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Banning Straws? Overblown Climate Hysteria

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By Lorna Roberts @ Shutterstock.com

During CNN’s Town Hall style seven-hour Democratic Party presidential candidate session, the most benign climate-change plan proposed was “more authoritarian than anything Donald Trump has ever suggested during his presidency. Democrats were not merely proposing massive societal upheaval but mass coercion,” warns David Harsanyi in The Federalist. Not once was any hysterical proposal challenged, Mr. Harsanyi also notes.

Ellie Bufkin, a senior contributor at The Federalist, presents some of the most blatant facts that “debunk the idea that giving up your bendy straws will do any planet saving whatsoever.”

  • The United States contributes less than 1% of plastic ocean pollution annually (The Wall Street Journal)
  • Plastic straws account for less than 1% of the 1% that the United States dumps into the ocean (Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions)
  • Paper straws are not actually biodegradable and use significantly more energy to produce than plastic straws. In fact, paper straws don’t degrade all that much faster than their plastic counterparts. (The Environmental Protection Agency)
  • No, you can’t recycle paper straws either. Items tainted with food product must go to landfill. (Recyclebank)

Unnecessary climate panic is changing the law and our lives at an alarming rate. While it may seem like a minor inconvenience to drink out of a mushy paper straw or sippy-cup lid, bans on straws have become the trendiest piece of legislation in the United States. Virtue-signaling progressives rejoice in what they consider to be “planet-saving” bans on useful items needed by children and disabled people on a daily basis.

The bans are not based at all on science and facts about ocean pollution, but entirely by emotional activists intent on making people think the world is on the verge of ending. Straws account for a nearly immeasurable amount of refuse in the ocean, yet laws are being changed at the whim of a conspiracy that they are a significant risk to the planet, despite significant evidence to the contrary.

Read more from Harsanyi here.

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Debbie Young

Debbie, editor-in-chief of Richardcyoung.com, has been associate editor of Dick Young’s investment strategy reports for over three decades. When not in Key West, Debbie spends her free time researching and writing in and about Paris and Burgundy, France, cooking on her AGA Cooker, driving her Porsche Boxter S through Vermont and Maine, and practicing yoga.