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Not Even If It's Cheap
Great day today, just great. Among other events, I agreed to go out and inspect That Same Damned Facility with the Odors again, because this time the... concerned citizen... called the US Senator, so the USEPA is sending two people driving 300 miles up here from Chicago to investigate, and they want me to show them how to get there. This will be about the 20th time I've inspected the place in the last three years.
Every so often something horrible happens in the environmental field. Some chemical plant explodes or something. And the cry goes out, where were the government regulators? Why didn't they catch this before it blew up? I'll tell you why. Somebody had an industrial facility in their back yard and didn't want it there, so they started a letter writing campaign and also a program of harassing phone calls to every agency and politician they could find, over and over again. And while they should have been checking the chemical plant, the EPA was three hundred miles away investigating a whiff of paint fumes over a back fence, because some senator (an anti-environmentalist Republican, more likely than not) ordered them to.
Not too happy about that, or the chest cold I may be developing. Then this afternoon came the real prize.
Some Honest Businessman came to the realization that a gallon of gasoline and a match was cheaper and faster than having this old house on his property demolished in a safe and legal manner. He called to ask me if that was allowed under the air pollution regulations. It isn't, of course.
He then explained, very carefully, that arson would SAVE HIM MONEY. I then explained, very carefully, that even if it was cheap it was still ILLEGAL.
So I got the twenty-minute rant about how some day they'll force government to let Honest Businessmen do anything they want to on the property for which they pay taxes. I remained calm. Outwardly.
How was your day?
Every so often something horrible happens in the environmental field. Some chemical plant explodes or something. And the cry goes out, where were the government regulators? Why didn't they catch this before it blew up? I'll tell you why. Somebody had an industrial facility in their back yard and didn't want it there, so they started a letter writing campaign and also a program of harassing phone calls to every agency and politician they could find, over and over again. And while they should have been checking the chemical plant, the EPA was three hundred miles away investigating a whiff of paint fumes over a back fence, because some senator (an anti-environmentalist Republican, more likely than not) ordered them to.
Not too happy about that, or the chest cold I may be developing. Then this afternoon came the real prize.
Some Honest Businessman came to the realization that a gallon of gasoline and a match was cheaper and faster than having this old house on his property demolished in a safe and legal manner. He called to ask me if that was allowed under the air pollution regulations. It isn't, of course.
He then explained, very carefully, that arson would SAVE HIM MONEY. I then explained, very carefully, that even if it was cheap it was still ILLEGAL.
So I got the twenty-minute rant about how some day they'll force government to let Honest Businessmen do anything they want to on the property for which they pay taxes. I remained calm. Outwardly.
How was your day?
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