantime, it seems that if everything is an environmental disaster then people should choose for themselves what bags to use.
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You're really not that smart, legislators. Go scream at your trees. Let people decide for themselves. You tyrants take comfort in enforcing the littering laws and the borders. Leave the rest of us alone.
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