Another environmeddlist has made the startling discovery that, as mentioned previously here, there are way more polar bears than lying activists have led the general public to believe; in fact, the numbers are at historic highs. The often-repeated claim that "man-made global warming" is killing off the cuddly beasts is not only untrue, it's an outright lie - one that you can see for yourself by visiting Metro's Oregon Zoo, where greenie graphics depict "the plight of the polar bear". If you choose to visit, make sure to do so on Sunday, Feb. 10, as the zoo will offer free admission on that day in honor of the Chinese Year of the Snake. Save yourself ten bucks or so; marvel at the relentless displays.
Unger wanted to write the definitive book on how man-made global warming was destroying polar bear habitats and leading to their extinction.
It's astonishing, sometimes, how much everybody knows - that's actually orchestrated lies.
Similarly, in order to Save The Planet™ by banning "plastic" bags, environmeddlists in California and elsewhere have relied upon repetition and orchestration of outright lies: "plastic" bag manufacturers use massive amounts of oil and cause millions of pounds of non-biodegradable refuse, and so-called "reuseable bags" are much better for the environment. There are just a few problems with these campaigns: nothing about them is true.
As noted on occasion here, the bags aren't a petroleum-based product; no oil is used to produce them. In point of fact, the very professional environmeddlists who decry them today hailed the bags as miracles of environmental-friendliness; produced from waste gas derived from natural gas wells, a gas that was generally flared off was turned into something useful and reusable - and a great improvement over the horrible, environment-killing paper bags.
Today, of course, it is the very "plastic" bags that they supported thirty years ago that now are The Problem, and the only solution is to force people to use "reusable cloth" bags. Unsurprisingly, there are problems with this. And has anybody else noticed that it is always the Left that leaps to ban whatever their dislike du jour happens to be?
Jonathan Klick and Joshua Wright, who are law professors at the University of Pennsylvania and George Mason University, respectively, have done a more recent study on the public-health impact of plastic-bag bans. They find that emergency-room admissions related to E. coli infections increased in San Francisco after the ban. (Nearby counties did not show this increase.) And this effect showed up as soon as the ban was implemented. (“There is a clear discontinuity at the time of adoption.”) The San Francisco ban was also associated with increases in salmonella and other bacterial infections. Similar effects were found in other California towns that adopted such laws.
Well, that's easily solved; simply pass a law requiring people to wash their cloth bags! Oh, but then there's the fact that cloth bags require much more energy to manufacture, and that requiring washing of the bags imposes additional costs not only in energy, but in terms of water use and detergent use as well. In fact, the more closely one looks at the cloth bag preferences of the activist environmeddlists, the more apparent it becomes that they are actually less "environmentally friendly" than the dreaded "plastic" bags.
