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Oh — you probably thought I was going to write about the Colorado Supreme Court voting to remove President Trump from the Primary and General election ballots in Colorado. Well, the stupid runs deep in Colorado and isn't limited to courts and elections.
The Colorado General Assembly enacted a law in 2021 (House Bill 21-1162) that bans single-use plastic bags at checkouts starting Jan 1, 2024. We've already been paying 10 cents a bag (gives a whole new meaning to "dime bag") for the last year or so whenever we forget our reusable bags in the car (80% of the time for some of us). There are all kinds of caveats and exceptions for restaurants, for example, but Styrofoam containers are included in the ban and Chick-fil-A has already switched over to a double-layer (plasticized cardboard?) drink cup.
Because, you know, banning highly compressible, whisper thin, non-degrading (when did "degradable" as in "biodegradable" become a good thing -- creating a manmade sludge rather than a stable manmade waste?) in landlocked Colorado (our plastic isn't ending up in the oceans unless by some fluke) is going to save the planet!
Now when we forget our petroleum product reusable bags (vinyl, for example) in the car, we'll be paying 10 cents for paper bags at the checkout. Because there are no environmental costs to making and transporting bulky paper, let alone the ubiquitous cardboard containers Amazon delivers by the 1,000s of tons daily. . . Right?
So while nearly everything you pick up in the grocery is packaged in plastic. . .
. . . or plastic inside carboard. . .
Eliminating these babies is going to make all the damned difference to the world climate. . .
I subscribe to the Thomas Sowell YouTube channel where I pick up all kinds of gems from the great man. My new favorite is a phrase he uses in the following clip -- "consequential knowledge" while discussing his book, Intellectuals and Society, where he also imparts the wisdom that "it is much easier to concentrate power than it is knowledge." The example he gives of consequential knowledge (at about the 4 minute mark) is while coming in for a landing at the Ithaca airport, the pilot suddenly gunned the engines because he had been informed by the control tower that he had neglected to lower his landing gear.
That, my friends, is consequential knowledge which, as Sowell explains, is knowledge the presence or absence of which has consequences. The Colorado General Assembly, like the Colorado Supreme Court and pretty much all of the bodies in which power is concentrated in this country lacks consequential knowledge about much of what they legislate, but especially about life on this planet without plastics.
Colorado stupid.
Discussion (89)
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In our neck of the woods some towns distribute blue plastic bags for the Town garbage guys to pick up and put in their trucks. Others (like ours) let you choose between putting your trash curbside in your own black plastic bags or in plastic bags inside a wheelie. Everything plastic coated. I have to ask for brown paper sacks at the grocery store, but they are available. (And they hold more and stand up nicely in the way back of the car.) But if I use them I then I have to put them in white plastic sacks to put in the wheelie bin. Which is hard plastic. They don’t have a clue, do they?
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NY banned those bags a couple years ago. Sam's Club sells boxes of 1000, so I bring my own.
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It's been many years, but I recall (loosely) about a supposed study in a city that banned "single use" plastic shopping bags and found that the overall number of plastic bags used in the city increased after the ban. Apparently many of those "single use" bags were used for more than one use, additional uses that now required consumers to purchase additional plastic bags (trash can liners, kitty litter and dog poop disposal, lunch totes, wrapping messy garbage, etc.). I have a friend who used them to carry books and papers to church meetings to contain the books and papers and to protect them from the frequently wet weather.
Mrs. Tabby prefers her reusable bags for grocery shopping because her reusable bags are semi-rigid, with structure so when full they stand up better in the back of the car, and each holds more stuff so there are fewer bags to carry from the garage to the kitchen when she gets home. But that's her choice. Not everyone would make the same choice, especially if they were unable to carry the weight Mrs. Tabby can carry.
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Yes, I use them to pick up litter when I walk the dogs. Am I supposed to use paper bags now? Or purchase thin, portable plastic bags for the purpose? Or maybe I should just leave the litter on the ground and let the Colorado General Assembly do something about it. Idiots.
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Great Youtube channel - thank you for the heads-up!
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