Bill Maher on the Great Garbage Election of 2024

November 10, 2024 • 12:30 pm

Here’s Bill Maher’s 7-minute comedy/news bit from Friday’s “Real Time.”  The title of the episode refers, of course, to comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s statement at a Trump Rally in NYC: “”There’s a lot going on. I don’t know if you know this but there’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah, I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”  It was not funny, and did not go down well, though of course nothing hurts Trump.

In this bit Maher is calling attention to the human-caused “death of the ocean”.  He avers that un-polluting the ocean will be much harder than curbing global warming.  And what we see on the surface (there’s one “garbage island” the size of France!) is only the tip of the iceberg:  70% of the garbage, much of it plastic, sinks to the bottom.

Curiously, Maher avoids discussing the election results save to say that Harris was part of the only party that even deals with the environment, yet she never mentioned pollution and even reversed her earlier anti-fracking position. Maher clearly sees oceanic pollution—and environmental pollution in general—as critical but ignored issuea.  Recycling, he says, is a crock, since only 9% of plastic gets recycled.

. . . and here’s his 3½-minute monologue about the election itself:

15 thoughts on “Bill Maher on the Great Garbage Election of 2024”

  1. Engineer Mark Rober has a great video on robotic cleanup of … well, see for yourself (if the url makes it):

    See below this comment :

  2. Three times the size of France. I find no fault with Maher’s argument. Not only does most of the plastic sink, but it degrades into ever smaller particles, which cannot be practically removed, robotically or otherwise. Plastic is the most pervasive pollutant on the planet. It’s long-term effects have yet to be seen. I’m glad he’s raising the issue.

    1. No fault except that Mr. Maher cites no evidence that ingested microplastic particles are any threat to human health or that they contribute to dead zones in the ocean or to loss of large food fish. After all these years since, “Plastics!”, you’d think we’d have some clue by now. (OK, he’s a comic, who turns what his writers give him into well-timed funny lines like drowning fish and Gerard Depardieu…)

      Yes attempts to recycle plastic are foolish. It’s not worth enough to be valuable given the costs and diesel emissions of curbside Blue Box programs — send it all to landfill which will at least keep marine life from being tangled in it. I’m glad he explained how the plastic trash islands in the ocean got there. Burn it for electricity if you like — Denmark does — but plastic trash has large bulky volume for the heat content and most plastics have less heat per kg than native petroleum, being partially oxidized in manufacture. Like hydrogen, a lot of squeeze, not much juice. Transporting truckloads of it long distances from the hinterlands to power plants in North America will not be cheap and the government doesn’t want us burning anything that came from the ground for electricity anyway.

      Plastic might have the lowest impact on the environment of the alternatives for containers: glass, paper/cardboard, crockery, metal. Plastic beats them all except for being bio-nondegradable litter not worth the cost of scavenging. (If something else was better, consumers would never have let the market switch to plastic.) What are the impacts of banning plastic containers and replacing them with what? Is plastic even a problem worth the effort to solve it?

      It should be noted that plastic discarded and not burned is carbon neutral and doesn’t contribute to global warming. Efforts to link the two, such as banning plastic drinking straws as our government did, are wrongheaded. Polyethylene will never emit CO2 except for the fuel heat of synthesis. It is as if the ethane used to make it was just left in the ground.

      1. +1

        Add to that : plastic needs to be clean for recycling.

        I’m not sure how much so, but it takes energy to clean it, and produce the water or soap to clean it. That’s potable water – a valuable resource.

        In practical terms, homeowners/renters/etc. use clean warm tap water to get the recycle clean. Or, just throw it out as not worth cleaning, like laundry detergent bottles, peanut butter jars, etc. or else might contaminate a whole truckload? Ants / animals all in the recycle bin?

        I don’t know!

      2. +1
        Good points and I largely agree. We’ve produced 11 billion tons of plastic in the last 90 years, much of which has polluted Earth’s oceans. But imagine how much wood, glass, and metal we would’ve used had we never developed plastic that would’ve led to global deforestation and the environmental horror of mining. More recently, scientists have found land and sea-based bacteria that are able to metabolize plastic (polypropylene I think) as a carbon source. So maybe there’s an environmentally benign way to biodegrade it in the end.

        That’s no excuse for us to pollute our air and water or not to actually capture and recycle plastic but as with all things, there are always tradeoffs.

          1. Natural gas from ordinary drilled (+/- hydraulically fractured) wells is the primary feedstock for plastics in North America because of its abundance and low cost, not bitumen from oil-bearing rock which struggles to be economically viable at “normal” oil prices. You can make almost anything from ethane and propane and it takes startlingly little to make a lot of yoghurt tubs, because the stuff is light to begin with and is strong enough that single-use containers need use very little of it. We re-use our grocery deli tubs (with lids!) for many months for leftovers before they finally break. Amazing stuff.

            And plastic litter discarded on the roadside doesn’t puncture bicycle tires the way broken glass bottles used to.

        2. The plastic wouldn’t even be in the oceans if we hadn’t tried to pretend we were going to recycle it. But it remains politically popular because it’s the only “green” thing that most people will ever do. If bacteria biodegrade the plastic, it will emit CO2. But let’s see. 11 billion tons of plastic emits about 40 billion tons of CO2 if fully burned or biodegraded. That 90 years of plastic is just about one year’s worth of current global CO2 emissions. So we could do that at trivial cost. Good suggestion.

          It also shows how little of our petroleum is turned into plastic and how little all that plastic weighs, since that ocean full of plastic has so little carbon locked up in it. Its low density is one of its attractive features for packaging that offsets the difficulty in reusing it, as Bryan alludes to.

      4. Yes, Leslie, again.
        Given the chemical nature of plastics – and a lack of evidence of its carcinogenic, teratogenic etc. consequences, a lot of the opposition seems to be aesthetic and anti-capitalism, anti-consumerism.
        Which makes the debate lefty political rather than scientific/medical.

        Environmentalism 30 years ago was about not poisoning the environment. Since about 20 years ago it has become mainly lefty political.
        Witness a certain Swedish truant moppet who … now… stumps for (gimme a break, really) Palestine.
        Of course.

        D.A.
        NYC

      5. Yes, Leslie. And glass isn’t biodegradable either. Also, I gather from the literature that quite a lot of the microplastic in the oceans is (micro)particles from tyre wear or clothing, i.e., dust, and the most dangerous plastic stuff swimming there is parts of fishernets.
        Certainly we should avoid polluting the seas with plastic garbage, but it’s not always feasible or better to use non-plastic containers for stuff that needs to be contained.

  3. He seems to be the only talk show host with any credibility now. He is rational compassionate kind and of course funny.

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