Reva McAulay
MHC 200 Weekly Writeup #10
11.12.12
The history of the environmental movement in the U.S. is fairly impressive. Rachel Carson was obviously a very multi-talented person who could have done fine without risking so much time on a book that might not have been the success it was. The first Earth Day also had an impressive turnout in light of how now it’s basically something elementary schools celebrate.
Governer Pataki giving $230 million to create a fleet of buses and cars that run on clean energy was great, but it shows just how expensive this stuff is. $230 million just to have a bunch of clean fuel buses and cars, so creating the kind of infrastructure to allow normal cars to run on clean fuel must have an astronomical price tag. That must cost far far more than even the $9 billion dollar water-filtration plant, because it would require more than one building. (It’s also really weird that you can buy 1026 acres of land for less than $3 million but one filtration plant costs $9 billion).
LEED is fascinating, but unfortunately it seems like the only buildings that live up to those standards are the super fancy ones that make every effort to look entirely environmentally friendly. It should be something that all new buildings get. That’s not going to happen unless regular architects and engineers learn how to build environmentally friendly buildings, instead of just the super fancy, super expensive environmental architects. If we got to the point where LEED certified buildings were only marginally more expensive to design, marginally more expensive to build, and then a bit extra for materials, it would make economic sense to build them in all cases, since the long term energy savings would make up for it.
As for fracking, I am very much against it, especially upstate, but I still think everybody is being a little too hard on them. There is no reason to disallow people from doing a very safe activity for economic gain if that is what they choose to do. And nobody should forget that whatever anybody says, fracking is still very safe. It is not like standard mining that will do serious damage to the environment, one hundred percent. Fracking has a risk attached to it, but it is a relatively small one. The question is whether that small risk is worth the economic benefits, which I say it isn’t, but I’m not the dictator of the country so my opinion doesn’t count (by itself). Also, demanding proof that something is entirely safe is a little unreasonable. How is anyone supposed to prove a negative? It’s easy to prove that something causes harm, but impossible to prove that there is exactly zero chance of something bad happening. If every new technology had to be proved safe, there would be no advances made, because cars, airplanes, and cell phones all have never been proved safe.
That said, I think the risk entailed in fracking upstate (loss of clean drinking water for a city of 8 million people) is not worth the benefits (temporary job growth in a region that is not a ghost town like North Dakota). It’s great that so many people (environmental organizations, citizens, Mark Ruffalo) feel so strongly about it as to make commercials, put on ads, and create and sign petitions to Gov. Cuomo. It seems to me that public sentiment is against it here. Also, I would much prefer to see companies spend their money on renewable and clean fuels instead of going to great lengths to scrape the last drop of natural gas out of the barrel. That seems like a short-sighted strategy, considering that it’s going to run out in the near future while having a leg up on renewables will provide an ever increasing advantage.
