A front page story in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel got my 'juices' flowing this morning. The headline says, "Region stays on polluted list".
One air monitoring device less than one mile from the Illinois border in Kenosha County was detected to have been slightly beyond the ozone limits that EPA had laid on us. Never mind that the prevailing winds blow that here from the Chicago land area, we are compelled to burn reformulated fuel, we're supposed to observe 'ozone alert' days and not even mow our grass. I am surprised that we are not forbidden from firing up the charcoal grill too. Oops! We certainly don't want to give the EPA any more great ideas.
Why have I heard nothing about the Chicago land area and its massive efforts to limit the pollution that was detected ever so slightly on the very southern edge of Kenosha County. Maybe there are no 'massive efforts' about which to write. Why is it that we are forced to pay the price for the pollution from our neighbors to the south of us? What penalties are they paying for having caused this in the first place. Are they making any progress or are we the perpetual scapegoats? Are we to burn reformulated gasoline for the next 100 or so years? And, of course, we get to burn food as part of the reformulated gasoline movement since state and federal governments have mandated its use even though it is terribly inefficient, even though a gallon of ethanol requires something on the order of 1,800 gallons of fresh water to manufacture.
Reformulated gasoline was never as efficient as regularly formulated gasoline. My mileage was at least 10% worse even before ethanol was required in our gasoline. Whatever the federal government has managed to overlook is being found by our state government. Legislators with very obvious special interests, coupled with the ethanol industry lobby, have pushed the state mandate for ethanol use on us and they didn't even have to breathe heavy to make it happen.
The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) has also added to this fiasco by recognizing that since we are at the point of virtually having attained that which they told we'd have to attain, it has raised the bar. We were originally instructed to attain the level of 84 parts per billion. Even with the aberration of 2005 when wind movements blew Chicago land 'crap' into Kenosha County, we were over the benchmark by 1 part per billion. Washington County has been shown to be at 72 parts per billion, for example, but we're captured by the drag line net of the federal government.
Not to let simple-minded folks like we taxpayers think we were going to win one from the 'Feds', the national benchmark of 84 parts per billion will be dropped to 75 parts per billion in 2013. So you see, the goal posts continue to be moved.
I wonder what might happen if we had a whole group of legislators in Washington like Jim Sensenbrenner and Paul Ryan? Maybe the federal government would learn that not all badgers roll over and play dead!
This should serve us as a beacon in the night when we think about the environmental movement in general. We'll never reach the levels of anything that will be deemed enough. We'll always have to reach some newly discovered (or created) benchmark. There are twice the number of polar bears today that existed twenty-five ago and yet our federal government has just declared them to be on the endangered species list. Al Gore has spun his myth on global warming and, even though 32,000 scientists have just stated that they do not believe in the global warming myth, we continue to be forced to follow the 'great one' and his preaching. Yes, it is preaching; his movement is a religion and he is its leader. He rules his domain from his 14,000 square foot dwelling except for when he is jetting around the world spewing carbon emissions about the globe. Oh, I forgot, we can purchase carbon credits so that a tree can be planted...a tree that will not reach maturity and begin delivering on its promise of cleansing carbon dioxide from the air for a decade or better.
One of my favorites is, of course, the compact fluorescent light (CFL) that is essentially a container of mercury waiting to pollute our homes should one break, or pollute ground fill sites for another million years or so since the majority of people are not going to properly dispose of them. The science behind these kinds of scare tactics is suspect, at best.
