These pictures are familiar to senior Pittsburghers and to anyone who has researched the history of Pittsburghduring the time it was known as "The Smoky City". They were taken in the downtown area in the daytime in the late 40's or early 50’s. The clock says it is 11:00 AM - not 11:00 PM.
Most homes were heated by burning coal. And the steel mills burned coke. The soot turned a fresh snowfall turned gray within minutes . Mount Washington and the Southside were the poor areas back then because the prevailing winds in Pittsburgh are west and northwest and these areas got dirtier quicker and smelled more. Businessmen needed a second white shirt to make it through the day. Housewives had to assess the wind direction before they put the wash on the clotheslines. My grandparents lived in Hazelwood, the home of Jones and Laughlin's coke batteries. The smell of rotten eggs, sulphur dioxide, was everywhere.
The environment is pristine compared to what it was when I was born in 1951. Therefore, I propose that the EPA has completed the job and should be downsized to an agency that polices what it has accomplished.
But, given that it is a federal government agency, it is immortal. It makes regulations that have the force of law. Federal agencies can’t make laws. Only Congress can do that. The Constitution says so. But Congress has been happy to abdicate its responsibilities especially because millions of people, who couldn’t know what things were like in the past, believe that they and their children would be nothing more than gelatinous hunks of cancer if not for the EPA.
Because all federal agencies have budgets that increase every year without regard to how efficiently they spent last year’s money, they ignore a fundamental law of economics - the Law of Diminishing Returns. In the case of the EPA, making a reduction in a pollutant when the concentration of the pollutant is high is relatively easy and inexpensive. This is The Law of Harvesting The Low Hanging Fruit. Making further reductions becomes increasingly difficult and more expensive to the point where another small reduction will be prohibitively expensive.
Cost is one thing but the more important question: "Is the next reduction in pollutant concentration even necessary in the first place?
The EPA contends that the only safe concentration of a pollutant, carcinogen, etc. is zero or as close to zero as can be measured. This is blatantly illogical. The waste and toxin removal systems evolved by biological organisms did not stop working when the EPA took over.
About 20 years ago, 4 – 6 parts per billion concentrations of Trichlorethylene (TCE) were found in the aquifer that runs under the Ohio River and supplies potable water to some Beaver County communities. The cancer risk of drinking two liters a day of this water was described to be the same as smoking 10 cigarettes over one’s lifetime. Only when the belief is that zero is the only safe concentration can one make an idiotic statement like this without choking on it.
The pollutant du jour is mercury. TV ads assert that invisible mercury in the air causes brain damage in the unborn child. And the source of the mercury? They say it comes from burning coal.
Are the liberals really concerned about the unborn child? Or are they revealing once again that they are a bunch of nutballs who think upside down?
Liberals believe that an inconvenient unborn child is merely a biological mass that can be flushed down the toilet at the whim of the the owner of the uterus. These same people claim that invisible air-borne mercury will harm the convenient and wanted unborn child. And these same people apparently believe that the mercury in CFL light bulbs is different from that other mercury because CFL bulbs are going to save Mother Gaia.
What idiocy. The inmates have nearly taken over the asylum.
Burning coal creates heat energy; which is converted to electrical energy; without which none of us could survive.
Burning it makes smoke that contains unburned carbon (soot), sort of burned carbon (carbon monoxide), burned carbon (carbon dioxide), burned sulfur (sulfur dioxide), water and lesser quantities of other stuff. And while the environment is doing quite well, emissions could be reduced even more if the EPA allowed coal-fired power plants to make incremental improvements. But it demands that these plants obtain new permits for the entire facility. The permitting process takes years (job security eh?) and the demands of the EPA are extremely expensive (The Law of Diminishing Returns).
And thus the EPA shows itself to be an immortal bureacracy which has abandoned its original charter. It cares nothing about the environment when it comes to preserving itself.
And that is why it must be abolished it it’s current form.
