Yes, Of Course! CEI Argues That Unless We Use More Plastics, We'll Have To Kill Elephants For Ivory

[hatrack]

Meanwhile, the industry-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute has also launched a new pro-plastics campaign, starting with a paper that claims that “plastics benefit wildlife and the environment.” Which animals are helped by the plastics that are literally killing them by the millions? We wish this were a joke, but it’s not. CEI thinks that if we weren’t using “synthetic products like plastics,” then we would “have to harvest such resources from wild animals—such as ivory from elephants.”

Yes. Of course. Either we let the fossil fuel industry dump its byproduct plastics into our oceans, atmosphere, and bodies, or it’s back to an ivory-dependent economy. No middle ground. Plastics definitely saved elephants and destroyed the ivory trade, and any reduction in plastic use now would mean we’d go back to using ivory for pool balls and piano keys and everything else. (To be honest, they really missed an opportunity to threaten that we'd have to go back to killing great blue whales for their baleen and sperm whales for lubricants.)

This kind of very logical and good faith argumentation really bodes well for the rest of the CEI campaign! CEI will also highlight the “value that plastics have for humanity, enriching our lives in many ways, including helping improve our health and ability to fight dangerous diseases, including COVID-19." And for their third act, they’ll acknowledge “legitimate concerns about the impact of plastic litter on the environment, particularly wildlife, and how we can address those problems without banning useful products.” And then finally, they take aim at “unworkable legislation proposed on Capitol Hill.”

Through both Berman and CEI we can see the industry is fighting plastic bans with the usual playbook, with a particular focus on using recycling as a distraction to argue against bans and as we noted in the spring of 2020, using the pandemic to score PR points. And as we know well, the focus on recycling is straight from the very-well-documented plastic disinformation handbook. Back in 2019, the Center for Public Integrity published a lengthy investigation into the long war to protect plastic, starting with a 1988 plastic bag ban in New York’s Suffolk County, and continuing to the present. It has all the same tactics as climate denial, likely because people like Berman are behind the fossil fuel industry’s disinformation on both fronts.

EDIT

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/9/8/2050989/-Embrace-Plastics-Or-We-ll-Kill-Elephants-For-Ivory-New-Pro-Plastic-Propaganda-from-CEI-Suggests

[duhneece]

1. Reminds me that our congresswoman said we need oil for pantyhose

Yvette Herrell said that