An Israeli politician named Abba Eban once said, “Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources.” Nowhere is that sentiment better on display than where science intersects with politics, as the two rarely travel in the same lane.
While politics is, as Otto Von Bismarck once said, “the art of the possible,” science represents the rigid outer boundaries of the possible. So, when politicians invariably push those scientific boundaries beyond absurdity, supercilious political buffoons self-identify by trying to out-science actual scientists.
In the case of environmental protection, political buffoons invariably advocate for “feel-good” solutions which make little to no difference. We commonly know this as “virtue signaling.”
A prime example of a “virtue signal” is the evolution of the en vogue banning of plastic straws across multiple jurisdictions; a practice which President Donald Trump has promised to end via one of his new executive orders.
The start of the left’s paper straw movement can be traced back to a 9-year-old misstating a statistic as fact. Yes, you read that correctly. Young Milo Cress started a local “Be Straw Free” campaign in 2011, and as he researched plastics and our environment, Milo erroneously claimed that Americans used more than 500 million drinking straws per day.
"That was the number that I stuck to, because it seemed to be around the middle of what they were saying," said Cress. That might be an acceptable assumption for a 9-year-old. But for science?
Anyways, Milo gave his rudimentary calculations to Eco-Cycle, a Colorado-based recycling nonprofit that thought it was a good marketing plan to partner with a pre-teen would-be environmentalist and did not bother to confirm his numbers.
Eco-Cycle, in turn, gave Milo’s statistics to the National Park Service who, with no independent fact-checking of its own, told the same to NBC News, who likewise didn’t check to see if everyone carried the one.
NBC then told the world.
And the world told two friends, who then told two friends, and so on; the fake stat spread in a buffoonish game of “Telephone” played by a lot of people who had neither the scientific expertise nor the experience in compiling statistics necessary to vet it.
As it turns out, actual scientists found contrary facts that were hard for these buffoons to swallow, causing NBC to retract Milo’s folly.
The facts are that plastic straws make up about 4% of plastic trash by piece but given that they only weigh about one sixty-seventh of an ounce, it is nowhere near the largest source of plastic waste. While eight million tons of plastic waste reach our oceans annually, plastic straws make up somewhere around 0.025% of that plastic waste.
That’s still 2,000 tons of plastic straws in our oceans, but in the race to “save the planet,” it’s equivalent to someone cleaning a cup of water out of the Atlantic Ocean and dumping it back in.
Now, of course, we should all forgive Milo for some incorrect assumptions and calculations he made at the tender age of 9 in a school project. In fact, we should applaud his ambition.
What we should not do is forgive a group of adults who ran with a 9-year-old’s calculations with little or no independent fact-checking in the name of promoting a “feel-good” narrative.
To unrepentant environmental buffoons, the data is irrelevant. The message is all that matters.
Take this statement from Greenpeace's Kate Melges after Seattle started enforcing its own plastic straw ban: To her, the plastic straw ban is about "taking a stand on plastic pollution ... and really taking a stand on what needs to happen, a ban on all single-use plastic products.”
So what if the science didn’t science!
This is the genesis of a classic virtue signal. Since 2011, banning plastic straws has become a way for large American-based companies and government buffoons at local, city and state levels to show the world how great they are at fighting for the environment.
By taking up feel-good measures that do little to solve what reasonable people can agree is a growing problem, these buffoons gain political favor and a reputation of being serious about saving the planet that they truly do not deserve.
Because looking like you solve a problem is so much better than solving the problem. Even if that reality leaves 99.975% of the problem unaddressed.
Hopefully, now that President Trump is brushing the buffoonery aside, actual adults can work to solve this problem for real this time.
Gene Berardelli is a street-smart New York-based trial attorney who has developed a solid reputation as both an election attorney successfully representing conservative candidates, and as an award-winning content creator and author of "Schnooks, Crooks, Liars and Scoundrels: A Field Guide To Identifying Political Buffoons." — Click Here Now.