After last class, every breath I take on the streets of Manhattan I take with a little ease. I generally used to hold New York in relatively high regard when it came to environmental issues, but after gaining a better understanding of the air pollution problems I decided to do some more research and I found the results to be fascinating. I was not entirely wrong to glorify New York because the greenhouse gas emissions per person and our annual electricity consumption are actually quite low. New Yorkers are responsible for 7.1 metric tons per person per year, less than a third of the national average. The density of New York also allows it to have the largest mass transit system in the United States, meaning far less use of personal cars. For once this semester when I stopped to consider the environment and more specifically its relation to New York City I found myself happy. Maybe the PCBs were acceptable if we were so on game in other ways. Of course unfortunately I realized my mistake when I looked deeper into New York’s air pollution.

Our city’s amazing density may mean less pollution per person, however when factoring in the concentration of people and therefor pollution that it enables it becomes very worrying very quickly. An EPA study ranked Manhattan 3^rd in the nation for cancer risk from airborne chemicals with Bronx and Kings counties also coming in the top 10. In the American Lung Association’s (ALA) 2012 report on ozone levels and particle pollution not a single borough broke higher than C with the exception of Staten Island’s particle pollution ranking B; however their ozone levels earned them the five boroughs only F. Perhaps the saddest part is these are the highest rankings New York has ever seen since the ALA began writing these reports thirteen years ago. Rejoice as we may over low emissions and use of mass transit, the air we breath is slowly killing us, with 6% of annual deaths in NYC chalked up to air pollution by the New York Department of Environmental Protection.

The good news however, as proved by the ALA study, is that although New York’s air quality is still horrible it is improving, and the city is making a conscious effort to address the problem. In 2007, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg launched PLAnyc, a policy agenda intended to tackle many of the problems set to face New York in the future with environmental issues being one of the key platforms. The effort set the demanding goal of having the cleanest air of any big US city by 2030. According to the initiative’s 2011 report “over 97% of the 127 initiatives in PlaNYC were launched within one-year of its release and almost two-thirds of its 2009 milestones were achieved or mostly achieved.” Perhaps the initiative was simply made by Bloomberg to make himself look good (2009 was an election year) but the city has been putting forward a great deal of policy over the last ten years to move the city towards cleaner air. Hybrid buses and cabs now both represent large portion of their larger fleets and since 2005 top city officials have been mandated hybrid vehicles for their personal cars.

What I see to be one of the most potentially exciting improvements is the implementation of the new Citi Bike system set to launch in spring of 2013. Having seen similar bike share systems at work in other major cities in America and abroad I see massive potential in the program and think it is a fantastic alternative to cabs and cars. It provides just the right balance of personal direction and ease of use, allowing one to take a bike wherever they want at any time on a whim without having to worry about the hassle of locking it up and bringing it with them. Unless the program is greatly mismanaged I could see the Citi Bike system making a serious difference in further turning New York away cars which would cause a potentially drastic increase in air quality over time. At least I hope it will.

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.

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.

In our latest installment, the saga of corporate destruction and irresponsibility continues. It is truly dumbfounding that the EPA found Exxon Mobil dumping hazardous waste without a permit on three separate occasions and, seemingly, no real disciplinary action came of it. On top of that, Mobil cooked their books on the matter to make the claim that benzene concentrations were not as high as the EPA found them to be, and the Agency learned of this as well. Isn’t lying to a government agency some sort of crime? I suppose it might not have been worth the government’s trouble to pursue in court. That’s scary: a company powerful enough to not only flout the government’s orders but also dissuade it from pursuing legal action.
There is a trend in these companies we have seen wreaking havoc over the past few classes: they are all corporations. Because they are entities unto themselves, the people running them are harder to hold responsible. Without internal documents to condemn people in power, no individuals can be held accountable. And unfortunately, despite the fact that corporations are real people with inalienable rights as of 2009, you can’t put them in jail. All you can do is fine them, taking what is probably a small chunk of change in corporate terms, and hope that that’s enough of a disincentive to keep them from doing it again. The efficacy of this is doubtful, however. It would probably have cost more than the measly ten million dollars the government fined Exxon Mobil for it to have run its barge-cleaning business in a way that didn’t pollute bodies of water.
Also, the consent decree is laughable. The government needs to stop handing them out to businesses that are royally taking advantage of the American public. The five big banks behind the 2008 crash, including Wells Fargo and Citi, were given a consent decree and fined. Money is hard to track as it makes its way through the bureaucracy, so who knows what fraction of the $20 billion allotted for mortgage relief will get to homeowners, and how it will be distributed. The consent decree is especially heinous in the case of Exxon Mobil and Arthur Kill, as the EPA found that they had altered their numbers to try to evade blame, so obviously they were conscious of what they were doing.
The later part of the class got into some of the logistics of how we can use science to shift public policy. The example discussed, in which lead deposition rates were dated and matched to changes in policies and historical events (e.g., World War II and the advent of nuclear weapons), seemed to work well. This got me thinking, though, about times when the science would not be as clear-cut. Lead has been known to be harmful to brain development for years, so showing health effects was not an issue in the example given. For the myriad other substances running rampant in the industrialized world, many of which we know very little about and all of which are assumed innocent until proven guilty, scientists would have to first make a convincing case for the danger posed by the chemical before regulations could be imposed and progress tracked. This is very difficult, as it is not ethical to purposely expose people to something you believe to be deleterious, and finding people who are already exposed to it introduces countless other variables that must be controlled for, such as lifestyle choices.

Seong Im Hong

September 24, 2012

Weekly Journal 3

            This week, we ended our discussion on water pollution and then continued on to the topic of air pollution. By the end of the class, I was, as usual, smarter than I was coming in. I encountered some interesting ideas such as profits v. fines, which I researched a little on my own. (I did not research, however, what the dominant source of lead was from the 60s to the 80s because I did not want to ruin the surprise. I look forward to it.)

One idea that was particularly intriguing to me the last lecture was the struggle between profits and fines. To the laypeople, $11.2 million is probably more than we will see in our lifetime. Because of that, when I first heard that Exxon Mobile was fined that amount, I felt vaguely pleased and vindicated. Surely, I thought, that was a hefty change. I was mistaken. One strange and alarming thing about our society is that there is a gigantic gap between the corporations and the laypeople. Because of that, those who are unfamiliar with what I call “corporation-money-unit” feel themselves removed from corporations and their doings. Take Exxon-Mobil’s fines, for example. $11.2 million is impressive by the sheer number of zeroes attached to the 1s and the 2, but compared to Exxon’s $40 billion profit in 2006, the fine for pollution was tiny. Miniscule. Insignificant. (I tried to compare the proportion of the fines to the profit to my own expenses. According to my calculations, I would lose $0.16 from the $570 I get every month from scholarships. Not $16, but $0.16. Well, heck, I lose more in change falling out of my pocket each month than that.)

This made me wonder exactly what the judge was thinking. Did the zeroes attached to “corporation-money-unit” made him think $11.2 million harsh enough? Even the wealthy does not earn as much as corporations do. Or did Exxon-Mobile’s “freedom of expression” sway him? (And this is a whole another can of worms that is, though juicy, too sticky to deal with in a journal.)

This is why I think a policy of proportional fines (as in Switzerland and Finland) may be a good idea for this time in our society.

If we fined Exxon-Mobil (and any corporations or private citizens) an amount proportional to their income for a particular wrongdoing, I think that we won’t have a problem of repeat offenders such as Exxon-Mobil. Like Professor Alexandratos pointed out, Exxon-Mobil continued to illegally pollute the Arthur Kill because its profits were simply too big to not. What if the fine was $11.2 billion rather than $11.2 million? That means 28% of its profits, gone. (That percentage for me would mean a loss of $160, or my groceries exchanged for ramen noodles.) That means angry stockholders for executives to deal with. That means a warning shot.

However, I doubt that this will be adopted into our rightist politics anytime soon. In an era in which the wealthy are constantly told that they are under attack by the 47% of the American population who want to destroy their hard-earned success that they alone are responsible for, we will never even convince a congressperson to consider sponsoring the bill, let alone actually have their names appear anywhere near it. It probably would spell out an end to their political career after being labeled a socialist-communist-Muslim-atheist-foreigner. I read that the American Dream is a myth now, and that class differences are far too big for anyone talented and hardworking to actually climb up the social ladder as they did a hundred years ago. I read that the reason the poor vote Republican is because they genuinely believe that they will one day become part of the wealthy caste. Maybe that is so. Maybe the only way we can realize a policy of proportional fine is by having a vast majority of Americans realize that life isn’t as it was years ago. Money isn’t even vaguely worth the same for everyone, and that there really is a corporation-money-unit that is wildly bigger than a private-citizen-money-unit. I doubt many Americans will listen, though.

Today, a whole menagerie of harmful chemicals—toxic metals, gases and PCBs among them—form and are displaced as a result of daily human processes of production and consumption. Without proper care, these chemicals could slip into critical parts of the systems that sustain human life—air, water and food—in dangerous amounts. They could cause severe illness, disability or death. To prevent this, somebody needs to acknowledge the need for action and take up the burden themselves. It would make sense for whomever takes care of these by-products to be one of the entities with some role in creating them—either the producers or the consumers.

Unfortunately, humans don’t seem to be in consensus about whose responsibility this issue should be. And anybody familiar with human nature knows that in order for anything to get done, responsibility needs to be relegated. Until firm expectations are established—for corporations, or for the environmental lookout of local communities, or both—things are unlikely to change. Corporations will dump as much waste as they like wherever they like—if they are caught, they’ll pay their fines and be free to continue as before. The EPA will file lawsuits that drag on for years, jail none of the perpetrators and do nothing to prevent the same crimes from being committed over again.

So whose job is it to protect people from environmental abuses that could harm them? Corporations and most of the public continue to back away from the problem and point at each other. In some cases, the former doesn’t even acknowledge the damage and the danger—even, as Exxon Mobile did, taking steps to conceal it—to avoid legal repercussions. The latter lacks information, and cannot legally demand or allow anything except through the power vested in its elected authorities. This is why, unless corporations begin to take on the responsibilities of human beings as well as their rights, the task of protecting the people must fall to the government.

The government’s first duty is to serve the general welfare—to ensure, within its abilities and without unduly restricting freedom, that its people are safe and have what they need to live. Corporations tend to view their first responsibility as to their stockholders, hence their loyalty is to whatever practice maximizes profits. When the government fails to restrict the freedom of corporations, letting them fall into violations and cause disasters repeatedly, it fails at its duty. The public is too large and scattered to act as one body, for itself—it has no powers, and no information; it needs the government, and the government needs to acknowledge its duty and act decisively to carry it out. And the first thing it must do is legally outline and grant itself its full powers to protect the environment—and thus, its people. It could legitimize its jurisdiction by pointing out that air and water are common resources—they don’t obey state boundaries.

It’s natural for people to feel that they have a sort of duty to the groups they belong to. Everybody on this planet is a part of the greater community of mankind—but people tend to focus more on their duties towards their smaller, more exclusive groups. This is why corporations fail to change their way of thinking, year after year. Since their beginning, they have existed to maximize profits—all of their constituents take up roles and attitudes to this end. This is why we must turn to the government, until the day when people change their way of thinking—until all humans wake up to the fact that taking care of their home planet and their fellow human beings is synonymous to taking care of themselves.