Pollution

Tom Lehman uswa12 at lorainccc.edu
Thu Dec 3 07:59:14 PST 1998


Dear Doug and the LBOers,

Louis brings up one of my favorite tunes. Smart management is going to make use of byproducts. Rather than send them to the toxic waste dump. It makes economic sense to make use of the byproducts of a process because the captured byproducts are free. All you have to do is figure out what you can use them for, make out of them, or sell them to whoever needs them. Now I realize this is impossible with certain types of radioactive shit at this point in time---but just about any other type of chemical has the potential to be turned into something useful.

As far as culprits in the air quality control(aqc), look up in the sky and wonder where all those tons of jet fuel and exhaust are ending up. If you want to be pedestrian follow a black smoke spewing city bus around for awhile. Are jets and city buses immune from criticism? Consider the altitudes that jets operate at and the the millions of tons of fuel they burn at those altitudes. Or why we destroyed our urban and interurban light rail systems(trolleys) in this country. Four wheel drive or rear two wheel drive is no issue compared to the real culprits.

Another thing we should consider is the destruction of the best farmland in America by urban, suburban, exurban sprawl.

Sincerely, Tom L.

Louis Proyect wrote:


> >The most polluted places are those who haven't yet reached a sufficiently
> >developed stage, be they ruled by right-wing dictatorships, or by socialist
> >(China, URSS) or social-democratic (India) governments. Rich countries, be
> >they California or Singapore, can afford paying the costs of cleaning up. If
> >you can provide a *realistic* path from a subsistence economy to the
> >Information Age, skipping the "Dickens phase", I'm ready to follow you. But
> >this time it must work for real: even if the enemy is bad, ugly and unfair.
> >
> >Enzo
>
> In actuality, pollution has not been cleaned up in places like California
> in such a way as to really resolve the ecological crisis. What has happened
> is that pollutants do not go directly into the atmosphere any longer, but
> are collected at the smokestack and then deposited in "toxic dumps", which
> are in working-class or poor neighborhoods. Indian reservations' biggest
> industry, after gambling casinos, is as collection sites for the poisons
> big corporations produce. Scientists like Barry Commoner urge that the
> industrial process be retooled in such a way as to eliminate toxic
> byproducts *within* the industrial process. Rachel's Weekly comments on
> Commoner's "Making Peace with the Planet":
>
> "Commoner argues...that we have tried to cure the symptoms instead of
> trying to prevent the disease. Once pollution is created, Commoner argues,
> there is little that can be done about it. Take, for example, the chemical
> industry. Under the federal Community Right to Know law, the chemical
> industry has reported that it emits 20 billion pounds of toxic chemicals
> annually into the environment. Based on these data, the Congress's Office
> of Technology Assessment (OTA) has estimated that the actual yearly release
> of toxic chemicals into the environment is close to 400 billion pounds. Of
> this, only 1% is destroyed, which is the only way to prevent these
> substances from threatening living things. If the other 99% of chemical
> industry wastes were to be destroyed, the cost would be $20 billion
> annually. But the entire profits of the chemical industry in recent years
> has been only $2 billion per year, so obviously the chemical industry
> cannot afford to destroy its own wastes. This is why the chemical industry
> still releases 99% of its wastes to the environment and must continue to do
> so. Commoner's point: once pollution has been created, it is too expensive
> to control. The only way to avoid damage from pollution is to avoid
> creating it in the first place: pollution prevention is the only way. ('If
> you don't put something into the environment, it isn't there,' says
> Commoner, with characteristic simplicity.)"
>
> Finally, the biggest ecological crisis we are facing has nothing to do with
> "pollution" as such. Global warming is not being caused by toxins, but
> through the "normal" process of private transportation. As long as the auto
> industry finds profit in 4-wheel drive, off the road vehicles, which were
> responsiblejust by themselves for a 12% increase in the greenhouse effect
> last year, we face a catastrophe which was foreshadowed by the 10,000
> deaths in Central America in the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch.
>
> Louis Proyect
>
> (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)



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