A Biden administration policy to phase out single-use plastic straws on public lands prompted an absurd scene in the House of Representatives late Thursday night.
I just don't know why we're not making better legislation about single-use plastics rather than just arbitrarily banning plastic straws. It's so weird. One fucking turtle video. This isn't even picking low hanging fruit, this is legislators picking an apple off the ground and holding it up like they harvested a whole crop.
Meanwhile, I'm getting served a paper straw in a plastic cup with a plastic lid, neither of which I can recycle because it has food residue, and there are no public recycling bins anywhere anyway, and even if there were we don't recycle that plastic in my district we just dump it directly from the recycling center to the landfill. That's lip service, not progress. I'm throwing away garbage cans full of plastic every week without scrutiny, but the package of plastic straws that would have lasted me years is the focus of attention? Not biodegradable plastic? Not reusable packaging? Not paper packaging for consumer goods? Not analyzing the weight savings in fuel vs the increased weight of reusable packaging made of wood, glass, metal, cardboard, etc? No, just choose the smallest thing possible that still feels conspicuous enough for voters to think progress is still happening. With Amazon orders I'm throwing away as much bubble wrap these days as a retail store.
The topic is so big that any real progress is beyond the capabilities of our current government. The Democrats can't generate political will, the Republicans are obstructionist, and both sides simply report to their corporate overlords anyway. The only levers progressives can pull are hoping that enough moralizing, intersectionality, and virtue-signalling will offset overconsumption. It's the plenary indulgences of capitalism–we can still wastefully overconsume if we only buy fair trade products made out of recycled materials made by a diverse indegenous non-hierarchical employee owned collective of secular humanist queer amputees with developmental disabilities who donate a percentage of profits to protecting charismatic megafauna in developing nations. I can't even afford regular groceries, fuck that.
I just don't know why we're not making better legislation about single-use plastics rather than just arbitrarily banning plastic straws. It's so weird. One fucking turtle video. This isn't even picking low hanging fruit, this is legislators picking an apple off the ground and holding it up like they harvested a whole crop.
Meanwhile, I'm getting served a paper straw in a plastic cup with a plastic lid, neither of which I can recycle because it has food residue, and there are no public recycling bins anywhere anyway, and even if there were we don't recycle that plastic in my district we just dump it directly from the recycling center to the landfill. That's lip service, not progress. I'm throwing away garbage cans full of plastic every week without scrutiny, but the package of plastic straws that would have lasted me years is the focus of attention? Not biodegradable plastic? Not reusable packaging? Not paper packaging for consumer goods? Not analyzing the weight savings in fuel vs the increased weight of reusable packaging made of wood, glass, metal, cardboard, etc? No, just choose the smallest thing possible that still feels conspicuous enough for voters to think progress is still happening. With Amazon orders I'm throwing away as much bubble wrap these days as a retail store.
The topic is so big that any real progress is beyond the capabilities of our current government. The Democrats can't generate political will, the Republicans are obstructionist, and both sides simply report to their corporate overlords anyway. The only levers progressives can pull are hoping that enough moralizing, intersectionality, and virtue-signalling will offset overconsumption. It's the plenary indulgences of capitalism–we can still wastefully overconsume if we only buy fair trade products made out of recycled materials made by a diverse indegenous non-hierarchical employee owned collective of secular humanist queer amputees with developmental disabilities who donate a percentage of profits to protecting charismatic megafauna in developing nations. I can't even afford regular groceries, fuck that.