Never heard of rolling coal? It is exactly that, with the added bonus of horrendous fuel economies and potential fines.

And people still do it.

How many? How often? To what total effect?

This whole “this is how you get Trump” rhetorical maneuver deployed without a scintilla of evidence across a ton of issues is both lazy and tiresome.

Maybe you're not spending any time outside of San Francisco and the other major cities. There is a whole other half of America that feels very differently about all this. There's even many people in the big cities who feel this way, but they stay quiet out of fear.

I do agree. But my point is, concrete problems are much easier to tackle than hypothetical problems.

You can always just make up "the silent majority." Nobody believes it anymore.

Yep, "the silent majority" that created The Tea Party and lead to Trump in the White House?

I'm reminded of the "save the trees" campaign of my youth that lead to the removal of paper bags from supermarkets (with massive marketing to convince the public plastic was just as good as paper) and 20-some-odd years later created "the plastic bag crisis". Now local supermarkets are making a big thing out of getting rid of plastic in favor of paper or (preferably) reusable bags.

Yes, you can always invent self-serving narratives ("And that's why Trump was elected!") but that doesn't mean these self-serving narratives have any basis in reality. The right-wing reactionaries who get hopped up about California's straw bill are not actually reacting to anything. Anti-environmentalism is part of their core identity and if they weren't whining about one bill they'd be parroting conspiracy theories about Musk. The reactionary pose is just a pose, the sort of thing teenagers do -- it's not any kind of rational position supported by the facts or intelligent analysis.

> I'm reminded of the "save the trees" campaign of my youth that lead to the removal of paper bags from supermarkets (with massive marketing to convince the public plastic was just as good as paper)

You do understand that our understanding of the world evolves over time? That science progresses? Twenty years ago nobody really understood how dangerous plastics are and in the last twenty years plastic use has exploded. Now people are trying to do something about this. This is called progress. It's not an indication of some plot but rather the natural process of discovery and change that drives civilization forwards.

> Yes, you can always invent self-serving narratives...

Sure you can but that's not the argument posed -- saying "the silent majority" is a mere illusion totally discounts that most people aren't a member of radical {left,right} leaning groups who make a bunch of noise and get the headlines. This kind of reasoning is basically "you're either with us or against us" and serves no useful purpose in reasonable debates.

> Twenty years ago nobody really understood how dangerous plastics are...

They totally did.

All I’m saying is that there’s a lot of people who feel differently about this kind of stuff. And that you wouldn’t know it if your world is the major cities. I don’t understand your reaction here and elsewhere in this thread.