Proper Plastic Disposal, not Plastic Bans, is the Solution to Plastic Pollution

In a Star-Ledger Guest Columnist, We need to end plastic pollution now. Don’t wait for the state to act Jennifer M. Coffey wrote:

Plastic pollution is a threat to our wildlife and ecosystems right now, but it’s a very solvable problem. First, we need to turn off the plastic pollution machine. That’s where ordinances banning plastic and requiring the use of durable, recyclable, compostable or degradable materials is critical.

In 2016, the World Economic Forum released a robust study that said if we keep using single-use plastics at the current rate, by 2050 we will have more plastic than fish in our ocean [sic], measured pound-for-pound. In 2050, my now-10-year-old niece Giselle will be about my age. I owe her better than an ocean full of plastic, and I know many of you feel the same way. We also need to clean up the plastic that is already in our environment, and luckily, there are many nonprofit and for-profit organizations already working on that!

Coffey is the executive director of ANJEC, The Association of New Jersey Environmental Commissions. She condemns “industry advocates”, the New Jersey Food Council, for trying to override a growing spate of local municipal bans by urging legislators “to push a weak plastic bag bill through the Legislature.” 

I posted these comments:

Note the bait and switch--equating plastic pollution with plastic use, as if everyone who bags their groceries in plastic bags goes home, puts the food away, then drives to the beach and throws the bags into the ocean. In fact, we reuse plastic shopping bags for trash can liners or car trash--double use.

The problem is proper disposal, and Americans are good at it. Americans contribute almost none of the “ocean full of plastic.” 95% comes from newly industrializing nations in Asia and Africa. Americans, in fact, account for less than 1% of “mismanaged” plastic waste and only 1/10% of marine debris. That’s America as a whole. Banning plastic statewide, let alone in any particular municipality, will do nothing to solve the ocean plastic problem, but plenty of inconvenience to NJ residents. A ban is a sledgehammer overreaction that only an Environmentalist could love.

The problem is not plastic use. The problem is plastic pollution. Plastics are a boon to human well-being. Kudos to the plastics industry for pushing back. They’re standing up for their livelihoods and our quality of life.

One thing I will say is at least the plastic ban warriors are addressing a real problem, actual pollution--unlike the climate crisis fearmoners, who claim that carbon dioxide is a pollutant, mislabeling it “carbon pollution”. 

Related Reading:

Plastic Bag Bans Won't Help the Environment, But They'll Cause More Foodborne Illnesses--Hans Bader

Why the Sudden Frenzy Against Plastic Straws?--Jeffrey Tucker

QUORA *: ‘Do you know what Ayn Rand's take is on pollution?’

QUORA *: ‘Do you know what Ayn Rand's take is on pollution?’

Here is my answer:

To my knowledge, Rand didn’t spend much time specifically on the issue of pollution. But given that her political philosophy is grounded in the principle of individual rights, it logically follows that she would believe that anti-pollution laws have their place in a free, industrial society.

And she did have a few things to say explicitly on pollution and the government’s role:

As far as the issue of actual pollution is concerned, it is primarily a scientific, not a political, problem. In regard to the political principle involved: if a man creates a physical danger or harm to others, which extends beyond the line of his own property, such as unsanitary conditions or even loud noise, and if this is proved, the law can and does hold him responsible. 

Rand also had a balanced view of pollution vs. the benefits of industrial activity, which I think is consistent with the views of most Americans:

City smog and filthy rivers are not good for men (though they are not the kind of danger that the ecological panic-mongers proclaim them to be). This is a scientific, technological problem—not a political one—and it can be solved only by technology. Even if smog were a risk to human life, we must remember that life in nature, without technology, is wholesale death.

These quotes are taken from the sections Pollution and Ecology/Environmental Movement of the Ayn Rand Lexicon.

Some half a century ago, at the dawn of the Environmentalist movement (then labeled “ecology”), Rand predicted that Americans would clean up the air and rivers and so on, but would never do so at the expense of their standard of living, as the “back-to-nature” crowd demanded. Since then, great strides have been made against industrial pollution, even as Americans’ living standards continued to increase. Although the ideological Environmentalists continue their anti-industrial campaign (with some success), Rand’s “take” on pollution has largely become the mainstream, in my view.

Related Reading:

Introduction to Objectivism

Dueling Letters: Pollution vs. Climate Ideology

What Does Climate Change have to do with Pollution? Nothing

EPA Cuts in the Climate Change ‘Fight’ Means More Money to Mitigate Real Pollution

A Humanist Approach to Environmental Issues—Alex Epstein

The Industrial Revolution Was Dirty, but Pre-Industrial Europe Was Worse

* [Quora is a social media website founded by two former Facebook employees. According to Wikipedia:

Quora is a question-and-answer website where questions are created, answered, edited and organized by its community of users. The company was founded in June 2009, and the website was made available to the public on June 21, 2010.[3]Quora aggregates questions and answers to topics. Users can collaborate by editing questions and suggesting edits to other users' answers.[4]

You can also reply to other users’ answers.]

Dueling Letters: Pollution vs. Climate Ideology

A pair of letters in the New Jersey Star-Ledger, Swallowing sewage? Experts take opposite sides, pits then-NJ governor Chris Christie’s Department of Environmental Protection commissioner Bob Martin against the campaign director of environmentalist activist group Clean Water Action David Pringle. The letters were responses to a NJ Star-Ledger editorial When you swallow sewage at the Shore, thank Trump. You can read both letters here. I focussed on Pringle’s bait-and-switch:

Barnegat Bay, Ocean County and its people have been especially put in harm’s way by these weakenings and, more broadly, the climate denying and delaying policies of the Christie administration.

I left these comments, slightly edited:

This statement completely discredits Pringle’s case. As a layman, I simply don’t trust it. Why? Because he is mixing two separate issues into one package deal—pollution and climate change policies.

Pollution is a legitimate concern that should be addressed. The government has a role through objective anti-pollution laws. Climate change, on the other hand, has become a rallying cry for the anti-industrial, anti-reliable energy (hydro, nuclear, fossil), anti-capitalist, anti-business agenda of the ideological environmentalism movement.

Actual pollution is a threat to humans, so policies to fight it are good for humans. However, policies to “fight climate change” are harmful to humans, because they in essence hamper economic and industrial progress and thus harm humans’ ability to protect against natural dangers, to clean up the air, land, and water, and to flourish. Environmentalism is, as the name implies, motivated not by human well-being but by preserving “pristine” nature from humans. They seek to minimize human impact on nature. This is a direct attack on man’s means of survival, which is the freedom to transform the danger-filled natural world into a man-made environment conducive to steadily improving human life through technological-industrial development. Nature in its pristine, undeveloped state is wholesale death for humans.

The environmentalists’ non-impact standard of value leads them to judge human activity as bad simply because it changes something in the natural world. Hence, climate change is bad to the extent humans may contribute to it, even if the change is mild and manageable and the benefits are enormous to human life. Human-caused climate change is bad, they hold, simply because it’s climate change, even though the harmful effects of the change are minimal or nonexistent and the benefits of the human activity causing it are enormously beneficial (e.g., reliable economical energy from fossil fuels) and the climate change itself has important positive benefits (e.g., more CO2 equals more plant growth).

This same standard of non-human induced change also calls into question their anti-pollution proposals. How many pollution control regulations actually pass proper cost-benefit analysis? Regulations that produce minimal or inconsequential pollution control benefits often impose maximum harm to individual freedom and livelihoods. Those should be reviewed and rolled back. But notice that environmentalists’ knee-jerk reaction is always to support new regulations and oppose any rollbacks. This fits perfectly with their non-impact standard.

As I said, the packaging together of pollution and climate change destroys the so-called “clean-water advocate” case, because of the standard that implies—minimizing human impact. A better standard by which to measure environmental issues is to maximize human flourishing while minimizing only impacts objectively determined to be negative to human well-being. By definition, that implies a constant review of pollution laws and a reform or rollback of laws that objectively do more harm than good. I don’t trust that Pringle sees it that way.

----------------------------------------

Environmentalists like to label anyone who disagrees with their policies as “climate deniers.” In fact, they are the real deniers: They seek to deny humans the capacity to change the natural world, including the climate, to human betterment.

Related Reading:

What Does Climate Change have to do with Pollution? Nothing

EPA Cuts in the Climate Change ‘Fight’ Means More Money to Mitigate Real Pollution

A Humanist Approach to Environmental Issues—Alex Epstein

The planet has never been a safer place for humans to live—Alex Epstein

Still Peddling the “97%” Myth

Shortly after Trump took office, an op-ed appeared in the NJ Star-Ledger offering Advice for Trump from N.J.'s former EPA chief: Phone a scientist. The op-ed equated Trump’s intention to roll back Obama’s so-called “Clean Power Plan”—which is really a war on reliable energy more drastic than Germany's failed energy poverty scheme—with the rollback of “environmental policies that keep our air and water safe.”

Obamacare isn't the only major health reform on the chopping block under President Donald Trump. So are the environmental policies that keep our air and water safe.

The Clean Power Plan to limit the smog and soot flowing into New Jersey from other states, the Paris climate pact to help contain global warming, the hard-fought settlement with polluting companies to clean up the Passaic River -- all could become casualties of Trump.

The equation of policies to reduce harmless greenhouse gas emissions like carbon dioxide in order to “contain global warming” with actual pollution that is harmful to human life is a common trick of environmentalists.

But the goal of Obama’s Clean Power Plan is to drastically roll back co2 emissions by restricting and ultimately outlawing fossil fuels, not contain pollution. The purpose of embedding global warming into a paragraph about pollution is to sneak in the real motive of the anti-reliable energy crowd by equating them. They do not equate.

Environmentalists claim to have science on their side. But if so, why the deceitfulness? Perhaps because the science doesn’t support them. So, they deceitfully distort the science, as well. In a section asking former Obama Northeast EPA administrator Judith Enck if she has “Any advice for the Trump administration?,” she answered

I think the best thing is for them to get briefed by scientists. If they objectively listen to the science, they will understand how serious a threat climate change is.

I often cite a peer-reviewed scientific paper in which the author surveyed about 13,000 scientists, and asked them, “Do you believe that climate change is real and is primarily caused by human activities, such as burning fossil fuels and burning forests?”

Ninety-seven percent of the scientists said yes. What we need the Trump administration to do is listen to the science. The leadership, including the president himself, should randomly call up any credible scientist and have a conversation about climate change.

My emphasis. I left these comments:

Notice the bait and switch under the question “Any advice for the Trump administration?” [Former EPA Regional Administrator Judith] Enck first asserts that “science” will tell you “how serious a threat climate change is” if we will only “listen” to them.

But the actual question that 97% of scientists supposedly agree on says nothing about any threat, serious or not, posed by climate change. The question she cites asks, ““Do you believe that climate change is real and is primarily caused by human activities, such as burning fossil fuels and burning forests?” The “97%” merely agrees that climate change is real and that human activity is a factor.

Climate change is real and humans are partly responsible? Even if "primarily" responsible—i.e., more than 50% responsible—so what? It doesn't say they agree there is a threat of catastrophe. It doesn’t say they agree that fossil fuels and other life-giving activities should be curtailed or eliminated. The question implies no moral evaluation at all. So why do environmentalists and their political allies keep regurgitating the 97% statistic? Because they want to establish the "big lie" that climate change in and of itself is bad if caused by human activity. They are anti-human race.

Environmentalists believe that human-caused environmental change—not negative change, but change as such—is bad and thus human impact must be curtailed at all costs. But non-impact is an anti-human flourishing standard, and we should reject it. Humans survive and thrive by changing the Earth from a danger-filled environment to a place hospitable to human life and flourishing. Life is better with climate change and fossil fuels than without either. Humans don’t need a stable climate. We need plentiful reliable energy and the freedom to produce it, in order to drive all of the industries that improve our lives. Climate change is not the threat. The Environmentalists’ war on energy and industrial development is the real threat.

I’m surprised that anyone still peddles the “97% of scientists agree” myth. That statistic has been debunked as meaningless ad nauseam. The truth is that, on proper analysis, only about 2-4% actually agree that catastrophic climate change is imminent and humans are the primary cause. Catastrophic climate change is pure speculation. What is scientifically demonstrated is that climate change is mild and is partly natural and partly human-caused, and has not led to more dangerous weather extremes despite decades of increasingly hysterical and failed predictions of disaster.

But even if global warming causes weather extremes to become a little more extreme, so what? The fundamental issue is not whether or not we should clean up actual pollution whose harm to humans is greater than the benefits. The fundamental issue is human non-impact on nature versus human well-being. The truth is life keeps getting better and safer for more and more people as fossil fuel energy usage increases. Someday, viable replacements for fossil fuels will become technologically and economically feasible, provided the energy free market that enables energy entrepreneurs to flourish is not totally crushed. That would not make environmentalists happy, but it would be great for humanity. In any event, rolling back reliable, industrial-scale energy production would cause a real catastrophe—for human life.

Trump should pay attention to the big picture, rather than be swayed by scientists who simply claim that “climate change is real and is primarily caused by human activities” and blindly accept that that is a bad thing.

Related Reading:

Unreliable Energy, Not ‘Dirty’ Energy, Threatens New Jersey

World’s CEOs are Right to Demote Climate Concerns, Worry About “Over-Regulation”

Obama's War on Energy Producers and Consumers by Ari Armstrong

King Obama's Carbon Emission Mandate

In NJ: ‘No’ on Ballot Question #2

As New Jersey’s election approaches, the New Jersey Star-Ledger editorialized, Vote yes on ballot question #2: The lockbox for enviro funds:

The concept is simple: When polluters destroy your neighborhood, the fines they pay in settlements should go toward restoring your neighborhood.

But not in the twisted logic of Trenton. All too often - especially under this governor - this money has gone to plug holes in the state budget. The Legislature tried to minimize the diversions, but Chris Christie vetoed its attempt.

Now, a ballot question on Nov. 7th will allow voters to put a stop to this, once and for all. It would amend the state constitution to say that every dollar in polluter fines would have to go to "repair, restore, replace, or preserve the state's natural resources."

This money is not for cleanup, which polluters are already mandated to pay for; it's to restore the neighborhoods, waterways and marshes that were damaged, and compensate the public for the loss of their use.

It can rehabilitate unhealthy river banks, build parks on land that had been contaminated, or even construct baseball fields to make amends to communities that lost the use of them for years.

I left these comments:

If the fund is not for cleanup, then what is it for? It’s a giant piggy bank for ideological environmentalists to “"repair, restore, replace, or preserve the state's natural resources." What exactly are “natural resources?” What does “compensate the public” mean? What is the public, if not the clique that controls the fund? To an environmentalist, anything man builds is not “natural”—including your home or business or even church. Environmentalists are, by definition, concerned with unaltered nature as opposed to nature improved for human flourishing. Will the money be used to fund eminent domain to seize private property in order to “restore” it to “natural resource” status? Will the money be used to “preserve” even more property from human improvement, further exacerbating the “affordable housing crisis?”

Here’s a better option. If the purpose of the fines—which, for the sake of argument, I’ll assume to be just—is what this editorial says it’s for, how about using the money to directly compensate the actual individual victims of the pollution with monetary awards?—something on the order of the asbestos settlement, where in theory an objective process determines actual harm. True, this could create a “gold rush” of people trying to cash in. But at least real victims of “destroyed neighborhoods” have a chance at actual compensation—and a choice to do what they want with their share of the settlement. If they want to use it for their own personal benefit—say, to move to a cleaner neighborhood—fine. If they want to pool their payout with other victims to build a baseball field or rehabilitate a river bank they actually use, they’re free to do it. If there is real harm, the money rightfully belongs to the victims who were objectively harmed, not something labeled a “natural resource.” (Why should non-victim members of neighborhoods, communities, or “the public” get free parks or ball fields?) At least everyone, not just environmentalists, would have a crack at it. Award any excess money not awarded to individuals directly to “the public,” in the form of equal payments to all individual residents who together comprise NJ’s public—If we’re going to “compensate the public,” let’s actually do it.

In the meantime, based on this editorial, I’m voting “No” on ballot question #2. The collectivist premise behind it gives too much power to the environmentalists as opposed to actual victims. True, the money will probably continue to be diverted to the state budget. But at least the general fund is controlled by our elected representatives, accountable to voters. True, Trenton’s loot is a special interest feeding frenzy. But at least all special interests—through our elected representatives, not just the environmentalist lobby—will have a say in how the dough is dished out. Vote “NO” on Ballot Question #2.

Related Reading:

Misrepresenting NJ GOP Gubernatorial Candidate Guadagno’s Positions.

Environmentalist Witch Doctors Not Concerned With Human Benefaction

Environmentalists, Luddites, and Collectivism

We Owe Our Children a More Technologically Advanced Society, Not 'Preserved' Nature

PennEast Pipeline and Arsenic

The PennEast Pipeline poses arsenic risk to N.J. water supplies, writes T.C. Onstott and Julia L. Barringer in a guest column for the New Jersey Star-Ledger. The proposed pipeline will bring natural gas from Pennsylvania’s hydraulic fracturing fields into NJ. It is one of the front line battles in the environmentalists’ war against oil and gas pipelines.

I left these comments, edited for clarity:

Much of this article is devoted to telling us that arsenic is toxic to humans and animals, which is already well-known (although only above certain thresholds). And then we see the word “potential” mentioned several times. But what are the risks of not having reliable energy—you know, the kind that well owners need to bring that water into our homes on demand? Such energy is delivered to millions of Americans through millions of miles of existing pipelines in service today in the U.S.

It’s easy to find risks everywhere. But big picture thinking is vital. Negative side effects could be mitigated. But the vastly greater benefits of pipelines like PennEast dwarf the environmental risks involved. After all, where would we be without this energy? At the mercy of environmental dangers.

The issue is really moral. It pits environmentalists against human well-being. Environmentalists value untouched nature, which runs counter to what human beings need to survive and thrive—reshape nature to satisfy human needs. Pipeline builders and their supporters, including the future buyers of their energy, value human life.

Environmentalists use the so-called “precautionary principle” to fight industrial progress wherever projects are proposed. The principle holds that no project should be undertaken until all possible environmental risks have been neutralized. Of course, that would require omniscience, which is impossible to human beings. If the precautionary principle were in effect at the dawn of human progress, the discovery of fire would have been abandoned, and humans would never have risen from the cave. And, of course, the precautionary principle never considers the risks to humans of not having natural gas pipelines. Environmentalists and their allies in academia and government can concoct an endless stream of potential risks and use them, no matter how minute, to stop progress by imposing more studies paid for by someone else.

I’m not an expert on this subject. So I can’t state unequivocally that the authors don’t have a legitimate point. But I am observant and a thinker. Three natural gas pipelines pass right through Readington, passing about a mile from my house, which is supplied by well water. This gas provides thousands of people with their vital energy. There are 320,000 miles of natgas transmission lines around the USA. Yet people are flourishing thanks to the natgas, not dying all over the place from arsenic.

Excuse me for my skepticism when nothing but negatives, but no positives, are listed by pipeline opponents. Pipeline proponents are always willing to acknowledge, and rightly made to address, the risks. If human well-being is the moral standard, then big picture thinking is vital. I hope someone with the appropriate expertise posts an opposing opinion on these pages.

[NOTES: PennEast posted “Arsenic Myths” on its website to counter pipeline opponents’ arsenic threat theory. Patricia Kornick, spokesperson for the PennEast Pipeline Company, posted this letter, PennEast Pipeline no threat to drinking water. Also, this letter titled Proposed pipeline won’t create an arsenic issue in drinking water, unfortunately behind a paywall, appeared in the Burlington County Times.]

Related Reading:

How To Solve The Water Crisis: Use More Fossil Fuels—Alex Epstein

PennEast Pipeline Objections Don’t Add Up

Eminent Domain: The Dark Side of Pipelines

The ‘Jihad on Pipelines,’ New Jersey Front

Untangling the PennEast Pipeline Rights Conundrum

EPA Cuts in the Climate Change ‘Fight’ Means More Money to Mitigate Real Pollution

Former New Jersey Governor James J. Florio continued the NJ Star-Ledger’s Earth Day assault. Trump has proposed a 31% cut in the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency. Part of the cut is to be achieved by eliminating climate change funding, including moneys that fund climate change considerations in environmental reviews.

In Thoughtful Republicans must stop Trump's EPA cuts, Florio laments:

EPA reductions on SuperFund cleanups will particularly impact our State with more such toxic sites than any other State. With over 110 toxic sites within our 21 counties, we average about five sites per County. That means no one lives very far from one of these toxic locations that are officially designated as "imminent and substantial hazards to human health and the environment".  Leaching as they do into our surface and ground drinking water supplies, expeditious remediation is essential to deal with these catastrophic problems of past practices.

In a related issue defending existing laws, such as the Resource Conservation and Recovery act (RCRA), which prospectively regulates the disposal of toxic waste, insures the creation of new SuperFund sites. [sic]

These are legitimate concerns, as is the issue of clean water. “In the 21st Century, with a new awareness of the problems associated with fossil fuels,” writes Florio, “water has assumed th[e] role [of] indispensable lubricant” of economic and social development. Note that Florio no longer views fossil fuels as indispensable in cleaning up pollution, but as part of the problem. We’ll see why later.

SuperFund sites are contaminated old industrial sites, often left over from defunct corporations. It’s arguable whether the government should be paying to clean up or contain the pollution of these sites. Where the polluting corporation is still in existence, it can and should, and usually is, made to fund the cleanup, or at least part of it. As to abandoned sites that pose a danger to innocent parties but in which responsible parties no longer exist or are unknown, the question must be asked in regard to paying for cleanup costs, “If not the general taxpayer, then whom?” I have no answer. It’s a question more properly addressed by free market legal scholars.

That constitutional issue aside, Florio followed his last statement with what one commenting correspondent labeled “a bizarre non- sequitur”:

Likewise, the failure to take seriously climate change concerns, denying even the existence of the problem by the Trump-appointed head of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, is a major threat to New Jersey's water supply.  

I chose this sentence as a lead into my comments, which I have edited for clarity:

Climate Change. Therein lies the problem—but it’s not the problem Governor Florio sees.

What is scientifically demonstrated—hysterical speculation to the contrary notwithstanding—is that the causes of modern climate change is some heretofore debatable combination of natural and human causes, but which in any event is benign, mild, and manageable. Yet the EPA is wasting enormous financial resources on “fighting climate change?” Why?

Climate catastrophism is a political agenda of the statists on the Left—an agenda rationalized by the idiotic notion that carbon dioxide is a pollutant. If the EPA could stop wasting $billions on “fighting climate change”—which Trump seems to intend to do—the bloated EPA budget can be cut without reducing spending on cleaning up real pollution. The Federal Government may even be able to increase funding of legitimate pollution cleanup while cutting the budget and saving taxpayers money.

Wasteful climate change spending is the problem. (There’s probably a lot of waste in the superfund cleanup operation, as well, given that the EPA seems to be staffed in part by environmentalist zealots.) That issue aside for the moment, Pruitt appears to be a level-headed guy and a welcome rational counterbalance to the climate change hystericists. Pollution certainly has been a negative side effect of industrialization. And a lot of anti-pollution progress has already been made, but no one would argue against the notion that more needs to be done. The government and law has a role in this. (What that role entails is beyond the scope of this discussion.)

I think Pruitt may do a good job of prioritizing spending and separating the Ideological Environmentalism’s political agenda from the practical work of pollution control and cleanup. I certainly trust him more than I trust the quasi-religious climate catastrophists and their enablers.

Related Reading:

How To Solve The Water Crisis: Use More Fossil Fuels—Alex Epstein

The planet has never been a safer place for humans to live—Alex Epstein

Coal Pollution Study is Obsolete

A new study indicates that some pregnancies in four New Jersey counties East of a Pennsylvania coal-fired power plant “may” have been negatively affected by the plant’s emissions, reports Kathleen O’Brien for NJ.com (Pregnancies in 4 N.J. counties affected by pollution, study concludes). “While the health dangers of coal emissions have been long documented - asthma and cardiovascular problems - they now appear to extend to pregnancy as well,” O’Brien reports.

But how relevant to analyzing the health safety of coal is the study today? The study covered the period 1990 - 2006. The power plant, the Portland Generating Station in Upper Mount Bethel Township, was built in 1958, and would sometimes coat window sills with ash. The plant wasn’t retrofitted with the latest anti-pollution equipment, and the owner, GenOn Energy, decided the old plant wasn’t worth the cost of installing the new equipment that would have allowed it to reduce sulfur dioxide and mercury emissions to legally allowable limits (although the mercury limits may be overly strict because dangers of mercury emissions from man-made coal burning may have been wildly overstated for political reasons). So Portland stopped using coal in 2013, switching to natural gas and/or diesel fuel.

I left these comments, slightly edited:

All pollutants—real pollutants, not carbon dioxide—have thresholds below which they are not dangerous to humans. As long as economically viable technology exists to clean the emissions—and always keeping in mind the enormous and vital life-giving value of electricity—dangerous levels of pollutants should not be allowed to be released.

Reading back through the various links dating from 2012, 2013, and 2014, we find that the technology apparently exists. But the Portland Generating Station is an old mid-Twentieth Century facility. Retrofitting the 1958 plant with the latest state-of-the-art anti-pollution technology would not have been economically feasable, so the owners decided to shut it down.

Considering the big picture, it seems obvious to me that this study is obsolete as a means of judging the health dangers of modern coal-fired electricity generation. State-of-the-art coal plants are much cleaner today (albeit much less competitive to natural gas, thanks to fracking technology). I suspect the radical anti-coal faction knows this, which explains why it has switched to peddling the ridiculous myth that carbon dioxide, the trace greenhouse gas without which life on Earth could not exist, is a pollutant. This way, any human activity that emits CO2 can be labeled “carbon pollution,” which sounds bad but is actually beneficial to the plant life (including agriculture) that gives us oxygen.

Related Reading:

The Truth About Coal and Mercury—Alex Epstein

The Cloud Is Powered By Coal -- And That's A Good Thing—Alex Epstein

Obama's Criminal Assault on Coal

NY's Fracking Ban: Environmentalists Phoney CO2 Obsession Revealed

Related Viewing:

How Coal Improves Our Environment—Alex Epstein

I Oppose New Jersey's Proposed Grocery Bag Surcharge Bill

Last year, a bill was introduced to levy a surcharge on so-called “single use” carryout plastic bags supplied by food stores. As Susan K. Livio reports for NJ.com (That plastic bag is going to cost you, N.J. bill says):

Customers would be required to pay 5 cents for every plastic or paper bag they use to carry their purchases under a bill a state Assembly committee approved Thursday.

If the bill is signed into law, retail operators in New Jersey would begin charging 5-cent fee for each single-use carryout bag on June 1, 2017. Stores would keep a penny, as would the state Division of Taxation to administer the program.

The remaining 3 cents would be used to create the "Healthy Schools and Community Lead Abatement Fund" to support the testing of homes and schools' water supply - a major cause of concern in the state.

The fee would not apply to people who are 65 and older, and to low-income people who are enrolled in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, also known as WIC, or the Work First New Jersey public assistance program.

The New Jersey Star Ledger Editorial Board also chimed in (Time to wean ourselves off plastic shopping bags), calling the bag fee “a win-win. The lead crisis could be assuaged by the bag fee, and bag reduction creates environmental benefits.”

Below is a consolidated version of comments I left at both articles:

So now we have a “lead crisis.” Want more money or power to flow to government? Create a crisis.

And what is a “single-use carryout bag?” We save and reuse our shopping bags, both plastic and paper, for secondary purposes all the time. We line our waste baskets with them. We use them as dirty laundry receptacles when we travel, and myriad other uses. We only throw them out when they’re either dirty or damaged, and then dispose of them properly.

But under Spencer’s bill, we’ll have to either fork over a nickel surcharge for something we’re already paying for as part of our grocery bill and which has uses beyond carrying out groceries, or start buying plastic bags off the grocery shelves. Where’s the “environmental” gain? Where’s the “wean?” Glad and Hefty should love this bill. And for what? To pay for testing of other people’s water lines? If it’s a private building, the owner should pay. If it’s a public building like a school, the local taxpayers should pay.

A3671 is discriminatory to boot. It applies only to people under 65, to self-supporting people not on the government dole, and to the most successful businesses.

It’s expected that someone like [NJ Sierra Club director Jeff] Tittel [quoted in the article] would support this bill. He doesn’t care about people (he’s an “environmentalist,” after all). But what’s Spencer’s excuse for this one-size-fits-all bill that doesn’t fit one size? Another busybody who wants to force her values on everyone else by law? A rationalization for another tax? To fight pollution (which should be fought by punishing polluters, not responsible people)? Who knows?

Improper disposal of plastic bags is a problem. I get that. I’m all for anti-pollution laws. Fine ‘em. But I don’t buy that, properly disposed of, plastic bags are a problem. If it were a really serious problem, they’d be legally banned. The real motive behind bills like this one is clear. As Spencer says, “No ban means money keeps flowing into the fund.”

Here’s a fair compromise: If you don’t like plastic or paper bags offered by the retailer, bring your own bags. If the convenience and utility of store-offered bags suits your purposes, you should be left alone. The politicians should keep their noses out of it.

Related Reading:

What Does Climate Change have to do with Pollution? Nothing

Forget Chinese and Indian "Pollution". Let's Go Full Speed Ahead on America's Industrialization