THE HOUSE JUST PASSED ANOTHER “SAVE OUR SEAS” ACT. HERE’S WHY IT WON’T – By Greta Moran (The Intercept) / Oct 7 2020
“There’s a reason the plastics industry likes this. It’s because they don’t really have to do anything.”
THE SAVE OUR Seas 2.0 Act purports to offer a bipartisan solution to the unthinkable amount of plastic — 11 million metric tons, a figure predicted to nearly triple by 2040 — that enters the ocean every year. It seems Congress would agree.
On Thursday, the federal bill was expedited to the floor of the House of Representatives and passed on suspension, a procedure typically reserved for noncontroversial bills. In the less than 15 minutes of debate to precede the vote, no dissenting views were raised. The bill has returned to the Senate — it passed unanimously there in January — and is expected to be signed into law by President Donald Trump, who also signed the Save Our Seas Act of 2018 into law. Then, once in effect, the Save Our Seas 2.0 Act will not do much at all.
Outside of Congress, the Save Our Seas 2.0 Act has faced steeper scrutiny from environmentalists who see it as an extension of decades’ worth of failed policies that assume the plastics crisis can be solved by innovating recycling and waste management — and who are suspicious of support from the plastics and chemical industries, not known for their enthusiastic commitment to eradicating plastic pollution.
“It is so woefully inadequate to the scale of the crisis that it is really very little more than a distraction endorsed by the plastics industry to keep our attention away from the focusing on real solutions to the problem,” says Brett Hartl, the government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity, one of the 40 environmental organizations to sign a letter, addressed to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, in opposition to the bill.
Continue to article: https://theintercept.com/2020/10/07/save-our-seas-bill-plastics-pollution/
