Matt Walsh

We make the most vitally important technology products that everyone in the world uses or benefits from, from the phone to the search engine, to self-driving cars, to reusable rockets.

We innovate.

And in general, we are civilized to a much greater degree than most of the world.

Just as one example to illustrate that last point, one example of many that can be used.

There's been a lot of talk, especially in recent years, about pollution in the ocean.

A few years ago, we went through the, as you remember, the great plastic straw panic, where every restaurant in the country switched over to paper straws that melt in your Diet Coke while you're trying to use them.

But as I said at the time, this panic was always totally absurd, at least in our country, because almost none of the pollution in the ocean is from the United States.

Why?

Because in the United States, for the most part, we don't dump our trash into the rivers, which then ferry it like a conveyor belt into the ocean.

No, that is done in Africa and Asia, which is why 95% of the plastic pollution in the ocean comes from those two continents.

That leaves only 5% of the ocean's plastic debris to be split between the continents of Europe, North America, South America, and Australia.

Brazil is the worst plastic offender outside of Asia and Africa.

23 European countries collectively are 18th on the list.

The United States comes in 20th.

America, with its population of 330 million, is dwarfed on the plastic pollutant list by countries like Sri Lanka with 310 million fewer people.

So we could collect all the straws in North America, bundle them together, and shoot them into the sun, and the state of the ocean would hardly be improved at all.

Indeed, we could stop using plastic altogether.

It would barely make a dent in the problem.

And that's because, again, we are a civilized country, and we don't dump our trash into our rivers.

That's exactly what they do all across Asia and Africa.