Earlier this month, Tim Dickinson at Rolling Stone and Rebecca Leber of Mother Jones published two revealing looks at an ever-present but often overlooked problem: plastics.
Leber provided an excellent overview of how the fossil fuel industry sees plastics as a lifeline in a world of constrained carbon emissions, while Dickinson dove deep into plastic pollution, politics, and propaganda.
As both Leber and Dickinson discuss, groups like the industry’s American Chemistry Council and Plastics Industry Association are following the industrial denial handbook.
One of their targets has been local plastic bag bans. The industry, for example, set up the deceptively named Progressive Bag Alliance (that Dickinson notes recently rebranded as the American Recyclable Plastic Bag Alliance) and another front group called Bag the Ban, intended to fight against local ordinances banning plastic bags.
Last week, New York City’s ban on plastic bags went into effect, and deniers were quick to exploit the coronavirus pandemic to serve their rhetorical aims. The New York Post ran an op-ed claiming that tote bags would spread the virus – a piece that was originally published at the industry-funded Manhattan Institute’s City-Journal.
The industry’s PR reps are also busy promoting the fact that medical supplies are often plastic. Steve Everley, who does PR for oil and gas companies and tweets somewhat often about the glory of plastics, tweeted a Bloomberg story about coronavirus potentially improving plastic’s polluting image, as well as a Grist piece that he describes as a reminder of “the enormous health and environmental benefits of plastic.” Exactly the sort of messaging Dickinson describes as being core to the industry’s propaganda.
Similarly, Canadian denier Patrick Moore was angry about a Canadian declaration that plastic is toxic, and sarcastically suggested Canada would soon be leading the world with “wooden blood bags, steel gloves” and other non-plastic medical equipment.
In case you were wondering if he’s a legitimate expert or tin foil-wearing crank, Moore followed up by describing anti-plastic activists as “fanatics who oppose free thought and free speech and free choice.”
There’s no need to wonder though, given that Moore is infamous for claiming a pesticide is perfectly drinkable then refusing to do so, or more recently claiming the Great Pacific Garbage Patch “is a hoax” based on what he described as “a satellite photo on a cloudless day” that doesn’t show it. But the image is quite obviously a composite map and in no way a satellite photo, particularly given that it shows Antarctica stretched out along the bottom of the image, as Mercator projection maps do and real images do not.
Then again, maybe Moore’s right and it is a photo, and the Earth is flat!
And if you can believe that, then the supposed health benefits of plastics, or the drinkability of pesticides for that matter, aren’t too hard to swallow, either.