Exaggerating Claims Helps No One

When editors and columnists railing in favor of disposable plastic bags use fallacious arguments and flimsy attacks, it makes them look like fools. Unfortunately, this fact can go both ways and a couple of Los Angeles officials now stand as an example of what not to do.

In their Aug. 15 Blowback, L.A. County Supervisors Yvonne B. Burke and Zev Yaroslavsky argue that consumers should be charged a 25-cent tax for each plastic bag they use. The Times of London wrote in a March 8 editorial, “Many of those who have demonized plastic bags have enlisted scientific study to their cause. By exaggerating a grain of truth into a larger falsehood they spread misinformation, and abuse the trust of their unwitting audiences.”

Regrettably, the supervisors are doing precisely what The Times warned against — spreading misinformation. Burke and Yaroslavsky assert that “about $375 million each year is spent in California on cleanups and other efforts to mitigate the environmental effect of disposable bags, costing each household about $200.” Nearly 37 million people live in California, and $375 million divided by 37 million is $10.14. Are we to assume that each household has 20 people? Burke and Yaroslavsky do not state how the $375-million figure is calculated, but it is apparently the entire California litter cleanup budget — for everything. Why do they pin the entire state litter cleanup budget on plastic bags?

See, this is a bit of a bummer to hear. Do we not already have approximately a million reasons to put a limit on plastic bags? Why fudge the numbers? The plastic bag thrall is looking for any reason at all to discredit our mission as trivial and unreasonable, and we don’t do ourselves any favors by helping them out with exaggerations.

Not that this article is spotless, either — and of course, why would it be, when it’s written by our good pal Stephen L. Joseph? It’s full of all the same tired old ad hominem attacks, straw man fallacies, false dichotomies, and even subtly links reusable bag champions to… communism?!

Burke and Yaroslavsky criticize plastic-bag manufacturers for trying to “protect their profits.” There’s no shame in that; this is not the old Soviet Union.

Oh, well okay. So the point of this is most certainly not that the LA Times article is right — it’s just that, perhaps from now on, we need to choose our words much more carefully and stick to the hard and fast facts. The opposition makes up enough nonsense reasons to counter us every day. Let’s not help them by giving them real ones.

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2008 at 7:17 am and is filed under The Daily. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.