Now a teenager, Milo Cress was 9 years old in 2011.
That was when he phoned manufacturers and came up with a production
estimate of 500 million plastic straws a day.
This figure has no other verification but is now accepted fact on mainstream-media.

Comment-
A 9 yo makes an estimate, fine.
Basing public policy on that figure without corroboration is bad bad.

-----------------------------
http://reason.com/blog/2018/01/26/a-l...
and
http://reason.com/blog/2018/01/25/cal...
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Is all the other environmental policy of that standard?
Read The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World's Top Climate Expert *
by * Donna Laframboise

https://judithcurry.com/2011/10/19/la...

Judith Curry is one of the few real scientists in the field.
She gives this quote from Mark Twain-

” . . . people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand,
and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the
questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners,
whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.”

etc.