OPINION:
Busybodies across the country love nothing more than forcing the rest of us to spend more of our hard-earned dollars on pointless, feel-good exercises. Most recently, meddling leftists have been hard at work banning shopping bags and making lightbulbs more expensive.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Golden State’s busybody in chief, on Sunday signed legislation that will banish plastic bags from grocery stores by 2026. The state has had a ban on plastic bags since 2014, but like most nannying government rules, it was convoluted and riddled with loopholes.
The state allowed customers to pay a 10-cent tax for the privilege of carrying one’s groceries in a “reusable” bag made from thicker plastic. The liberal logic at the time was that the public would treasure these bags and continue to lug them back to the store on every future visit.
Most people had better things to do than worry about preserving a 10-cent bag. Others realized carrying food items turned reused bags into breeding grounds for bacteria and disease.
As a result, California’s nanny-state dictate backfired spectacularly. Total plastic use rose from 147,000 tons in 2004 to 231,000 tons in 2021, according to a recent study by CalPIRG, an environmentalist group behind prohibiting plastic bags.
Under the new mandate, dutiful Golden State liberals will be expected to carry their organic arugula home in their reusable NPR tote bag. But this, too, is folly. According to a Danish government study from 2018, organic cotton bags require about 20,000 uses to offset their environmental footprint compared with single-use plastic bags.
Paper bags will also be allowed. They used to be the norm in checkout lines until environmentalists objected to chopping down forests just so consumers would have a convenient way to carry their goods home. Plastic bags were pushed as an environmentally friendly alternative, but the winds have shifted. Environmentalists have come full circle, and paper bags are fashionable again.
The Golden State’s whimsical micromanagement has inspired the Biden-Harris administration. Earlier this year, the Department of Energy decided to make it even harder to manufacture a decent lightbulb. Uncle Sam already prohibited the brilliant and affordable light of an incandescent bulb, declaring LED light the future. But now federal micromanagers aren’t satisfied.
The LED bulbs that were supposed to be the solution to the nation’s energy problems are no longer good enough. They’ll have to sip even less power under regulations that take effect in 2028. This will effectively double the cost of an average bulb as the mandarins in Washington seek to justify their paychecks by chasing ever-diminishing returns from their proclamations.
The administration touts all the savings you’ll see 30 years from now, under the new rules, when the purported savings offset the initial price increase. If the savings were legitimate, the technology would be able to sell itself.
But this administration doesn’t trust the free market, and it’s not going to wait for the technology to be ready. “The climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time,” Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, said in her recent interview on CNN.
Buying different kinds of lightbulbs and giving up grocery bags won’t alter the global temperature change. But a lot of climate grifters and charlatans will become substantially richer as a result as government dictates force the public to switch to their pricier products.
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