Newsflash: GOP Doesn’t Care About Your Grandkids
When talking about deficits and debt these days, a common Republican talking point is that we’re kicking the can down the road and our kids and grandkids are going to have to pay for all the spending that we’re doing now. It’s not a bad talking point. It has the benefit of actually being true, which already makes it better than most of their talking points for the last few years, but of course it supposes that we just ignore that the GOP has no problem running deficits when they’re in the driver’s seat.
But I digress. So the GOP is very concerned about your kids and grandkids, right? Wrong. They might want to make sure that coming generations can enjoy the same low tax rates that we all do now, but conserve the earth for them? Not so much.
WASHINGTON - Today, Committee on House Administration Chairman Dan Lungren, R-Calif., announced that he has directed the House Chief Administrative Officer (CAO) to suspend the House composting program after a recent review of the program, which costs an estimated $475,000 annually, revealed that it has actually increased the House’s overall energy consumption and has produced nominal reductions in carbon emissions.
Giving Chairman Lungren’s review the benefit of the doubt, it seems that all that’s happened here is that they’ve cut an ineffective program and saved half a million dollars. That and the House GOP is giving a big middle finger to Nancy Pelosi, who started the program while she was Speaker. Except that instead of the compostable containers that the House cafeteria has been using, they’re going back to styrofoam, which has such wonderful environmental properties:
Earth-Raping Dictator-Supporting House GOP Brings Styrofoam Back
“Foamed polystyrene” is a miraculous invention that manages to be completely awful through every step of its near-eternal “life cycle” — it is manufactured with petroleum that must be imported from Middle East dictatorships, toxic “styrene oligomers” migrate into the food it holds, it’s highly flammable and produces black poisonous smoke, and most of the 25 billion polystyrene cups tossed every year will take more than half a millennium to degrade.
Anyway, more than a hundred American cities and counties have banned polystyrene food packaging — that means, “It’s illegal to use polystyrene food packaging,” because that is what people with brains do when they’ve recognized a problem, such as “the oceans are filled with bits of styrofoam coffee cups, forever.”
So in the interests of saving half a million dollars and tweaking Nancy Pelosi, the House GOP is now going to put the 1200 tons of material that got composted last year back into the trash, except that now a lot of it will be styrofoam that will sit in landfills for hundreds of years.
The GOP doesn’t give two shits about your grandkids or the planet that they’re going to have to live on.