Reva McAulay
MHC 200 Weekly Write-up #3
9.24.12
The EPA is apparently a bunch of spineless wimps. Now admittedly they have huge corporations and even lots of politicians against them on the grounds that their policies interfere with economic growth but still. I’m not even saying that they need to create more stringent regulations, although I think they should. But when a government organization imposes such lax punishments on people who blatantly flaunt the rules and outright forge lab tests, that qualifies them as a bunch of spineless wimps. It seemed bad enough last week that Gen Electric got to avoid cleaning up the river for decades, but at least that could charitably be considered some sort of due process. Exxon Mobil did it one further by not only ignoring the law but by getting caught ignoring it several times and then forging test data to get around it. The punishment for which was a relatively small fine that meant nothing to a corporation the size of Exxon Mobil and was probably less than the profits that came from the illegal act in the first place.
The EPA’s reaction to the first time they saw Exxon Mobil cleaning barges in Arthur Kill was reasonable: inform the company that they would have to stop. The next time they caught them doing it should have resulted in a significant fine on top of having all the profits from the barge cleaning taken away. The third time should have resulted in much larger fines, ideally in addition to fines and citations for the individuals responsible for running that operation. And the fraudulant lab tests should have gotten criminal charges for the people who ordered them and actually changed them and fines for everyone else who knew about it.
Yeah, its taking a hard line on it, but the EPA has so little power and authority that they have to take a hard line if anyone is to be reasonably expected to follow regulations. There are dozens of laws out there that people don’t follow because they are so unenforced as to seem that it is almost encouraged to break them. Say, for example, jaywalking (at least in New York City). There’s no risk to jaywalking, and even if you do it in front of a police officer they won’t so much as tell you not to do it. All of this makes it so that there’s nothing wrong with jaywalking on either a practical level or a moral level. If the EPA does not enforce its own regulations, it almost seems like it is encouraging people to ignore them. What moral imperative is there to follow the law if the law makers think it is so unimportant as to not even be worth taking action against?
One question remaining is where such barge cleaning operations should happen. There hardly seems a safe place for these chemicals to be released. The one ongoing point of uncertainty in this class is what exactly should be done with hazardous wastes, since we’ve seen so many examples of what should not be done.
The study of lead in Central Park lake was more interesting but less ire-inducing, so it goes last. Although having to wait to find out the cause of the lead levels is about as annoying as finding the last chapter of a mystery ripped out and having to go back to the library to track down another copy. The example of leaded/unleaded gasoline is I think a good example of why it is better to err on the side of caution when it comes to environmental policies. Scientists discovered that lead in the air had a negative effect on health, so policy-makes decided to eliminate what seemed like a large source of lead: leaded gasoline. That unleaded gasoline did not actually improve air quality is not so important when seen from the future perspective that the economy recovered quite well from switching to unleaded gasoline. Although it probably hurt the US auto industry, they would have run into other troubles anyway, probably sooner rather than later. That is a much better outcome than would have happened if leaded gasoline did turn out to be dangerous but continued to be used anyway. If the government decides to wait for incontrovertible truth on every public health or environmental issue, there will be even less progress than there is now (which is very little). At some point they just have to decide that the risks of doing nothing outweigh the consequences of action. Otherwise you end up with results like the one we learned about last week, with General Electric spending years arguing that the high levels of dangerous chemicals weren’t their fault, and that even if it was it wouldn’t be their responsibility to fix it, and even if it was there wasn’t anything they could do so the best course of action would to do nothing and allow the environment to fix itself.
