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Yes, you read that headline correctly<\/a>. <\/p>\n It is real. <\/p>\n It has come to this:<\/p>\n 2018 will forever be remembered as the year that hating plastic straws went mainstream. Once the lonely cause of environmental cranks, now everyone wants to eliminate these suckers from daily life.<\/p>\n In July, Seattle imposed America’s first ban on plastic straws. Vancouver, British Columbia, passed a similar ban a few months earlier. There are active attempts to prohibit straws in New York City<\/a>, Washington, D.C.<\/a>, Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco. A-list celebrities from Calvin Harris<\/a> to Tom Brady<\/a> have lectured us on giving up straws. Both National Geographic<\/a> and The Atlantic<\/a> have run long profiles on the history and environmental effects of the straw. Vice<\/i> is now treating<\/a> their consumption as a dirty, hedonistic excess.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n (Source<\/a>)<\/p>\n This will go down in world history as an example of perfect propaganda — in large part because you’ll very soon start hearing how effective these bans have been, despite the fact that they’re not the real problem<\/a>, and despite the fact that it’s the weight<\/i> of plastic that should most concern environmentalists, not the raw number of plastic things used, or whether those objects are recyclable.<\/p>\n [M]ost plastic, whatever form it enters the ocean as, will eventually be broken up into much smaller pieces known as micro-plastics. It is these micro-plastics that … pile up on the ocean floor, and leech into the stomachs and flesh of sea creatures.<\/p>\n Reducing the amount of micro-plastics in the ocean thus requires cutting down on the aggregate weight of plastics entering the ocean each year. It cannot be stressed enough that straws, by weight, are a tiny portion of this plastic: At most, straws account for about 2,000 tons of the 9 million tons of plastic that are estimated to enter the ocean each year, according to the Associated Press<\/a> .02 percent of all plastic waste. The pollution problem posed by straws looks even smaller when considering that the United States is responsible<\/a> for about ONE PERCENT [my emphasis] of plastic waste entering the oceans, with straws being a smaller percentage still.<\/p>\n As countless experts have stressed<\/a>, truly addressing the problem of marine plastic pollution will require going after the source of this pollution, namely all the uncollected litter from poorer coastal countries that lack developed waste management systems.<\/p>\n Straw banners have proven stubbornly resistant to this logic. Instead, they have chosen to rely on either debunked statistics (such as the claim that Americans use 500 million straws a day, which was the product of a 9-year-old’s research<\/a>) or totally unproven notions (like the theory that straws are a “gateway plastic<\/a>“) in order to justify petty prohibitions on innocuous straws.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n (Ibid<\/a>)<\/p>\n Yes, 2018, the year the left took an even sharper and more dangerous turn: <\/p>\n Coming out OFFICIALLY against freedom of speech.<\/a><\/p>\n The year they sought to jail people<\/a> who use plastic straws. <\/p>\n The year bar-straws were labeled a “gateway plastic”<\/a>(!) <\/p>\n (Please note that, all who think me hyperbolic whenever I say the left and the right are merely two sides of the same penny, which they are.)<\/p>\n The year Starbucks Bans Plastic Straws — and Winds Up Using MORE Plastic because of It<\/a><\/p>\n The year they doubled-down on the debunked idea that Scandinavia is a model for “democratic socialism”<\/a><\/p>\n The year they blinded themselves one time too many in seeking to resurrect the horrific and immoral ideology responsible for more death and destruction than any other ideology<\/a> in world history:<\/p>\n