December 1, 2012
-
Why We Need The EPA…A Primer for Idiots
During the election, I noticed a sickening number of posts about the EPA, that opined how “wasteful” and useless it was, and how it “needed to go”. Admittedly, these posts and replies tended to come from the “Small government twinks”, who refuse to admit how much of their lives are actually made possible by “government interference”. Today, the EPA is down in Paulsboro NJ, scene of a train derailleur that sent something called Vinyl Chloride into the air, causing dozens of people from an area three towns wide to be hospitalized.
A few cogent facts. Vinyl Chloride is severely toxic. It can kill you, and not slowly. The bridge that caused the train to fall into the water is owned by Conrail. A few yahoos are opining that this is not a “tax payer” issue…but a matter of “private property”. That’s nice…but since the gas LEFT the property in the PUBLIC air, it makes a sticky problem. Should the locals just HOLD THEIR BREATH til the toxins dissipate? What about the chemicals that made their way into the creek? The aquifer in South Jersey is sand…any chemicals will leech into the ground water…effecting millions, not to mention the local flora, fauna, and farms. Gee…I wonder when the last major company cheerfully took on an environmental clean up? I wonder which one didn’t drag their feet, and FORCE the government to take them to court for YEARS…while they debated liability? (And don’t even start with BP…we will not know the full cost of that disaster for a decade…they did the BARE minimum.)
Conrail will not just ante up.
SOMEONE will have to force their hand…but in the mean time, the mess MUST be cleared. This isn’t one of those “Let’s wait until the cut the check” moments. This is like Katrina, 9-11, or Sandy…it NEEDS immediate attention. Now NJ is still absorbing the impact of Sandy…which they are now estimating at 30 BILLION in damages, including lost revenues. I’m pretty sure the local municipalities are going to have a helluva time collecting taxes on the Mc Mansions the storm destroyed. FEMA doesn’t cover “vacation homes”, and the insurance industry stopped writing policies on that side of the Parkway a few years ago. That’s not an opinion…it’s fact. So NJ doesn’t have the resources to deal with an environmental accident of this level.
Pretty sure Clark Kent isn’t going to fly in and suck the toxins from the air, the ground water, and the soil. SO…we need something BIGGER, and stronger than a local governmental entity to cope with it. “Well I don’t live in NJ.” Nice for you…but I assume your state has a railroad going through it somewhere? Meaning the same thing could happen to you. And maybe you have a smaller population…so less people will be effected…but you need only look at the town of Libby Montana to see what an industry can do to a small town.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libby,_Montana
And yeah, the EPA stuck their FAT NOSES into that one too…because the mining company had no intention of correcting a thing.
The election is over. People need to understand connections.
Clear air and water are no longer happy accidents. Observe the air quality over in China, where there is NO regulation. A lot of the same people I know who favored “small government” are now DEMANDING that “someone” fix the Jersey Shore. “Someone” usually means the Government, the same one they claim to detest. The town of Camden is struggling to police it’s streets, and is being told by the Governor to take a hike. Now I am not being snide…but I wonder if the attitude of “FIX THE SHORE NO MATTER WHAT” is accompanied by the knowledge that the cost of doing so will be IMMENSE? They want “no new taxes”, but they want Seaside back. I would add that some of the shore communities were rather elite. Just how many tax dollars should be spent to repair a recreation area that tended to exclude the public from access to the beach? Vacations are optional. But police coverage is a necessary evil, and I am wondering why no one is talking about that.
Yes, I know people LIVED at the shore. They built their homes there. Funny thing. I live in New England now. Most of the “beach houses” of 100 years ago are actually quite away from the beach. I guess they actually NOTICED that if you built too close to the water, you could lose it all in a big storm. They also did a MUCH better job of maintaining the dune plants that stabilized fragile shore areas, and protected the beaches. Those prickly burr things that hurt your feet do a dynamite job of keeping sand in place. The growth that is home to nasty green heads helps KEEP the beach where it is. But this is really about the EPA…and if we really need the protection.
A few years back, the families at Camp LeJuene in North Carolina (you know MILITARY families?) started turning up with a record number of childhood cancers…nasty ones. Lots of miscarriages too. That usually means an environmental issue…and sure enough it was. Turns out the base dry cleaning plant was leeching chemicals into the ground water…and had been for a while. They didn’t call Ghost Busters…They called the EPA. They tested…made suggestions to correct the situation…and left quietly. What a HORRIBLE, invasive, EVIL governmental agency.
You get the gist. But if you really think you don’t need the EPA, plug your state’s name into a search engine, followed by the words “Super Fund Sites”. And when you read about what they had to clean up, REMIND yourself that the Superfund no longer exists. They “de-funded” it over a decade ago. Oh…and most of THOSE sites were messes from decades before. That toxic stuff has the half life of Radium, or worse…it doesn’t “go away”. Any midnight dumps done since then are not slated for clean up…now…tell me again how WE DON’T NEED THE EPA?
Post a Comment
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Comments (27)
I think that people who believe that government agencies like the EPA, FDA, USDA etc do more harm than good or are examples of big government have no clue how much their lives would really change without them. They are always crying private corporations, and that’s just laughable….where do they think they money comes from that pays “private” corporations that get contracted to clean up disasters like the BP spill?
I’m not sure and can’t look up the information now but I think I heard not long ago the NJ annual budget is about $1 billion. As you said the estimated damage from Sandy alone is $30 billion. We’ve already forgotten a hurricane hit the Northeast last year. If NJ citizens had to shoulder these costs alone NJ would be all but unlivable right now. Now this Conrail wreck and I heard there was another train wreck caused by the same bridge collapsing several years ago yet republicans in Congress filibustered the President’s infrastructure bill which not only have started much needed repairs on roads and bridges but would have put people to work to do those repairs. People working means people have money to spend and that is good for our economy. Not only are the republicans in this Congress penny smart and pound foolish. They have been willing to put America at risk for the sake of making a President fail so they would be able to take the White House in 2012….or so they believed. Now I wonder how much it will cost taxpayers to clean up this toxic chemical mess? I grew up learning expressions like “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”
It makes me want to give someone a copy of “The Jungle” and tell them to kick rocks. People don’t always do the right thing, especially when it’s going to cost so much money. I thought it was obvious that the EPA is a necessary part of the government. Maybe it’s not obvious that the sky is blue, either.
@SasGal - Unfortunately, they are MANY.
When the Twin Towers were being built, tons and tons of asbestos was used in the construction, as a fire retardant. At the time, it was cutting edge…and made sense. No one could have predicted that after they were completed, asbestos would be found to be so toxic, or so dangerous. Instead of insisting on re-mediating the building, it was decided to leave the walls intact…on the grounds that it was MORE dangerous to go digging it out, making it airborne than leaving it where it was. Also logical. No one could have IMAGINED what would happen to those Towers…or could have dreamed that the asbestos would rain down on the streets below like an evil snow.
Less than a day after the attack, the EPA was THERE…at Ground Zero. A few years later, they were there for Katrina…the Anthrax Post Offices, the BP spill…all the places no one WANTED to be near. But if you look around Xanga, you’ll find posts by people who swear the EPA is some evil agency, determined to ruin people’s lives.
I don’t know if I have seen posts like those? Can you point me in a direction?
@SasGal - http://explorer9360.xanga.com/764639397/ron-paul-encyclopaedia—quick-overview/
You could start with this one…and just about every other Ron Paul supporter on Xanga. Paul was clear that the EPA had to “go”…it was a branch he intended to shut down.
@galadrial - Interesting. I’ll look into these.
Whenever I meet a “small government” conservative I always ask them if they think the FCC is an example of “big government” or restrictions on abortion or gay rights. Many social conservatives are anything but conservatives in terms of the size of government.
@galadrial - I never understood why people would think that letting go of the EPA was a good thing. Although, many Ron Paul supporters I have talked to had no idea what I was talking about when I’d ask them about the EPA. They really had no clue what Paul’s intentions were regarding the whole organization.
I don’t really know what’s worse, someone who is blind to campaign promises, or someone who knows and still supports things like that.
@Saridactyl - The problem with ending ANY oversight is the assumption that industry will behave without being MADE to.
Paul is a major Ayn Rand fan…he named his son for her. He simply can’t stand the thought of ANY market or industry oversight, which he believes corrupts capitalism. But too often, the “little guy” has been run over by the industry giants—proving that the field is anything but level.
The ignoramuses you’re talking about forget—or just never knew—the history of the things they yak against, which as often as not have a conservative pedigree. The EPA’s no exception. Nixon was the one who established that agency, f’rchrissake.
Just because people support smaller government doesn’t mean they want to do away with all federal agencies. I would also point out that supporting a candidate does not necessarily mean you agree with them on every single stance they hold. Ron Paul believes that there is too much corruption with the EPA – a lot of companies simply pay the EPA fines and keep on polluting rather than stopping the polluting. They get bought off. Paul believes that more power should rest with the states in handling their own environmental issues rather than the federal government and that it would be more effective than the EPA. For decades, people like myself have been derided as nuts for not trusting the EPA’s lack of concern over fluoride. Finally, this year, it’s been admitted that fluoride is a serious health hazard (causing dental fluorosis) and that the levels of it in our tap water is actually dangerous. I don’t know if I support disbanding the EPA…it’s one of those things I could go either way on provided a) the EPA gets it’s act together or b) the states were willing to take over the responsibility.
@firetyger - You may not have noticed, but some states have a MUCH larger risk of environmental disaster, and it’s impact than others, NJ is one of those Gateway states—-where stuff goes through on the way to somewhere else. It also had a HUGE population, for such a small land mass, so when something happens, it’s guaranteed to effect a much larger population than if the same disaster happened, say in the rural Midwest.
“The states have to take care of their own”. Interesting. So based on that, the Midwest would not exist inside a few tornado seasons, Louisiana and parts of Alabama would be SOL after Katrina, NJ would be shutting down shop about now…and I am hard pressed to imagine a region that doesn’t feature some sort of natural disaster. So I see no issue with SHARED emergency response which is of MUTUAL benefit.
And I am not saying you are crazy on the fluoride thing…but I’ve been hearing about the effects of pcb’s, dioxin, and a whole train car full of chemical horrors that would whiten your hair for three decades, from a man who worked with them EVERY day. Some of the toxins can kill you pretty damned quick, or worse, inflict a long, slow lingering death. Let’s say I am more focused on THOSE than fluoride. In the grand scheme, it’s like worrying about the poppy seeds on a bagel triggering a false positive on a drug test…when you know you are a junkie.
No matter what you believe, the better question is what sort of environmental hazard exists near you…that they KNOW about…and what might be there unseen. Because it doesn’t glow green, or smell funny, or always shows up to the naked eye. Fluoride is not on a par with a priority pollutant that can ruin your health at 3 parts per billion in a water solution—and just might exist in your soil, your air, or your water.
@n_e_i_l - Hi Neil…yes, and he was the first president to propose National Health care too…yet no one ever called HIM a socialist.
The EPA’s history is complex. At it’s inception, it had no teeth, no ability to enforce. When it did, it it was small fines that meant nothing, compared to the cost of the cleanup. Later they were allowed to charge corporations for that—in addition to the fines, to make polluting too expensive to be worth it. THAT was when the legal battles got serious. Companies would spend decades in court, arguing liability—all the while staging re-organization or sales that would assure that the original corporate entity was a shell by the time the case was heard…and eliminating or limiting their actual costs.
That’s why I will never agree that a corporation should have citizens rights…they can evade justice almost at will, simply by keeping a case in the courts for decades. If someone shoots me, they have to face a trial…but if a company causes my death as an acceptable loss to doing business, no one is accountable.
I too worry about the callousness with which many large corporations operate when it comes to the welfare of their fellow human beings. I worry about how easily they seem to avoid accountability via paying off the right people or via legal shell games. And I about how the EPA hasn’t been able to stop it, though they have been mitigating disasters in many cases and I do appreciate that.
I don’t think that giving the EPA more power or money would solve the problems, and I don’t think gutting the EPA or getting rid of it will solve the problems either. I think we have a more fundamental problem of greed and corruption to deal with in both many corporations and our government. Until we solve those problems, finding a more effective way to deal with environmental issues is going to be about as probable as successfully hunting jackelopes. Which is tragic, because ecological catastrophes are becoming ever more likely and they’ll only get worse as we continue to engage in massive over-consumption of natural resources.
@Nous_Apeiron - I have to disagree.
Since clean ups are increasingly restricted (Recalling that there IS no Superfund anymore), and the current logic is cleaning something up AFTER it is an emergency,( when it will cost three times as much) the EPA can’t have it’s funding or it’s power limited by “popular” perceptions. Reagan began gutting the EPA thirty years ago, and put that idiot Watt in charge of the interior.
Water once fouled is a lost asset…land once contaminated can be CENTURIES away from use. And clear air, last I checked was not optional. We have a current tax code that ALLOWS a company to write off the cost of an environmental clean up. WHY? Do we allow convicted felons to write off their legal costs?
I’m not a tree hugger. I was married to a man who dealt with things that just about gave me nightmares. There was one waste site where a failed chemical manufacturer got the BRILLIANT idea of manipulating some chemicals to “make” legal hybrids of currently banned substances. Sort of a chemical version of Jurassic Park? The result was hundred of drums of unstable mixtures the company left behind—some buried, some not. I vividly remember hearing about one of them. It was kept alone in a cinder-block shed…nothing near it. This gave the remediation team pause. They finally moved it into an open field. (It was sitting in a few inches of water.) They were told to dry it down, and open it very carefully.
They then extracted a tiny sample from the full drum (that would be 55 gallons?) One GRAIN of that stuff, (which looked like salt I am told) was then set up in a pipette that was arranged to release a small amount of water…so they could observe how stable it was. The resulting PLUME of flame (More than 10 feet) suggested it was EXTREMELY unstable. But by then, the company had shut down, and the owner had fled to parts unknown. Now I guess they could have LEFT it there…for some unsuspecting idiot to play with…but I suggest that would have been a fairly major hazard for the locals.
The same man who worked that site also attended a workshop on domestic terrorism, where they discussed the fact that any any week, there are about a dozen would be Una-bombers cooking something potentially deadly in their KITCHEN. Fortunately, they usually end up killing themselves…leaving behind STUFF that must be dealt with. Pretty sure there will be no volunteers for that job…short form…we NEED the EPA. And the EPA can’t be frail, toothless, and unable to enforce law.
@galadrial - I don’t disagree with you on the scope of the problem. You’ve already made an excellent case for why we should take the problem seriously.
So let’s say that we try the approach of increasing the funding and enforcement powers of the EPA. Here’s what I suspect will happen if we do that in our current situation.
Large corporations in industries that have major environmental impact make sure that their toadies are likely candidates for any new or current positions of power in the EPA. Bills which would close loopholes favorable to their profits are defeated by special interest groups serving as a front for or simply discreetly funded by those same large corporations. They make significant campaign donations to important legislators and key players in the administration, providing them with enough reason to look the other way. New regulations are kept in extended discussions for as long as possible, and when finally instituted, they are immediately challenged in court, delaying their effects long enough for the corporations to limit their losses. Their representatives pay lip service to the idea of environmental protection when talking to EPA officials or watchdog groups and talk about how badly the EPA hurts the little guy who can’t afford to challenge them legally as a dodge to keep from having to talk about how they factor in massive EPA fines as a cost of doing business and act unethically. In essence, they continue doing business as usual.
But maybe I’m just indulging in pessimism. So what do you see changing if we increase the power and funding of the EPA?
@Nous_Apeiron - So I see you side stepped the idea of closing the little “tax break” loophole for clean ups?
It’s like this…the Swiss observed that when the uber wealthy got speeding tickets, they just paid them—so what? THEN they made the speeding fine based on your annual income. You could get a ticket for 800K…which made that lead foot sort of expensive. Guess what? It worked.
So far as “corruption” in the EPA is concerned, I think the issue is more the corrupting influence of lobbies—which for the last 30 years have bought sold virtually EVERYTHING in DC. The Abromowitz scandal certainly proved enlightening—about the level of corruption that spread like a web from Ave K out.
Let me ask you this. If you could PROVE that an company CEO had knowingly (and many did) allowed something to be dumped that resulted in childhood cancers, and the death of say 2 dozen children…would you support sending that CEO away for life? For the last 30 years, we have allowed companies to do what an individual would face life in prison—even a death sentence for. Would you support enacting RICO, when a board of trustees acted in concert,and produced something that hurt people’s lives, destroyed their land—that sort of thing?
Enron happened a long while back. So did Worldcom. Bernie Madoff is still in jail…yet I have seen NO EFFORT to deal with white collar crime. Is the answer to ignore it? If a child is poisoned by ground water contamination, is it just a terrible shame…or a terrible crime? In China they EXECUTE you for that sort of thing. In the US, we give you a gilded severence package.
I know about EPA regulation by virtue of being married to a scientist for almost 30 years. He knew the regs even BEFORE he worked for them…because companies USED to hire chemists to deal with regulatory issues. Now they just hire lawyers. My point is that this is not ignorance…it’s willful disobedience of laws. If you run a red light, you MIGHT hit someone else…but if you dump a serious toxin into a stream, or into the ground and it makes its way to a water table, how does that differ from a terrorist dumping something in a water supply? You will get a fine, and a serious ticket if you hurt someone. Your insurance will go up, and you will have YEARS to think about that mistake, all the while paying the price for it.
BUT NOT IF YOU ARE A COMPANY. That disturbs me.
What do I see changing if the EPA gets more funding? Well for one, they might start cleaning things from the old Super fund list again. Super Fund designation was a curious thing. It was not a matter of cleaning EVERYTHING..
.just the areas that had the most significant and immediate health risk to the greatest number of people.
NJ was the butt of jokes about toxic waste sites—but in reality there are hundreds more…all over the country. NJ got the funding because of it’s population. But there are other parts of the land that are JUST as fouled up…but have far lesser numbers of people. (Part of the reason the “death panel” nonsense amused me…we’ve been playing THAT one with potential Superfund sites for three decades.) Call me a dreamer…but I think people in Alabama deserve clean ups too…or Missouri—even Louisiana, which faces awful contamination from petroleum refineries. A town of 40,000 should not get short shrift, because a town of 400,000 needed it more. But THAT was how it was done.
Oh…and one other detail. Most of the sites they worked were about 40 years old. Meaning there are probably plenty of NEW ones, as yet unknown.That also bothers me immensely.
Is it actually fair for industries to hand the tax payers their clean up costs? How much of our taxes are actually business subsidies?
I suggest that the guidelines need to be stream lined—but when you run against the mountain that is “corporate law”, good luck with that. I was chosen a few years back to be part of a” mock jury” for the law firm that represented the WR Grace trial. They hired me, and about a hundred other people for a week…900 bucks a piece, to listen to the case, and see how we responded. What did I learn? That several very large corporations had managed to keep the case OUT of court for almost two decades. Why? (I asked a lawyer I know about that.) Because the suits for the workers died with them. There were thousands in the beginning…by the time the case was heard? A few dozen. Their families could not sue after the family member died.
So while I appreciate the “little guy” stories, I am a bit more concerned about the BIG dudes who seem to screw the rest of us around endlessly…just because they can. If it hurt THEM, they could slow down…cool their jets…and maybe just decide that it’s better to play by the rules.
Or am I just nuts?
@galadrial - ”The states have to take care of their own”. Interesting. So based on that, the Midwest would not exist inside a few tornado seasons, Louisiana and parts of Alabama would be SOL after Katrina, NJ would be shutting down shop about now…and I am hard pressed to imagine a region that doesn’t feature some sort of natural disaster. So I see no issue with SHARED emergency response which is of MUTUAL benefit.”
I didn’t say that “the states have to take care of their own.” The way Ron Paul sees it and the way many of his supporters see it, it’s about decentralizing power, creating efficiency, and stopping corruption. That is really the main message limited government supporters care about. Not dismantling our entire government or getting rid of all regulation. A company shouldn’t be able to pay off someone like the EPA and keep on pumping out hazardous chemicals to the environment. They should have to stop, period.
When it comes to things like natural disasters, that is what the National Guard assists with a lot. They do relief work and help provide aid to those in need. Minnesota sent National Guard units down to Louisiana to help with Katrina. There is nothing wrong with helping each other out. I think the disagreement between you and I comes in who is calling the shots more often – the States or the Federal government.
@galadrial - You may want to re-read. I did mention what I thought would happen if we try to close the loopholes they use to help their profits. If you think that corporations will not do as I suggest they will do, then fair enough.
To answer your question, I have no problem with the idea of a life term for gross negligence that resulted in a dozen deaths. I also have no problem with corporations paying fines based on their income so that it really provides an effective deterrent.
My concern is with how we get that sort of thing in place. How does increasing the power and funding of the EPA accomplish increased efficacy of that sort?
I don’t think you’re nuts for getting the sense that it would be easier to play by the rules. It generally is in fact easier I think many people engage in irrational self-interest, especially in the corporate world and in political institutions. That has certainly been my experience with the corporate world.
@Nous_Apeiron - I think the matter of keeping it all “in the courts” lacks more than efficacy, as you put it. It allows a case to be a political football, that can be tossed about, based on the administration that happens to be current. The amount of support and attention a case gets should not be based on who is seated in the White House…but frequently it is. We have gone out of our damned minds, because now there are ONLY two permissible schools of thought where the EPA is concerned. It is either a liberal vampiric agency, sucking the lifeblood from industry, or it is little more than a granny agency, shaking it’s finger at the bad boys—but able to do little to stop the behavior.
Part of my objection is watching MY taxes being used to clean up corporate messes, while the companies made cast profits. I wonder…you noticed the link to Libby? That town is just about dead…and the company that made the mess is long gone…leaving chaos in it’s wake.
I found this this morning…
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/03/louisiana-town-evacuated-explosive-materials_n_2229479.html
I would bet anything it began as a disposal issue…since the sheer bulk of it is huge, and the cost of disposing that much unstable material would be immense.
The argument that industry will behave unless regulated is basically absurd. “Small companies” have made ungodly messes—like the dry cleaning industry. I shudder to think what ones the size of Monsanto have managed to create.
@firetyger - No offense…but what do you think “De-centralizing” government is going to do, exactly?
We cannot exist as 50 separate little city states—all pulling in different directions. You need a central government to deal with, among other things, when the states will not play nicely together. Currently, the farm runoff from the Del/Mar Peninsula is creating a disaster for the shell fish industry in the Chesapeake. A hundred years ago, it was the cattle versus the horses, or the sheep. Today it is the chicken versus the crab. The Del Mar producers, including Tyson can pretend its not their problem—they don’t make the rain that carries the chicken waste to the Bay…but their industry is WHY there is an issue. With a De-centralized government, how would you suggest this will go? We’re connected by more than the odd lines on a map. We share land that has no lines of demarcation that will protect one state, from what another state does.
So I see the need for there to be something bigger than each state’s wants, or needs. Period.
@galadrial - Let me be clear, wanting smaller government and decentralizing some power doesn’t mean I want the extreme of that. I don’t want the United States to act as fifty independent states because then we would end up with wars. The problem as I see it is that the Federal government has grown too large and has over-stepped it’s Constitutional boundaries. It has taken power from the states that belong to the states. Those powers should be restored.
@firetyger - And which powers would they be?
Actual examples would be appreciated.
@galadrial - For example, handling the job of the EPA. Which is what I thought we were talking about in this post. It’s like the Tenth Amendment says, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
@firetyger - So…despite the fact that one state can pollute another states resources (including ground water, or air) you actually are opposed to an EPA at all. The spill in Paulsboro is daunting because it’s very close to Delaware River, the Port of Philadelphia, and can effect not only NJ, but Pennsylvania, and Delaware as well. Were you located near it, you would have to depend on only one state to make the decisions that effect the other two…which could lead to stuff like war…which you did mention earlier.
Good luck with that….
@galadrial - No, I’d imagine that if the states set their own regulations they would still have to make certain that they weren’t violating their neighbors’ regulations if they have a shared resource like a river. You can’t just pollute your neighboring state. That would be one thing the federal government could handle – presiding over disputes between states if they cropped up.