"Spehro Pefhany" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 13 Jul 2011 09:44:05 -0400, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:


"Too_Many_Tools" wrote in message
...
On Jul 12, 7:34 am, "Ed Huntress" wrote:
"." wrote in
...
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- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Well said Ed.

All I have to remember is seeing rivers burn in America...

TMT

Speaking of which, I drove over the Cuyahoga the day before it caught on
fire. My luck was running good.

I had a bottle or two of "Burning River" beer in Cleveland last week

Ha! We should try comparing that with New Jersey's finest, "River Horse,"
brewed on the banks of the Delaware in historic, scenic, Lambertville, NJ.
g

(along with an awesome sandwich at this place:
http://www.meltbarandgrilled.com).. while watching the Jays win over
the Tribe in the 10th.. so some good did come of it.

Feh. A pox on both their houses. Go Yankees. d8-) (yes, that's a Yankees
cap)

--
Ed Huntress