McDonald’s has bowed to public pressure and replaced plastic straws that you can recycle, with paper straws that you can’t recycle and which have to be put into the general waste and burned.
How is this a victory for the environment?
Well it’s not, obviously. Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore could have told you this a year ago. As indeed he did when he tweeted:
‘Plastics – “Global Enemy Number One”- ECJ OK, let’s call for a global ban on plastic children’s toys and see how that goes over! This is “pop-environmentalism” at its finest. Banning plastic straws is disingenuous tokenism. 3 Cheers for Plastic!!’
Why was the co-founder of Greenpeace trying to stop us saving the planet?
Well he wasn’t. He just recognised that sometimes well-meaning environmental policies can do more harm than good. The war on ‘single use’ plastic was a moral panic, largely generated by the propaganda department of – you guessed it, Greenpeace – then amplified by useful idiots like David Attenborough and the BBC, and eagerly adopted by virtue-signalling politicians like Michael Gove.
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