Thursday, September 24, 2009

From My Cold Dead Hands . . .   [Jonah Goldberg]

From the Washington Post:

Environmentalists Seek to Wipe Out Plush Toilet Paper
Soft Toilet Paper's Hard on the Earth, But Will We Sit for the Alternative?
By David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 24, 2009

ELMWOOD PARK, N.J. — There is a battle for America's behinds.

It is a fight over toilet paper: the kind that is blanket-fluffy and getting fluffier so fast that manufacturers are running out of synonyms for "soft" (Quilted Northern Ultra Plush is the first big brand to go three-ply and three-adjective).

It's a menace, environmental groups say — and a dark-comedy example of American excess.

The reason, they say, is that plush U.S. toilet paper is usually made by chopping down and grinding up trees that were decades or even a century old. They want Americans, like Europeans, to wipe with tissue made from recycled paper goods.

It has been slow going. Big toilet-paper makers say that they've taken steps to become more Earth-friendly but that their customers still want the soft stuff, so they're still selling it.

This summer, two of the best-known combatants in this fight signed a surprising truce, with a big tissue maker promising to do better. But the larger battle goes on — the ultimate test of how green Americans will be when nobody's watching.

"At what price softness?" said Tim Spring, chief executive of Marcal Manufacturing, a New Jersey paper maker that is trying to persuade customers to try 100 percent recycled paper. "Should I contribute to clear-cutting and deforestation because the big [marketing] machine has told me that softness is important?"

Update: From a reader:

Really? I contribute to deforestation b/c big marketing tells me that softness is important? I may be contributing to deforestation but it's not b/c I've been listening to big marketing. Rather, I've been listening to my ass!
 
Speaking of ignorance and hatred of all things productive, why doesn't anyone challenge HMO and oil-company investor Michael Moore when he says things like, "Capitalism is legalized greed"? Was greed once illegal? If so, can we make smugness, self-importance, and hypocricy illegal too? I'll be the arbiter of what is smug, self-important, and hypocritical. The general rule of thumb will be that thinking like and behaving like me will be proof of innocence and anything I personally do is okay.
 
Can't environmentalist get a hobby that involves them controlling besides me? Maybe there needs to be a Sims the Benevolent Dictator edition in which the goal is to make the oceans recede, ice grow, temperatures cool, etc.

09/24 03:54 PMShare