Wipeout: Now Leftists are Coming for Your Toilet Paper
Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

Do leftists want to MADA, Make America Dirty Again?

A clue is provided by some of the cities they run, dotted as they are with human feces.

Now there’s a related clue, too: Some leftists would make toilet paper the next plastic straw (which itself was the next SUV) and start a war on it.

Just consider this Kimberly Strassel tweet, brought to us by American Thinker’s Monica Showalter:

Showalter remarks that leftists want to make us like socialist Venezuela, where, aside from being reduced to eating cats and dogs, people find toilet paper in short supply. She also quotes the NRDC (National Resources Defense Council) itself:

You may not realize it, but the toilet paper in your bathroom likely comes from some of the most important — and threatened — forests in the world. In fact, Procter & Gamble is driving the devastation of one of the last great forests on earth to produce Charmin, the world’s biggest toilet paper brand — made out of 100 percent virgin forest fiber.

Now we’re running out of time: Between 1996 and 2015, more than 28 million acres of Canada’s boreal forest were logged. This logging threatens the ways of life of hundreds of Indigenous communities, releases hundreds of millions of tons of climate-altering carbon stored in the forest into the atmosphere every year, and devastates iconic wildlife.

Procter & Gamble must own up to its environmental impact and stop making its toilet paper from virgin pulp rather than sustainable recycled materials. The cost to communities, species, and our climate is simply too high to keep flushing our forests away.

Showalter wonders why the NRDC is targeting Charmin, stating that those buying it actually use less paper because it’s so absorbent; she asserts that some leftists have actually advocated it for this reason.

Whatever the truth there, we should wonder what the NRDC’s game is. Why pick on Charmin? Is it because it’s a visible name that can attract attention? Is this a Jesse Jackson-style shakedown? Perhaps it’s just mindless, doctrinaire allegiance to recycling dogma, but the bottom line is that virtually everything the NRDC claimed above is false.

Note that a “boreal” forest is merely one characterized by coniferous trees and found in a subarctic climate in the Northern Hemisphere. Canada has 28 percent of Earth’s boreal zone and nine percent of the planet’s total forest cover; it also is, by value, the world’s leading exporter of softwood lumber. But its forests are hardly imperiled.

Here are the facts, courtesy of the very liberal Canadian government’s own website:

• Less than 0.3% of Canada’s forests are harvested annually.

• Less than 0.02% of Canada’s forests are deforested each year.

• [Only] 6% of forest land is on private property, [and] 100% of forests harvested on Canada’s public land must be successfully regenerated.

Moreover, as AppalachianWood.com points out, “Forest products companies are in the business of growing and harvesting trees, so reforestation is important to them.” Of course. Thinking otherwise is like supposing that a corporate farm wouldn’t replant its wheat. It would be out of business after one harvest.  

In other words, Canadian forests aren’t “threatened” and the nation’s wildlife isn’t being devastated. The NRDC is, simply, peddling lies.

It’s the same story in the United States, mind you, which is almost nine times as densely populated as Canada. In fact, we have more forested area now than 70 years ago, and the picture is only getting brighter. As AppalachianWood.com also informs, we plant approximately “2.3 billion seedlings” yearly (and “nearly 55 percent were planted by the forest products industry”).

As for “global warming,” all these new trees will help absorb CO2, but don’t bet on that stopping man-caused climate change — because you can’t stop a process that doesn’t exist.

Unfortunately, misinformation, NRDC-style, is par for the environmentalist course. Just consider that the plastic-straw witch hunt was jump-started by the “statistic” that Americans use “500 million straws a day.” Newspapers repeated this uncritically, perhaps oblivious to how it’s a phony number derived from the unofficial “research” of a nine-year-old boy.

Not only that, but plastic straws constitute a minuscule amount of our plastic waste, and, more significantly, the United States is responsible for only one percent of the plastics in the oceans. Virtually all of it comes from coastal Third World nations with poor waste-management systems.

In reality, the United States (and Canada) is doing splendidly on the environment, with air and water cleaner than they were 60 years ago.

Unfortunately, the political arena is more polluted with misinformation than ever, and this has consequences. It’s not just that we create laws and business policies based on it, either, such as cities outlawing plastic straws and businesses phasing them out. It’s this: If a doctor misdiagnoses you and treats you for the wrong illness, it may distract you both from grasping, and curing, what really ails you. Likewise, Chicken Little, the-sky-is-falling misdirection maneuvers distract us from real environmental problems that we actually could remedy.

For example, Democrat-run cities such as San Francisco (video below) could clean up the masses of garbage, feces, and hypodermic needles in their streets and do something about the vagrants responsible for them.

Los Angeles is another good example (video below).

Then, not only is the U.S.’s population only increasing because of (im)migration, but border-jumping illegal aliens often devastate our environment, leaving behind hundreds of tons of trash (video below) and sometimes even causing fires.

Of course, eliminating the importation of future leftist voters or putting an onus on Democrat-run cities doesn’t help statists politically. What does is portraying big business, average Americans, and all other people and entities you want to control as polluters in need of control.

What we need to wipe away and flush is the propaganda peddled by power seekers who use nature to try to conquer man.

Photo: ManuelBurgos/E+/Getty Images