The climate cult was wrong about paper straws

Aug 30, 2023

The same ilk of environmentalists that form the climate cult thought it could save the world by banning plastic straws and slowly but surely forcing everyone to adopt paper straws. As it turns out, paper straws may be even worse for the environment than plastic.

A Belgian study has found that paper straws have a higher concentration of “forever chemicals” than plastic straws. Those chemicals are toxic at high concentrations and take a long time to break down in nature, meaning the supposedly environmentally friendly paper alternative to plastic straws is worse for the environment.

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In other words, you have been drinking through lousy, mushy paper straws for nothing. As it turns out, basing environmental policy on a shoddy “study” performed by a 9-year-old child is not an effective way to save the planet. Who could have guessed?

Plastic straw bans and paper straw alternatives were not just some silly quirks that people were advocating businesses to adopt voluntarily. Seattle became the first city to impose a plastic straw ban in 2018. California enacted restrictions on plastic straws in 2019 at the state level, with several localities imposing their own restrictions on top of the statewide regulations.

This may seem like a nonissue, but it perfectly represents the environmental extremism that has taken over the Democratic Party and liberal media, who dutifully parroted that 9-year-old child’s bogus study on plastic straws. Bans and restrictions on plastic straws didn’t just make people’s lives unnecessarily worse; they ended up doing so for what now appears to be a negative effect on the environment. A small group of Democrats on city councils or in state legislatures decided they should further control how people live their lives or run their businesses, and they did so while getting everything wrong.

You can see this in other areas where Democratic panic over climate change is widespread. California’s energy grid is being propped up by fossil fuels because the state has too rapidly shifted to wind and solar energy, which are unreliable. California Democrats also phased out nuclear energy, which is carbon free and more reliable and efficient than the state’s failing renewables. Electric vehicle and solar panel production are both controlled by China, which doesn’t care about the environment and drives global carbon emissions higher than the United States can restrain them.

Climate activists and the Democratic politicians who have embraced them continue to push “solutions” on people that make their lives worse and have little to no effect (or, in this case, a negative effect) on the environment. The eco-cult is not just overly hysterical and controlling; it is also completely ineffective regarding its stated goal. It’s well past time to stop listening to the activists who just make people’s lives miserable for no gain.

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