What a Headache: California Regulators Want To Label Acetaminophen a Carcinogen

California regulators want to classify acetaminophen, a common over-the-counter drug, as a carcinogen—proving that not even headache relievers are safe from government overzealousness.

The issue stems from Proposition 65, a state law requiring the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment(OEHHA) to publish a list of chemicals known to cause cancer or reproductive harm. Manufacturers whose products include these chemicals must provide clear labels warning consumers of the potential harm. Prop 65’s reach is so vast that California’s list of carcinogens encompasses over 900 chemicals, prompting criticism that law imposes costly regulatory burdens and does more to confuse customers than warn them.

“We’re now dealing with the statute that is being inappropriately applied to baby food, to infant formula, to coffee,” said Karyn Schmidt, senior director of regulatory and technical affairs at the American Chemistry Council. In 2018, Schmidt argued that using ingredient disclosure as a safety measure inefficiently manages the risk of cancer.

Placing a warning label on the drug “could prevent consumers from treating their aches and pains,” or it could lead them to try “something stronger and unnecessary,” state Assemblyman Jim Wood (D-Healdsburg) told the Daily Democrat.

Oncologists have not reached a consensus about the correlation between acetaminophen and cancer risk. Cancer Prevention Research, a peer-reviewed medical journal published by the American Association for Cancer Research, found in 2011 no association between acetaminophen use and the risk of developing pancreatic cancer. Annals of Oncology last year reported no correlation between regular acetaminophen use and endometrial cancer risk in its studies.

State regulators have reviewed a total of 133 studies of the drug, which yield little consensus. These studies have limitations preventing them from drawing conclusive evidence that acetaminophen directly causes cancer. It’s not feasible to identify most acetaminophen users based on drug prescription data, for instance. Any evidence of pain associated with acetaminophen use is also dubious, as similar symptoms are associated with other analgesics.

Not only does the abundance of labels make consumers uncertain about which products actually cause cancer, but businesses face severe repercussions if their labels don’t comply with state regulations. Companies that fail to properly adhere to the regulation face hefty penalties and opportunistic litigation. Amazon has faced over 1,000 Prop 65 notices as of last August, with retailers such as Target, Walmart, and CVS also facing litigation.

The government shouldn’t force a pain-reliever to identify as a carcinogen, especially when the science is far from settled and the most likely result would be unnecessary confusion and fines.

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Trump Campaigned on Saving Factory Jobs, but U.S. Manufacturing Just Went Through a Year-Long Recession 

One way to think about President Trump’s electoral victory was as a referendum on the nation’s changing economy, in which the manufacturing jobs of the 20th century were giving way to service-sector employment of the 21st. 

Trump won an electoral college victory by flipping votes in the industrial midwest, where those shifts have been most jarringly apparent. His inaugural address lamented that “factories shuttered and left our shores, with not even a thought about the millions upon millions of American workers left behind.” His campaign slogan, Make America Great Again, was at least in part a nostalgic appeal to an old economic model, in which manufacturing employment and output was a form of national greatness. 

But although it is true that America’s economy has, on the whole, performed admirably well under Trump, with unemployment numbers hovering near historic lows, one of the notable dark spots over the last year has been manufacturing jobs—particularly those in the upper midwest. 

Last week, the Federal Reserve reported that U.S. manufacturing was in a recession for all of 2019. This wasn’t slow growth; the sector actually became smaller. The slowdown was relatively mild, with factory production shrinking by about 1.3 percent. But it was the worst performance since 2015, the year that Trump started his presidential campaign. Under Trump, the manufacturing economy has returned to the Obama era. 

Manufacturers have a clear culprit in mind for the sector’s poor performance. As The Washington Post notes in a report on the Federal Reserve data, the uncertainty and increased costs surrounding Trump’s trade war, which was billed as a way of supporting American factory jobs, has instead wreaked havoc on an export-heavy sector that relies on the global flow of goods to operate. Trump’s interventions were intended to prop up U.S. manufacturing. But they backfired, harming the people he claimed to help—who also happen to be some of the people who played a crucial part in his election. 

And while manufacturers did add jobs during the first two years of Trump’s presidency, the largest share of those jobs weren’t in the nation’s old industrial heartland, but in the sunbelt and the West. In states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, manufacturing employment has fallen. 

As Reuters reported last year, there were signs of serious manufacturing sector weakness in five of the six states that flipped from twice supporting President Obama to backing President Trump in 2016. 

Nor are manufacturing jobs the only ones to be hit by trade costs and uncertainty. As a New York Times report notes, middle-wage job growth, which includes manufacturing as well as occupations like mining and construction, slowed considerably over 2019, dropping from 2.6 percent to 1.3 percent, owing to trade-war squabbling. “That slowdown is driving the deceleration of job growth across the American economy,” the report notes. Farming, another industry that Trump campaigned on helping, was so harmed by the trade war that the Trump administration ended up spending some $28 billion—more than double the price tag of President Obama’s auto bailout—to keep them afloat. 

There is an obvious lesson here, which is that, despite Trump’s repeated insistence to the contrary, trade wars are neither good nor easy to win; they raise costs on American consumers and businesses; they add complexity and uncertainty, disrupting supply lines and business plans even when threatened tariffs don’t go into effect. They have, in other words, exactly the predictable negative effects that economists have known of and warned about for years. 

But there are also subtler lessons in the perils of sector-specific economic planning, and of expecting too much from a president. Trump’s attempts to prop up the manufacturing sector through tariffs and trade restrictions didn’t just fail to work; they actively harmed the people they were intended to help. So even as Trump has overseen an economy that has many bright spots, the sector and worker demographic he tried to boost ended up struggling.

You can, of course, chalk this up to Trump’s ignorance on trade, or to being captured by hackish advisors who believe that protectionism is its own form of good. But even if you think Trump was well-meaning, trying only to make good on the economic promises of his campaign, the failure of the trade war is worth keeping in mind the next time a politician promises to aid some particular group or industry: When the government tries to help, it often does more harm than good. 

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Bridgewater Co-CIO: “The Boom-Bust Cycle Is Over”

Bridgewater Co-CIO: “The Boom-Bust Cycle Is Over”

Just in case anyone was worried that the smart money was quietly getting ready to stop dancing after Bridgewater’s Co-CIO Greg Jensen told the FT in an interview last week that it’s time to buy gold (which he sees rising to $2,000 because the Fed and other central banks would let inflation run hot for a while and “there will no longer be an attempt by any of the developed world’s major central banks to normalize interest rates”) ahead of the Fed cutting rates to zero and that “equities are frothy” as “most of the world is long equity markets”, today Bridgewater’s other Co-CIO came out with a controversial statement that appears to convey a polar opposite message to Jensen’s warning.

Bob Prince, who alongside Greg Jensen helps oversee the world’s biggest hedge fund at Bridgewater Associates as its other Co-CIO, said the boom-bust economic cycle is over.”

Speaking to Bloomberg TV in Davos, Prince suggested that the tightening of central banks all around the world “wasn’t intended to cause the downturn, wasn’t intended to cause what it did” – and yet that’s precisely what the shrinking of the Fed’s balance sheet did hence the record expansion over the past four months – and shockingly said that “the lessons were learned from that and I think it was really a marker that we’ve probably seen the end of the boom-bust cycle.”

Prince was referring not only to the boom-bust cycle created by central banks, which first ease then tighten, resulting in bubbles and eventually crashes, as described in “Every Fed Tightening Cycle Creates A Crisis“…

… but also to the broader cycle of economic expansion and contraction that repeats itself. And as a result of central bank intervention since the financial crisis and monetary easing, that cycle has effectively been disrupted and has helped fuel the longest-running bull market in stocks. That has also led the hedge fund industry to struggle to match gains of passive funds tracking indexes, since virtually no downturns are now possible with central banks intervening every time there is even a modest downturn, something which BofA first pointed out in December 2017 when it wrote that “In Every Market Shock Since 2013 Central Banks Have Stepped In To Protect Markets.

It now appears that this last piece of tinfoil “conspiracy theory” has become “fact”, validated by one of the most respected stewards of other people’s money.

Or, in other words, “stocks prices have reached what looks like a permanently rising plateau.”

Could Bridgewater merely be talking its book? Certainly: the world’s biggest hedge funds suffered its first annual loss since 2000 in its most prominent Pure Alpha II last year, largely as a result of hedging, or short trades. The fund lost 0.5%, only the fourth annual decline since starting in 1991. As such, perhaps Prince’s observation is just a warning that Bridgewater will no longer actually “hedge” and will go all in on the long side.

That may also explain why Prince said that performance this year has been so far good for the firm. It certainly explains why just yesterday, his boss Ray Dalio, rehashes his warning from Jan 2018 – just before the market cracked – when he urged investors not to miss out an opportunity to benefit from strong markets. “Cash is trash,” he said in a CNBC interview in Davos on Tuesday. “There’s still a lot of money in cash.”

As a reminder, in 2018 cash ended up being the best performing assets. And with Bridgewater now claiming that “this time is totally different”, will 2020 be another painful repeat of 2018?


Tyler Durden

Wed, 01/22/2020 – 15:10

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Glenn Greenwald Responds To ‘Grave And Obvious Attack On Free Press’ Following Charges

Glenn Greenwald Responds To ‘Grave And Obvious Attack On Free Press’ Following Charges

Glenn Greenwald responded to charges levied against him Tuesday by prosecutors in Brazil, who have accused the American journalist of cybercrimes for his role in publishing embarrassing text messages that exposed corruption within the Brazilian judicial system.

According to the government’s criminal complaint, Greenwald “directly assisted, encouraged and guided” his sources, who gained access to online chats between prosecutors and others involved in “Operation Car Wash,” which The Intercept describes as a ‘yearslong, sprawling anti-corruption investigation that roiled Brazilian politics.”

Greenwald has denied the charges, citing a Brazilian Federal Police investigation that concluded he committed no crimes – and in fact highlighted his “careful and distant posture regarding the execution” of the alleged hacks.

“Less than two months ago, the Federal Police, examining all the same evidence cited by the Public Ministry, stated explicitly that not only have I never committed any crime but that I exercised extreme caution as a journalist never even to get close to any participation,” said Greenwald, adding “Even the Federal Police under Minister Moro’s command said what is clear to any rational person: I did nothing more than do my job as a journalist — ethically and within the law.

Operation Car Wash

The political scandal at the heart of Greenwald’s corruption charge is Operation Car Wash – which led to the prosecution of major Brazilian construction firms and politicians.

Among its most controversial convictions was that of former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, whose imprisonment on corruption charges removed him from contention in the 2018 presidential elections, despite leading in the polls. Instead, Bolsonaro won the office and quickly appointed Moro, the judge who convicted Lula, as his justice minister. After the Secret Brazil Archive reporting, the Brazilian Supreme Court released Lula on the basis of a procedural argument, a stinging rebuke of Moro’s work. –The Intercept

The Intercept‘s reporting relied on a trove of leaked materials which revealed scheming by prosecutors to ensure that Bolsonaro’s opposition (the Lula Workers’ Party) did not win the election. Prosecutors were also profiting from the scandal.

The Brazilian federal prosecutor who filed the criminal complaint, Wellington Divino Marques de Oliveira, who works in Moro’s Justice Ministry but has prosecutorial independence, wrote in the complaint that Greenwald had “directly assisted, encouraged and guided the criminal group, DURING the criminal practice, acting as guarantor of the group, obtaining financial advantage with the conduct described here.”

Bolsonaro has himself previously suggested that he would like to deport Greenwald and threatened to imprison the journalist for his work. At the time, The Intercept condemned the threat in a statement and reiterated that Greenwald and The Intercept’s other reporters enjoy free-press protections under the Brazilian constitution. –The Intercept

 Greenwald’s charges have drawn rebuke from across the spectrum.


Tyler Durden

Wed, 01/22/2020 – 14:51

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Trump Campaigned on Saving Factory Jobs, but U.S. Manufacturing Just Went Through a Year-Long Recession 

One way to think about President Trump’s electoral victory was as a referendum on the nation’s changing economy, in which the manufacturing jobs of the 20th century were giving way to service-sector employment of the 21st. 

Trump won an electoral college victory by flipping votes in the industrial midwest, where those shifts have been most jarringly apparent. His inaugural address lamented that “factories shuttered and left our shores, with not even a thought about the millions upon millions of American workers left behind.” His campaign slogan, Make America Great Again, was at least in part a nostalgic appeal to an old economic model, in which manufacturing employment and output was a form of national greatness. 

But although it is true that America’s economy has, on the whole, performed admirably well under Trump, with unemployment numbers hovering near historic lows, one of the notable dark spots over the last year has been manufacturing jobs—particularly those in the upper midwest. 

Last week, the Federal Reserve reported that U.S. manufacturing was in a recession for all of 2019. This wasn’t slow growth; the sector actually became smaller. The slowdown was relatively mild, with factory production shrinking by about 1.3 percent. But it was the worst performance since 2015, the year that Trump started his presidential campaign. Under Trump, the manufacturing economy has returned to the Obama era. 

Manufacturers have a clear culprit in mind for the sector’s poor performance. As The Washington Post notes in a report on the Federal Reserve data, the uncertainty and increased costs surrounding Trump’s trade war, which was billed as a way of supporting American factory jobs, has instead wreaked havoc on an export-heavy sector that relies on the global flow of goods to operate. Trump’s interventions were intended to prop up U.S. manufacturing. But they backfired, harming the people he claimed to help—who also happen to be some of the people who played a crucial part in his election. 

And while manufacturers did add jobs during the first two years of Trump’s presidency, the largest share of those jobs weren’t in the nation’s old industrial heartland, but in the sunbelt and the West. In states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, manufacturing employment has fallen. 

As Reuters reported last year, there were signs of serious manufacturing sector weakness in five of the six states that flipped from twice supporting President Obama to backing President Trump in 2016. 

Nor are manufacturing jobs the only ones to be hit by trade costs and uncertainty. As a New York Times report notes, middle-wage job growth, which includes manufacturing as well as occupations like mining and construction, slowed considerably over 2019, dropping from 2.6 percent to 1.3 percent, owing to trade-war squabbling. “That slowdown is driving the deceleration of job growth across the American economy,” the report notes. Farming, another industry that Trump campaigned on helping, was so harmed by the trade war that the Trump administration ended up spending some $28 billion—more than double the price tag of President Obama’s auto bailout—to keep them afloat. 

There is an obvious lesson here, which is that, despite Trump’s repeated insistence to the contrary, trade wars are neither good nor easy to win; they raise costs on American consumers and businesses; they add complexity and uncertainty, disrupting supply lines and business plans even when threatened tariffs don’t go into effect. They have, in other words, exactly the predictable negative effects that economists have known of and warned about for years. 

But there are also subtler lessons in the perils of sector-specific economic planning, and of expecting too much from a president. Trump’s attempts to prop up the manufacturing sector through tariffs and trade restrictions didn’t just fail to work; they actively harmed the people they were intended to help. So even as Trump has overseen an economy that has many bright spots, the sector and worker demographic he tried to boost ended up struggling.

You can, of course, chalk this up to Trump’s ignorance on trade, or to being captured by hackish advisors who believe that protectionism is its own form of good. But even if you think Trump was well-meaning, trying only to make good on the economic promises of his campaign, the failure of the trade war is worth keeping in mind the next time a politician promises to aid some particular group or industry: When the government tries to help, it often does more harm than good. 

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Molly Jong-Fast on Trump’s Impeachment, Democratic Candidates, and Why Twitter Is Great

“I don’t think you should do Twitter if you think you’re better than Twitter,” says Molly Jong-Fast in a wide-ranging interview with Nick Gillespie.

Molly Jong-Fast is a journalist, novelist, and memoirist who is an editor at large for The Daily Beast, where she writes frequently about President Donald Trump (she doesn’t much like him) and the Democratic presidential hopefuls (she will vote for whoever wins the nomination but isn’t excited by them). She’s also a contributor to Playboy, The Independent (U.K.), and The Bulwark, a website started up by some folks left homeless when The Weekly Standard bit the dust a while back.

Just after the first day of the Senate impeachment trial concluded, she sat down to talk with Gillespie about the 2020 election, what it’s like to grow up with famous relatives (her mother Erica Jong wrote Fear of Flying, her father is a well-respected author, and her grandfather Howard Fast was a massively popular novelist who wrote Spartacus and received the 1953 Stalin Peace Prize), and why she thinks Twitter (follow her at @mollyjongfast) is a great leveling force in contemporary media. Jong-Fast also has kind words for Bret Easton Ellis, whose 2019 book White she trashed, and explains why as a liberal Democrat she has a lot of overlap with libertarian beliefs about free trade, capitalism, and the legalization of vices.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

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Outbreak: Pictures From The Wuhan Viral Crisis

Outbreak: Pictures From The Wuhan Viral Crisis

Now that the coronavirus death toll has tripled in a day, global health officials are beginning to acknowledge the real risks, and this morning’s relief rally in stocks has mostly faded (with the Dow turning slightly red on the day).

But as morbid curiosity over the mysterious virus intensifies, and the number of declared cases and deaths surge, experts are warning that the pathogen has started to evolve and change.

To try and assuage a nervous population, Chinese health officials have said that all of those who have died from the virus had other co-occurring health issues, and that the mortality rate so far is much lower than the SARs outbreak from 2003, which killed between 30% and 50% of those infected (more than 800 eventually succumbed).

And one Chinese source warned that the pattern of new cases suggest the ‘first wave’ of the virus’s spread across China has finished, and a ‘second wave’ will soon be discovered in Chengdu, Hainan, Kunming, Xiamen and Nanning.

As Beijing scrambles to contain the virus, the city of Wuhan is starting to resemble an open-air prison, as Communist Party officials have ordered that nobody enter, or leave, the city.

As hospitals rush to prepare for an onslaught of cases, one Twitter source said they were discharging patients to make room for more coronavirus victims, forcing many onto the street.

Meanwhile, the hallways of hospitals were crowded with patients exhibiting symptoms that could be early signs of the virus.

Those same hospitals are setting up isolation tents to quarantine possibly infected patients.

A seemingly innocuous video of Chinese Premier Li Keqiang visiting a hospital in Xining a few days ago has prompting some Chinese to kvetch on Chinese social media that Li’s sunny disposition wasn’t appropriate given the severity of the crisis.

After a case was discovered in Taiwan, Taiwanese officials closed travel with Wuhan.

Though much is still unknown about the SARS-related virus, the graphic below encapsulates current thinking on the virus’s origins, as well as steps individuals can take to protect against infection.

According to a report in the SCMP, the wet fish market that has been identified as ground zero for the virus. Experts believe the virus may have jumped from one of the animals sold at the shop – known as the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market – which sells exotic wild animals for human consumption.

The market was shut down last month after the outbreak began, and is now under investigation and surveillance.

One stall that was on the east side of the market caught people’s attention online. According to a menu posted by the stallholder on Dazhong Dianping, the most popular review and rating app in China, the store sold dozens of different live animals and poultry, along with the fish. 

And given all these images, perhaps Goldman is right when they warn that the situation could worsen in the near term, given the lag between initial infection and the reporting of cases, as well as the intensity of travel in the coming week within and around China.

In particular, Q1 consumption growth in the region could decelerate if consumers are forced to cancel trips and forego leaving their house.

While the severity of the economic impact is unknown, whatever happens, it’s likely to be short-lived. In the SARS case and other recent outbreaks (e.g. H1N1, H7N9), the trough in activity typically occurred 1-3 months following the outbreak.

Increased public awareness, advancements in health technology, and better practices among both health professionals and government agencies may be mitigating factors, relative to prior outbreaks such as the 2003 SARS episode. However, transportation links and travel intensity within China have increased significantly during the intervening years, which could help accelerate the virus’s spread in the states.


Tyler Durden

Wed, 01/22/2020 – 14:35

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Soros-Linked Group Joins MSM To Censor And Purge Climate Change Skeptics On YouTube

Soros-Linked Group Joins MSM To Censor And Purge Climate Change Skeptics On YouTube

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

The censorship continues, as a George Soros-linked group has joined forces with the mainstream media to ensure climate skeptics are silenced on YouTube.  The group Avaaz, left-leaning non-profit group, published a report on January 16th on its website that claims YouTube is “profiting by broadcasting misinformation” to millions of people by giving climate denial videos too much prominence.

Independent mainstream media outlets are engaging in a politically-motivated campaign to force YouTube to demonetize and hide any video that denies climate change.  Regardless of the facts or scientific evidence revealed in the videos, if one doesn’t submit to the religion of climate change, they will be silenced if Avaaz has anything to do about it.

The report is an undisguised intimidation campaign, as not only does it list major advertizers who are running ads on videos that question the legitimacy of the threat climate change poses for humanity, but it explicitly calls for them to put pressure on the platform as a means of putting an end to the so-called disinformation.

Despite the findings being published just yesterday, many mainstream sites had lengthy articles posted not long after that, which featured quotes from those who worked on the report. Timings that suggest select websites were given early access, making it clear what agenda is being pushed, more so as they all tout the same talking points. Vice, Time, Gizmodo, The Verge, and countless other news entities want YouTube to punish creators who don’t toe the “correct” ideological line. The objective is to demonetize, and thus censor, such individuals as they’ll be less inclined to work on the content that they won’t be able to profit from. 

-RT

Nell Greenburg, a campaign director at Avaaz, claims the report isn’t about removing content and censorship, however, that contradicts the report’s own messaging. There is a clear attempt to have content hidden as the report calls into question the promotion of such videos in the “up next” box on the site. It’s semantics at this point, but hiding videos would hurt creators and dissuade them from even trying to share their thoughts. It is an indirect way of removing “wrongthink.”  The official narrative is the only narrative and when it comes to the domination of others, these people want to be at the top.

Basic human rights are under attack from all sorts of groups. And it is fairly safe to say that YouTube will give into the demands of this group, silencing and demonetizing anyone caught not parroting the Orwellian narrative the ruling class hands down.

This situation ultimately raises questions into why anyone, or anything, should have the power to dictate what others can create. Regardless of one’s personal views on the matter, there’s no denying that bold claims have been made about the climate that later were disproven. Little is, as yet, set in stone, and content that lands on any one side of the debate should be free to exist. If a creator is making videos people are watching, their hard work shouldn’t be thrown in the bin simply because an activist group with ties to one of the world’s richest people and his proxies says so. It is not the role of billionaires and their pet projects to play babysitter.

Sophia Narwitz, writer for RT


Tyler Durden

Wed, 01/22/2020 – 14:30

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Molly Jong-Fast on Trump’s Impeachment, Democratic Candidates, and Why Twitter Is Great

“I don’t think you should do Twitter if you think you’re better than Twitter,” says Molly Jong-Fast in a wide-ranging interview with Nick Gillespie.

Molly Jong-Fast is a journalist, novelist, and memoirist who is an editor at large for The Daily Beast, where she writes frequently about President Donald Trump (she doesn’t much like him) and the Democratic presidential hopefuls (she will vote for whoever wins the nomination but isn’t excited by them). She’s also a contributor to Playboy, The Independent (U.K.), and The Bulwark, a website started up by some folks left homeless when The Weekly Standard bit the dust a while back.

Just after the first day of the Senate impeachment trial concluded, she sat down to talk with Gillespie about the 2020 election, what it’s like to grow up with famous relatives (her mother Erica Jong wrote Fear of Flying, her father is a well-respected author, and her grandfather Howard Fast was a massively popular novelist who wrote Spartacus and received the 1953 Stalin Peace Prize), and why she thinks Twitter (follow her at @mollyjongfast) is a great leveling force in contemporary media. Jong-Fast also has kind words for Bret Easton Ellis, whose 2019 book White she trashed, and explains why as a liberal Democrat she has a lot of overlap with libertarian beliefs about free trade, capitalism, and the legalization of vices.

Audio production by Ian Keyser.

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Communist China Declares War on Single-Use Plastics

Communist China is the latest country to crack down on single-use plastics. On Sunday, the country’s National Development and Reform Commission issued new rules restricting or banning the use of everything from straws to miniature shampoo bottles.

Non-biodegradable plastic bags will be banned in major cities by the end of the year, and in the entire country by the end of 2022.

Restaurants will be banned from distributing plastic straws. They must also reduce their overall use of single-use plastics by 30 percent. Hotels will be prohibited from giving out free single-use plastic items by 2025, reports the BBC. The production of 0.025mm thick plastic bags will also be banned. The new directive includes an exception for bags holding fresh produce.

“Consumption of plastic products, especially single-use items, has been consistently rising,” said the Chinese government upon releasing the new regulations, according to The New York Times. “There needs to be stronger comprehensive planning and a systematic rollout to clean up plastic pollution.”

The English-language newspaper China Daily says that plastic consumption, and plastic pollution, has risen in the country recently thanks to the growing use of food delivery and e-commerce services—both of which use a lot of plastic packaging.

The Chinese government has already taken some steps to address the problem by severely restricting its imports of plastic waste from other countries (a move that has thrown the American recycling industry into disarray) and prohibiting stores from giving out plastic bags for free.

China, according to one 2015 study, is responsible for almost 30 percent of the plastic waste that gets into the ocean each year. Communist-controlled Vietnam and North Korea, alongside other coastal East Asian countries like Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines, are also all major plastic polluters.

The U.S., by contrast, is responsible for less than one percent of marine plastic waste.

On the surface, that would appear to make China’s plastics crackdown more justifiable than similar American bans targeting the minuscule number of bags, straws, and takeaway containers that end up as litter.

Yet the mere use of plastic products isn’t, by itself, responsible for China’s plastic pollution problem. As Reason‘s Ron Bailey noted in a 2018 Earth Day post, the “main reasons these countries are such big contributors of plastic marine debris is that their consumers’ garbage is uncollected and frequently ends up in open dumps.”

Rich countries with well-developed waste management systems manage to recycle, landfill, or incinerate almost all of their garbage. This is why wealthy Japan and South Korea emit much less plastic waste into the oceans than their regional neighbors.

Plastic prohibitions in China might cut down on the amount of waste in the near term, but a comprehensive long-term solution will require investing in better garbage collection and disposal.

It’s also important to stress that whatever China’s environmental problems, any prohibition is inevitably going to be enforced by an authoritarian, one-party state. On this front, African nations’ experience with plastic bag bans is instructive. In 2008, Rwanda’s government became one of the first to ban plastic bags. In 2016, Al Jazeera reported on the brutal measures government officials have since taken to stop the illegal importation of plastic bags from neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo:

If caught, smugglers say they are forced to destroy the bags, sometimes with their teeth. Worse, they are detained indefinitely and fined hundreds of dollars, which they have no means of paying. On the Congolese side, they say, beatings are common, and in exchange for sex, officers might allow smugglers to cross the border without paying a bribe.

Kenya has likewise banned plastic bags, only to see police harass scofflaws with fines and drug-war style raids. These very real costs to human freedom must be weighed against any environmental benefits of plastics bans. That’s something the international environmental movement has been really bad at, preferring to praise authoritarian Rwanda as “one of the cleanest nations on earth” and an example of what can be accomplished if “the political will really exists and true efforts are made.”

China would do better to keep growing richer, and then invest its prosperity in better waste management.

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