The plastic straw man

California virtue-signaling run amok

Used heroin needles and feces fill San Francisco’s streets, but some California municipalities have found a more dire threat — plastic straws. Santa Barbara is one of many cities that has banned plastic straws. It’s the first city, however, to make use of the product a crime punishable with jail time. Hand out a plastic straw, and you’re looking at up to six months in the slammer. Each straw counts as an individual violation, too. Hand out 60 straws in one shift and you’re looking at more jail time than many murderers get.

This is madness. But environmentalists insist these kinds of Draconian measures are needed to save the oceans. The growing amount of plastic in the ocean is a legitimate concern, but it’s not going to be solved by bans based on made-up statistics and oversimplifications.

You’ve probably heard that people in the United States use 500 million straws every day. Major news sources, including The New York Times, USA Today and The Washington Post, have cited it as fact. So has the National Park Service. One problem. That statistic was made up by a 9-year-old after he called various straw manufacturers in 2011.

Looks like the layers of fact-checkers and editors at The Times couldn’t be bothered to verify a statistic that fit their narrative so well before printing it. A trade association put the number of straws used each day at under 250 million. That’s still a lot of straws.

That’s where the oversimplification comes in. Eliminating every single straw in the ocean wouldn’t make a dent in the plastic problem. Even PETA cited a report finding that plastic straws account for 0.03 percent of the plastic in the ocean. That’s not even a rounding error.

Straw bans aren’t just annoying. They distract from the main cause of ocean plastic — abandoned fish nets and fishing equipment. Scientists with Ocean Cleanup have estimated that 46 percent of the plastic in the ocean comes just from fishing nets. These nets mostly originate in the developing world where the first priority of poor fishermen is survival. Environmentalism truly is a luxury of the wealthy.

That’s where Adam Minter, author of a book on the trash industry, sees an opportunity. Rather than ban straws, he suggests American consumer demand — and be willing to pay for — practices that reduce pollution from commercial fishing, such as requiring fishermen to label their nets.

Putting people in jail for using a straw isn’t just virtue-signaling run amok. Straw bans suck energy and attention away from solutions that would actually have a noticeable impact on reducing plastic in the ocean.

The views expressed above are those of the Las Vegas Review-journal. All other opinions expressed on the Opinion and Commentary pages are those of the individual artist or author indicated. Straw bans suck attention away from solutions that would actually have a noticeable impact on reducing ocean plastic.