"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
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"anorton" wrote in message
m...

"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...

"." wrote in message
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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.

Right. The horror story that I remember from my first engagement with
pollution issues was mine tailings in Lake Superior. The attitude of the
mining companies was incredible. They claimed it wasn't their problem.

So, we struggle along with an agency that has to do things that are
going to annoy people, or cost them money. So be it. There's no going
back, for those of us old enough to remember how dismal things looked
before there was an EPA.

--
Ed Huntress


Actually phosphorous in wastewater is not just a pollution issue. It is
also a matter of cost for sewage treatment plants. Removing phosporous
is the most complex and costly step in sewage treatment.

Well, based on some discussion in the (legitimate) greenie press out here
a few years back, they don't even try in most of the wastewater treatment
in this area.

It requires a biological holding pool, right? Algae or something.

--
Ed Huntress

There are special phosphorous absorbing algae, but most use reactions with
various inorganic compounds that require a specific pH. Then the precipate
has to be filtered or allowed to settle, then the pH re-adjusted.