First They Came for my Light Bulbs. Then for my Plastic Bags.

The Irish government doesn’t like plastic bags. So it has effectively banned them. Reports The New York Times:

There is something missing from this otherwise typical bustling cityscape. There are taxis and buses. There are hip bars and pollution. Every other person is talking into a cellphone. But there are no plastic shopping bags, the ubiquitous symbol of urban life.

In 2002, Ireland passed a tax on plastic bags; customers who want them must now pay 33 cents per bag at the register. There was an advertising awareness campaign. And then something happened that was bigger than the sum of these parts.

Within weeks, plastic bag use dropped 94 percent. Within a year, nearly everyone had bought reusable cloth bags, keeping them in offices and in the backs of cars. Plastic bags were not outlawed, but carrying them became socially unacceptable — on a par with wearing a fur coat or not cleaning up after one’s dog.

“When my roommate brings one in the flat it annoys the hell out of me,” said Edel Egan, a photographer, carrying groceries last week in a red backpack.

Drowning in a sea of plastic bags, countries from China to Australia, cities from San Francisco to New York have in the past year adopted a flurry of laws and regulations to address the problem, so far with mixed success. The New York City Council, for example, in the face of stiff resistance from business interests, passed a measure requiring only that stores that hand out plastic bags take them back for recycling.

Yet another environmental crusade sacrifices consumer choice for political correctness. Plastic bags play a minimal role in filling landfills–they are squishable, if people haven’t noticed–and often are reused by consumers for multiple purposes. Yet it appears that to use a plastic bag in Ireland now is the moral equivalent to declaring oneself to be a serial killer. Liberty and convenience be damned, we must all now worship at the altar of cloth bags.

The U.S. hasn’t yet gone so far. But Congress has voted to ban standard incandescent light bulbs. Can it be very much longed before the FBI begins prying plastic bags out of the cold, dead hands of those who shop till they drop?