I found this article here at Property Rights Foundation of America, Inc.. It’s by Carol W. LaGrasse, excerpted from full article by that title in Positions on Property, Vol. l, No. 2, May 1994. The End of the Long March Environmentalism’s Iron Grip
Click on the picture for the entire graph. Try to wrap your mind around some of these mind-blowing statistics: Each year during the previous Bush’s administration, the 59 agencies of the federal government introduced about 5,000 new regulations. In only one year, the Federal Register required nearly 70,000 pages to publish the new regulations, which took up 21 feet of library shelf space. One thing is sure: bureacracy loves more bureacracy.
Environmentalism is an intolerant quest whose holy goals can never be satisfied. The air, water and land can never be perfectly clean. Food will always have some residues. Emissions can never be reduced to zero. Logical standards for emission controls that served the public health have given away to veritably limitless requirements for cleanup under the arbitrary purview of bureaucrats who lack any perspective for what good their dictums do or do not serve. So they require virtually anything they want for any purpose that appeals to them at the moment, even if only as a bargaining chip to bring a business, person or farmer to his knees.
Carol Lagrasse For the Kathryn Cramers of the world, this isn’t funny when you consider the big picture.
Environmentalists must realize that all their “economic activity” so touted by Vice President Gore produces nothing to feed, clothe or shelter anyone. Environmental costs are nonproductive, which is a way of saying that bureaucrats, lawyers, and environmental consultants, and workers risking their health to remove asbestos, are fed, clothed and sheltered by the rest of us through taxes and fees collected from us under the gun of government.
And it’s growing at an alarming explosive exponential rate, as the chart above suggests. I can’t imagine the volume of environmental regulations that flooded government during the hysteria around Katrina in New Orleans, but I’m going to look and see if I can find it. Can you imagine if the growth rate of the EPA exploded beyond that chart above which shows what happened during the period of 1994 alone? If you haven’t opened the chart, the EPA figure of expenditures is $4.213 billion. And that was over ten years ago.
Grasp the totality of it. The use of land by people and businesses to construct homes and buildings of any type hangs on onerous environmental considerations. The use of existing homes, offices, schools, industrial buildings, gardens and even streets hinges on their “contamination” by lead, asbestos, PCBs, pesticides or whatever. Environmental regulations even creep into Personal behavior such as tobacco smoking during business and public activities, as well as during recreational pursuits. Environmental rules severely restrict every resource-based industry from farming to mining, and the manufacturing of virtually everything. The production of energy, the operation of vehicles and the transportation of goods are under constant environmental assault. Practical waste disposal is an exercise in futility involving environmental oversight of the processing of waste for recycling or disposal, the transportation of waste, the storage and disposal of waste on land (no matter how innocuous), and the disposal of even small fractions of waste to air or water. The regulation of any type of pollution from anything is possible, from the noise pollution of a chainsaw operated miles from other humanity to the minuscule oil pollution from a recreational power boat whose engine manufacturer has already reduced oil usage to a small fraction of the previous amount. The poison of toxic waste will never kill Americans. But the poison of uncontrolled power will kill the American soul, which is freedom.
It is easy to see how the marxists have embraced radical environmentalism to achieve their perfect utopian society. I wonder how they’ll like it when it’s been achieved. I resent their doing this to other people; I’d much rather they move to an isolated commune somewhere and live it and leave me the hell alone.
X posted at Cao’s blog
Thanks to Jo’s Cafe
Said Cao @ 10:54 am | Permalink
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I left the EPA too soon! Just think of all the fun I could have had trying to think up ways to spend that pile of moola?
Comment by Mike's America — 3/11/2007 @ 12:07 pm
Yes, perhaps. There are limits either way, extremes that should not be approached. There are those who ignore such problems, such as environmentalism, in totality. And disregard issues like water conservation until the last drops drip from their taps.
And there are those who are anarchists, who will stop at nothing to disrupt civilized society. I believe the truth, and the safe path for civilized progress lies somewhere within the oft-overooked middle ground.
Comment by Goshdarnit — 3/11/2007 @ 12:47 pm
Show me where the problem is, goshdarnit.
As far as I can see, this is hysteria for political ends, not because there’s a real problem that can be addressed or fixed.
In the event you haven’t seen it, I suggest you take a look at the film “The Great Global Warming Swindle”. It’s available at google, and a few other places, courtesy of Channel 4. I’m going to get this blog fixed so we can put up videos here. We used to be able to put them up in comments.
Comment by Cao — 3/11/2007 @ 3:30 pm
Cao, I think your webmasters have dissabled HTML for reader comments and responses.
Comment by Goshdarnit — 3/11/2007 @ 8:00 pm
Things seem in working order goshdarnit….no conspiracies here…
Comment by Richard Nixon — 3/11/2007 @ 8:53 pm
I am the webmaster, Goshdarnit, and I haven’t disabled html for reader comments and responses. But I do have some techies working on some issues here.
Comment by Cao — 3/12/2007 @ 7:04 am