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Navy says Iranian ship tried to capture unmanned drone in Gulf

The Navy said on Tuesday that it foiled an attempt from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN) to capture an unmanned drone in the Arabian Gulf.

In a statement, the U.S. 5^th Fleet said it observed Shahid Bazar, an IRGCN support ship, trying to detain a Saildrone Explorer unmanned surface vessel (USV) while transiting international waters at around 11 p.m. local time.

The Saildrone Explorer was equipped with sensors, radars, and cameras for navigation and data collection, though it doesn’t store classified information, the statement noted

U.S. Navy patrol coastal ship USS Thunderbolt, which was operating nearby, “immediately responded” to the incident, the statement said.

The Fleet also launched an MH-60S Sea Hawk from Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron 26, based in Bahrain.

In response to these actions, the IRGCN disconnected the towing line to the USV and departed the area four hours later. The Navy resumed operations without further incident.

Iran did not acknowledge the incident, the Associated Press noted.

Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, commander of U.S. Naval Forces Central Command, U.S. 5th Fleet and Combined Maritime Forces, called the IRCGN’s actions “flagrant, unwarranted and inconsistent with the behavior of a professional maritime force.”

“U.S. naval forces remain vigilant and will continue to fly, sail and operate anywhere international law allows while promoting rules-based international order throughout the region,” Cooper added.

Source: TEST FEED1

Federal court cancels upcoming hearing on possession of Trump attorney's phone

A New Mexico federal judge on Tuesday canceled a scheduled hearing over a Trump attorney’s attempt to get back his cellphone that was seized by federal investigators.

Conservative lawyer John Eastman, who advised former President Trump on efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results, said in June that the FBI had seized his phone during the execution of a search warrant that he argued was unlawful.

He’s now contesting the existence of a second warrant authorizing investigators to search his phone’s contents. 

“Because the Government has not produced the warrant … Eastman does not accept the proffer regarding the warrant’s existence and believes that this creates a contested issue of fact,” U.S. District Judge Robert Brack explained in a new filing.

But the judge dismissed Eastman’s arguments, saying the Trump lawyer “cannot make a good faith argument that an evidentiary issue on the existence of a warrant remains.” 

The Justice Department reaffirmed to the court that it obtained a second search warrant to search the contents of the phone, per the filing.

Brack said the court will decide on Eastman’s motion based on written briefings from both parties, not from a hearing. 

Eastman had rebuffed the initial warrant on the basis that it was overly broad, lacking probable cause and in violation of his Fourth Amendment rights.

He sued to retrieve his phone from the Department of Justice, arguing he wasn’t shown a search warrant until after his phone was taken, but the court denied his efforts to compel the release of the phone and pause the investigation.

Eastman’s legal team said in his initial complaint that his seized phone contains “emails that have been the subject of an intense, five-month privilege dispute” with the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Source: TEST FEED1

The Memo: Five reasons Democrats’ midterm chances are rising

Democrats are feeling stirrings of optimism about November’s midterm elections. 

It’s a remarkable shift of mood for a party that had been bracing for heavy defeats only a few weeks ago. 

President Biden’s party colleagues believe they have a strong chance of holding on to control of the Senate, at least. 

That’s partly because Republican candidates are struggling in key states such as Pennsylvania, Georgia and Arizona.  

It’s also because the Democratic Party’s poll ratings in general have ticked up, as have Biden’s. The president recently hit 44 percent approval, the highest point in a year, in a Gallup poll. 

Some of the more optimistic Democrats now believe it might even be possible to hold on to the party’s majority in the House, which is wafer-thin at just five seats. 

Holding the House still looks like an uphill climb to most independent experts. But here are five reasons why Democratic fortunes have improved. 

Abortion has become a huge issue 

The Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe v. Wade, announced in late June, was a crushing defeat for liberals. 

But there has been an electoral silver lining, as voters react against what many of them appear to see as a conservative overreach into one of the most intimate areas of their lives. 

Polling averages suggest that Democrats began to close the gap on Republicans from virtually the day the decision was announced and have now all but eliminated the GOP’s edge. 

An even louder warning shot was fired by voters in Kansas — an unlikely location for a backlash against conservatism. On Aug. 2, the pro-abortion rights side ran out the winner by almost 20 points on a ballot measure revolving around whether the state constitution should guarantee the right to abortion. 

Then, last week, Democrat Pat Ryan defeated Republican Marc Molinaro in a special House election in New York’s 19th District.  

Ryan campaigned hard on abortion rights and carried the district — a classic bellwether that went for former President Obama in 2012, former President Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020. 

Republicans still hope that the economy, and particularly inflation, will dominate voters’ minds come November. 

But the abortion issue has, at the very least, put that thesis into question. 

The Trump Wars have resumed 

The 45th president can dominate the news like few other people — but he often does so to the detriment of his party. 

The FBI’s search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate on Aug. 8 has opened yet another chapter in the tumultuous Book of Trump. 

The Department of Justice is investigating possible violations of three laws: the Espionage Act, another statute regarding obstruction and a third focused on wrongful destruction of documents. 

Much remains unknown despite the unsealing last week of a 32-page affidavit. The affidavit, which convinced a federal magistrate there was probable cause to believe a crime had been committed, was heavily redacted. 

The former president has, characteristically, been venting that he is the victim of an unfair and politically driven injustice. That may be enough to intensify the ardor of his MAGA base, but it’s not persuasive to everyone. 

In an appearance on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday, Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) stated outright that Trump should have turned over all the documents in his possession.  

Blunt also lamented that “less than 100 days before the election, suddenly we’re talking about this rather than the economy or inflation.” 

The Mar-a-Lago story is only the most dramatic element in the ongoing Trump drama. 

The enmity between the former president and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has bubbled to the surface once again. 

McConnell’s recent remarks on the importance of “candidate quality” in winning Senate races was widely interpreted as a jab at Trump endorsees who have run into difficulties, including Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, Herschel Walker in Georgia, Blake Masters in Arizona and J.D. Vance in Ohio. 

Trump duly shot back that McConnell was a “broken down hack politician.” 

Whatever the merits of the back-and-forth, it was another example of the kind of internal party feuding that tends to turn independent voters off. 

Gas prices have dipped 

For most of the first half of this year, gas prices moved up and Biden’s approval rating moved down. 

Over the summer, that trend has largely reversed. 

Gas prices hit their peak in mid-June when the national average price for a gallon of regular gas crested above $5. That spelled real pain for millions of Americans, especially those on the tightest budgets. 

But prices have fallen consistently since then. On Tuesday, according to the AAA, the national average stood at $3.84. 

The White House has sought to focus attention on the steady decline. Biden aides believe — with some justification — that the fall in fuel costs hasn’t got anywhere near the same media coverage as did the rise. 

When the price fell below $4 per gallon earlier this month, the head of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, Cecilia Rouse, said the decline was giving “much needed breathing room for families across the country.” 

However, there are several caveats worth nothing.  

Gas prices are still significantly higher than they were a year ago. The decline in prices appears to be driven in part by the belief that a recession could be coming. And some of the claims made by the White House — like its seizing on a CNN article that claimed the recent fall in gas prices amounted to “a $100-a-month raise” for American families — are a stretch. 

But the bottom line remains: Prices are down, and that’s good for the president and his party. 
 

Biden has hit a hot streak 

Turn the clock back three months, and one of the most common critiques of the Biden administration was that it simply had not done very much. 

Things have changed. 

The biggest example came with the passage of the $750 billion Inflation Reduction Act in mid-August. The bill enjoyed a Lazarus-like resurrection after it seemed at one point to have been sunk by Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-W.Va.) objections. 

But Manchin eventually got back on board following behind-the-scenes negotiations with Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.).  

The bill represents the nation’s most expansive effort yet to tackle climate change. It will also allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices. 

Also in August, Biden signed legislation into law to expand health care for veterans exposed to toxic burn pits — an issue on which the GOP got itself into a politically damaging tangle.  

August also saw the CHIPS Act become law, aimed at boosting the U.S. semiconductor industry. 

Last week, the president also announced that he would wipe out up to $20,000 in student loan debt for some borrowers. 

There are plausible doubts about the political efficacy of some of these moves — Biden himself was apparently in two minds for some time on the student loan issue, which Republicans have tried to portray as a giveaway at the expense of those Americans who have never attended college. 

Still, in aggregate, Biden has seriously shifted the perception that he had a rudderless first two years in office.  

His advocates contend it is one of the most substantive periods for any president since former President Johnson in the 1960s. 

Earlier crises are easing 

Biden and the Democrats got hit with a blizzard of bad news earlier this year, including supply chain issues that had left some grocery shelves bare and an infant formula shortage. 

The latter issue was especially traumatic. It’s hard to think of any economic issue in recent years that has packed such obvious emotional force. 

But the crisis has gradually eased, partly thanks to the relaxing of rules allowing foreign formula to be sold in the United States. Biden’s Operation Fly Formula had, by late July, delivered enough formula for more than 60 million bottles, according to the administration. 

Supply chain issues, which bedeviled the nation and the global economy as the COVID-19 pandemic faded, are also improving. 

Two major indexes tracking the topic — the New York Fed’s Global Supply Chain Pressure Index and Oxford Economics’ U.S. Supply Chain Stress Tracker— have shown an easing for the last several months. 

The nation is not out of the woods yet. But the trajectory is much better. 

The idea that things are careening out of control — disastrous for any party in power — is receding, too. 

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage. 
 

Source: TEST FEED1

Pentagon chief marks anniversary of Afghanistan withdrawal, saying work 'is not done'

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin marked the first anniversary of the U.S.’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, acknowledging that America’s work “is not done” in the country.

In a memorandum to all Department of Defense personnel, Austin said the U.S. went to Afghanistan in 2001 to “wage a necessary war of self-defense” in response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack.

But since then, “no enemy has been able to launch such an attack on our homeland” due to the department’s efforts to defend citizens against terrorist threats, he added.

“Still, we know this work is not done. We must keep a relentless focus on counterterrorism—and we are,” he said. “We’re committed to supporting a whole-of-government effort to address the root causes of violent extremism. No one should doubt America’s resolve to keep our people safe.”

Tuesday marked one year since the last U.S. troops withdrew from Afghanistan, ending America’s longest war.

The withdrawal has been seen as a stain on the Biden administration, as reports revealed that the U.S. was unprepared for how quickly the Afghan government would collapse, allowing the Taliban to rapidly seize power.

But President Biden and his officials have stood by the effort, noting that the U.S. evacuated over 124,000 refugees, mainly Afghan civilians. The president has also argued that staying in Afghanistan would have cost more U.S. lives.

Read more — Afghanistan: One year later

In Tuesday’s memorandum, the Pentagon chief mainly expressed “profound gratitude” to all who served in Afghanistan for the prior two decades — including American service members, veterans of the war and their families.

Austin, who noted that he is also a veteran of the war, said he witnessed “firsthand the bravery, selflessness, and compassion that our men and women brought to the fight.”

“Two decades of noble service demanded significant and selfless sacrifice. Many Service members still bear the wounds of war, to body and to soul, and 2,461 brave heroes never made it home,” the Pentagon chief wrote.

“To our Gold Star families: We hold your loved ones in our hearts – and we pledge to you the unwavering commitment of a grateful Nation,” he continued.

Austin concluded his letter by addressing those who have “hard questions” about the war and what their sacrifices in Afghanistan meant.

“Last year, I said that although the Afghanistan war has ended, our gratitude to those who served never will. Today, I renew that pledge,” he continued. “To every man and woman who served in Afghanistan: This country will never forget what you did and what you gave.”

Source: TEST FEED1

Virginia rep asks Youngkin how he will prevent I-95 snowstorm gridlock repeat

Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) sent a letter to Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) on Monday asking what steps he is taking to avoid future traffic gridlocks after a snowstorm in January left travelers stranded for hours on I-95.

The snowstorm happened days before Youngkin took office, but Spanberger urged the governor to implement recommendations from a newly released watchdog report that found many of the issues could have been avoided if state officials had implemented suggestions from the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) following a similar incident in late 2018.

“It is vital that we never again see a repeat of the circumstances that clogged a critical transportation artery, left Virginians — young and old — stranded without food and medication in their vehicles for more than 24 hours and demonstrated a vulnerability to our Commonwealth’s and nation’s security,” Spanberger wrote in the letter. 

“Preventing a repeat of these horrible circumstances requires intense oversight by your administration,” she said, while noting the incident occured before Youngkin’s administration.

The state’s Office of the Inspector General released an audit earlier this month critical of how state agencies responded to the January snowstorm, which left Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and hundreds of other travelers stranded overnight on I-95 south of Washington.

The audit followed a state-commissioned report released in April that indicated state agencies collectively “lost situational awareness” while not placing blame on any single official or agency.

The inspector general’s audit found that state officials did not apply lessons learned from a similar snow event in December 2018 that caused issues on I-81 in Southwest Virginia, leading to an after-action report by VDOT with recommendations.

The audit also criticized the state for not having a hazard-specific plan for snowfall and not effectively communicating to the public. 

The inspector general’s office recommended state officials apply lessons learned, better plan for snow-specific events and provide accurate information to the public.

In the letter, Spanberger asked Youngkin what steps his administration is taking to ensure all the audit’s recommendations are implemented. 

“I am deeply concerned by the newly-released IG audit, which takes a very critical view of the Commonwealth’s level of preparation in advance of that early January storm, our current level of preparedness were we to face similar circumstances in the coming winter months and our state agencies’ history of not implementing fulsome process improvements,” Spanberger wrote.

The congresswoman asked Youngkin why changes were not made after the 2018 after-action report and what accountability measures will be put in place to ensure future lessons are timely implemented. 

“The Northam administration failed to adequately prepare and plan for the I-95 snow debacle,” said Youngkin spokesperson Macaulay Porter. 

She said Youngkin appreciated the inspector general’s audit and has worked to mitigate risks from snow events since taking office in January days after the I-95 incident.

“Under the governor’s leadership, snow events following his inauguration were managed to the standard of preparing for worst case scenarios as opposed to under preparing for snow emergency events,” said Porter.

Source: TEST FEED1

Retired general holds wide lead in New Hampshire GOP Senate primary race: poll

Retired Army Gen. Don Bolduc (R) holds a wide lead among other Republican challengers in New Hampshire’s GOP Senate primary, according to a new poll out on Tuesday.

A University of New Hampshire Survey Center Granite State Poll found that among likely Republican primary voters in the state, 43 percent of those surveyed would back Bolduc if the GOP primary for the New Hampshire Senate seat was held today. New Hampshire state Senate President Chuck Morse got the second highest percentage of support, at 22 percent.

Businessmen Vikram Mansharamani and Bruce Fenton and former Londonderry Town Manager Kevin Smith all received less than 10 percent support. A separate 20 percent of respondents said they did not know or were undecided. 

Roughly equally percentages of those polled said that either an endorsement from Gov. Chris Sununu (R) — 35 percent — or former President Trump — 36 percent — would make them more likely to vote for their endorsed candidate. 

The development comes ahead of the state’s primary, scheduled for Sept. 13. Neither Trump or Sununu have weighed in on the primary, which will determine who will take on Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) in November. The nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates the seat as “lean Democrat,” with Hassan considered one of the more vulnerable Democrats up for reelection.

A poll conducted by the Saint Anselm College Survey Center and New Hampshire Institute of Politics and released earlier this month also showed Bolduc leading his GOP challengers, with the retired general receiving 32 percent support among Republican voters surveyed compared to 16 percent for Morse, who was in second place. 

The University of New Hampshire Granite State Poll was conducted between Aug. 25 and Aug. 29 with 1,993 respondents polled in the total survey. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.2 percentage points. There were 892 likely Republican primary voters polled in the sample and the margin of error for those respondents is plus or minus 3.3 percentage points. 

Source: TEST FEED1

High-tech wooden cities could fight fire, climate change, study says

Future cities composed of fire-resistant, high-tech wooden buildings could help counter the climate impacts of the coming urbanization boom, a new paper suggests.

The study in Nature Communications builds on a growing architectural and engineering movement that sees wood as not only a more sustainable building material than concrete and steel — but in many ways a superior one.

Half of the world population currently lives in towns and cities, a number that is expected to increase to 85 percent by 2100.

Housing those people in 20th century style mid-rises would mean a staggering hike in carbon emissions as it will lead to huge increases in the production of concrete and steel — whose production is already the source of large amounts of greenhouse gasses.

“But we have an alternative: we can house the new urban population in mid-rise buildings — that is four to ten stories — made out of wood,” Abhijeet Mishra of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research said in a statement.

Like all wood products, the “engineered wood” in question  — found in “mass timber” products such as glulam and cross-laminated timber — would store carbon, rather than emitting it.

But beyond this similarity, the technology bears little relationship to the posts and plywood used in traditional wood construction for single family homes.

In cross-laminated timber, layers of wood are glued together in alternating perpendicular layers in a manner akin to a highly-compressed Jenga set. That creates an extremely strong — but relatively lightweight — composite that can be used for the manufacturer of high-rises.

The International Building Code, the standard for many U.S. cities, in 2021 authorized architects to build all-timber buildings as high as 18 stories without any kind of variance or special permitting, according to trade journal Woodworks.

Some are even higher: The Ascent residential high-rise in Milwaukee opened this summer at 25-stories and 282 feet tall. That building has a reinforced concrete core — but the nearest runner up, the 280-foot tall Mjøstårnet in Norway, is all-wood.

On the shorter side, the five-story PAE Living Building in Portland, Ore., measures 58,000 square feet, generates its own power and reclaimed water, and is designed to last for 500 years, tech news site New Atlas reported.

As an added benefit, such products — which require the kind of small, easily-combustible trees that have little use in markets and help turn small fires into enormous ones — could help create lucrative markets that could finance the costly work of fireproofing forests, Reuters reported.

They also help head off fires inside buildings — while light-frame wood apartment complexes burn easily, engineered timber chars when exposed to flame but does not combust. 

In one video of a test by the U.S. Forest Service’s Forest Products Lab, a fire set in a model two-story mass-timber apartment did damage but failed to get purchase — allowing it to be easily put out by the apartment’s sprinklers without the aid of firefighters.

Wood offers additional advantages for architects and environmental designers. Unlike traditional building materials, it tends not to release dangerous chemicals like formaldehyde — potentially leading to better indoor air quality, Reuters reported.

Then there are the more subtle impacts.

“It has biophilic qualities — warmth to touch, the visual texture and fresh smell — that makes it more welcoming and a more pleasant space to live and work as opposed to exposed steel or concrete or white painted drywall,” architect Tom Chung told finance trade magazine Banker and Tradesman.

The relative lightweight of mass timber also allows a kind of construction — defined by huge windows and lots of light — that makes some buildings appear to soar, as in a new terminal at the Zurich airport, Architectural Digest reported.

There’s a catch, the Potsdam team noted: producing the timber necessary for these future wooden cities could come at the expense of forests — which would negate some of the climate benefits.

It could also mean converting farmland to timber plantations, cutting into the land area needed to grow food for those added billions.

Using that land “to grow trees could potentially cause competition for the limited land resources,” coauthor Florian Humpenöder said.

But the scientists found that they could make up most of the 345 million acres needed by sourcing wood from forestland already cleared for timber.

This isn’t a perfect solution, they acknowledge.

“The explicit safeguarding of protected areas is key, but still, the establishment of timber plantations at the cost of other non-protected natural areas could thereby further increase a future loss of biodiversity,” Alexander Popp of Potsdam said in a statement.

That means this system only provides benefits in tandem with “strong governance and careful planning,” Mishra said.

Source: TEST FEED1

Monetary policy lessons for the Federal Reserve

In his Jackson Hole speech last week, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell enumerated a number of lessons that are now guiding his thinking as to the appropriate stance of monetary policy. Notable in his speech, however, was his failure to mention several even more relevant lessons in today’s economic setting. That omission is likely to keep the Fed on an overly hawkish monetary policy action course that will produce an unnecessarily hard economic landing.

It is difficult to take exception to Powell’s assertion that the Fed can and should take responsibility for delivering low and stable inflation. Nor can one argue with his view that public expectations about inflation play an important role in setting the path of inflation over time and that the Fed should keep at it until the job is done.

But one can bemoan that Powell continues to ignore probably the most important lesson from past monetary policy experience on which almost all economist can agree. It is that monetary policy operates with long and variable lags.

In 2021, the Fed’s failure to remember that lesson contributed to a surge of inflation. It did so by inducing the Fed to keep interest rates too low for too long even as inflation was rising and the economy was receiving its largest peacetime budget stimulus on record. Now, after already having tightened monetary policy substantially since the start of the year, the Fed risks producing a hard economic landing by failing to recognize the long lags with which monetary policy operates.

The Fed does so by contemplating further large interest rate increases even at a time when there are clear signals that inflation has already peaked and that the economy is already slowing. Not only has the economy already recorded two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. Consumer sentiment is slumping, and the housing market is already in a meaningful recession as a result of the rise in mortgage rates from below 3 percent at the start of the year to around 5.5 percent at present.

Another important lesson that the Fed seems to be ignoring is that market liquidity is a fundamental determinant of stock market and housing market prices. Last year, by adding $120 billion a month in market liquidity through its purchases of Treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities, the Fed contributed to bubble-like conditions in both the stock market and the housing market.

Now the Fed risks causing those bubbles to burst in a way that could damage the economy. It is doing so by withdrawing $95 billion a month in liquidity by choosing not to roll over its bond holdings at maturity at the very time when financial markets are already on the back foot.

Yet another lesson to which the Fed is seeming to turn a blind eye is that its interest rate decisions have an important bearing on the rest of the world economy, whose performance can have important spillover effects to the U.S. economy and its financial markets.

The Fed’s interest rate hikes to date have already caused capital to be repatriated at an increasing pace from the heavily indebted emerging market economies. That is now prompting the World Bank to warn about the risk of another emerging market debt crisis.

At the same time, the Fed’s interest rate hikes have caused a substantial strengthening of the dollar. That is the last thing that the European economy needs as it struggles with strong inflationary pressures from rising energy prices in the wake of Russia’s war with Ukraine.

All of this raises serious questions about the advisability of the Fed’s current hawkish monetary policy stance, which involves interest rate hikes in 75 basis-point increments and balance sheet reduction at a pace of $95 billion a month. Rather, the Fed would be better advised to raise interest rates and shrink its balance sheet’s size by less aggressive amounts.

That would give it time to see how its monetary policy tightening will impact both the domestic and the world economies over the longer run.

Desmond Lachman is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He was formerly a deputy director in the International Monetary Fund’s Policy Development and Review Department and the chief emerging market economic strategist at Salomon Smith Barney.

Source: TEST FEED1

These states have the highest rates of smoking

While the number of Americans who smoke has fallen dramatically over the past several decades and continues to trend downward, smoking continues to take a huge toll on the lives of Americans. 

Cigarette smoking among U.S. adults dropped from more than 33 percent in 1980 to about 12 percent in 2020, an all-time low, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Cigarette smoking, however, results in more than 480,000 deaths each year, including 41,000 deaths from secondhand smoke, and researchers estimate smoking is responsible for nearly 30 percent of all cancer deaths each year. Most lung cancer deaths in the U.S. are due to smoking. 

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Notably, a recent Gallup poll found just 11 percent of American adults surveyed said they had smoked a cigarette in the past week, a decrease from the 16 percent who said the same a year prior. Meanwhile, polling also shows more Americans now smoke marijuana than tobacco at 16 percent. 

Despite the drop in popularity, smoking remains prevalent in many parts of the country, predominantly in the South and Midwest, according to the Global Smoking Report published by medication access company NiceRX. 

Here are the states with the highest smoking rates:

West Virginia – 23.8 percent

Kentucky – 23.6 percent

Louisiana – 21.9 percent 

Ohio – 20.8 percent

Mississippi – 20.4 percent 

Alabama – 20.2 percent

Arkansas – 20.2 percent

Tennessee 19.9 percent

Missouri – 19.6

Indiana – 19.2 percent

States with the lowest smoking rates

Rhode Island – 13.3 percent

New Jersey – 13.1 percent

Maryland – 12.7 percent

New York – 12.7 percent

Washington – 12.6 percent

Hawaii – 12.3 percent

Connecticut – 12.1 percent

Massachusetts – 12 percent

California – 10 percent

Utah – 7.9 percent

Source: TEST FEED1

Would a single-use plastic ban be counterproductive?

A petition filed by a number of environmental organizations calls on the General Services Administration to halt the acquisition of single-use plastics across the entire federal government. According to these groups, plastic packaging harms the environment, and with the U.S government being the largest consumer of goods and services in the world (spending more than $650 billion on products and services each year), it should uphold a standard of abandoning plastic.

However, contrary to the idealism of the campaigners, banning the federal government from using single-use plastic goods would not benefit the environment. In fact, life-cycle assessments on items such as single-use plastic bags have shown that there is a discrepancy between actual re-use rates of alternative bags and the re-use rate to break even on environmental grounds. Paper bags need to be re-used four times, LDPE bags five times, non-woven PP bags 14 times and cotton bags 173 times. Their actual re-use rates are about half that, making them less sustainable than single-use plastic bags, which may also be used by consumers as bin liners. A 2020 study by University of Michigan Professor Shelie Miller displayed how alternatives to single-use plastic items are dependent on high re-use rates. Those rates are often not achieved.

The same effects appear when we compare glass bottles to plastic bottles. As glass bottles are much heavier, their carbon footprint for transport is also higher. Whoever substitutes a plastic straw with a bamboo straw should also probably be aware of their significant carbon footprint.

Further than that, the federal government doesn’t only purchase plastic straws or plastic-bottled water. In fact, a ban on plastic would impact a plethora of products the government acquires for vital services, ranging from national parks and wildlife to construction and shipping logistics. If the GSA were to consider a ban, the least it should do is conduct an impact assessment on the effect it would have on sustaining those services. However, as a general measure, a ban is no strategy for transition: It prevents government departments from using plastic where necessary and does not guarantee a path forward for substitution. For instance, the GSA is transitioning to electrify its fleet of vehicles, yet without banning gasoline-powered vehicles. 

A lot of the animosity toward plastic is derived from the idea that all single-use plastics are just used once and then burned in a pit or thrown in the ocean. This outdated perception drives a lot of the imagery we see used by campaigners.

In fact, the concept of “single-use” becomes redundant after we consider how far we’ve come with recycling. Over 90 percent of Americans living in cities with a population of over 125,000 people, already have access to recycling of single-use plastic bags. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the U.S recycling rate for what’s known as PET plastics (polyethylene terephthalate) increased from 2 percent in the 1980s to more than 24 percent in 2018. Over time, an increasing amount of plastics will end up being endlessly recycled.

A ban on single-use plastics through the General Services Administration would undermine the immense progress that has been made in the field of plastics over the past decades. The divestment from plastic would prevent manufacturers from developing new products and increase prices for everyday consumer goods. Most of all, it would be counterproductive to the goals that the environmental activists claim they support. In fact, it’s another one of those examples where supporters of single-use plastic can say to environmentalists: I’m on your side, but you’re not.

Bill Wirtz is the senior policy analyst at the Consumer Choice Center, focusing on new technology, agriculture, trade and lifestyle regulations.

Source: TEST FEED1