The Times has begun a major new series on water pollution, detailing the degradation of our water’s quality by the usual suspects, and the attendant health consequences. This looks to be a great piece of journalism, and is further proof that despite print journalism’s many failings, we need outlets like the Times to survive in some form. Who knows, this series may actually provoke some sort of salutary response.
There’s really nothing surprising here. State agencies, underfunded and understaffed, have greenlighted environmental crimes over the course of the last eight years. This trend was either initiated or encouraged, depending on how you look at it, by the Bush EPA, which preferred its water polluted, thank you. What is amazing about all this is how easy it became, the Times didn’t really have to look far, in many instances, for proof of what was going on:
Records analyzed by The Times indicate that the Clean Water Act has been violated more than 506,000 times since 2004, by more than 23,000 companies and other facilities, according to reports submitted by polluters themselves. Companies sometimes test what they are dumping only once a quarter, so the actual number of days when they broke the law is often far higher. And some companies illegally avoid reporting their emissions, say officials, so infractions go unrecorded.
In other words, the companies were fessin’ up, secure in the knowledge that they had a friend in Washington, and lots of friends in state Capitols, as the Times also demonstrates.
One interesting point made in the article is that today’s pollutant’s are relatively invisible. The water looks fine, only it’s poison, so it’s not as easy as it was in the 60s and 70s to take compelling pictures of dirty rivers and streams.
The health consequences of all this are serious, and of course, will be tremendously costly in the long run. It’s an object lesson in the interconnectedness of all things; if we would put money into enforcement of existing laws, and make some common sense changes in the law to go after non-point sources of pollution, we could avoid serious health costs (some obvious consequences are documented in the article) over the long term, since many of these poisons are slow acting. Wouldn’t it be nice if Congress had done the right thing 7 months ago, and put stimulus money into state governments instead of tax cuts. Had that money been made available, with some directly targeted to this kind of enforcement, we would have been investing in something that would have had beneficial results in both the short and long term.
In addition to enforcement, maybe we should be using some of that stimulus money to simply pay for installation of whatever equipment is needed to enable these polluters to stop. It rankles to shovel money at the bad guys, but there are times when you have to be practical, and in any event, it would be a trivial expense to what we’ve given to the Wall Streeters that have ruined our economy once, and who we are now enabling to ruin it again.
So kudos to the Times for bringing this issue to the fore, and double kudos for relegating the teabaggers to page 36 or thereabouts.
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