"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
...
In article , "." wrote:

On 7/11/2011 7:49 PM, Ed Huntress wrote:
"Joseph wrote in message
...
In ,
"Ed wrote:

[snip]
Welcome.

Do you think it's time to storm the EPA?

g I have mixed feelings about it. I appreciate their problem.
They're
charged with reducing pollutants of many kinds. As a long-time
fisherman
and
outdoorsman, I remember what it was like before we had the EPA. The
Delaware
River was a uniform gray on the bottom and the carp, which were almost
the
only fish living in it, were gasping.

Now we have shad again, and blueback herring, and even trout as far
south
as
Lambertville, NJ. Atlantic Salmon have been netted in the Delaware
Bay --
not quite ready to brave the river, but hanging around and hoping it
will
keep improving. They left nearly two centuries ago.

We lost one of the most beautiful and unique trout waters in the world
when
the acid rain killed most of the trout in the Adirondacks. That reached
crisis levels when I was in my early teens. It broke my heart. I
haven't
been back for decades, although I hear it's somewhat better since stack
scrubbers were applied to coal-fired plants in the Midwest, which is
where
the acid rain came from.

So I try to look at it case-by-case. It's not easy.


The basic problem is that they don't know when to just stop, declare
victory, and move on.

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. And, I wash by hand so there has never been an issue
anyway.

This is a false dichotomy, and in addition fails back-of-the-envelope
reasonableness calculations.

The false dichotomy is the claim that we can have either clean rivers or
clean glasses. Actually, there is no reason not to have both, as
discussed next.

The main use of phosphate chemicals is fertilizer: "About 95% of the
phosphate rock mined is used to produce fertilizers, animal feeds and
pesticides." [1]

This leaves 5% for everything else, including dishwasher detergents.
Modern dishwashers use a few ounces of detergent per wash, while farms
use phosphate fertilizer by the ton. The difference is thus orders of
magnitude.

So even if we stopped washing dishes altogether, nothing much would
change.

Yeah, except when it does. Cumulative phosphate use from washing clothes, in
densly populated areas, can be a much higher percentage of the phosphate
load on rivers. I haven't seen the numbers for a while but I recall that it
was a high percentage in the Delaware at one time. There isn't as much ag
runoff in that river as in many others.


As I said above, The basic problem [with the EPA] is that they don't
know when to just stop, to just declare victory and move on.

Joe Gwinn


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma


[1] "World Phosphate Production: Overview and Prospects", L. CISSE and
T. MRABET, World Phosphate Institute, 3, Rue Abdelkader Al Mazini, 20001
Casablanca, Morocco, in Phosphorus Research Bulletin Vol. 15 (2004) p.
21-25, www.imphos.org/download/jena/cisse_prb-15.pdf.