What sucks is that the plastic bag is better for the environment.

If we just considered oil in comparison, a plastic bag uses less oil to create then does a paper bag. Making paper takes a lot of energy. And transporting those paper bags takes more energy.

Anyway, we could have ultra-high temperature vortex burning trash fired energy plants and get secondary energy from all the plastic bags... but, that seems to be something that would hurt the environment, so we can't have that.