On Mon, 11 Jul 2011 22:39:41 -0700, "." wrote:
gigantic snip
There's truth in that. Sometimes they have to keep at it or it's bound to
regress. Sometimes they paint with too broad a brush. The job they've
been
charged with seems almost impossible, but they've had big successes.
Joe Gwinn
look at it this way - would you rather have healthy rivers and cloudy
drinking glasses or nice clean drinking glasses and dead rivers? I
choose the former.
I agree, which is why I put up with it. But in this hyper-individualistic
society, the kind of broad rulemaking that EPA has to engage in, just to do
its job, is going to grate a lot of people the wrong way. Sometimes it
grates all of us the wrong way.
For example, let me describe how I made dry-fly dope in 1959. Dry-fly dope
is the stuff you put on a floating trout fly to keep it floating.
First, take a quart of carbon tetrachloride and pour it into a mayonnaise
jar. You should do this is good light, like on your kitchen table. Then get
out your box of Gulf Wax (paraffin wax) and your pocket knife and start
shaving the wax into the jar of carbon tet. Keep doing this until the carbon
tet won't dissolve any more wax. Take a good half-hour doing this so most of
it has a chance to dissolve. Then shave in some more wax, until there's wax
in there that won't dissolve.
Put the lid on the mayonnaise jar and put it on the kitchen counter for a
day or two. If the rest of the wax dissolved, you're done. If you're fishing
in cold weather, put the jar in your refrigerator and let some wax
precipitate out, as it will. Then decant the jar into another jar, which
will be your cold-weather fly dope.
So you now have a ten-year supply of the most effective fly dope anyone has
seen before or since. No problem. Hell, you breathed more carbon tet just
stopping into the dry cleaner to pick up a suit. Who knew?
Some of the antagonism to bureaucratic rules is that kind of thing. It's
just an unwillingness to accept that the old ways of doing things are
harmful, even if you never saw any evidence of it yourself. How many people
are alive who breathed carbon tet? Most of us. People in the Midwest didn't
see no steenking acid rain coming from their power plants. That all fell in
the Northeast. Hrumph.
But the EPA's wetlands rules, while well-intended and basically a good
thing, have led to some laughable cases that cost people a lot of money for
nothing. Woe be unto you if your drainage ditch is considered to be the
branch of a named creek and it backs up onto your property in the
springtime. You've got a wetland, and you can neither build on it nor drain
it.g
That's the cost of living in an ever-more-complex society, one in which we
ignored pollution for so long that we had to mitigate it just to get the
environment back to some semblance of health, and in which the prevailing
attitude is extreme individualism and property rights. We may like the fact
that the law is blind and applies to everyone equally, but an EPA regulation
that does that is tyranny. Hrumph.
I'll take the EPA, in the balance, but not without some frustration. I was
born with hyper-individualism, too. And I really *like* carbon
tetrachloride. My precious, dwindling supply, which I keep next to my
four-pound bottle of mercury, has saved my bacon on some really tough
tapping jobs in hard steel....but maybe we shouldn't go there....
there are certainly some ridiculous outcomes, the panic over bottles or
spills of metallic mercury being one, however on the balance I cannot
imagine any other mechanism for dealing with the "tragedy of the
commons". We need to ensure that the full costs of something, and that
includes costs that accrue elsewhere - the example of acid rain, or
rivers poisoned by phosphates are both good examples - as are the
earthquakes in Arkansas from fracking, and of course photochemical smog.
If we could price these things so the creator pays then the "free
market" might work, but there is no practical mechanism to include these
effects in pricing.
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ult.../AcidRain.html
Current trends
Since the early 1980s, emissions of sulfur dioxide have been reduced in
both Europe and North America. Even though nitrogen oxides have not been
reduced proportionally, the result has been a reduction in the amount of
acid deposition. This seems to have stopped the acidification of lakes
but not yet reversed it. The technology exists to generate electricity
from coal with greatly reduced emissions and as this technology comes
into use, that aspect of the problem should improve.
What about forests?
Not enough is yet known to be certain, but my guess is that sulfur
dioxide will turn out to have only a supporting role to play and that
the major culprit will turn out to be ozone. Air pollution by ozone,
like that by nitrogen oxides, is largely a matter of automobile exhaust.
[Link]
--
Maxim 12: A soft answer turneth away wrath.
Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head.