Let me make a terrible confession. In a kitchen cupboard I keep an enormous trove of what the news media keep telling me are single-use plastic bags. The trove exists because the description is, well, rubbish. A 50-liter trash bag is for a single use. The little bags I get from the store — or used to get from the store — I nearly always reuse.
Alas, my trove will stop growing. This week, Connecticut joined the cascade of localities that have implemented plastic-bag bans. The main reason, as far as I can tell, is that the government thinks I'm an uneducable dunce. If the government believed anything else, it would surely consider educating me in the environmental impact of various means of carrying goods home from the store, rather than telling me what I can and cannot do. I find it a continuing mystery that our quite sensible worry about climate change must always lead to fewer choices for ordinary people.
Regular readers know that I lean libertarian, but my argument here isn't ideological. Certainly I'm not saying the state should never constrain choice; but given that constraint comes in the form of law, and law always carries the risk of violence at the moment of enforcement, we should always be sure we've exhausted the alternatives first.