In this week’s session we began along the same line of thought as last time, discussing the case of the Mobil company’s barge cleaning business. After being caught dumping waste without a permit, the company lied and subsequently dumped their waste directly into the Arthur Kill rather than properly store it or dispose of it.
This seems outrageous, as if Mobil deliberately flaunted the law merely for its own gain. It seems insulting to the public, shortsighted irresponsible. But in the end, when Mobil finally agreed to a settlement with the EPA, it was fined only $11 million – an insignificant sum to a company of that size. A public company is beholden to its shareholders, not the American people, and it makes its decisions based on costs and benefits. If Mobil can operate a business making tens, hundreds, or thousands of millions of dollars by avoiding paying for cleanup, it will gladly pay $11 million in fines. If the fine is smaller than the benefits of avoiding cleanup, which is assuredly is, the fine is nothing more than a small tax (and the company didn’t even need to admit wrongdoing!) The business is still worthwhile, and any smart business owner would make the decision to dump in the future if the opportunity arose.
In recent times awareness campaigns have brought attention and criticism to companies that do things like this, so businesses have to consider a bit more scrutiny when deciding whether to obey environmental restrictions or not, or risk the curse of bad public relations. But there’s no guarantee that even an educated consumer base will choose to, or even be able to avoid doing business with shady companies. People have their own cost/benefit analyses to do when deciding where to buy from, and an economy that is often oligopolistic in nature makes it hard to avoid a company even if they wanted to. We can’t rely on such considerations when determining how to stop companies from placing unpaid for costs on the public. If we want companies to make the right decision for the environment, the fine for breaking rules must be higher than the profit they get from breaking them, adjusted for time and the risk of getting caught.
Later that day we delved into the details of air-borne pollutants. Such pollutants are not really subject to bioaccumulation like water-borne pollutants are, but they also have a much greater ability to harm us directly. We can separate our reservoirs from the ocean, but we can’t separate the atmosphere we’d like to breath from the atmosphere we try to avoid.
We also have to consider how much each polluting source contributes to overall public health problems. Banning a product is a big deal; it means disrupting an industry, ending jobs related to that product, and ultimately raising prices as a more expensive or less effective replacement is used, which may have its own negative side effects. So products should not be banned unless the scientific evidence shows that they have significant negative side effects. Even if we know a harmful chemical is present within the population, we must study how it got there before we jump to conclusions.
If we know that lead is a poison, and lead is found in gasoline, it does not necessarily mean that banning leaded gasoline will improve public health by a significant amount. Lead was used (until the 1980s) in myriad products, much of which entered the atmosphere or otherwise. If, for example, 90% of the lead found in people can be traced to lead paint in buildings, and the lead concentration in humans is 50% higher than the safe level, banning lead paint will have a much strong effect on public health than banning leaded gas.
