Environmentalists have discovered that banning plastic bags and forcing people into the reusable bag business, not only increases recyclables, but kills people, recycling their corpses into the planet. For environmentalists who think that human beings are an infestation on the skin of mother earth, this is a good thing. For sane ethical people however this should be horrifying news.
Klick and Wright estimate that the San Francisco ban results in a 46 percent increase in deaths from foodborne illnesses, or 5.5 more of them each year. They then run through a cost-benefit analysis employing the same estimate of the value of a human life that the Environmental Protection Agency uses when evaluating regulations that are supposed to save lives. They conclude that the anti-plastic-bag policies can’t pass the test – and that’s before counting the higher health-care costs they generate.
Do we really need a cost-benefit analysis to argue that doubling the number of deaths in a category is a bad thing?
Across California counties, the study has found an increase of 16 deaths. And those numbers will get worse as they expand beyond the yuppie population that actively likes using reusable bags and down into low income areas where they will be used sloppily and casually out of necessity, not by choice.
There’s an estimated 61 percent rise in ER visits due to E Coli and the estimated cost of all this is over 100 million dollars.
So now let’s consider what a national plastic bag ban would look like based on the national foodborne illness rates.
The CDC estimates that each year roughly 1 in 6 Americans (or 48 million people) gets sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases.
That number will go up to at least 64 million or 1 in 5 Americans. Assuming a 46 percent increase in the national foodborne illness death toll… we end up with 1,380 more people dying under a ban.
Julia Louis Dreyfus and Eva Longoria may have actual blood on their hands. But it’s not as if this will affect them. And for environmentalists, murdering an added 1,380 people, many of them from low income groups, is not a bug, it’s a feature.
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