Praising Poloncarz for Going Green

It's not often that I actually praise a capitalist for doing the correct thing, but Erie County Executive Marc Poloncarz has been on a bit of a roll on some environmental issues.

First: He worked to get those useless and stupid plastic beads banned from Erie County so that they don't wind up contaminating Lake Erie (or Erie lake, depending upon the end you are on. We're trying to keep our end clean, so this must be the better end.) I don't see why we need them. A good hand brush costs less and cleans better. (Or, for your face a good cleansing pad.)

Second: And I know I just blogged negatively on this yesterday, but he is working to get the lead out of Erie County homes. I wish there was a WNY wide effort to do this, but he's trying to blaze a way forward. I'll give him credit for coming up with a plan. Every house that is detoxified now is one less we have to worry about later and how many lives will be improved? And most of them will be poor people that can't afford to do the work. Hopefully other counties, NYS and the Federal government follow suit.

Third; Getting cigarettes out of pharmacies. OK. Smokers will just go someplace else to buy their cancer sticks. (Truth in advertising! I'm just calling it the way I see it.) The harder it becomes to get them, the more likely (hopefully) people quitting smoking will become. I'm not in favor of an all out prohibition. Look at the disaster that prohibition of alcohol was in the 1920's and the drug war now. (Actually, look at Portugal for what happens when drugs are legalized. Usage goes down. And people get help quitting. Amazing what removing a stigma can do. Sometimes.) And people quitting smoking saves us all on medical costs.

Fourth: He working to get rid of plastic bags in stores. Recycling them is not bringing them back into circulation. Many just wind up in the various dumps where they contribute to all the other land pollution that we produce. So trying to come up with a way to get rid of them is an environmentally sensible thing.

(Full disclosure: I do recycle my bags at the local grocery stores and have cut down on those annoying bags by buying some chico bags from YES! Magazine. The little metal clip is certainly novel and provides for a way to hang onto the bags easily. Plus the way that they fold up I can stuff them in a jacket pocket and always have at least one on me at all times. Blatant plug there. Perhaps we need to come up with a Socialist Action bag?)

One thing he does not want to do is put a nickel deposit or tax on the bags because that would disproportionately affect the poor. And poor people can't exactly afford the reusable bags that stores offer. (For some, the $1 that a reusable bag costs is a budget breaker.) So I'll give credit to Poloncarz for recognizing how this does affect the poor. This is the first time I've heard about someone putting the poor fist on something worth doing.

My only gripe is that they have to first do a study (cost $50 - $70,000 and over a year) to figure out how to eliminate the bags.

The sensible thing to do is use the $50+ thousand dollars to buy reusable bags for the poor and get the bags to them. Possibly through the super markets when the poor use their benefits cards or WIC?

In any event, the logistics of doing this environmentally friendly and sound act is the hard part.

It is worth doing though.

Anything that cuts down on our usage of oil is good.

Now, if we could only convince the oil companies of that.