Cure for the environment

Anyone who watched the Cuyahoga river burning in Cleveland in 1969 can attest to man’s ability to pollute. Or just try taking a breath in windless downtown Los Angeles in the late ’80s. Or check out the mutated frogs in the Carolinas. Or watch the lake fish rise, belly up, in New England as acid rain destroys their habitat.

Man can and does pollute the local environment. Taken collectively across the planet, man’s hand can be seen to the detriment of nature. CO2 levels are higher than ever recorded. The ozone layer needs repairing from the release of CFCs (which we never knew were so dangerous).

Can it be all fixed? Sure, but at a cost. The cleaning of the Cuyahoga River, now teeming with fish and wildlife once more, cost hundreds of millions over the decades and, no doubt, cost industry profits and locals jobs. What was the alternative? To leave it as it was would have caused a dead zone for all humans and life.

Cleaning up is really horribly expensive and takes decades. Just ask how much those toxic waste sites cost in Superfund dollars. And “un-polluting� is darned expensive, too. To clean acid from factory smoke, to remove pollutants from human waste, to stop chicken factory-farming run-off mutating frog life, to scoop up mud-infested PCBs from the Hudson — all these and more — require new laws, law enforcement and heavy financing (both public and industrial). Not polluting in the first place, not causing pollution, that’s the cheapest. As our grandparents used to say, an ounce of prevention is better than the cure.

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Now we’re faced with a dilemma. The Clean Air Act working its way through Congress already has so many loopholes and riders as to make it practically useless. Don’t get me wrong, it is a start or at least a beginning to play catch-up with the rest of the industrialized nations. But those nations have their own versions of loopholes and “provisos� they can escape behind. The truth is, cleanup and “un-polluting� is so darned expensive that no one can afford it. And as for India and China, they not only cannot afford it, they have no desire to afford it. Building one coal-powered smoky power plant a day, China is on an industrial roll and will not be stopped anytime soon. Their smoke goes east, toward the United States.

I think cleanup is a whole new industry, one we have to afford when it comes to waste sites. The Superfund works, after a fashion, and needs new funding. But to try and “improve� or “un-pollute� our factories and power plants seems to me a waste of time. Why not simply engage in the time-tested American methodology of improvement, innovation and break-through? Let the capitalist system find the solution.

How does that work? For example, first the government could set standards for electric generation pollution (every government in America since 1776 has set all kinds of standards... standards from cooking stoves, gas pressure, tire wear, road speeds, electrical current... the list is endless and not at all socialist or fascist). Then it sets a target date. Then the best brains in America go to work.

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In 1952 the Pentagon set a standard for a transport plane it would buy. That was government money being guaranteed, backed by government standards and government purchasing power. The plane had to be a jet (brand new back then), it had to be made of aluminum, it had to carry 80 or more people, it had to have a range of at least 2,000 nautical miles and cruise at 30,000 feet. At the time, there was nothing flying that came close to even half that capability.

The first Boeing 707, called the test model 367-80, flew in 1954, and the first aircraft off the production line were military KC-135A flight refueling tankers and transports. After the military had four years exclusivity, Boeing rolled out the passenger 707 in 1958. The rest is history. And transportation in this country changed forever.

We need that type of forward thinking right now. Forget squeezing industry to un-pollute, forget trying to bully China into not burning coal, forget taxing with cap and trade (a device thought up by President Bush, the first one).

Like Obama’s much maligned dictate of a 35.5 mpg standard for cars by 2016, Ford has already said it will comply long before that — and make more money, selling better cars, in the process. Wall Street is happy and the taxpayer won’t have to pay to clean up more pollution. And the old cars? Scrap them, recycle them into new efficient cars.

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I advocate doing the same with all the generating power plants in this country. Set new vastly ambitious standards, set the date for compliance, fund the research (as the Pentagon did for that first prototype) then let industry find the solution and profit. Make those polluting power plants obsolete, just so much scrap iron and concrete. Tear them down. It’s a win-win. Make the new ones, make them 200 percent better, and make us the world leader by profit and example — just as Boeing and American aviation did for 14 years before anyone even began to catch up (Airbus’s little commuter, the A300, was launched in 1972).

As for the other types of polluters, find a better use for their effluent. The chicken farming factories could ship that sludge to the ranges of Texas, where they spend millions on fertilizer made from imported oil. Or those PFCs dumped into the Hudson could be chemically turned into something useful. Don’t ask me what; just don’t pretend American ingenuity cannot find a solution. It always has and it always will — if it is provided with an incentive, a standard (a fair set of rules) to work to, and the initial seed money. That’s not socialism or “big brother.� Like the Pentagon’s investment in U.S. ingenuity before, that’s the American heartland’s best hope and best interests being kick-started into action.

Peter Riva, formerly of Amenia Union, lives in New Mexico.