Should we get rid of all environmental regulation?!

So I went to a local Japanese restaurant after work the other day, I’ve been craving sushi after my week in the desert and so I settled in for a little chicken teriyaki and a B52 roll.  I ordered my standard bowl of miso soup as well and while I waited for the waitress to bring the soup, I sat there listening to the discussion at the next table.  At the table sat an older man who had the attention of a younger woman and two young guys, he was pontificating about the environment, liberals and such and I was about to tune it out when something caught my attention.  It was the phrase, “all this environmental stuff is blowing hot air, our environment is better now than it has ever been.”

He then went on to describe how the foothills area of the Sierras has improved vastly over the gold rush times.  He went on to talk about how the area was deforested and polluted with the chemicals of mining and how now we have trees and clean water and everything is wonderful.  Now, he’s not wrong about that but he then went on to talk about how because the environment is getting so much better that we need to get rid of all of this unnecessary regulation of the environment, that things get better as time goes on and that fifty years from now our environment will be cleaner than it has ever been because the earth repairs itself.  I looked over to see these three young people staring up at him with admiration in their eyes and I almost spit up my miso soup.

I quietly sat there wondering if I should insert myself into the conversation and lay down a little bit of reality and in all truth slaughter this half-ignorant wind bag, but in the end, I live and work in a very conservative county and I really just wasn’t up for the annoyance on a Friday afternoon, so I ate my meal and slipped out to enjoy my weekend.  But I don’t want to let this go, it fries my ass when I overhear things like this and friends I frequently overhear people who know just a little bit about science and then use this tiny bit of understanding to inappropriately apply science to support their ideology.  So my friends instead you’ll get to hear it and this is what I would have said.

Hi pal, couldn’t help overhearing your conversation and I find your perspective to be interesting and completely idiotic.  You are covering and interesting concept in environmental science, which is what point in time do we use as the baseline for the environment.  Taking your example, if we use the middle of the 1800’s as our baseline then yes, our environment here in the foothills is much better than it was.  However, if you pick 1800, then we have a whole different ballgame because prior to the massive environmental impact of the gold rush, this area was pristine forest habitat.  So apparently things don’t get better as time goes on, maybe you just picked a really convenient point to make your argument conform to your ideology.  I would ask people who lived on the Cuyahoga River in the 1960’s and 70’s if they think all of this environmental nonsense is just a lot of hot air.  In case you don’t know, the Cuyahoga River is most famously known as the river that caught on fire because it was so polluted:

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

So my friend why don’t we look at the reality of the environment globally and seriously if you think the global environment is better now than in 1850, I’d have to say you’re a moron.  In 1850 passenger pigeons on migration flew overhead in flocks that were a mile wide and sometimes 300 miles long, taking hours to pass; you could regularly catch blue fin tuna bigger than the biggest tuna caught today;  and there were even grizzly bears in California actually roaming around, not just on the flag.  I could go on and I don’t want to take away the successes we have had in recovering and saving species, species like the Bald Eagle, the Gray Wolf and the California Condor.  However our environment is in trouble:

* There are dead zones in our oceans depleted of oxygen

http://azstarnet.com/news/science/environment/article_69547a06-1391-5939-b3ca-451cc65b5017.html

* We now the Great Pacific Garbage Patch floating in the Pacific

http://www.greatgarbagepatch.org/

* Niger is so polluted due to oil extraction that they should close the country

http://zdeaconblue.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/the-bp-gulf-oil-spill-is-nothing-compared-to-this%e2%80%a6/

* Air quality is so bad in Beijing that athletes at the Olympics wore dust masks

http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/vancouver/blog/fourth_place_medal/post/U-S-athletes-wear-face-masks-upon-arrival-in-Be?urn=oly-98641

* Haliburton and friends are destroying water quality through hydrologic fracking

http://zdeaconblue.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/natural-gas-fracking-in-the-news/

 And yes my conservative friends, I made that entire argument without once mentioning global climate change.  How do we get people to understand the simplest of scientific principles and the difference between causation and correlation?  Honestly I don’t know but trust me we are trying in Biology and Environmental Studies classes all over the world we are trying.  In the meantime let’s remember all of the good things the Clean Air and Water Acts as well as the Endangered Species Act have done.  Should our environmental laws and policies be reviewed, of course no law or policy should be above review, but let’s not be stupid enough to think that they should all be abolished, if you’re not convinced you can borrow my copy of Silent Spring.

If this is true, BP may lead the United States into Depression

Hello friends, what I have for you tonight, if it is true, is nothing short of terrifying.  The following link that I provide: http://beforeitsnews.com/story/76/057/Scientists_Warn_Gulf_Of_Mexico_Sea_Floor_Fractured_Beyond_Repair.htmldescribes    reports  Anatoly Sagalevitch from the Russian Academy of Sciences as saying that the Gulf of Mexico leak is much worse than we have been told.  In fact the report suggests that the well is not able to be capped, leaving only two options.  Option 1 let the well run dry, which could take as much as 30 years, or seal it with a nuclear bomb.  During the Soviet era the Russians on five occasions used controlled underground nuclear explosions to cap wells.  As a matter of fact, in May the Russian newspaper, Komsomoloskaya Pravda, made this very suggestion.

This is a calamity of amazing proportions if it is true!  First off imagine the outcry of even suggesting detonating a nuclear weapon so close to the shore of the United States.  The political fight over that alone should be an amazing show.  If we do this detonation, what size wave will that throw against the gulf shore?  What type of contamination will the blast inflict upon the ecosystems of the Gulf of Mexico and how long will they take to recover?  On the economic front, should the blast be called for we can call an end to oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, is that Saudi Arabia I hear cheering?  Considering that the report says that oil is leaking from twenty-two separate sites along the sea floor I wonder how many barrels of oil per day are actually leaking out, the count has risen from the original 1000 barrels a day to the most current estimate of  up to 40,000 barrels a day.  This spill is already the third largest of all time and if this report is true, it will quickly become the largest oil spill in the history of mankind and the worst ecological disaster the Gulf of Mexico has ever seen.

The implications are far-reaching from the impact on shrimping, oyster and fishing industries including impacting the Blue Fin Tuna fleets of the northeastern US coast as the area impacted is the birthing and raising ground of these fish.  As we enter hurricane season who on the gulf isn’t terrified that a major storm will come through and throw massive amounts of crude onto the shore and into the sensitive wetlands of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

The economic implications of this report are beyond alarming.  If we are forced to nuke this well shut, then drilling in the gulf stops and we become much more highly dependent upon foreign oil.  Oil prices will rise quickly and we will see $4 a gallon gas soon, or will it be $5, or $6 a gallon gas?  When oil prices raced past $100 a barrel and domestic gas prices above $4 a gallon our expanding economy suddenly stopped and reversed itself sending us and our financial system on a crash course with depression.  We narrowly avoided that depression and somewhat stabilized our economy, but with the European financial issues we’ve seen serious volatility in our markets.  Nuke this well in the gulf and I fear that the next great depression is a certainty.