On 2/7/2012 8:08 PM, Robert Neville wrote:
gonjahgonjah.net wrote:

Your stupidity is noted. Thanks for playing.
Classic - when you can't argue on merits, throw a tantrum. Here's an easily
understandable explanation of what happened.Excerpts follow:


In 2000, Washington state’s Department of Ecology finally got around to creating
a computer model for the Spokane River. ...The entire exercise was as much
computer-assisted speculation as actual science.

Spokane has a single water-treatment plant to handle both the city and the
surrounding county. As of 2001, the plant handled 40 million gallons of
wastewater per day. But because of growth, demand for the area was projected to
rise to 60 million gallons per day by 2020. To meet this demand, the county
wanted to build another treatment facility.

In 2003, the county completed its study for a new water-treatment plant,
culminating in a plan to build a $73.4 million facility. The state Department of
Ecology agreed to the scheme and indicated they would grant the requisite
permits. But a few months later, Ecology changed its mind. After being
threatened by a lawsuit from the Sierra Club, the department concluded that
building the new plant would be a violation of the Clean Water Act. It turns out
that the EPA considered the Spokane an “impaired” waterway. This may sound
drastic, but the EPA found 600 bodies of water to be impaired in Washington
state alone. And the EPA would not allow construction of any new plant until a
TMDL plan was put in place.

Jim Correll, of CH2M Hill, the engineering firm hired to build the new plant,
explained in 2006 that the state’s requirement was not scientifically possible.
“The technology does not yet exist to do anything like what we expect the DOE to
require,”

...no one knew for certain how much dishwasher detergent actually contributed to
the problem. Advocates of the ban claimed—without hard evidence—that 15 percent
to 20 percent of all the phosphorus entering Spokane’s water-treatment plant
came from dishwashers. But a 2003 study done in Minnesota concluded that only
1.9 percent of the phosphorus there was the byproduct of household dish
detergents.

To their credit, most of the folks pushing the detergent ban made clear that
getting rid of phosphates in detergent wasn’t going to fix the problem.
“Anything we can do is good,” said Jani Gilbert, a spokeswoman for the
Department of Ecology, “but I also want people to understand it’s not going to
solve the river’s problem.” Rick Eichstaedt, a lawyer representing the Sierra
Club in talks with the state and the EPA, admitted that “from a Spokane River
cleanup perspective, it’s not going to solve the problem, and in fact, it’s not
the major source of the problem.”

With the genie out of the bottle in Washington state, environmental activists in
other states began lining up to pass their own bans. By 2010, 15 other states
had passed bans, but that turned out to be mere environmental showmanship.
Because before the ink was even dry on the Washington law, the detergent
manufacturers quietly threw in the towel. Instead of manufacturing two sets of
product—one for Washington state and another for the rest of America—the
industry giants agreed among themselves to move to phosphate-free detergents
nationwide by July 2010.

The ban itself, it turns out, has helped the river very little. A year after it
went into effect, supporters conveniently forgot their promises of reductions in
the 15 percent to 20 percent range and trumpeted news that phosphorus flowing
into the city’s water-treatment plant had declined by 10.7 percent, to just 181
pounds per day. Buried in the accounts was a remark by the plant’s manager
admitting that because the new phosphorus filtration system was so efficient,
nearly all of the in-flowing phosphorus was getting filtered out anyway. So the
reduction of phosphorus actually making it into the river as a result of the
detergent ban is much, much smaller.

Last month the University of Washington released a study suggesting that some of
the phosphorus being discharged into the Spokane River never actually worked as
fertilizer for algae to begin with. It seems that not all phosphorus is alike.
Some of the effluents making their way into the river contained phosphorus in
complex molecular forms which are not bioavailable. Algae lack the enzymes
necessary to break down this phosphorus, meaning it is essentially harmless. The
study was a useful reminder that all science is settled. Until it’s not.


http://www.weeklystandard.com/articl...62.html?page=3

LOL. The Weekly Standard. You're so ****ing stupid. ROTFLMAO!!!