How Much We Take on Faith

The other day I got into a discussion with a colleague about plastic, which led to a comment about the amount of plastic in the ocean and what a problem it is. My response that only about 1% of the ocean plastic comes from the United States was met with stares of disbelief. Instead of arguing the point with someone who firmly believed the opposite, I offered to send references. The next day I emailed an explanation of the situation from a number of reputable sources.

From National Geographic in a story about the large accumulation of waste in the Pacific: "Microplastics make up 94 percent of an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic in the patch. But that only amounts to eight percent of the total tonnage. As it turns out, of the 79,000 metric tons of plastic in the patch, most of it is abandoned fishing gear—not plastic bottles or packaging drawing headlines today."

My next stop was a Bloomberg article with a sub headline of: “Skipping straws may be hip. But there are much better ways to fight pollution.” They first point out that the original estimate, the one activists and news media cite with confidence, that Americans use 500 million straws per day is based on highly dubious data that came from a small survey by a nine-year-old for a grade school science project. Then it was spread without any attempt to verify it by those who wanted to emphasize the problem. "Similarly, two Australian scientists estimate that there are up to 8.3 billion plastic straws scattered on global coastlines. Yet even if all those straws were suddenly washed into the sea, they'd account for about .03 percent of the 8 million metric tons of plastics estimated to enter the oceans in a given year.” So what we have been told about straws being the problem is a gross exaggeration.

A Science report on marine pollution verifies exactly what I was saying with a table on their site,  Table 1 titled: “Waste estimates for 2010 for the top 20 countries ranked by mass of mismanaged plastic waste (in units of millions of metric tons per year).” The US is listed at the bottom of the table with a contribution of .09% – less than one percent. That same information is repeated in pie charts on other sites.

So all this fuss about banning straws is bogus. It is a feel-good exercise that grows because so few people take the time to do the research. Ocean pollution is a problem, but the advocates and politicians are misinformed and are passing along that poor information to the rest of us – and we are buying it.

This and many other trends and movements have become their own religions. They depend on blind faith. The preachers stand up and confidently make ignorant and absurd allegations about chemicals, food safety, pollution, economics and a host of other subjects. The general population takes it on faith, chanting “amen” in all the right places. This leads to poor policies and results in those responsible for poor policies being reelected on the basis of making their followers feel good about themselves, about how pure they are, about how caring they are. It’s much more about ego and self esteem than science or actually saving the planet.

In reality these policies deliver little or no benefit and may have unknown side effects or unforeseen consequences. They are at best a waste of time. Critical thinking is the answer, but who wants to deal with reality?