The Plastics Ban

Bjorn Lomborg explains in the Globe and Mail why Trudeau’s new initiative to ban plastic bags and straws will harm the environment.

Buckminster Fuller explained a simple, eye-opening fact to us in a public lecture I attended long ago at Queen’s: left alone, technology itself will ensure the least possible pollution.

Technology is the eternal quest to do more with less. Business too is all about finding efficiencies. If government just keeps its hands off, there will be, over time, less and less pollution. Every bit of pollution is a profit lost, a material wasted.

It pretty much follows, without having to independently do the math, that the current practice of using plastic straws and plastic bags will be the one that produces the least pollution. If a better solution is found, government regulation will not be needed to impose it.

What, then, is the point of such meddlesome regulations? Why, in the face of logic and evidence, do governments keep pushing such measures?

Restraint of trade. Every new regulation tends to reduce or eliminate competition for bigger players already in the market. Every new regulation is employment for another high-priced lawyer, a costly accountant, at each corporation. Small start-ups cannot afford this. They keep those in power in power; they employ the clerisy; and they offer opportunities for graft.

The most obvious casualty in this one, usual, is the poor. Plastic bags are recyclable in a thousand ways, notably as trash receptacles.

I can see good use for one right now.