Remember three years ago when I got a little hot under the collar about people refusing to move to reusable grocery bags?
China has banned plastic bags.
Surprising to me was the factoid that China spends 37 million barrels of crude oil just on plastic bag production per year. What must we be spending?
(Of course, as Al Gore pointed out in An Inconvenient Truth, here in the US it’s an epic (and losing) political battle to regulate car manufacturers to increase fuel efficiency standards to 35 miles per gallon…by 2020. China is already at 35 mpg, Japan is at 40 mpg, and the EU is at a staggering 48.9 mpg.)
We could do so much to get off the goddamn oil syringe, and apparently it’s just too damn taxing for us to even try.