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As a bartender, the latest wave of environmental misinformation and exaggeration struck particularly close to home. I’m referring, of course, to the environmental push to outlaw plastic straws<\/a> in bars, with, additionally, the threat of steep fines. <\/p>\n Have you ever heard of “noble cause corruption”?<\/p>\n It’s when you’re so convinced that your argument is on the side of right and good and just and true that you believe there’s nothing wrong with lying or exaggerating in order to prove your case: <\/p>\n The ends justify the means, in other words.<\/p>\n The term “noble cause corruption” was originally coined by the American police force. It referred to those cops who “know” that a suspect is guilty and so feel totally justified in breaking the rules by, for instance, planting evidence or forcing confessions. <\/p>\n Of course, if you had to force a confession or plant evidence, how then did you “know\u201d guilt in the first place?<\/p>\n The “noble-cause-corruption” principle is illustrated perfectly, over and over again, and is perfectly analogous with any number of environmental claims — and when people ask me, as they often do, why I’m critical of environmentalism as a worldview and (Neo-Marxist) philosophy, this is among the first reasons I give:<\/p>\n Because if you must lie to the public about the urgent problem of climate, or deforestation, or plastic waste, or acid rain, or rising oceans, or the ozone layer, or pollution, or species extinction, or CO2, or recycling, et cetera ad infinitum, then how do you know you\u2019re not also lying to yourself about how big the problem is and how certain you are about it?<\/p>\n Have you heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, for instance?<\/p>\n Did you know that it doesn’t actually exist? <\/p>\n Quoting Tom Hartsfield at RealClearScience<\/a>:<\/p>\n Have you heard of the giant plastic island in the Pacific Ocean? Several times in casual conversation, I’ve been told that mankind is ruining the oceans to such an extent that there are now entire islands of plastic waste. Daily Kos tells us that this “island” is twice the size of Texas!<\/p>\n First, we can do a quick feasibility calculation. The mass of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), the plastic from which most water bottles are made, required to create a two-Texas-sized island just one foot thick is 9 trillion pounds. That’s 15 times more than the world’s annual production of plastic. Even if a year’s worth of the world’s spent plastic bottles could be airlifted out over the ocean and directly dropped in one spot, this island could not be made.<\/p>\n So, here are the facts. Much of the ocean contains little to no plastic at all. In the smaller ocean gyres, there is roughly one bottle cap of plastic per 50 Olympic swimming pools\u2019 worth of water. In the worst spot on earth, there is about two plastic caps\u2019 worth of plastic per swimming pool of ocean. The majority of the plastic is ground into tiny grains or small thin films, interspersed with occasional fishing debris such as monofilament line or netting. Nothing remotely like a large island exists. Clearly, the scale and magnitude of this problem is vastly exaggerated by environmental groups and media reports.<\/I><\/p>\n (I recommend you read the full article<\/a> — especially if you belong to the Party of Science.)<\/p>\n And from the left-leaning US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA):<\/p>\n “While ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ is a term often used by the media, it does not paint an accurate picture of the marine debris problem in the North Pacific Ocean. The name ‘Pacific Garbage Patch’ has led many to believe that this area is a large and continuous patch of easily visible marine debris items such as bottles and other litter — akin to a literal island of trash that should be visible with satellite or aerial photographs. This is not the case.”<\/p>\n — Ocean Facts, National Ocean Service<\/p>\n The following, from Slate Magazine<\/a>, was written Daniel Engber — a journalist and environmentalist who, in a rare moment of candor wrote: <\/p>\n “There Is No Island of Trash in the Pacific. But the cause of clean oceans needed a good story. Our warming planet could use another one.”<\/b><\/p>\n The actual Pacific-Garbage-Patch story couldn’t haven been scripted any better. <\/p>\n It begins with an oil-heir on his way back from a yacht race(!) This oil-heir, in the picture at the top of my article here, is the poster child of the so-called limousine liberal: the person seeking to atone for his father’s money (while not actually having to part with it) by creating a cause and rallying cry for the environmentalist philosophy.<\/p>\n Daniel Engber, of Slate, makes explicit that the garbage patch was indeed just a rallying cry — and declares furthermore that this is completely acceptable<\/i> [emphasis mine] because the cause is so very necessary that truth is irrelevant.<\/p>\n “In early August 1997, Charles Moore found himself floating through the North Pacific in his Tasmanian-built catamaran. Moore, an oil heir, activist, and yachting captain, had just finished up a two-week race and was heading back from Honolulu to Santa Barbara, California, through what\u2019s called a \u201cgyre\u201d\u2014an area of the ocean like the Sargasso Sea, wrapped inside a giant weather spiral, that serves as a reservoir for flotsam. As he described it in a 2003 article for Natural History, the thousand-mile journey took him through an endless field of plastic\u20143 million tons of it in all, he guessed, in an area about the size of Texas. Everywhere he looked he saw debris: bottles, bottle caps, wrappers, fragments. And when he returned to this \u201cGarbage Patch\u201d a year later, he found a vast \u201cplastic-plankton soup\u201d and a litany of bigger objects: a volleyball, a cathode-ray tube for a 19-inch TV, a truck tire mounted on a steel rim, and a gallon bleach bottle so brittle that it crumbled in his hands. Moore\u2019s Garbage Patch would grow in size and fame in the years that followed.<\/p>\n “It was this false appraisal\u2014this projection of collective guilt as a trash archipelago\u2014that brought the problem of marine debris back into the public eye. It gave us all a way to comprehend, or at least hallucinate, what was otherwise a widespread, microscopic devastation.”<\/p>\n (Link<\/a>)<\/p>\n Comprehension, hallucination … it’s all the same.<\/p>\n None of this is to say that we shouldn’t be concerned about litter and pollution. It is, however, to say that lying is always unacceptable — no matter the “cause” — and that if at this point you still put wholesale trust in the environmental movement, you’re putting your trust in dangerous hands: the hands of proven prevaricators, with a specific agenda that is not as benign<\/a> as you’ve been led to believe.<\/p>\n Here’s climatologist Stephen Schneider admitting in no uncertain terms that it’s okay to lie to the public: <\/p>\n \u201cOn the one hand, as scientists, we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but \u2014 which means we must include all the doubts, caveats, and ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we\u2019d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public\u2019s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to off up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This \u2018double ethical blind\u2019 we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective and being honest.”<\/p>\n \u2013 Stephen Schneider, quoted in Jonathan Schell, \u201cOur Fragile Earth,\u201d Discover Magazine.<\/p>\n And the man who kicked it all off, James Hansen of NASA, apparently feeling some compunction:<\/p>\n \u201cEmphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue\u2026. Now, however, the need is for demonstrably objective climate forcing scenarios consistent with what is realistic under current conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 James Hansen, \u201cCan We Defuse the Global Warming Time Bomb?\u201d<\/p>\n Yet here he was before:<\/p>\n \u201cWe have at most ten years\u2014not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 Jim Hansen, \u201cThe Threat to the Planet,\u201d The New York Review of Books, July 13, 2006, 12\u201316, at 16.<\/p>\n “In the United States of America, unfortunately we still live in a bubble of unreality. And the Category 5 denial is an enormous obstacle to any discussion of solutions. Nobody is interested in solutions if they don’t think there’s a problem. Given that starting point, I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are” — Albert Gore, Grist Magazine.<\/p>\n