Should the Plastic Bag Be Saved?

I've traveled outside of North America only once in my life, and that was to Ireland in 2002. That was the year they switched from the Irish Pound to the Euro, and it was when they put a tax on plastic bags. We dopey tourists didn't know anything about that plastic bag thing before we got there. The deal, in theory, was this: If you wanted a plastic bag when you went to the store, you had to pay for it. But, at least where we were, in the southeast, the little goods-and-grocers we went to weren't even offering the option to buy a plastic bag — they simply didn't make them available at all. Or paper. Once I found out about the new tax, I asked quite a few people there how they felt about it — people working in stores, and people shopping in them. To a number, every response was positive. The older folks remembered when that's the way it was anyway... everybody brought their own cloth bags and wicker baskets when they went shopping. No big deal. The younger folks said that it made so much sense, even if it wasn't as convenient. And everybody said that they didn't miss all those empty plastic bags blowing around the countryside. They did say that there were people who didn't like the new tax at all, and that its introduction wasn't without some serious resistance. Resistance, I suppose, from people like the Save the Plastic Bag Coalition, which seeks to expose "the anti-plastic bag misinformation campaign." Misinformation such as this, I'm guessing: I've read through the savetheplasticbag.com website, and I frankly don't care which points they are and aren't right about. I don't care if plastic bags aren't made from oil. I don't care if landfill space and animal deaths are overstated by the green zealots (or understated by the coalition). The fact is that we don't need plastic or paper bags for most shopping trips. A tax or even an outright ban will create a small environmental victory that can inspire greater change... because it's just so simple to do. I was listening to a discussion one time about the embodied energy of building materials and the construction process vs. the rest of the building's lifecycle energy. It was argued that since the operating energy of most buildings dwarfs the energy involved up to the point of occupancy, it seemed almost silly to even worry about anything but efficient envelopes and mechanicals. David Eisenberg, director of the Development Center for Appropriate Technology, piped up and said that comparing just the two sets of information certainly would lead to that conclusion. However, it takes almost no adjustment in perspective to realize that embodied energy is of enormous importance... and even though operating energy has even greater impact, both are significant.