To look at the news surrounding China's recent announcement of a ban on thin plastic bags you'd think the gates to environmental heaven had just swung open. I'm sure I could see those very gates if the air outside my office windows wasn't full of nitrogen oxides and coal soot generated by the perma-gridlock on East Chang'an Ave. There are plenty of stories out there about this. I won't link to them all. Just go to Google news and search China + Plastic + Bags and stand back. Of course you'll have to use a proxy server or the VPN of your choice as, natually, any attempt to input "China" into Google News results in a Nanny time-out. Good thing I'm not shopping for crockery.

China's plastic bag ban is guaranteed to be one of this century's great exercises in futility. Hundreds of years from now, when future historians living on a planet that has come to terms with being knee deep in PET bottles, plastic bags and discarded mobile phones compare Sisyphean tasks, this will probably rank right up there with trying to rehab Britney Spears and rooting for the Chicago Cubs.

Don't get me wrong: Plastic bags are truly one of mankind's most vile creations, right up there with the "Lyte Funky Ones", Easy-Cheese and Hummers. The goddamn things are everywhere. The first men to land on Mars will find plastic bags wafting around in the red dust. That those men will probably be Chinese is certainly poetic justice. Sea turtles famously choke to death on them. When I lived in a westward facing apartment I used to judge winter windspeed by the velocity of the plastic bags whipping by my window. Now that I've moved I judge it by the plume coming out of the immense smokestack at the power station just east of Dawang Lu and the plastic bags whipping by my window.

My wife and I use fabric shopping bags, and we try to extend the life of those plastic grocery bags we do get by using them to line our wastebins, take our lunches to work, scoop the cat litter and so on. One of things that really offends me is that some supermarkets in China use plastic bags that are so inferior that bunches of parsely can poke holes in them, thus rendering them completely useless for any further applications (especially cat litter). Of course, those same bags can hang upon roadside shrubs for years. Oddly, the other thing that is always hanging from roadside shrubs in China is men's underwear. I don't understand it, but there it is.

So I applaud the intent behind China's new ban on bags. And if it's enforced with the same vigor as the "bans" on pirated luxury goods, unsafe coal mines and dumping pure PCBs into Chinese rivers I am sure we can all look forward to a healthy, green future.

But the ban is unlikely to be vigorously enforced. So much of China's economy is gray, it's hard to figure out how it could be enforced. This is true even in Beijing, much less in the provinces, where the mountains are high (because they are buried deep in plastic bags and festooned in underwear) and the emperor is far away. Are the chengguan going to wander around with calipers testing the thickness of plastic bags? Say, buddy. Those look a little thin... Seems unlikely in a country where I recently saw a car complete a U-turn on Chang'an Ave. by turning left from the right-hand sub road, cutting across four lanes of traffing and avoiding a fiery, head-on collision by using the crosswalk as a turn lane. In front of the old Transport Ministry building. Seriously, if you're not going to bust that, why are you going to care about plastic bags?

No, I figure plastic bags will rank pretty low on the list of enforcement priorities, especially in the sticks, where they will be made by grungy, little unlicensed factories, delivered by men on tricycles and sold out of village kiosks where the same tea eggs have been pickling in tar next to the pesticide bottles since 1962. There won't be much of a tax audit trail there. And if the local cadre has hand in the local bag factory (and why wouldn't he?) the chances will be even lower.

Of course, the bags aren't actually banned, except for the thinnest and nastiest of the bunch. They're going to be charged at 1 mao a pop. And this in the midst of an inflation panic. This is exactly the kind of thing that no one in the cities in will notice and people in the impoverished countryside will either suffer from or, more likely, ignore. If you're going to introduce 1 mao into this equation, I suggest paying people 1 mao a bag to return the things, like a bottle deposit. The same beady-eyed uncles who snatch half-full PET drink bottles out of your hands at tourist sites would put paid to the stray bags pretty quickly. Finance that with a tax on Porsche Cayennes (speaking of mankind's vile creations) and I figure everything would balance out nicely.

Not that we even have a straight answer on what the best alternative to plastic bags might be. In the old days it was easy. We had paper. Then we had sleek, space age plastic. But then plastic was bad, so we had paper as option, but we had to request it. But then it turned out that paper bags might be worse anyway (bleach and trees, you know) and plastic bags would be better if we were recycling them. But we weren't recycling, so the only option was to shell out fifteen bucks for Anya Hindmarch's preposterous "I'm not a plastic bag" fashion victim bag. Try putting the cat litter in a bag you just paid $15 for and see how the wife reacts. And then we all gave up and started ordering in and dumping our trash out the window into the courtyard. Plus ca change, etc.

Or, of course, build a better mousetrap in the form of a cheap bag that actually biodegrades in a reasonable amount of time. They can do amazing things with corn starch these days. But, alas, there is no corn starch left because it's all going into American ethanol because we don't want our green energy supplies to be in the thrall of those sinister agents of evil, the Brazilians.

It makes you want to put one of those bags over your head. But Chinese grocery bags are so cheap you can't even commit suicide with them. You just end up sitting there with a shredded bag over your head making little, flappy snare drum noises as you breathe. A dignified end it ain't.