“In our free-enterprise economy, the benefits are privatized but the costs of pollution are socialized.” Ricardo Navarro speaks the truth. The lesson you taught on Thursday I believe really shows this, because it consisted of the disgusting money-hungry companies as well as what exactly pollutes the air, and how that has an effect on all of our lives.

And I have to say, the story of Arthur Kill really reminded me of how greedy some people can be, especially when you put them together into a business company. Showing the amount Exxon made in profit is what did it. They made $40.6 billion in 2007, and then $41.1 billion in 2011. What. I cannot understand why they and so many other companies believe that getting rid of toxic materials by burning or whatever they choose, as long as they get rid of it, is “too expensive.” Really? It wouldn’t even take a billion out of your profits, but it’s still too expensive for them to consider. That just baffles me. Exxon was well aware of the fact that they were doing something wrong. They intentionally altered their test method because they knew what they were doing was creating a hazardous amount of benzene. Knowing this just makes it worse, and I can’t understand how they couldn’t be charged for lying (understatement) as well. But of course, it only took eight years until the court system did something about it, when in reality they really didn’t. It should not have ended with a consent decree, and it should not have only ended with a fine of $11.2 million. By that I mean the courts should have kept an eye on that money to make sure it was being put to good use. But now, we have no idea how the majority of that money was used. It might as well have been thrown into the air, along with the other pollutants in society.

Speaking of air pollutants, I mostly just think of cars and gas when I hear of it. I wouldn’t have thought of spray painting, out of all things! I of course instantly thought of graffiti, but it makes sense that living in such a big city would mean that all those buildings would be spray painted, instead of painted by thousands of hands. Excluding this (and several others) ignorant moments, I was aware of quite a number of things, thankfully.  For example, I think it’s pretty well known that lead affects brain development in children. I remember there being such a big deal a few years ago about children toys being extracted out of toy stores because the paint they were made out of consisted of lead, thanks to China. I didn’t know, though, that in 1996, gasoline that had tetraethyl lead was banned, leading people to believe that this made a decrease in blood lead level as well as in the atmosphere. But this isn’t actually the case, since a study was done in the Central Park Lake using four sediment cores to determine when the lead levels really did drop. Surprisingly, it was at a max. from the late 1930s into the early 1960s. So it wasn’t the gasoline usage then, since people were still using the tetraethyl lead gas a lot during this time. What was it then?

Unsurprisingly, we were left to wonder until the next class. Obviously, some members of the class will look it up (I just did). But I will try my best to act surprised during class.

That, and I will try my best to remember the most important event in history. Even though I have barely listened to them. (Sorry!)

It’s actually quite refreshing to step back from the generally ethical and moral dilemmas that humans and corporations might face in terms of environmental impact, and instead turn to the actual scientific element of how this ecological damage is being caused. It’s not just that I appreciate the rational component of all this, but I also value the fact that knowledge provides us with an exact representation of the problems we create. The mere idea that “we are causing harm to the environment” can be described with depictions of chemical compounds and quantified with the numbers that accompany them. It’s a much more satisfying way to address the issues we face because we can then garner specific avenues of action to be taken. It’s all horribly ironic, however; science has the potential to be our savior in just the same capacity that it has led us to our current predicament.

Thus, it was with great concentration that I approached our last lecture. If there’s anything that I’ve learned after taking science courses, it’s that most of what I’ve been taught is either simplified to some extent or does not account for the complexity of other factors. More often than not, I have to come to terms with both. Indeed, the air is polluted not just because of the carbon dioxide that theories of global warming have made so prominent or the sulfur compounds that cause acid rain, but also because of many other chemical compounds that are being released into the atmosphere. A common trend that I noticed from all the causes of S, N, and C oxides was the role of fuel combustion. Although we may not have gone into the specifics of the current technology used to downgrade the impact of these compounds, I can’t help but wonder if and how we are dealing with their release into the air besides just filters. In addition to focusing our efforts on looking for alternative fuel sources, we could also look for useful tools that would more effectively deal with the way we our disposing of our waste.

The disconcerting thing is perhaps not that we aren’t capable of coming up with such technology; it’s that there are so many different ways that our economically driven practices can cause harm. And even if companies do find alternate means of disposal (hopefully not with the hands-off approach that so plagued Arthur Kill), it is highly likely that we are just putting off the waste to another location or crevice that we will worry about later—hence my question at last lecture about where the particulate matter actually goes despite the filters. Indeed, RCRA’s renewal to the HWMP was a smart move, but I would encourage even more government oversight into the process by which companies use, store, and dispose of chemicals, but I’m just not sure how much our attempts are genuinely to reverse our impact on the environment as opposed to maintaining the present and very near future (essentially a nice way of saying that the future generations will have to deal with the real mess).

Either way, what struck me as a great move as mentioned in the last lecture was the 20^th Century Atmospheric Metal Flux Experiment in Central Park Lake. I think that experiments like those need to be ever so often to track and take into account the atmospheric absorption of commercial residue. It not only provides a plethora of raw information, an analysis of the material would give us reasons to look into our actions; we can see how directly the environment is getting affected by air pollution. If anything, it reminds us how far-reaching our influence has been.

One thing that often surprises me is the sheer lack of respect for government policy that many polluters display. We often speak about government intervention as a last resort end-all solution to environmental issues. For example, when discussing the pollution of Rio de Janeiro there was an inherent regard for the power of government. In our discussion we mentioned how with the Olympics and the World Cup approaching, there could be major progress. The government chooses to bring these events to the country and will thus clean up for them. However, we may have overestimated federal power. These global events also push people to stop polluting and the debris in the Rio de Janeiro was mostly from local sewage and trash. In other words, there were no giant corporation cutting corners and dumping large amounts of pollutants into the environment.

The point is, when it comes to government versus capitalism, the government has much less power than we may think. The action taken against Mobil for the pollution of Arthur Kill and the dragged out lawsuit perfectly exhibit the impotence of federal action. Mobil dumped oil and other wastes into open air ponds, directly against EPA regulation. I found it ridiculous that the government caught them three separate times and all Mobil did was to continue to pollute. Even more ludicrous is that, when told not to dump into open-air ponds, Mobil began to pollute Arthur Kill directly. This smart aleck reaction shows just how little regard a giant corporation like Mobil holds for the government. Mobil even faked test results to maintain its barge cleaning business and avoid a multimillion-dollar clean up. The root of this immunity lies in a hallmark of capitalism itself, incentives.

Though reprehensible, Mobil’s actions are totally understandable and logical. As a corporation Mobil functions on basic incentives. The barge cleaning business is so profitable that no amount of reasonable fines can approach profits. Invoking the wrath of the EPA means nothing if a ten million dollar fine is the worst possible outcome. In fact it is only worth it for Mobil to fight the lawsuit on the off chance that all they end up paying are lawyers fees. In the context of how the government currently deals with giant polluting corporations, capitalism will always win out over federal goodwill.

In order to really stop pollution, the government must work on the level of capitalism and harness the power of incentives. A great place to start would be to equalize fines to the price of avoiding them in the first place. If a corporation can pay x amount of dollars to prevent themselves from pollution and risk paying a fine of the same amount if they are caught polluting, there is no reason for them not to invest in an environmentally sound method of waste disposal.

Alternatively, the government can try to implement incentives on a more personal level. Instead of operating solely in fines and forced cleanups, perhaps jail time for offenders with knowledge that they are breaking the law would dissuade most companies through their CEOs. This presents many logistical problems however. Between wonky test results, neither faked nor accurate, and lobbying by rich companies, there are many obstacles to moralizing the issue of pollution.

All the obstacles to effective government intervention put more pressure on society. It is difficult to boycott products based on the environmental decisions of their makers. However, as long as companies know that this is not remotely a step that people would take they can continue to pollute without fear of major repercussions.

Unrelatedly, I just want to discuss how awesome the sediment core experiment from the central park lakes is. The scientists stuck a tube in the ground and pulled out a timeline. I can imagine the slightly varying colors of the many layers. I like when these metaphysical ideas such as time can be captured in very tangible, earthly fragments.

Fines: A Cost of Doing Business

In the corporate world, people are out to make profit at any costs necessary, even if it means illegally harming the environment. One of the most unethical cases that I have heard of so far is the polluting of Arthur Kill by Exxon Mobil in Staten Island, New York. The lack of consideration for the environment as well as the time that it took for Exxon Mobil to address the issue is devastating and extremely unethical.

A corporation should be treated as a single entity, and if found to have broken the law, the corporation should face judicial persecution. This is how the world should work, but it simply does not. Instead, the government fines these corporations in hope that they will stop the illegal activity. However, the reality of it is that the business will not stop what they were doing, as it was probably extremely profitable. Exxon Mobil was found guilty of dumping benzene into open-air ponds as well as denied the fact that the waters were over twenty times the legal limit of benzene. Furthermore, Exxon Mobil was found to have altered their data in fear of losing their barge-cleaning business. To top it all off, the EPA told Exxon not to dump the hazardous waste into open-air ponds, and so instead they flushed the sludge into Arthur Kill.

Instead of fining Exxon Mobil of $11.2 million, I feel that the EPA should have taken at least 1% of their profits over time in order to recover the area that they have polluted with benzene. On the large scale, $11.2 million is nothing in comparison to Exxon’s total profit in 2011, $41.1 billion. This comes out to a mere 0.0003% of their total profits and an amount so miniscule that there is not much recovery that can be done in Arthur Kill.  To Exxon, this fine is just seen as a cost of doing business. After being found guilty on three separate occasions, I feel that Exxon should have faced more criminal charges as well as a larger fine. Also, I believe that it should be up to Exxon to clean up the mess that they have created instead of leaving it up to the community around Arthur Kill. We should not have to pay taxes that are used to clean up Exxon’s mess when they were the one in fault.

However, the lack of recovery however cannot be blamed entirely on Exxon Mobil. The government was given $3 million to directly restore the land on the waterway, yet from 2001 until today, the government has only used $1 million to buy and preserve wetlands. Where has the other $2 million gone? The government is also at fault by not using the funds given to them by Exxon for the sole purpose of recovering the wetlands of Arthur Kill. They are not doing all in their power to take care of something as important as the environment, and this must change.

In the 1980s, the government also made a faulty assumption by thinking that leaded gasoline was a large contributor to hazardous lead levels in the air. However, after lake bottom analysis was done on a lake in Central Park, it was found that lead levels declined drastically in the 1960s, over twenty years earlier than the ban of leaded gasoline. Lead is a cheap additive, and allowed for better fuel economy and there may have been no need to phase out leaded gasoline in the 1980s. Again, the government should base their action on research rather than on assumptions in order to allocate funds efficiently.

In order to better the environment, many steps must be taken by the corporations polluting the environment, the government, and the people. Environmental recovery will only succeed if a majority of the human population contributes in reversing the damage that has been done to the earth thus far. However, at the rate we are moving at today, with the mindset of both the corporations such as Exxon and the government itself, I feel that not much will be achieved in the years to come. Something must be done to change this.