William Arguelles
Spiro Alexandratos
Seminar 3
September 15, 2012
Opinion Paper 2
It’s not very often that life is so accidentally humorous in a totally unintentional way. But, the whole situation with GE and PCBs that we learned about in class honestly sounds like the plot of one of the most ridiculous video game franchises ever, Resident Evil. Like I mentioned before, I’ve never really learned about environmentalism so most of your lectures are entirely new information for me. I have, however, played a lot of video games, so my instinctual reaction is to relate this new information to something I do understand, evil video game corporations. I sincerely hope that I just have a really simplistic view of the situation, but I cannot even see this GE-PCB nonsense without thinking about it as life acting out the Resident Evil games.
Let me try to explain the PCB situation like I understand it. A gigantic near-monopoly of a corporation, General Electric, had a problem in the 1940s. They needed to store a ridiculous amount of electricity to gradually send out and power the NY state area, but the capacitors needed a really good really cheap insulator. So using the dark sorcery of Chemistry, GE created the PCB, a substance that let them cheaply insulate their capacitors and make unreal levels of electricity with “no foreseeable downside. In an alternate imaginary universe, the gigantic near-monopoly of a corporation, the Umbrella Corporation, had a problem. They had cured so many diseases, no one was buying their pharmaceuticals. So using literal dark sorcery, Umbrella created the T-Virus and the anti-virus, so people would get sick with one and cured by the other with no foreseeable downside.
I know you think I’m grasping at straws here, but bare with me. I also know it’s going to irk you to no end, but to me, PCBs have to be the product of black magic, because it is a hilariously evil compound that would make the T-Virus look cuddly. Not only does the reaction to synthesize PCB produce a more stable end-product, thus making a backwards decomposition near-impossible, but the reactants are both easy to find/make and really cheap. So mass-producing PCB seems to be an easy cheap process. In addition to that, PCBs are, in general, odorless, only lightly yellow colored liquids that easily flow through skin that, when accumulated, are highly toxic. So, to reiterate, PCBs are cheap and easily made products that can’t be readily destroyed and when they build up in your easily penetrable body, are toxic. In comparison, the fictitious T-Virus is made in a highly complex and expensive reaction that can’t be cured and when they build up in your body, turns you into a zombie. When your product makes me instantly compare it to video game viruses that make zombie armies, this is not something you should be dumping in the water. Not even the literally evil Umbrella Corporation did this, because that would be the textbook definition of insanity.
Of course, GE did dump this ridiculously invincible compound into our rivers, because the obvious solution to getting rid of a toxic impossible to destroy substance is throwing it in the water and hoping for the best. This brilliant plan of “make poison, use poison for a little bit, then throw poison in the water” continued for about twenty five years, or five years longer then my entire lifespan so far. Then the EPA apparently realizing how ridiculous this plan was, made GE stop using PCBs. Hurray! Of course, it ended up with millions upon millions of pounds of this toxic substance sitting on the bottom of the Hudson. So after about another twenty five years, the EPA finally won the legal right to remove these toxins from the bottom of the river in 2007 or so. Mind you, this has been about a sixty year period of dumping PCBs into the river and letting them sit there all toxic like at the bottom of the river.
I honestly cannot comprehend this level of utter disregard not just for the environment, but also for common sense. In what universe does dumping massive quantitates of a toxin into a river not end horribly? The certifiably evil Umbrella Corporation at least had the decency to try to contain the virus, albeit horribly, once they realize the cure didn’t work. GE however, still denies that they did anything wrong and that the EPA is wrong in disturbing the environment to try to remove this toxic substance because it would mess up the delicate equilibrium of the ecosystem. I really can’t comprehend the motives behind this. Money? Do they keep more money if they ignore it or deny it? I guess they must, because that’s the only logical thing I could think of to let people be this insane.
