If you live in Massachusetts and would like to see something banned, just send a note to Governor Maura Healey and you’ll probably get your wish. Gas stoves, cars, fluorescent light bulbs… pick your poison. And if she can’t convince the legislature to ban it, she’ll just sign an executive order and cut out all of the muss and fuss. It’s a very efficient system if you don’t mind a healthy dose of autocratic authoritarianism mixed in with your morning coffee. Now Healey has struck upon something else that Simply Has To Go. And that would be single-use plastic bottles. The legislature hasn’t seriously looked at anything like this so she is at least aware that she can’t wipe out that entire sector of the marketplace singlehandedly. But she’s pretty sure she can do it inside of the state government. So with a stroke of the pen, she will ban state agencies from buying any products in single-use plastic bottles. Problem (?) solved! (Fox News)

Massachusetts is slated to become the first state in the nation to ban state agencies from purchasing single-use plastic bottles, Democratic Gov. Maura Healey announced at a climate change event.

“In government, we have an obligation to stop contributing to this damage and chart a better path forward,” Healey said Monday in New York City, according to the Boston Globe. “So we are proud to become the first state to adopt a procurement ban on single-use plastic bottles.”

Healey delivered a keynote speech Monday for the Clinton Global Initiative during New York’s “Climate Week” and announced she would be signing an executive order later this week banning state agencies from purchasing single-use plastic bottles. The governor said the plan is intended to help protect oceans and the climate.

I’ve written here before (to the dismay of some of our regular readers) about my own concerns with plastic waste and the lasting baggage it leaves in its wake. We also already know that the vast majority of plastic trash does not wind up being recycled and ends up in landfills or, far more often, in the ocean. There is nothing positive about this for people or the environment. But this is an extremely complex situation and there are tremendous challenges involved in figuring out ways to either replace plastic or deal with it more effectively.

This brings us back to Governor Healey. Like so many other autocrats, she is willing to ignore all of those complexities and demand that reality change overnight because she has decreed that It Shall Be So. But that’s not how it works. Like most things in the world, addressing the issue of plastic waste is a zero-sum game. If you order one situation to change without anticipating the consequences, someone else is going to carry the burden.

So how would this ban play out? If the state can no longer order any products delivered in single-use plastic bottles, such products will not be available in government cafeterias, shops, or vending machines. That would include products like soda and iced tea, of course. But it would also include bottled water. It’s the most common way for water to be consumed currently in the United States and bottled water is now the most commonly consumed beverage, surpassing even soda and other soft drinks.

The Massachusetts state government employs nearly 450,000 workers. If they follow the national averages, more than half of them drink bottled water every day. When there is no water in the vending machines or the cafeteria, what happens next? Will they be allowed to lug their own supplies in from home? The proposed order doesn’t seem to prohibit that, so perhaps we’re only dealing with an inconvenience here. But it’s still an inconvenience and eats into their time. And if they are buying their water elsewhere to bring in, you’re not really decreasing the total number of single-use plastic bottles, are you? So you’re placing a burden, however small, on your workers while producing effectively no net progress toward the stated goal. (That’s the zero-sum game in action again.)

Conversely, she could ban bottles from being brought into the office and provide everyone with filtered water pitchers. (Which is what we use at home.) Fair enough. That would immediately drive a significant reduction in the number of single-use bottles. However, the state would have to purchase and distribute tens of thousands of pitchers. What are they made of? Plastic. They last quite a while, though, so there would probably still be a net improvement. But those pitchers have filters that have to be replaced often. The filter cartridges are also made mostly of plastic. And they are thrown out regularly. The pitchers wear out eventually and will be similarly discarded. And it will all wind up in the landfill. And someone in every office will have to spend time washing the pitchers and changing the filters. Do you see where this is going?

Even if you agree that plastic waste is a serious long-term issue (and I do), an executive order banning bottles is not a solution. It’s virtue signaling, which is a favorite pastime for Democrats. You’re exchanging one set of problems for a new set. If you really want to help, invest in research to replace plastic with something more viable in the long term and less destructive to the environment. But that would require a lot of time and effort and this is the government we’re talking about, so…