Spokane WA: Sustainability Action Plan? Why Not a Bag Tax?
The California Assembly (lower house) approved a “bag tax” GovArnie says he will sign if the senate approves. It criminalizes plastic bags, requiring “paper only” bags and a $0.25/bag tax, collected by Sacramento for re-distribution to well-meaning select projects across the state like recycling and wishing for candy.
These bills are nothing new in the annals of illogic. There are five major garbage whorls circling (mostly stationary) in the oceans. The North Pacific Gyre is the Texas-sized example you remember from previous bag tax hysteria. The wholring Gyre includes more than 1% and less than 10% plastic bag detritus. So, that’s a problem on a long list of problems that the world has generally in its ungovernable regions and strata.
But is the “urban tumbleweed” the problem? Yes, we can see the bag (harder to see CO2 or Hg), but is my bag in Washington State or your bag in California going to make it to the whorl?
We were proud of Seattle residents in August 2009 for rejecting their City’s Council’s bag “fee” ordinance (fees for all bags, plastic still ok, and the retailer keeps the fee(!?)) Seattle residents rightfully romanticize their lovely city, but even the most sustainably-concerned weren’t buying that thousands descended nightly on Discovery Park in Magnolia and performed their evening ritual of committing their plastic remains to the bosom of the Pacific Ocean.
The Spokane City Council saved voters the referendum and simply rejected a proposed bag tax back in 2008. The Spokane River is one degree of separation from the Pacific Ocean – but it’s undeniably connected -- so this early bag-tax rejection keeps the whorl-concern alive, as seen with the Sustainability Action Plan under consideration.
So, we set out to circumnavigate the perimeter of Spokane’s ongoing Hoopfest street-basketball tournament to see if the ballers are dropping any bags in or near the Spokane River (”Gateway to the Whorl”). Plus, maybe there are more categories of trash than just plastic bags the government could tax under the pretext of downsizing the Gyre to, say, Montana-sized. Like Tums packages, or cigarette butts, or ice cream wrappers.
Or MN (mother nature) – like these leaves, dirt and snakeskin.
But for the most part, the streets were clean and plastic bags were about fifth on the list of trash seen (cigarette butts, plastic bottles, paper cups, food wrappers, plastic bags.) Plus, the potential positives of trash – like the notion that this was a full bottle of Vitamin Water dropped by one car, squashed by the next, sending nothing but wholesome vitamin-laced H2O into the sea.
The Spokane Mayor is asking the City Council to “adopt” the previously “accepted” Sustainability Action Plan the city commissioned from a group of well-meaning citizens and experts whether to reduce, reuse and recycle or whether to follow the sustainability practices of the ostrich family.
Here is the report – 23 pages of nice ideas and logical statements.
Noted council-scientists Nancy McLaughlin and Bob Apple voted not to even “accept” the report last year. Apple has come out this year against “adopting” it because it might deprive us of driving cars. Plus, of course McLaughlin and Apple are apparently on board with Gov. Palin’s analysis of the leaked climategate emails that definitively lay to rest the hysteria that man could ever dare to alter the atmosphere.
This is especially impressive from Apple – balancing all this scientific prowess – while suffering the affliction of amnesia wherein the enviro-skeptic “democratic” contender for the 3rd District House seat does not remember being a 3rd District leader of the GOP in the GHW Bush days like we remember him being. You remember, Bob, back before the toilet paper hoarding controversy and the neckties.
Maybe Apple and McLaughlin should give their respective presumed-closed-minded constituents a little credit. Why not just resist the SAP because smart governance and administration are a better answer to “sustainability” than “adopting” a “plan” which on its face says is not an “ordinance” but could arguably force green criteria into decisions in a way, that, for example, equally sensible platitudes like jobs-creation or property value considerations are not forced criteria. In other words -- just say you’re against it rather than have us read your global cooling articles in Nature Journal. No reason to risk your “credibility” by spewing BS even the morons you think want to hear it know is BS.
