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Show Me the Seas of Plastic!
All of this kerfuffle over plastic straws, pollution of plastics, etc… hides a fundamental problem: the oceans do not have a problem with plastic! There are no massive floating islands of plastic bottles and straws or anything else. The ocean breaks plastic down, bacteria live on the stuff, and it all goes back into the food chain, with no lasting impacts at all. Arguably, as plastics sustain other life forms, putting plastic into the ocean may well enhance aquatic life. And it all happens very quickly — days and weeks, not millennia.
Here’s my challenge: Are there any satellite or aerial photos showing the seas choked with human-produced garbage? (There are some staged photos.) Or has the “Party of Science” once again created a crisis from whole cloth? And if so, we should be making this the core argument: Just as CO2 is plant food, plastics may be sea food.
Published in General
One reason I’ve been suspicious of the plastic-soup-ocean claim is every time I’ve found broken glass on the beach. It’s not sharp anymore. Wave motion just dissolves the glass. Why not the plastic, I asked myself?
Also more rule of law. It’s not like Pakistan doesn’t have any environmental regulations. Impose rule of law globally today (I know, a fantasy scenario), and the world’s air pollution problems will literally blow away overnight. Water pollution problems will take a few months or so.
Wow, that is great. My ideas were to sail out to the plastic and inspect them to see what their manufacture or expiration dates were; those are often written in the plastic, aren’t they? Look at that and look at the levels of decay.
Or tag some plastic bottles, release them into the wild, and check up on them later.
Your way is better!
I’ll bite. I remember when NYC used to dump sewage miles out in the ocean – in the same area year after year. At some point someone actually checked on it – it had more life than just about anywhere.
Sewage is FOOD to all the stuff in the ocean. And not necessarily bad food, either.
Link did not work for me.
I’m having trouble entering links on my android device. But if you take the visible text of that URL and paste it in your browser, it should work.
Got it. So they found plastic bottles – none floating, all at the bottom of the Med near Greece. Doing no harm whatsoever.
The ocean, not only in raw power like this but in a variety of feedback mechanisms (see Limestone and the Carbon Cycle), is the great equalizer in so many ways. But don’t look too close, many a narrative could crumble before our very eyes.
I’ve posted this here before, but it’s especially relevant to this discussion. Some George Carlin language, of course. Make sure to watch it till the end.
https://youtu.be/7W33HRc1A6c
There are some careless news environmentalists who say, “The degredation byproducts could be harmful to marine life.”
And then at the other extreme, there is somebody who asserts (with even less evidence or reason, if you can imagine such a thing) “Doing no harm whatsoever.”
There are mixed opinions on the optimal amount of nitrogen in ocean bays and marshes.
I was involved on the periphery of a legal action against the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA) to stop the turning on of the Boston outfall tunnel because it was positioned in such a way that it would be sending its effluent into Cape Cod Bay.
There are many pollutants in city sewage discharge. And since they have been sending their sewage nine miles out, not surprisingly Boston Harbor is a lot cleaner than it was. The conclusion is obvious: whatever they were putting in there was not good for the health of the harbor. Now that they have stopped, the water is a lot healthier for fish, plants, and people.
All we wanted was for the MWRA to keep its pollution in its own treatment facilities and send it out to Quabbin Reservoir for tertiary land-based treatment. The Massachusetts environmental affairs department who came up with the great idea to send it swirling into Cape Cod Bay told us over and over it would not be a source of pollution. We said, “Fine. Keep it in Boston Harbor.” Oh, no, they said. We can’t do that. It’s too toxic.” Indeed.
All that said, the health of Cape Cod Bay, 18 years after they turned on the outfall pipe, seems to be okay, although there has been some degradation.
I am surprised to read your report about Long Island Sound doing so well. When I was researching sewage treatment systems on the East Coast, I ran across a bone-chilling account of something called the “Bight.” I haven’t looked at this in years, but it described it as a dead area in the sound, caused by the discharge from something like nine sewage outfall tunnels running out of metropolitan New York. The fishermen described the Bight as dead of life. But you’re saying that was another myth? That’s interesting.
Sometimes the bigger problem is too much nitrogen. That’s true in lakes and ponds and in ocean coastal waters without good currents running through them. Also, coastal areas where shellfish are located absorb a lot of pollution, pollution being defined as any substance that causes a problem in a particular location. Arsenic is a natural element, but it can kill us. Pollution is about location.
Really?
How do some plastic bottles degrading on the seabed impact life as we know it?
And even if there might somehow be some smidgeon of impact, why assume that it is negative and not positive? After all, we know that adding tires and ships to the bottom of the sea is good for aquatic life.
I think the article mentioned some of the substances that might be a problem, but was modest enough not to jump to conclusions. But if you are so sure that it’s good, go ahead and use the degredation byproducts of plastic, including the small particulate matter, as your regular drinking and cooking water. I doubt you’ll fall over dead. You’ll probably be a valued contributor on Ricochet for several years to come.
And just because adding tires and ships might be good for some aquatic life doesn’t mean it’s good for other forms. Aquatic life is diverse. It’s pretty difficult to say what’s good for one is good for everyone. Well, socialist central planners can say such things when they’re trying to impose one-size-fits-all solutions on humans, but life generally isn’t that binary.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that the vast, grand, all-encompassing assertions you make about this, or about nitrogen waste, or about CO2, might be good enough for totalitarian planners, but conservatives might want to be a little more discriminatory and tentative in their judgments.
Oceans are incredibly diverse and enormous. If they are starved of anything, it is extra food. Anything we stick in them is found to be useful by something, and the lower that thing is in the food chain, the more food it supports all the way up. Even temporary geothermal vents attract incredible life, like local pop-up restaurants.
The stuff people make and throw out is energy-rich – and the oceans already handily digest everything from raw petroleum (in vast quantities) to all manners of waste. So just about anything we stick in the ocean that does break down is going to enrich it in some way.
Is iWe “so sure that it’s good,” or just preferring someone cites some decent evidence that it’s bad–before crafting policy on the theory that it’s bad?
I wish he was that cautious. But he has made lots of crazy statements like “CO2 is plant food.” Even that would be OK if he also acknowledged that it can kill you if properly applied.
That is one way to look at it. And certainly you’re correct over a certain period of time.
I keep going back to this main point, that Boston Harbor was dead. We had been dumping sewage and toxic waste into it for three hundred years. It was unsafe to swim in and ugly to look at. And on warm days, it stunk to high heaven. Clearly, it had reached a saturation point where it couldn’t adjust to the pollutants from the sewage of the 43 cities and towns that dumped their waste into it.
Over time I suppose you’re right, that the water will eventually restore itself.
^This should win an award for comment of the year.
The City of Seattle banned all plastic straws and utensils from food-service establishments on July 1. In our travels in the US, we have come across a product called “Potato-ware”, compostable utensils and plates and such, which would be legal in Seattle. I imagine that most food-service establishments would move to using something like that. In a standard act of virtue-signaling, Starbucks (which is based in Seattle), said that they will be phasing out all plastic straws. BTW, Seattle has “Mandatory Recycling and Composting”, and “garbage police” to enforce that.
Ray and I are on a cruise ship in Hawaii, having crossed about 2,000 miles of North Pacific Ocean to get here, and we didn’t see any floating garbage, just miles and miles of sea.
I do, however, remember seeing pictures of huge globs of floating garbage recently. They were in the harbor of Rio De Jeneiro, in Brazil, around the time of the Summer Olympics.
Who drinks coffee through a straw?
In the tropics they drink iced-coffee through a straw in many places, millions of people everyday.
I drink McDonalds iced coffee through a straw. Back when I first did it I had to train the people behind the counter how to make them. I’d ask for no cream, no sugar, no flavoring. Just coffee and ice. So they’d bring me a coffee with cream and whatever, and I’d have to explain, “No, I want one with none of that stuff. No cream, no sugar, no extra flavoring.” “You want just coffee and ice?” “Yes, just coffee and ice.”
The first summer I went through that several times in various McDonalds throughout the Great Lakes region. By the second summer they seldom got it wrong. Now the menus on their kiosks allow you to order it the right way.
Maybe I’ll look for some paper straws, if I can find them, to keep in the glove compartment, and then I’ll leave the plastic straws behind. Waste like that (to say nothing of the cup and lid) used to bother my depression-era parents and grandfather back when I was young, but I had gotten used to it. The recent crusade against plastic straws might end up taking me back to my roots.
Straws through Medicare….oh brother. No Deposit. No Return.
Extra $$ for the bendy ones.
And I ask for one, if the tumbler is too full or heavy to lift; or if liquid in a mug is hot…Simple.
I do, because my intention-tremor spasticity makes it unsafe to lift and tip a cup/mug of hot liquid to my mouth, okay? Mine would likely be tea, actually.
But, I DO need a straw!
The term “lab coat left” (#LabCoatLeft] came to mind after Obama’s team handed out lab coats to “medical professionals” posing at the White House for a photograph promoting Obamacare.
I don’t. I don’t drink it at all. I only drink water, tea, the occasional soda, and leftist tears. Sometimes I use a straw.