Having your heart in the right place is a nice quality. But it often makes for bad public policy, and in the case of Baltimore City Councilman James Kraft, D-1, the practice of putting his emotions first seems to have displaced his head.
He equated using plastic bags with Nazi extermination tactics at a City Council meeting earlier this week.
“We don?t want to be criticized by future generations for not doing enough now as were those who dealt with the Germans then,” Kraft said.
So what follows? Should those who use plastic bags be charged with murder? Genocide?
No one can claim plastic bags help the environment. But he hurts his cause by outsizing their danger by orders of magnitude ? especially when similar plans have failed throughout the rest of the state.
Bills in both Anne Arundel County and the state legislature failed to make it into law in the past year. And studies show plastic bags are cheaper and require less energy to make than paper bags.
He would better serve his cause by proposing voluntary restrictions on environmentally damaging practices. Asking the city of Baltimore to ban buying bottled water, which is readily available at every tap, and requiring city employees to pay for their own parking to encourage them to use public transportation are two ideas to start with.
He could also add a plastic bag recycling component to neighborhood cleanup days and encourage city grocery stores that do not already offer to recycle bags to do so and to offer reusable bags for free or for a low price. Upscale market Whole Foods banned them in some stores before banning them in all stores earlier this month. It was encouraged to expand the program in part by strong customer demand for reusable bags after the company began offering them for 99 cents.
Banning them outright will only drive already skyrocketing food prices higher. Kraft can serve both the environment and his constituents by changing the culture rather than the law.
