From Conservative Forum for Hawaii

We have one last chance to persuade our County Council NOT to go ahead with Pete Hoffman's plastic bag ban.

Your help is needed. If everyone adds a voice, the impact will be felt. Recent public feed-back has been very much against this law, and momentum is building. Most councilmen have re-election on their minds, and are sensitive to the people's voices.

The next and final council meeting on this is Wednesday, December 21. Please let them know how you feel, immediately, by sending them an email or fax. (Too late for US mail.) Mr. Pilago is the key swing vote, and he can indeed be influenced for the better.

Please do NOT let this drop. It is just like the "broken window" theory of police work: allowing small crimes to go unpunished, like breaking windows, leads to massive larger crimes becoming common.

Allowing even the small loss of liberties to go unchecked inevitably leads the ratchet to go only one direction towards our loss of even greater liberties. This has got to stop, and you can and must help.

Our position as conservatives is that this bag ban law is another unwarranted micro-management of our lives that should not be the purview of our elected officials.

We also feel all the arguments by the progressive activists pushing this are all wrong, and the net effect would actually be harmful.

• We feel that litter is a behavioral problem, not an item problem. For example, we cannot reduce car accidents by banning just Toyotas.

• Plastic bags will be replaced by paper, which is less environmentally kind than plastic, takes even more landfill room, and actually introduces more carbon into the air than plastic bag production and use.

• Plastic bags do NOT contribute any significant content to the vast mass of sea-borne plastic debris.

• NO scientific studies show plastic bags are a significant harm to wildlife. None. Only a very few, rare, isolated and over-hyped photos contradict this, not any real science.

• Plastic bags will be replaced by paper, or re-usable bags, which are much less useful for the full spectrum that bags are currently used for (transparent, cheap, light, and water-proof)

• Paper bags will be more expensive than plastic, costs that the poorest among us can afford the least.

• Our government should be making life easier and cheaper, not harder and more expensive.

• These sorts of details of daily life are for individuals to decide, NOT the nanny-state government. Personal liberty is again lessened by this ban.

Time to take a stand and STOP this sort of bad government behavior. If not, they will just continue and repeat this again and again. It started with light bulbs and low-flow toilets and shower heads, and many more items. Next up: banning all Styrofoam.

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HTH: Trash focus of council meeting