“Politics,” said Groucho Marx. “Is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.” Never was that truer than in the ridiculous green campaign against plastics. While plastic pollution in the world’s oceans is undeniably a problem, the greens are comprehensively wrong, both in their diagnoses and remedies.
Because, while smug greens are banning plastic shopping bags and straws in the West, the reality is that the bulk of the plastic in the oceans isn’t our fault.
Recent data indicates that 95% of ocean plastics originate from just a handful of sources in Asia and Africa. A new study is even more specific.
International researchers estimate that as much as 73 percent of the garbage in the Atlantic Ocean originates from Chinese merchant vessels, Canada’s National Post reported on Tuesday.
Researchers from Canada and South Africa studied waste washed up on the beaches of Inaccessible Island, an island in the heart of the southern Atlantic Ocean, on a series of trips that began in 1984. Nearly three-quarters of the trash they sifted through originated in Asia, produced by China. The research challenges long assumptions that plastic debris at sea primarily originates on land.
The researchers found that the bulk of plastic pollution is drink bottles, and that most of it was time-stamped within the previous year. It should take three to five years for such plastic pollution to make the voyage from land to sea. So what’s going on?
Put simply, Chinese shipping crews are dumping their plastic crap over the side with reckless abandon.
Currently, 75% of bottles are from Asia, with most from China. The recent manufacture dates indicate that few bottles could have drifted from Asia, and presumably are dumped from ships, in contravention of International Convention for the Prevention of Pollution from Ships regulations. Our results question the widely held assumption that most plastic debris at sea comes from land-based sources.
“I think the evidence is pretty strong that it’s coming from merchant shipping,” Ryan said…
China is widely considered the world’s most egregious polluter. In 2018, the country produced more carbon emissions than the United States and the European Union combined. Thus far, their attempts to ensure their country remains habitable have had mixed results.
principia-scientific.org/study-chinese-cargo-ships-dump-73-of-trash-in-atlantic-ocean/
Just don’t expect the socialist greens or the screeching Kiddy Klimate Kult to actually say anything to the world’s worst polluter. Far easier to inconvenience gullible Westerners by forcing us to use crappy paper straws.