----- Original Message ----- From: "T Rittenhouse" Subject: Re: OT: screen cleaning - help, please
> In the mean while the 3rd world nations continue to use the stuff (freon) by > the ton.. All this kind of stuff makes the ignorant think they are doing > something to help the environment. While, the governments allows > corporations and cities to continue to pollute in mass amounts. I noticed > this back when they started requiring boats to have holding tanks on the > Great Lakes while whole cities continued to dump raw sewage into them. Then > there is the requirement for all that expensive anti-pollution equipment > required on your car, while coal fired power plants continue to spew junk > into the air (Hugh Morton, the owner of GFM, says that NC has grandfathered > in 7 such plants, each of which produces more pollutants than all the cars > in the state). Then there is your nasty mercury batteries, we can not buy > them for our old cameras while industrial use of mercury continues. > > Don't get me wrong, getting rid of nasty stuff in the environment is a good > thing. But, the way to do it is to stop the major polluters first, then > trickle the restrictions down to the poor consumer. But then, the poor > consumer doesn't have tons of money to lobby with., so it's politics as > usual. This is all very fine and dandy, but how do we expect to have the moral authority to complain about what a 3rd world nation is doing if we don't stop doing it ourselves. I always found it odd and hypocritical that we were so vocal about Brazil chopping down it's rain forests when we were clear cutting huge tracts of our own forests during the 1980's. As for the coal fired plants and the like, it is possible to burn coal almost as cleanly as natural gas. Our coal fired plants here are proving it. Unfortunately, the technology is expensive, and you are correct, big business tends to buy politicians off (they call it "lobbying") so they can keep doing the nasty stuff. William Robb
