Earth Day Network (EDN) chose “End Plastic Pollution” as their theme for this year’s April 22 Earth Day. It is just the tip of the anti-plastic activism that now consumes environmental extremists.
A Google search on “Plastic Pollution Coalition” (a group claiming to represent “more than 500 member organizations” dedicated to “working toward a world free of plastic pollution and its toxic impacts”) yields almost 90,000 hits, including a video made with Jeff Bridges for the campaign.
Even the United Nations has joined in, making “Beat Plastic Pollution” the theme of its June 5 World Environment Day, “a global platform for public outreach that is widely celebrated in over 100 countries.”
But demanding heavy-handed action on the comparatively minor problems that plastics present makes no sense. To help the public assess these attacks against this miracle material, let’s consider what leading environmental thinkers have to say about issues EDN raised on Earth Day, beginning with its use of the term “Plastic Pollution.”
Canadian ecologist and Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore stresses that plastic is not toxic. “It’s litter, not pollution. Many people find it unsightly, and the solution is to educate people not to discard it into the environment and to organize, as is done on highways, to have it removed.”
EDN also says plastics are “poisoning and injuring marine life.” As Moore notes, “Plastic does not ‘poison’ anything. It’s non-toxic. Do they think our credit cards, made with PVC plastic, are ‘toxic’?”
Of course, plastics can release toxins when burned, but not when they are simply littered into the general environment. So burning should be done under careful emission control standards.
“The main reason birds and fish eat bits of plastic is to get the food that is growing on them,” Moore adds. “But they’re both quite capable of passing bones and other fairly large objects through their digestive systems.” Plastics are no exception.
Paul Driessen, a senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and author of books and articles on energy and environmental policy, points out that “some animals do ingest plastics or get caught in plastic loops and nets.
But the notion that marine life (and people) are being poisoned by chemicals in plastics has no scientific basis.”
EDN next complained about “the ubiquitous presence of plastics in our food.” Moore responded, “This is complete nonsense. If a bit of plastic gets in our food it is passed right through the digestive system.”
“Plastic wraps and containers help preserve food and keep bacteria out,” Driessen emphasized. “Which is worse? Barely detectable trace amounts of chemicals in our bodies, or serious bacterial outbreaks?”
EDN also worried about plastic “disrupting human hormones.” Physician and lawyer John Dale Dunn, a lecturer in Emergency Medicine at the Carl R. Darnall Army Medical Center in Fort Hood, Texas, dismisses this concern: “Hormone disrupter scares … are based on junk science. Many extensive studies have shown no toxic or lethal effects from BPA, which is a beneficial chemical that has promoted progress and provided new products that are well received and very helpful.
“The debunking of hormone disruptor researchers and their claims has been definitive and devastating,” Dunn notes. “JunkScience.com director Steve Milloy also has been prolific in his criticisms of hormone disruptor junk science, “as this excellent article explains.
Bizarrely and unbelievably, EDN proclaimed plastic as “threatening our planet’s survival.” Reminiscent of how Comedian George Carlin poked fun at the plastics scare, Driessen dismisses this hyperbole. “Earth has survived huge meteor strikes, massive ice ages, Devonian and other mass extinctions, and other planetary calamities. Now, plastics have usurped dangerous man-made climate change’s role as the threat to planetary survival!?”
EDN promotes “a global effort to eliminate primarily single-use plastics.” Steve Goreham, executive director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of “Outside the Green Box – Rethinking Sustainable Development,” responds: “Single-use plastics are a boon for humanity. Packaging food in plastics instead of animal skins, wood, metal, glass, and paper brings major sanitation, convenience, and health benefits, as well as lower cost. The solution is biodegradable plastics for single-use products, not the elimination of plastic.”
In keeping with their climate alarmism, EDN said they want “alternatives to fossil fuel-based materials.” Driessen replies: “It is absurd to suggest that non-oil and gas sources would make plastics better – or that it could be done without turning nearly the entire planet into a massive biofuel farm to provide energy and plastics. The impacts on water supplies, croplands, and wildlife habitat lands would be devastating.”
As retired NASA-JSC engineer Alex Pope explains, “fossil fuels and fossil fuel products have made life better for billions of people on this Earth…. This better life is due to energy from fossil fuels and to fossil fuel products, especially plastic products… The war against fossil fuels and fossil fuel products is all the same war. I think they know they are losing many parts of the war against using fossil fuels for energy,” so now they are cranking up the war against vital fossil fuel products that enhance and safeguard lives.
EDN wants “100% recycling of plastics.” Goreham brushed this idea aside. “100% recycling of plastics is not an economically sound policy. Either landfilling, incinerating, composting or recycling plastics is best, based on cost and applicability. Today’s landfills are environmentally friendly in modern nations.”
EDN wants people to “reduce, reuse, recycle and remove plastics.” Driessen says “this will work in some places and cultures. But where people have no food, sanitation, clean water, jobs, electricity or real hope for the future, do you really think they will worry incessantly about plastics?”
The first Earth Day was held on 22 April 1970 in response to the legitimate concerns of millions of people that reducing air, land and water pollution needed to happen more quickly. The movement grew, until today Earth Day Network president Kathleen Rogers estimates that “more than 1 billion people in 192 countries now take part in what is the largest civic-focused day of action in the world.”
This should surprise no one. All sensible people are environmentalists. We want to enjoy clean air, land, and water, and we like to think future generations will live in an even better environment. These were the original Earth Day objectives, and I am happy to have presented at Earth Day events in the early 1990s.
However, as Henry Miller and Jeff Stier observed in a Fox News article, “In recent years, Earth Day has devolved into an occasion for professional environmental activists and alarmists to warn of the apocalypse, dish up anti-technology dirt, and proselytize. Passion and zeal now trump science, and probability takes a back seat to plausibility.” That is sending science and rational thinking backward hundreds of years.
All this demonstrates the wisdom of Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt’s proposed rule to require that data underlying scientific studies used to justify federal environment and energy policies be open to public inspection and criticism.
This means actual evidence, full independent peer review, and data, methodologies, computer codes, and algorithms will no longer be kept secret.
Sterling Burnett, senior fellow for environment and energy policy at The Heartland Institute, calls Pruitt’s proposal “one small step for regulatory reform, one giant leap for scientific integrity and political transparency.” EDN and its allied groups should have to prove plastics are dangerous pollutants before governments take any actions against them.
Meanwhile, Gorehamreminds us how important plastics are to health and safety in modern societies. “They are a miracle material. We fabricate food containers, boat paddles, shoes, heart valves, pipes, toys, protective helmets and smartphones from plastic.”
Even EDN and some other anti-plastics groups seem to recognize that plastics are indispensable for numerous applications since they also call for manufacturing these products.
They just want them made from man-made hydrocarbons (biofuels, et cetera), instead of from the oil and natural gas that Mother Nature created and left beneath Earth’s surface for humanity to use to improve our lives in countless ways.
Hopefully, applying Pruitt’s new rule, and ignoring the groundless claims of extreme eco-activists, will ensure that plastics are with us for a long time to come.
Tom Harris is executive director of the Ottawa, Ontario-based International Climate Science Coalition.
Modern enviromentalisms new age pagan cult that demands sacrifices like with Abortion and Euthinasia banning DDT was just one and this rant against Plastic is just as idiotic as their rant against the Internal Combustion Engine Plastic can be recycled such as soft drink and milk bottles and their #1 and #2 Plastic Bottles These Enviromental Crusades are based upon ideology and junk science
First World problem Sure must be nice to have the luxury to rant against litter.
Maybe they could have a campaign to get people to properly dispose of trash instead of removing plastic from the trash.
I saw a picture on Yahoo, or some other site that bundles point ‘n click headlines, showing an albatross allegedly filled with plastics. The carcass of the dead bird was filled with what appeared to be entire milk bottles and smaller plastics, clearly recognizable in a quite small image. I wonder if that is a true picture or if it is like those Attenborough films, staged for the impact; why would an albatross swallow entire plastic bottles (etc…) when they usually swallow live fish? The claimed location was some unnamed atoll in the Pacific Ocean that is supposedly littered with garbage. Or perhaps it’s true and I’m just too suspicious of media these days.
I always cut up those plastic can collar rings and most plastic today is made biodegradible in landfills and the oceans its mostly nylon fishing nets and in some areas their illegaly shooting certian Hornbills to make little trinkets and in Southern Europe Song Birds are illegaly trapped to serve as a delicacy
The article shows a correlation between the climate change movement and what the EDN is doing. This includes alarmism and taking a stand where there is no real science to support it.
Now the next step is needed. To be consistent with climate change, cities need to sue the plastic manufactures. This would be for their cost of clean up. The people doing the actual littering would be blameless, the plastic manufactures would be liable for selling their legal product. The suits would also be for the cost of cleaning the littwe up in the future. This can’t happen quite yet. First they need a well organized conspiracy so that near identical suits would be filed by different cities in a relatively short time period.