Never Cleaner

The environment has never been cleaner in my lifetime than now".... is the way I begin a part of my guest lecture to the business classes at a local college here in Pennsylvania. The look on the faces of the products of our public school educational system is one of disbelief.

So begins Robert T.Smith in his article in the American Thinker entitled Never Cleaner. And the truth is, he is right. I can still remember when the Cuyahoga River in downtown Cleveland caught fire. I can still remember when Lake Erie Perch were too contaminated to eat. I remember smelling the rubber plants in Akron, Ohio from 25 miles away. None of this is true today. Yet we still hear that man is polluting the planet and (cue the scary music please) "we are all going to diiiieeee!"

We have also paid, and are paying, a huge price for our atonement for having been environmental sinners. The nation has spent untold billions of dollars adding scrubbers to clean up air emissions, treatment facilities to clean up water emissions, reusing or recycling waste products to eliminate putting them in landfills. The nation has also shed thousands of jobs which are now performed overseas and out of the reach of the EPA. Now, the fact of a cleaner environment is good for people overall, and some of it even forced us to be yet more efficient, and therefore productive.

Still, I can remember when the average family station wagon got only 10 miles per gallon (MPG) and one in particular, an Mercury station wagon that seated 8, only got 6 MPG. Today, I routinely get 30 MPG in my SUV. While we should never sit smugly by and be satisfied, it doesn't hurt to know where we have come from, and to realize that there are greater problems to solve than getting our fuel mileage from 30 MPG to 35 MPG. As Bjorn Lomborg noted in his book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, what we are proposing spend world wide under the Kyoto protocol, to little practical effect, could be used instead to provide clean water to people living third world countries. The fact that nobody has taken Lomborg up on his idea says a lot about the real goals of today's environmental movement.