Serving the High Plains
Serving the High Plains
Leave it to Californians.
In the state whose air carries a permanent brown stain of exhaust while millions of cars waste millions of hours standing still in traffic, their new solution to environmental contamination is to outlaw plastic drinking straws.
These are the same Californians who won’t give up the “freedom” of having their cars at work.
They pat themselves on the back for giving up the right to sip beverages from sturdy plastic tubes while their cars continue to pump ozone and oxides of nitrogen into the stale air.
I started using commuter trains when I lived in the Los Angeles area as soon as they became available.
While I was thus enslaved to public transportation, I could mourn my forsaken freedom by reading, sleeping, working and talking to fellow slaves.
I was less frazzled at work and less exhausted at home at the end of the day. That, I found, was well worth surrendering the right to drive somewhere for lunch.
California’s guardians of the ecosystems don’t look at things that way, though.
While I lived there, they came up with some strange solutions to pollution while they ignored the big, brown, hazy elephant in the room.
One was declaring the wonderful smell that comes from a bakery to be a pollutant.
To an environmental bureaucrat, it’s not a whiff of great bread, it’s a volatile organic compound (VOC) like gasoline fumes.
Delectable barbecue smoke to the environment czars becomes a PM 10 solid pollutant, like diesel exhaust. It contains micro-particles that make it visible and therefore bad for you.
The first step the environmental czars are likely to take in outlawing plastic drinking straws will be to rename them so they sound threatening.
I propose they start calling them non-authorized cylindrical vacuum-operated liquid ingestion devices, NACVOLIDs for short.
If a waiter in Santa Barbara is jailed (no joke, they’re really doing that) for giving a plastic straw to an undercover beverage intake enforcement officer, unlawful distribution of NACVOLIDS sounds like a better reason for incarceration than handing out the wrong drinking aids.
Then I can see illicit “sip-easies” sprouting up in the back alleys of Los Angeles and San Jose. If you can show you’re a friend of Luigi, you can come in and enjoy a drink without worrying that the straw will collapse into mush.
What’s in that pack on the table? Those aren’t legal cigarettes, those are (gasp) plastic straws. Hide those NACVOLIDs from the kids!
The geniuses who came up with outlawing drinking straws admit that it’s not going to make a dent in reducing pollution, but, they say, it’s a start.
A real start to solving the real problem would be something like letting people who only need a phone and a computer for their jobs to work at home or at remote sites closer to home.
That could mean fewer high-rise office buildings, and you could use the plastic needed to wire new high-rises to make drinking straws.
Steve Hansen writes about our life and times from his perspective of a retired Tucumcari journalist. Contact him at:
stevenmhansen
@plateautel.net
