How climate change enthusiasts jump the shark

Making people feel guilty about their inhalers isn't going to solve anything

A waterskiing polar bear.
(Image credit: Illustrated | JohnPitcher/iStock, Vector/iStock, ap-images/iStock, yopinco/iStock)

It is a lot of work keeping up with all the things that are bad. This is especially the case for those things that were, until very recently, good, in some cases unambiguously. Bottled water is a good example. Remember when everyone who was not some kind of toothless Mountain Dew-addicted deplorable used to go through one of those big Costco-sized containers of bottled water every week? Now we are still expected to drink half of our body weight in water every week, but only with a refillable container. (Whatever happened, I wonder, to that marvelously democratic institution the drinking fountain?) Meanwhile, carbonated soft drinks have been #problematic for ages, along with cigarettes and hamburgers and toilet paper.

I have to say, though, that I did not expect asthma inhalers to join hard-hitting NFL defenses on my list of problematic faves. If, like me, you have a sibling who was born prematurely and spent a good part of his early childhood breathing medicine from a nebulizer and his teen years sucking on an inhaler, you would know how valuable these devices are. The fact that in the process they are said to release something called hydrofluoroalkane into the atmosphere probably would not occur to you as something we should be too worried about. But according to research reported by the BBC, inhalers are, in terms of the environmental threat they pose, "as big as eating meat."

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Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.