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Arnold Schwarzenegger is here to terminate your hamburger addiction

by MelissaHope Posted on June 28, 2016

Conan the Vegetarian

Arnold Schwarzenegger is here to terminate your hamburger addiction

By on Jun 28, 2016Share

A sweaty Arnold Schwarzenegger wanders across a barren wasteland before turning to the camera and jawing out the line, “Less meat, less heat… more life.”

This is a scene in the latest James Cameron flick, a public service announcement for the advocacy group WildAid and the Chinese Nutrition Society, aimed at linking meat eating to climate change. It’s meant to sway people to follow the country’s new dietary guidelines and eat less meat. So far there’s just a “behind the scenes” teaser, and it’s predictably over the top. Animal agriculture isn’t as big a producer of greenhouse gases as Cameron claims. He says it’s the second biggest, but you have to include all farming (plants plus animals) and forest clearance to make ag the second biggest emitter.

Cameron and Schwarzenegger are basically claiming that meat will destroy the world. It would be more accurate to say that, while meat-eating is carbon intensive, animal agriculture is also a key step in making a better world for many poor farmers and underfed kids. But who goes to a Cameron or Schwarzenegger film for nuance? If the flexing Governator can help convince affluent Chinese and rich people around the world that they don’t need meat to be strong, so much the better.

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Arnold Schwarzenegger is here to terminate your hamburger addiction

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Hot Chilis, Maggot Therapy, and Penis Transplants

by StephaiPapathan Posted on June 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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We can thank the armed forces for a lot more than just national security: Many advances in modern medicine we take for granted came from scientists’ work trying to keep soldiers safe. Everything from inventing certain mosquito repellents to treatments for dysentery and diarrhea have come from the military’s medical breakthroughs.

That’s just one of the insights Mary Roach shares on this week’s episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. The writer also tells host Indre Viskontas about advances in ear plugs, a method of cleaning battle wounds that involves maggots, and the latest innovations in penis transplants.

Most or Roach’s studies and anecdotes come from her latest book, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War, which keeps with her style of single-syllable-science-titles (Gulp, Stiff, Bonk) but has a completely new theme: the military. Roach got the idea for the project while she was reporting in India and learned that the world’s hottest chili pepper, the bhut jolokia (also known as the “ghost chili”), has been weaponized by the Indian Defense Ministry.

“Military science suddenly presented itself to me as something that was more esoteric and broader…and less focused on bullets and bombs,” she explains.

Roach talks about inventions as old as military toilet paper, and newer advances such as penis reconstruction and replacements. The procedure wasn’t an option in the past, Roach says, because injuries that left soldiers without lower limbs or genitals were often fatal. Advances in medical treatment mean soldiers often survive below-the-belt wounds and may need genital reconstruction. The surgery is still uncommon: There are only about 300 genital injuries for every 18,000 limb amputations, she says. On her visit to a cadaver lab at Johns Hopkins, Roach was able to learn about the arteries necessary to connect in order to perform a successful surgery.

“It’s like transplanting a tree,” Roach says. “You don’t just lop it off, you take the roots and the soil around it.”

Roach is known for her squirm-inducing but always fascinating subject matter, such as cadavers, fecal transplants, and pig sex. In Grunt, Roach even details the healing power of maggots. As medieval as it sounds, the creature is incredibly efficient at cleaning wounds. Although the knowledge had been around for centuries, it was World War I surgeon William S. Baer who noticed a soldier who had been lying in the fields for days returned to camp with large open wounds that were free of infection. When he saw that maggots had been eating the dead flesh, allowing the wounds to heal, Baer started using the insects. Today “maggot therapy” is used on diabetic patients; the insects are even approved by the FDA as a medical device. While military surgeons are open to the idea, Roach says, getting hospital staff on board is a challenge.

“It’s been an uphill struggle…they’re maggots, they’re gross!” Roach said. “The nursing staff has to be trained in how to change the maggot-dressing and they might not want that added to their duty list.”

Roach sees her exploration of military science as illuminating some of the grizzly realities of war.

“Even when things are going okay in the military, even when no one is shooting at you, it really sucks,” Roach says. “It’s not a political book, but it’s kind of an antiwar book in its own way.”

Mother Jones senior editor Dave Gilson also talked with Mary Roach about Grunt. Here’s a highlight from their interview:

W.W. Norton

MJ: Did hanging out with soldiers and researchers change any misconceptions you had about the US military?

MR: I didn’t have any conception of this world at all. I didn’t realize that almost any of this existed—the Naval Submarine Medical Research Lab, or NAMRU Three or the Walter Reed Entomology Branch. That was all a surprise to me. I had maybe a misconception that everyone in the military was sort of hawkish. But in fact, the people who deal with the aftermath of war, trying to repair people’s bodies and minds, they are understandably quite anti-war. They’re not big boosters of war, particularly the people I talked to at the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System. Pathologists, people who have a real, day-after-day, graphic presentation of what war does to the body. I wasn’t really expecting that.

Inquiring Minds is a podcast hosted by neuroscientist and musician Indre Viskontas and Kishore Hari, the director of the Bay Area Science Festival. To catch future shows right when they are released, subscribe to Inquiring Minds via iTunes or RSS. You can follow the show on Twitter at @inquiringshow and like us on Facebook.

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Hot Chilis, Maggot Therapy, and Penis Transplants

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If Music Be the Food of Love, Play on, Rufus Wainright

by LatiaAddis Posted on June 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Jacob Blickenstaff

Rufus Wainwright, the son of critically admired folk singers Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle, grew up amid a bramble of musical siblings, aunts, in-laws, half-siblings and close family friends. (Wainright also has a daughter with Lorca Cohen, daughter of Leonard Cohen, whom he co-parents along with his husband.)

While maintaining the family legacy of incisive songwriting, Rufus has stood on his own as a genre-expanding songwriter, incorporating elements of classical music, opera, and the American songbook into visceral contemporary music, beginning with his self-titled debut in 1998.

He has made those influences more explicit during the last decade with 2007’s Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall—a live, song-for-song re-creation of Judy Garland’s Live at Carnegie Hall album, and an opera, Prima Donna, which Wainwright composed and produced in 2009 and released as an album in 2015.

Earlier this year, Wainwright released another classical work, All My Loves, which presents nine Shakespeare sonnets in both dramatic recitations and composed arrangements. The eclectic treatment under producer/arranger Marius de Vries—who previously collaborated on Wainwright’s lush albums Want One and Want Two—involves a varied cast that includes soprano Anna Prohaska; pop singers Florence Welch (of Florence & the Machine) and sister Martha Wainwright; and the actors Helena Bonham Carter, Carrie Fischer, and William Shatner. I caught up with Wainright recently as he swung though New York to reprise Rufus Does Judy at Carnegie Hall. He is now touring in Canada and Europe.

Mother Jones: Shakespeare’s sonnets explore longing, betrayal, and lust and its consequences, themes that are present in your songs as well. Did you have a sense of that connection as you worked on this project?

Rufus Wainwright: I feel like the sonnets are the gift that keeps on giving. Certainly in terms of my life—anybody’s life—you go through death, childbirth and marriage, glory and defeat, and so on. The last 10 years for me have been all of that, so the sonnets have been there with me. I’ve been able to lean on them profoundly for many years, and they’ve given me a wider perspective of what’s going on, really, on the inside. If my songs can do that as well, then I’m a lucky guy.

MJ: You began working on musical settings for the sonnets some years ago, while your mother was fighting cancer.

RW: I wrote the music for the majority of them during her illness. It wasn’t planned out that way, just coincided. But I was happy to not have to write lyrics while that was going on in my life—it was so painful.

MJ: Part of the scholarly debate about the sonnets is whether they were autobiographical or written on behalf of someone else. Do you feel there are parallels in songwriting, the autobiographical vs the universal?

RW: I wouldn’t categorize my work as mysterious as the relationship between Shakespeare and his world, because that is one of the great mysteries: How could someone have written all that he did? Was it only one person? And why do we know so little about it? I don’t take that mantle, but I will say that I strive for what you do find in Shakespeare’s work—that there is a definite humanity and a definite character behind the writing in the sonnets, and it’s very real because it’s so deeply personal. I try to aspire to that in what I do.

MJ: Are there qualities in his material that you are trying to bring into your songwriting?

RW: I can’t really gauge that. I just keep chugging along and I hope that in doing work with the sonnets or the operas—or singing Judy Garland shows—that all gets in there. It’s not up to me to judge that, either; that’s for the public to do. But I want to deepen as an artist, and working with Shakespeare definitely points in that direction.

MJ: Sonnet 20, which addresses the “master-mistress of my passion,” is most discussed and interpreted in context of homosexuality, and the longing of one man for another. What’s your take on it?

RW: I think it is about attraction in general. That’s what is so brilliant about it. There’s no question that the writer projects a sort of startling situation in that because he’s a man he can’t quite do all that he wants to with this other man. But he focuses more on the effect of beauty—what it makes one do emotionally and how it breaks down the barrier between man and woman. That’s part of the subtlety that Shakespeare is the best at, ever, in any art form.

MJ: Something that perhaps was under-noticed on your earlier pop albums is how much classical music is a part of it. For example, the opening track of Want One, “Oh What A World,” takes directly from Ravel’s Bolero. When did you first start to integrate classical into your pop songwriting?

RW: My love of classical hit pretty early. I was 13 when it occurred, and that was really the only music I listened to for many, many years. I went to a conservatory, but I always knew I would be in the pop world, because A) it was more fun and B) you didn’t have to practice as much and you could go out more. But I immediately saw this opportunity to inject my material with these sounds that most members of my generation really didn’t know about, so it was a great way to differentiate myself from the pack. Now I’m paying back the favor a little bit.

MJ: Tell me about your collaborations with Marius de Vries.

RW: Marius is one of the great and most versatile musicians of our time. He’s really able to keep a keen eye on what’s going on in the pop world, but by the same token introduce all sorts of musical influences be they classical, ethnic music, or whatever—so he’s a great unifier. I really needed someone like that to do this album because I’m going out on so many limbs.

I let him go out and see what he can bring back, and oftentimes it’s great, and sometimes we know immediately it won’t work. We give each other a lot of leeway because we respect each other’s taste, and also sometimes our lack of taste, because we’re not afraid to do things a little out of the ordinary.

MJ: This new album takes a very eclectic approach, both in the performers involved and the musical settings.

RW: I feel that the sonnets can take it. They are so wildly varied and so sturdy in terms of their form and geometry and light, so it was fun to throw all these different musical styles at them and see what sticks. And of course they all stick if you do a good job at it, because they are limitless.

MJ: As a husband and father, have you had to temper your artistic ambitions?

RW: The only big change is that I have to rest a lot more now! I think my imagination and my passions are still firing away, but it’s really the body that starts to make up the rules. It’s not a major problem; it’s just when you get a little older you realize how much your body thanks you when you are good to it. I haven’t changed much.

MJ: Judy Garland was coming out of a rough time when she made those live recordings. Do you feel any affinities with her and where she was in her life at that time?

WR: Well, I have a lot of advantages: I’m not addicted to horrifying pills. I also have surrounded myself with far more caring and upright individuals. And I wasn’t abused as a child, so I’m doing okay!

MJ: Sorry, I wasn’t trying to put you in the same redemptive narrative box.

WR: I mean, I love Judy Garland! I worship at her altar in so many ways. But really when it comes to me getting on stage and performing that material, that’s when I call to the songwriters and the lyricists and musicians and really make it about that. If you try to unsettle her spirit and bring it into the room, it’s a double-edged sword. If you are going to try and do battle with her, you’re going to lose, so I make it about the music.

MJ: I wonder what the dynamic was, and still is, between you and your intensely musical family.

RW: I’m very blessed, mainly because even though my family is mostly in show business, it’s really centered around music. My parents were very successful in many ways, but they weren’t necessarily top of the charts. We were never wealthy because of music. We always had to work and we always had to struggle a little bit, and I think at the end of the day that’s been very good for me, because I have a sense of it being very ephemeral. I don’t have a sense of entitlement in terms of being some kind of spoiled brat. Musically I’m able to keep going, because it’s not about money and it’s not about success. It’s a challenge.

This profile is part of In Close Contact, an independently produced series highlighting leading creative musicians.

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If Music Be the Food of Love, Play on, Rufus Wainright

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20,000 leagues under the sea, we’ve made a mess

by QuinnTiffany Posted on June 22, 2016

Deep sea dumpster diver

20,000 leagues under the sea, we’ve made a mess

By on Jun 22, 2016Share

Congratulations, us! We’re officially everywhere.

Not content with corralling our influence to the land-based parts of the globe, we’ve managed to weasel our way into the very depths of the ocean, according to scientists from the University of Aberdeen who found pollutants in the bodies of amphipods more than six miles under the sea.

Among the chemicals detected were polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), a class of chemicals used to make plastics. PCBs are known to act as carcinogens, neurotoxins, and hormone disrupters, so they were banned in the United States and many other countries in the 1970s. But PCBs are hard to break down, and — clearly — haven’t been banned everywhere. Scientists suspect the high concentrations in the Mariana Trench are due to its proximity to plastic manufacturers in Asia.

Researchers also found polybrominated diphenyl ethers, which are found in flame retardants and are currently being phased out in parts of the world.

Scientists are concerned that these toxins could impact the trench’s ability to act as a carbon sink. Deep trenches are full of microbes that help convert carbon and regulate climate, but pollution could disrupt that ecological service.

“We often think deep-sea trenches are remote and pristine, untouched by humans,” said Alan Jamieson.

Looks like nothing on this planet is.

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Campaign Finance Documents Show Donald Trump’s Campaign Is in Disarray

by TraceeCothran Posted on June 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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Maybe Corey Lewandowski got out at the right time. While reporters scrambled on Monday to figure out why Trump let his campaign manager go, the campaign was preparing to release its latest campaign finance filing that looks, at least at first glance, to be devastating. It doesn’t look much better on second glance.

The first glance: Hillary Clinton’s campaign has more than 35 times the cash Trump’s does.

Here’s the second glance: Ted Cruz dropped out of the GOP primary on May 3, meaning that for the month of May, Trump was all but assured the nomination and the campaign should have been in prime fundraising mode. But it wasn’t. Even taking into account Trump’s long-stated claims that he had no interest in raising money from others (something he has reversed himself on)—filings the campaign made with the Federal Election Commission late Monday evening show that Trump simply couldn’t get any fundraising momentum going. He raised a grand total of $5.6 million from May 1 to May 31, $2.2 million of which was in the form of loans from Trump personally.

That’s very bad. It means Trump raised just $3.4 million from people other than himself. His vanquished opponent Cruz, whose campaign had melted away, raised $2.6 million over the same time period.

Trump’s fundraising has always been anemic and the campaign has always relied heavily on loans from the real estate magnate, but barely beating his defeated opponents isn’t a good look. Hillary Clinton’s campaign raised $26.3 million in May. It was only her third best fundraising month. But unlike the other top months, which came at the height of the primary against Bernie Sanders, Clinton wasn’t spending money as fast (or faster) than she could raise it. Clinton managed to bank the bulk of her May fundraising, which is how she now has $42.4 million on hand.

Trump, who spent more than he raised, has $1.2 million in cash on hand. True, Trump has always had very little cash on hand at the end of a reporting period. But this was because he was writing the checks and didn’t need to keep cash on hand. But now that Trump insists he won’t be self-financing, those low numbers are a problem. Even if Trump significantly increased his fundraising since May 31, he would have to be raising money at an almost unprecedented rate to catch up to Clinton.

It’s not just the low numbers that portend potential disaster for the GOP’s man. It’s the way he arrives at the low numbers that looks scary. There’s no real significant support from top donors—the bedrock of a strong monthly fundraising report. But the Trump campaign picked up just 133 donations that hit the maximum allowed amount of $2,700. Clinton had more donations of $2,700 on just May 17 (140) than Trump had all month, and almost 15 times as many for the entire month (1,981).

Elsewhere in Trump World things are looking just as bleak. While some of the super-PACs that have sprung up to back Trump have yet to file (and at least one major one won’t be filing any information at all until next month), the Great America PAC, which fashions itself as the only “real” Trump super-PAC, has just $501,000 in cash on hand. Compare that to the main pro-Clinton super-PAC, Priorities USA, which has nearly $52 million in cash on hand.

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Campaign Finance Documents Show Donald Trump’s Campaign Is in Disarray

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For environmental activists, 2015 was the deadliest year yet

by BobbieWhinham Posted on June 20, 2016

Four protesters were killed last year in protests over the huge Las Bambas mine in Apurimac, Peru. Photo courtesy of Observatorio de Conflictos Mineros en el Perú.

For environmental activists, 2015 was the deadliest year yet

By on Jun 20, 2016 9:41 amShare

As we continue to mine the Earth for its resources, global corporate interests are fighting to get to the dwindling supply. And as the stakes rise, so has the death toll of our planet’s defenders.

Last year was the most dangerous year yet for environmental activists, the watchdog group Global Witness reported on Monday. An average of three environmentalists per week were murdered for resisting resource extraction and pollution by major agribusiness, mining, and logging interests — with 185 activists total murdered around the globe. (The murder rate was 59 percent lower in 2014.)

Of the 185 dead, many were assassinated; others were tortured, or publicly executed.

A number of Latin American countries were the most deadly for environmental defenders.

Global Witness uncovered that governments have increasingly criminalized activists for organizing or protesting, including in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, and Madagascar. “Across the world, collusion between state and corporate interests shield many of those responsible for the killings,” Global Witness reports.

The winner of the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize is among the countless indigenous activists recently murdered. After having led her community to resist hydroelectric dams in Honduras, Berta Cáceres was assassinated in her home in March of this year. Her success made her a target: Once she forced the largest dam company in the world to abandon a major project on the Gualcarque River.

The report is all the more sobering given that the vast majority of incidents go unreported.

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In Secrets of Coral Spawning, Hope for Endangered Reefs

by Myrna Posted on June 20, 2016

Scientists are racing to understand the bizarre reproduction rites of coral as declining water quality and climate change devastate reefs worldwide. Link: In Secrets of Coral Spawning, Hope for Endangered Reefs ; ; ;

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In Secrets of Coral Spawning, Hope for Endangered Reefs

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The Roosevelt Dime Celebrated Its 70th Birthday This Year

by KlausCoolidge79 Posted on June 19, 2016

Mother Jones

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There’s no reason to post this today in particular, but 2016 is the 70th anniversary of the Roosevelt dime. Huzzah! It holds the US record for longevity in design: aside from dates and mint marks, it’s remained unchanged for its entire 70 years.1

There’s an interesting story about that design. Obviously Franklin Roosevelt is on the obverse and the symbol for the March of Dimes, which was closely associated with Roosevelt, is on the reverse. But there’s more. At the time of Roosevelt’s death in 1945, the Soviet Union was still an ally against the Axis powers in World War II, and there was a strong pro-communist clique within the US Mint’s Bureau of Engraving that wanted to memorialize our alliance with “Uncle Joe” Stalin. They settled for quietly engraving his initials right below Roosevelt’s bust. Unfortunately for the clique, by the time the dime was released to the public in 1946 the Soviet Union was no longer an ally and the red scare was well underway. When Stalin’s initials were discovered, conservatives went ballistic and the Mint had to quickly come up with some kind of plausible cover story. Luckily, the artist who drew Roosevelt’s bust was named John Sinnock, so that was the story they settled on. The initials had nothing to do with Stalin. It was just an unfortunate coincidence that Sinnock shared Stalin’s initials.

But it really is Stalin’s initials on the dime, and they’re there to this day. You can see them pretty easily with a magnifying glass. In fact—

What’s that? You don’t believe this? Well, of course not. That’s because everyone reading this blog has at least a room-temperature IQ. Modern US coins all feature their designers’ initials, which is why you can see VDB on the Lincoln Cent, GR on the Kennedy half dollar, and so forth. But in the right-wing fever swamps of the 1940s, a lot of people really did believe that these were Stalin’s initials.

So you see? Americans have always been a little bit crazy. Or even a lot crazy sometimes. We should all just feel lucky that Donald Trump wasn’t president at the time. He would have insisted on the dime featuring his initials, not some loser artist’s. And initials probably wouldn’t have been enough. He would most likely have directed the Mint to engrave TRUMP on every coin issued during his tenure. No conspiracy theory would have been necessary to know where that came from.

1The Washington quarter lasted 67 years, 1932 to 1999, before it was changed for the state quarter series. The record holder for a single side of a coin is the Lincoln cent. Its obverse hasn’t changed in the 107 years since its introduction in 1909.

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The Roosevelt Dime Celebrated Its 70th Birthday This Year

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Antarctica, most remote place on Earth, just hit a scary CO2 milestone

by PercySpangler Posted on June 17, 2016

Antarctica, most remote place on Earth, just hit a scary CO2 milestone

By on Jun 17, 2016 3:38 pm

Cross-posted from

Climate CentralShare

We’re officially living in a new world.

Carbon dioxide has been steadily rising since the start of the Industrial Revolution, setting a new high year after year. There’s a notable new entry to the record books. The last station on Earth without a 400 parts per million (ppm) reading has reached it.

Carbon dioxide officially crossed the 400 ppm threshold on May 23 at the South Pole Observatory. NOAA

A little 400 ppm history. Three years ago, the world’s gold standard carbon dioxide observatory passed the symbolic threshold of 400 ppm. Other observing stations have steadily reached that threshold as carbon dioxide has spread across the planet’s atmosphere at various points since then. Collectively, the world passed the threshold for a month last year.

In the remote reaches of Antarctica, the South Pole Observatory carbon dioxide observing station cleared 400 ppm on May 23, according to an announcement from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on Wednesday. That’s the first time it’s passed that level in 4 million years (no, that’s not a typo).

There’s a lag in how carbon dioxide moves around the atmosphere. Most carbon pollution originates in the northern hemisphere because that’s where most of the world’s population lives. That’s in part why carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hit the 400 ppm milestone earlier in the northern reaches of the world.

But the most remote continent on earth has caught up with its more populated counterparts.

“The increase of carbon dioxide is everywhere, even as far away as you can get from civilization,” Pieter Tans, a carbon-monitoring scientist at the Environmental Science Research Laboratory, said. “If you emit carbon dioxide in New York, some fraction of it will be in the South Pole next year.”

An animation showing how carbon dioxide moves around the planet. NASA/Youtube

Tans said it’s “practically impossible” for the South Pole Observatory to see readings dip below 400 ppm because the Antarctic lacks a strong carbon dioxide up and down seasonal cycle compared to locations in the mid-latitudes. Even factoring in that seasonal cycle, new research published earlier this week shows that the planet as a whole has likely crossed the 400 ppm threshold permanently (at least in our lifetimes).

Passing the 400 ppm milestone in is a symbolic but nonetheless important reminder that human activities continue to reshape our planet in profound ways. We’ve seen sea levels rise about a foot in the past 120 years and temperatures go up about 1.8 degrees F (1 degrees C) globally. Arctic sea ice has dwindled 13.4 percent per decade since the 1970s, extreme heat has become more common and oceans are headed for their most acidic levels in millions of years. Recently, heat has cooked corals and global warming has contributed in various ways to extreme events around the world.

The Paris Agreement is a good starting point to slow carbon dioxide emissions, but the world will have to have a full about-face to avoid some of the worst impacts of climate change. Even slowing down emissions still means we’re dumping record-high amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.

That’s why monitoring carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa, the South Pole, and other locations around the world continues to be an important activity. It can gauge how successful the efforts under the Paris Agreement (and other agreements) have been and if the world is meeting its goals.

“Just because we have an agreement doesn’t mean the problem [of climate change] is solved,” Tans said.

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The Problem with Plastic Bag Alternatives

by Gabriele89V Posted on June 15, 2016

Plastic bags are a hot-button issue for environmentalists. Plastic bags are simply no good. In addition to the harmful chemical components of plastic, the material is responsible for a behemoth pile of waste, unappealing yet accurately named the Great Atlantic Garbage Patch, that stretches from the Virginia coast to Cuba, harboring 26 million plastic particles per square kilometer.

If this massive amount of plastic waste wasnt enough to turn you off from disposable bags, consider how they end up in our sewers, on trees and ingested by wildlife that mistake them for food.

All of those facts have to do with what happens to plastic after we use it. The single-use plastic bag has a very short usability span. According Environment Massachusetts, plastic bags are used for an average of about 12 seconds but they can take up to 1,000 years to degrade.

Finally, theres the environmental footprint of plastic bags. These stables of everyday American grocery shopping generate about 1 kg of carbon for every 5 bags used, according to Time for Change. Consider, then, that Americans use about 100 billion plastic bags per year. Thats 200 billion kgs of carbon per yearand were just talking about the United States.

Clearly, plastic bags need to go. But its not quite as simple as switching to paper or reusable bags, as Ben Adler argues in an article for Grist. Here are a few things we need to consider as we enact new policies to prevent against environmental degradation caused by plastic bags.

The Problem with Paper

Paper bags are often lauded as much better for the environment than plastic products. This is because paper is biodegradable and is therefore much less harmful to nature than plastic. A paper bag in the middle of the ocean is unlikely to cause any trouble to marine life or the composition of the ocean, as its made out of the same stuff as any natural plant.

However, as you probably suspected, deforestation isnt an issue to take lightly. We need the worlds forests direly. They offset carbon in the atmosphere, helping to curb climate change. They are also the homes of billions of species, which the planet requires for biodiversity.

Paper bags made from recycled materials are a great option in some ways, but not in others. In his article, Adler points out that paper bags, in fact, have a higher carbon footprint than plastic.

Very broadly, carbon footprints are proportional to mass of an object, David Tyler, a professor of chemistry at the University of Oregon, told Adler. For example, because paper bags take up so much more space, more trucks are needed to ship paper bags to a store than to ship plastic bags.

The Problem with Reusable Cotton

If youve ever shopped at supposedly environmentally conscious stores, youve probably been handed a complimentary green shopping bag at checkout (or been given the option to purchase one). Even aside from the idea of giving people goods that they wont necessarily use, this practice can be extremely wasteful.

Cotton isnt a miracle product. According to the World Wildlife Fund, cotton occupies just 2.4 percent of the worlds cropland, yet it makes up 11 percent of the global market for pesticides and 24 percent for insecticides.

The Best Solution

Because of these factors, many environmentalists believe that recycled plastic meant for reuse is the best alternative. Plastic that can withstand many uses and that isnt easily thrown away will cut down on waste while curbing carbon emissions and protecting forests.

The ideal city bag policy would probably involve charging for paper and plastic single-use bags, as New York City has decided to do, while giving out reusable recycled-plastic bags to those who need them, especially to low-income communities and seniors, Adler writes.

As for how citizens can best address the problem themselves, using reusable options is still your best bet. However, rather than purchasing cotton bags simply for grocery shopping, consider using a backpack or duffel bag you already own. No need to use resources for yet another bag when you probably have perfectly good ones lying around.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

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The Problem with Plastic Bag Alternatives

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