As of July 2024, all plastic bottles in the EU will have their cap attached to them by a small plastic tab. Social media is already full of videos of users trying to drink without caps scratching their nose, gouging out an eye, or cutting their lip. This inconvenience is the result of yet another green regulation, recently passed by the European Parliament, that aims to reduce the impact of plastic on the environment. It also helps illustrate the state of mind in which millions of European citizens went to vote last Sunday to elect the new configuration of the European Parliament: the weariness provoked by the fact that so much that is intended to save the planet simply makes life more difficult for its inhabitants.
The EU, dominated by centrists (or progressive conservatives), as well as social-democratic and green elites, has, for years now, been in a race to be the first Western institution to implement the U.N.’s 2030 agenda. The EU’s leaders believed that they wouldn’t have to pay for their attitudes and the consequences of their policies, such as the environmentalist madness, the massive influx of illegal immigration, their tolerance for Islamism, the ruin of local farmers, their disregard for the traditional values of the Christian West, and their push to dilute national sovereignty. And, indeed, they hadn’t paid for any of it . . . until now.
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