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Comment by Tiktaalik | Hacker News Reader

This sort of policy is somewhat of a distraction from the wildly more important goal of reducing CO2 emissions.

A single use plastics ban is fine if it is a minor part of a more comprehensive policy that is focused on CO2 emissions, but by itself, eh, this is not really our most pressing issue in the near term is it? (of course we should reduce single use plastics eventually)

This government has been very uneven on climate issues so I'm not expecting them to announce a ban on CO2 emitting power generation tomorrow or anything. My concern is that announcing this policy so soon after the NDP announced the same thing in their rather bold environmental package is merely part of an attempt to boost their environmentalist cred and blunt the impact of rival environmentalist parties while changing the channel away from their weaker CO2 reduction efforts.

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> merely part of an attempt to boost their environmentalist cred and blunt the impact rival environmentalist parties while in actuality doing the absolute minimum

Yeah, it fully is. The major parties in Canada are slowly, and much too late, getting the message that the environment is the biggest election issue this year. They haven't been taking it seriously at all til now, hence this kind of bandwagon jumping. We're still going to hold them to the promise though.

> the environment is the biggest election issue this year

Is it? It should be, but I'm pretty sure the biggest election issue is always going to be the economy.

That being said, maybe the advantage is that the environment is becoming less of a partisan issue. Anecdotally, my left- and right-wing friends and family seem to be coming closer to a consensus that we need to act.

Still, it's easy to say "we need to fix the environment". My own city council voted unanimously on a resolution to slash our city's greenhouse gas production. But then when it comes to specific proposals on what that would look like, such as saying "no" to building a new convention centre or new highways, suddenly there's no political will. "Something should absolutely be done... as long as it doesn't cost us anything."

So we'll ban single use plastics (barely effective, but very popular), but we won't cut back on exploiting the Alberta oil sands, or on deforestation for that matter (both of which would have a tremendous impact, but at great economic and political cost).

I'm more curious about the Conservatives' response to this, actually, as talking about waste has been one of their favourite diversion tactics whenever the environment (read: climate change) comes up. Will they vote for this?

We're going to suffocate under a blanket of plastic long before the effects of CO2 kills us. Single-use plastics are essentially a slow-motion, global oil spill.

The goal of these bans is to force use of better materials. The huge majority of plastic pollution comes from the economic fringes in Asia, but demanding goods come in better packaging to be sold in large western markets will hopefully tip the financial scales enough to force manufacturers' hands resulting in less plastic waste globally. I can get behind that.

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