Bag Ban: City of Portland Claims That a 536,000 Sq Mi Garbage Island is Off Oregon’s Coast. Anyone Seen It?

July 20, 2010

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Remember now in the infamous poll question approved by the City Council (and paid for by taxpayers) claimed that plastic bags contributed to a garbage island off the coast of Oregon twice the size of Texas?

“Single-use petroleum-based plastic shopping bags pollute our land, contribute to a swirling mass of garbage twice the size of Texas off Oregon’s coast, and continue our dependence on dangerous foreign oil supplies. Making paper shopping bags is a toxic process that pollutes our rivers. To encourage more use of reusable shopping bags, do you favor or oppose banning plastic bags in the City of Portland and requiring a 5-cent fee on paper bags?”

Even though a call to the Mayor’s office couldn’t produce a picture of this huge swirling mass of garbage,  Roy Kauffman, Sam Adams’ spokesman, says he’d seen pictures at this website. Eric the Great combed through the website. No pictures. You know, you’d think anything that big should have a resort on it or something, but it isn’t there.
Even if the Mayor’s office (relying upon environmentalist websites for his ban information) calculate “twice the size of Texas” in linear miles, it’s still a 5,000 mile long span of garbage isle. The distance from southern Oregon to the Bering Straight is 2,300 miles, so you’d think SOMEone would have seen a 5,000 mile long span of garbage off the coast. We’re waiting for the pictures.
Oh,  but look. Environmentalists took out a trawler they dubbed, The Junk, to find the vast plastic garbage isle in the middle of the Pacific. They dragged their netting for 24 hours and 50 miles. They admit finding about a cup of “plastic” debris, none of which looked like plastic bags. See it for yourself.

Their answer to finding no plastic bags in their cup? Ban them. H/T to Save the Plastic Bag here for help in finding the video.
Once again we have a case of environmentalists hyping a fear, lying to politicians, who in turn lie to us and demand we do SOMEthing. They have to lie because they have little to no compelling proof that the evil plastic bag is to blame for the garbage isles which exist in the natural vortex of the ocean.  That this crowd at Portland’s City Hall fell for it is not surprising. Theyhave their eye on using their power to pursue a personal political agenda (an ethics violation btw) instead of the core functions of the job they were hired to do.
While they conduct their navel gazing and expenditures of perfectly good tax dollars for this phony poll question and their other projects like spending money fighting Arizona’s perfectly legal immigration law, they’re now going to voters to fund fire engines non emergency vehicles through a bond measure on the November ballot (here).

Tell ’em where you saw it. Http://www.victoriataft.com