The Chinese have allegedly decided to “clean up their act” environmentally speaking. Their solution: ban plastic bags at supermarkets and make shopping less convenient. You can get away with such silly regulation in a communist country … or places like San Francisco, which banned the bags in 2007. Ironically, while such bans might sound like no-brainer green policies, the environmental benefits are questionable. A study conducted well over a decade past clearly demonstrated that plastic bags have lots of virtues, such as being far more energy efficient than paper. They take up less space in a landfill and are much easier to carry! Of course, you don’t have to switch to paper, you can move to reusable cloth. However, cloth bags are much more expensive for a reason—they too require resources to make as well as periodically clean. Maybe they are “greener,” but maybe not. In any case, I prefer the freedom to choose. But socialists—and many leftists here—don’t let freedom—or the facts—get in the way of their “heroic” efforts to save us from ourselves.