The plastic bag ban gets passed.

Jared, you really are a sad little anorak, aren’t you? All you’ve been able to do is keep repeating the one little factoid that you’ve so proudly been able to find as if it had any real significance in the face of huge bodies of alternative evidence and the informed opinions of everyone from Clean Up Australia through to the Chinese government (who, last time I checked weren’t that interested in making me or the Greens feel warm and fuzzy).

I’ve wasted more than enough time on your pettiness.

Hah. That’s awesome. The old “i’ll quote myself” conceit! 😉 You’ve rather inelegantly and longwindedly reminded me why debating on the internet is such a waste of time. By the way, you’re not Simon Corbell moonlighting on RiotACT are you? Because your arguments, (il)logic and obstinacy in the face of not a shred of evidence seems strikingly characteristic.
Have a nice day!

Jared, as you love aphorisms, perhaps I should remind you, in the context of the Piatt and Nettleship article, that absence of evidence does not constitute evidence of absence.

Anyway, you’re flogging a dead horse on this one – I observed back on 9 December that:

‘The argument about choking sea creatures was only one of many possible arguments in favour of reducing our plastic usage in any way we can. If, indeed, that one-among-many argument turns out to have been exaggerated, that would merely weaken one plank of evidence – far from disproving even this small component of the evidence.

In fact, if you check out some of the reasearch, the story with plastic bags in the oceans may be subtler but far more frightening.’

The problem, as you note yourself, is plastic – its production and ultimate escape into the environment. It’s not limited to impacts in oceans. And some of that material I referenced back on 9 December indicates that the deeper problem, in the context of marine environments, may be all kinds of plastic breaking down into small particles and both being mistaken for zooplankton and, more generally, creating environmental toxicity.

The argument doesn’t hinge on plastic bags killing larger creatures, but rather this deeper problem – and all the other problems with unneccessary plastic production.

The argument for banning plastic bags is not defeated by the fact that other forms of plastic may be both more prevalent and more damaging. If this reasoning is taken to its extreme, one could never take any action until the largest issue was targeted. Just because plastic bags constitute a modest proportion of the actual plastic stream doesn’t mean that banning them would be pointless. Just because there may well be other forms of plastic that are causing even worse problems doesn’t mean that taking immediate, available action is irrational. Any single action wil almost invariably be imperfect or incomplete – that does not invalidate it.

Any why would one need a cost benefit analysis when the only real cost is one of trivial convenience?

Where to start? The link i posted contains the following link:

Piatt, J.F. and D.N. Nettleship. 1987. Incidental catch of marine birds and mammals in fishing nets off Newfoundland, Canada. Marine Pollution Bulletin 18(6B): 344-349

It’s written in English, you don’t need to be a marine biologist to understand that nowhere in the article are the words ‘plastic’ and ‘bag’ used in conjunction. BUt here’s the abstract:

“Summer surveys of the incidental catch of marine birds and mammals in fishing nets around the east coast of Newfoundland indicated that over 100 000 animals were killed in nets during a 4-year period (1981–1984). Composition of catches depended on foraging behaviour, regional abundance, and the degree of foraging aggregation of different species. Highest incidental catches occurred in conjunction with the inshore spawning migration of capelin (Mallotus villosus), and the numbers of capelin predators caught varied with capelin abundance. Seabird by-catch was highest in the vicinity of major breeding colonies, decreasing rapidly with distance from these sites. In some years and locations, net-mortality may have constituted the greatest source of adult mortality for some species’ populations.”

It’s always baffling to me when people attack cost benefit analysis as some kind of subjective and arbitrary decision making tool. It may be that individuals and groups arbitrarily choose to input certain pieces of data while excluding others and there’s nothing anyone can do about that, but in terms of an objective decision making tool, CBA – the act of quantifying costs and benefits into a single metric – is about as good as it gets if you want to objectively investigate the merits of a certain proposal. If you know of a more effective alternative that is somehow more objective, then lay it out, you’ll be making a substantial contribution to human kind and good governance. You may think that monetising an environmental variable or outcome is somehow immoral or wrong and that for some reason the environment is priceless, but that in itself is effectively applying an infinite value at the expense of all others. If you think that’s the right value, stick it in a CBA. But you wouldn’t do that, because that’s about as arbitrary as you can get. If i told you that a ban would cost you $0.01 a year and save 1 bird, you might say “no worries”. If i told you a ban would cost you $1,000,000 and save 1 bird you’d say “no thanks”. Well, the answer is probably somewhere in between, we just need to approximate it.

Again, i’m baffled by your implicit assertion that plastic bags are inherently bad. ” after years of trying alternatives, such as voluntary reductions, absolutely nothing has been achieved in terms of real reductions in plastic bag production, use and litter”. Um, so what? Would the world be a better place without plastic bags? Or is there some optimal amount of plastic bags that you’d prefer to be in production and use at any one time? Is the problem plastic, or is it litter? Should we ban plastic bottles (which are far more prevalent in the litter stream)? Do you have some insight into the issue that tells you that plastic bags are the best target? Why not up the punishment for littering for example?

My issue is not with a ban per se, my issue is the process of getting here. What happened to evidence based policy making? The ACT government has provided scant evidence that banning plastic bags in Canberra will provide society at large with any benefits let alone pointing out what the costs are (or for example who stands to benefit from increased sales of saleable plastic bags or the perverse outcomes of forcing all supermarkets to stock Aldi type bags that take even longer to breakdown than those targetted to be banned). How many birds or fishlife or anything are currently killed by Plastic bags bought and sold in Canberra? I don’t know, do you?

Oh and by the way, here’s what else my ‘conceited’ preference for independent analysis uncovered: did you actually read the article you posted about ‘issues for the region of waterloo’? It makes the statement that “over a million birds and hundreds of thousands of marine animals die as a result of plastic bags entering our waterways and aquatic environments”. It provides the following 60 page report for that tidbit: http://www.unep.org/pdf/EcosystemBiodiversity_DeepWaters_20060616.pdf
But do you know what the report actually says: “Pelagic longlines…may also catch hundreds of thousands of seabirds (albatrosses, fulmars and petrels), sea turtles and cetaceans, and millions of oceanic sharks and rays each year.” So not over a million birds and hundreds of thousands of marine animals. And more significantly, NOT plastic bags. Not only did they misquote the report, they even got it wrong. Who’d have thought? Could the same mistake be happening again? But it’s right there on page 23 of the report! And guess how many times the UN report actually mentions plastic bags? Just once, in the following sentence:
“Plastic bags have a particularly lethal effect on turtles and mammals, who mistake them for prey (squid and jellyfish) and eventually die of suffocation or blocked intestines”.
But no mention whatsoever of actual numbers killed!

And i didn’t need to be a marine biologist to work that one out either!

jared – ah the old ‘I prefer my own independent analysis’ and ‘I’ll make up my own mind’ conceit. Of course, if you were a qualified marine biologist, environmental scientist and economist all at once, you might be able to do that.

The rest of us have no option but to go to expert sources. That’s why I think it’s important to be clear on who you’re dealing with. Given the amount of astro-turfing, greenwash and general deceit that goes on, checking the quality of your sources is critical. Otherwise, you end up believing that organisations like Sense in Science or (my personal favourite)the Lavoisier Group (worth looking up if you’re in need of a bitter laugh on a Friday afternoon) are actually rational and objective:
http://www.lavoisier.com.au/index.php

There are no neutral sources in the real world and no such thing as ‘the relevant articles’ – there’s only the selection of material referenced by your source. Incidentally, and sadly, one of the more reliable indicators of a fringe group like the ones above is an aggressive insistence that they alone represent independent, rational thought.

‘Cost bemnefit analysis’ is merely a particular methodology that can be employed to examine some subjects, but it’s really only as good as the objectivity of the data entered. When you’re dealing with trying to fix an economic value for complex externalities like environmental impacts, the analysis quickly becomes extraordinarily arbitrary. Therefore, while cost benefit analysis can be very useful with simpler economic issies, it is very far from being the gold standard in attempting to analyse complex problems like this one.

If you want a little hard evidence via careful analysis you could try these two from the US:
http://dpw.lacounty.gov/epd/plasticbags/pdf/DEIR.pdf
http://www.environment.uwaterloo.ca/u/jclapp/Final-bag%20report%20-%20May%202008.pdf

You forgot to mention the UN in your listing of ‘countless jurisdictions’:
http://www.examiner.com/city-buzz-in-miami/united-nations-calls-for-world-wide-ban-on-pointless-thin-plastic-bags

There’s no doubt that the alternative approach of establishing levies, as they did in Ireland and other places, has merits. But there’s also no doubt that, after years of trying alternatives, such as voluntary reductions, absolutely nothing has been achieved in terms of real reductions in plastic bag production, use and litter, so it is well and truly time for some direct action.

Of course it’s perfectly possible that the UN and ‘countless jurisdictions; have got it wrong and you and Martin Winer are right – just don’t expect rational people to come to the same conclusion.

I don’t know or care and neither is it relevant who Martin Winer is. I simply used his site because it contains links to the relevant article that various media sites, governments and others have misquoted and misrepresented to push their point of view. If you trust clean up Australia and Greenpeace, good luck to you. Personally, i prefer my own independent analysis and hence i’ll just go to the source and make my own mind up.

If you think that banning plastic bags provides a “modest improvement” or any improvement on net, prove it. Or at the least try and prove it with hard evidence via cost benefit analysis. I have no argument with you when you say “that taking an action that causes little if any real inconvenience and no harm whatsoever, in order to achieve a modest improvement, is worth taking.” as long as you’re talking about yourself and the psychic benefits that you presumably get from using less plastic bags, and not me (As i stated, there is nothing stopping you from doing this now). To me and many others, it is an inconvenience, it provides no improvement and hence it is not worth doing. As i’ve stated previously, show me some evidence that banning plastic bags provides society (not just you and like minded people) with a positive net benefit and i’m more than willing to listen. But to this point, the ACT Government, the SA Government, the Tasmanian Government, countless jurisdictions worldwide and countless NGOs have done no such thing.

Jared, you begin with a partial quote, taken out of context, in order to misrepresent what I actually said. You then put words in my mouth about massive conspiracy theories, which bears no relationship to what I actually posted (all I said was that, given their track record, Murdoch media stuff made me nervous – as in uninclined to trust it without checking which, in this case, proved to be wise).

By the way who actually is Martin C Winer? I had a bit of a look and all I was told was that he was a computer person and a mathematician. I tried to browse some of his other posts and couldn’t make much sense of any of them. On that basis, you’ll just have to forgive me if I prefer the advice of people like Clean Up Australia and Greenpeace (yes Jared – see below) to someone of completely unknown provenance. I’m willing to be shown his credentials, but neither he nor you has provided any evidence of them.

Your third paragraph would make an excelent illustration in a high school clear thinking course on one of the classic fallacies of reasoning. This one you can look up for yourself.

Oh and the ‘countless anecdotes’ are countless in the sense that there really weren’t any. There was evidence in the references offered, of vaying degrees of rigour, to the effect that plastic bags were part of a serious environmental problem that had particularly unfortunate impacts on the oceans and marine life. Some of the evidence was anecdotal in the sense that it was first person reporting of observations. I don’t recall anyone saying anything about ‘evil’ – rather just the perfectly rational concept that harm was being done. I don’t think there are very many peole who imagine there’s some kind of evil conspiracy going on here, it’s just that some people can recognise that harm can be done without malicious intent.

By the way, you can stop peddling the Greenpeace furphy while you’re at it. While they don’t see banning plastic bags as a huge achievement, they clearly recognise that these bags form part of the problem and support such bans as a matter of policy:

http://usactions.greenpeace.org/action/start/188/

http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5565

Incidentally, I don’t see banning plastic bags as a huge achievement any more than moving to compact flourescent bulbs. But I am rational enough to recognise that taking an action that causes little if any real inconvenience and no harm whatsoever, in order to achieve a modest improvement, is worth taking. Just because something is small doesn’t mean it’s useless. A great deal of the task of rescuing this damaged planet will consist of the cumulative effect of many small actions.

So, please don’t lecture me on being rational, if this is the best you can do.

you are citing what can only be described as ‘black’ literature (in the same sense as ‘black ops’).

Oh come on! Lets try and remain rational. If you don’t like the Times then go here: http://www.martincwiner.com/plastic-bags-caught-in-the-net-of-a-typo/ and for your reading pleasure you can find references for the very articles quoted in the Times and read them for yourself (including the Greenpeace one). There is no censorship and no massive conspiracy theory.

You can come up with hundreds or thousands of links to articles and websites that make all sorts of claims about plastic bags (including for example, the ACT government’s very own http://actplasticbags.net.au/) but not one of those links will back their anecdotes with hard evidence in the form of a cost benefit analysis that attempts to show that the costs imposed on society of using plastic bags outweighs the benefits. If they were so obviously bad, then presumably this wouldn’t be such a hard task.

Don’t bang on about how everyone is so lazy and that hundreds of years ago we all survived without plastic bags blah blah blah. We survived without cars, iphones, bitumen roads, skyscrapers, fridges, plasma tvs, lawnmowers, electric lighting etc etc etc yet all these items/conveniences do incredible environmental damage when they’re in use or disposed of. Do we simply ban them? Thousands of animals are killed by automobiles of every description every year. It’s obvious, everyone knows it, do we ban cars? No, because the benefits far outweigh the costs of killing wombats, kangaroos, cats and dogs, and countless other animals.

So please, quit with the countless anecdotes about how plastic bags and their users are inherently evil, reflect on the fact that the plural of anecdote isn’t evidence, remember that there is nothing stopping you from buying biodegradable plastic bags already, and at some point present me with some actual evidence that shows that banning plastic bags is, on net, good for society and not just a populist stunt. Good luck with that.

Oh and for those interested, the ACT Government’s key piece of evidence for justifying a bag ban was a telephone poll. The poll i put up earlier currently has the following stats: 34 responses, 28 (82.4%) Against a ban, 6 (17.6%) for.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BXY2XLQ

Breda – you’ve done a great job of exposing yourself, haven’t you? Housebound accused me of citing ‘grey’ literature – on that basis, you are citing what can only be described as ‘black’ literature (in the same sense as ‘black ops’).

Firstly, I always get nervous when something is pushed in the Murdoch media. Most of the sites supporting Breda’s argument are either industry groups of The Australian or The Times. these are the same newspapers that bruited Ian Plimer’s incompetent and discredited ‘Heaven and Earth’ as rational proof that climate change science is nonsense.

Then, if you then check out the apparent source of the data, the apparentli innocent and professional sounding ‘Sense about Science’, you find this:

Sense About Science

The UK lobby group Sense About Science says it is ‘A Trust to encourage a rational, evidence-based approach to scientific and technological developments’.

Its exact launch date is unknown but the domain name was registered in March 2002.

Within months it had begun to promote its point of view on GM crops to parliamentarians and the media, and had raised funding from ‘corporations and learned societies’.

An item on the Sense About Science website also refers to a ‘Sense About Science network of scientists and NGOs’. Clues to the network’s constituent members would seem to be provided by the organisation’s officers, staff, trustees, advisors, funders and project particpants.

OFFICERS/STAFF:

Chairman: Lord Taverne

Vice Chairman: Dame Bridget Ogilvie

Director: Tracey Brown

Other staff: Ellen Raphael

Both Brown and Raphael worked for the London-based PR company Regester Larkin till shortly prior to joining Sense About Science. Both are also part of the extreme libertarian network behind LM, Spiked, and the Institute of Ideas, to all of which Brown and Raphael have contributed. The domain name for the Sense About Science website – senseaboutscience.org.uk – was registered by Rob Lyons, who is also web master for Spiked.

Brown and Raphael are also key players in another of the network’s front groups, Global Futures. The phone number for Global Futures is the same as that for Sense About Science.

Does everyone get it by now? This is one of those loopy right-wing thinktank front organisations, run by corporate intrerests to discredit genuine attempts to deal with serious environmental problems.

On this basis, I stand by my earlier comments absolutely.

The argument about choking sea creatures was only one of many possible arguments in favour of reducing our plastic usage in any way we can. If, indeed, that one-among-many argument turns out to have been exaggerated, that would merely weaken one plank of evidence – far from disproving even this small component of the evidence.

In fact, if you check out some of the reasearch, the story with plastic bags in the oceans may be subtler but far more frightening:
http://www.cleanup.org.au/au/LivingGreener/plastic-bag-facts.html

http://www.environment.gov.au/settlements/waste/plastic-bags/index.html

http://www.environment.gov.au/biodiversity/threatened/ktp/marine-debris.html

http://www.gbrmpa.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/1966/general_impacts.pdf

http://www.harbourkeepers.org.au/marine-debris.htm

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=plastic-surf

http://www.kimointernational.org/MarineLitter.aspx

Oh and yes, Breda, I do think you are going to the wrong parties.

Sorry, a bunch of books written by people with an agenda does not qualify as ‘research material’. It qualifies as ‘propaganda’ – just like the whoopsie quoted above.

I am not advocating dumping junk in the ocean, BTW, but plastic bags are trivial in the big picture of ocean dumping. Banning them ranks with banning old fashioned light globes in the pointless and annoying symbolism stakes.

Oh, and I have a growing stash of plastic bags for post 2011 shopping. I’m getting bulk packs like the supermarkets buy. Should see me and my friends out for life. They fold up nice and small in your pocket when you go shopping – easy peasy.