. . that if you use one of those "environmentally friendly" reusable fabric bags, the environmental cost of those things is so high you have to use it over 300 times before it equals getting a fresh plastic bag on each of the 300 trips.

And, in the great "paper or plastic" thing, environmentalists have completely forgotten that the whole environmental movement was started due to pollution from paper mills.

But my favorite (other than banning horse slaughter, a law so wrong even Congress noticed and quietly retracted it) was the big campaign to ban phosphates in detergents in the Mississippi drainage region.

Detergent base is made by only a very few companies, and they couldn't see having a separate base for that region, so they shifted all production away from phosphate. The labels that say, "Phosphte Free!" are redundant, you can't buy phosphate detergent. The environmental nut cases celebrated their victory, dancing in the streets (well, almost).

Then actual science came in and showed that phosphates were already naturally in surplus. The real problem was nitrates.

Guess what phosphate-free detergents are made of.

Not a peep from the environ-mentals.

Of course, all this happened before the Internet, so you will find no evidence that this ever happened. Same for paper mill pollution.

I'm all for environmental protection, and contribute money to that end, but I prefer it be based on actual science rather than sound bites. We get more than enough of those from politics.