Job Creation: Screw the Environment

There is a groundswell of social conservative support for a serious relaxation of environmental rules that “hamper business,” or “add costly surcharges to our manufacturing and resource extraction businesses.” It has become one of the biggest issues in the up-coming mid-terms, despite a litany of disturbing consequences being experienced all over the world by those who indeed have such lax environmental controls. The pro-business movement believes environmental regulations are job-killers, never stopping to think how many jobs could be created in inventing and creating alternative energy sources, more efficient manufacturing and resource-extraction and how many jobs will be lost from ignoring the environment, which feeds us, powers us and sustains our quality of life.

Start with the poster-nation for pollution, a country whose leaders have finally come to realize that their lax environmental policies are unsustainable, deeply negatively impacting the health, life expectancy and quality of life of so many of their citizens. China. Polluted water from unchecked industrial effluents has decimated the availability of drinking and irrigation water; millions of acres of land are so toxic that the food grown on this land is downright risky. Carcasses of livestock wash routinely down rivers and clog lakes, and there are now countries (e.g., Australia) that have severely curtailed imports of foodstuffs made in China. As for air pollution, cities like Beijing have those who can afford it with massive filters in their homes, cars and offices. The Beijing skyline is seldom seen anymore with horribly thick stinging air that measures “beyond” current metering capacity. They know they have to fix the problems.

In the Middle East, the global-warming-induced-and-sustained drought in both Iraq and Syria – a burden disproportionately borne in Sunni regions governed by uncaring Shiite-controlled governments – turned farms into dust and loosed millions of now-impoverished farmers and their families as angry refugees without hope or help from anyone… except Muslim extremists with killing on their minds. How many lives will be lost and how many billions (trillions?) of dollars will it cost to counter that plague? Folks making a comfortable living don’t go to war and blow up the world.

That same killer heat has desiccated mid-western aquifers, parching the earth above, generated fires that have consumed massive forests in Colorado, New Mexico and California and sucked the water out of millions of Southwestern acres of once-productive farmland right here in the good ole USA. How many jobs will that cost, and how much will we have to spend import the stuff we used to grow?

Don’t look for that situation to get better anytime soon. “Some people, mostly non-scientists, have been claiming that the world has not warmed in 18 years, but ‘no one's told the globe that,’ [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration climate scientist Jessica] Blunden said. She said NOAA records show no pause in warming.

“The record-breaking heat goes back to the end of last year - November 2013 broke a record. So the 12 months from October 2013 to September 2014 are the hottest 12-month period on record, Blunden said. Earth hasn't set a monthly record for cold since December 1916, but all monthly heat record have been set after 1997… September also marks the fifth month in a row that Earth's oceans broke monthly heat records, Blunden said.” AOL.com, October 20^th.

Former Duke Energy executive, Pat McCory, couldn’t wait to disempower North Carolina’s environmental agency when he became governor. It didn’t take long for his constituency to suffer: “In 2014, tens of thousands of tons of coal ash and 27 million gallons (100,000 cubic meters) of contaminated water spilled into the Dan River near Eden, NC from a closed North Carolina coal-fired power plant that is owned by Duke Energy. It is currently the third worst coal ash spill ever to happen in the United States.” Wikipedia. Dirty, toxic, coal ash and lots of it.

The use of pressurized, chemically-treated water and the resulting wastewater wells created under the fracking oil extraction business seems to have caused earthquakes where it is practiced widely. An October 14^th report by the Seismological Research Letter links 400 micro-earthquakes in and around Canton, Ohio to fracking. And then there’s oil central, Oklahoma. “Katie Keranen… a research seismologist at Cornell University…looked at an area experiencing a lot of quakes very near … the town of Jones, a small town just northeast of Oklahoma City…

“[M]ore than 2,500 earthquakes have shaken this area since 2008, which accounts for about 20 percent of the quakes in the middle of the United States. Most of these disposal wells don't cause quakes, but the earthquakes near Jones could have been caused by a handful of high-volume wells, where millions of barrels of water are pumped every month. What Keranen found is twofold. First, she found that wastewater pumped into the ground can travel a lot farther than initially thought and that it builds up pressure all along the way on its path. And this pressure can cause fault lines to slip and trigger an earthquake.” NPR.com, July 31^st.

“A big chemical spill that contaminated the water supply of some 300,000 West Virginia residents [in January] has raised plenty of questions about the way the United States regulates industrial compounds… Some background: There are more than 84,000 chemicals in the United States — and we don't know all that much about many of them. The current U.S. law on chemical safety is 37 years old, riddled with exceptions, and widely seen as ineffective. The federal government has required testing for only 200 chemicals in the past 37 years — and banned just five substances deemed dangerous (the last was asbestos in 1991).” Washington Post, January 21^st. The CDC – yeah that CDC warned pregnant women not to drink that water, and soon the entire community was drinking bottled water. The links to the coal mining industry and water pollution have consumed millions of pages of criticism, documentaries and volumes upon volumes of corporate denial despite solid inconvenient proof to the contrary.

Oh I could go on for pages and pages, but you get my point. Dead and deeply unhealthy people don’t need jobs. People choking on air and gagging at produce and tap water might want jobs, but perhaps we might find new work for them in fixing the problems. All those threats of massive layoffs if this or that law or regulation were not terminated or if a Democrat got elected never came to pass. And it is strange that the very Republican party that approved so many national parks and built its legacy on the protection of natural resources – they are conservatives, after all – has turned its back on that same environment. When will it be American and Republican again to care about our natural environment, our quality of life and to rid ourselves of toxic environmental practices that will eventually kill more jobs and more people than in trying to find the right answers?

I’m Peter Dekom, and there are certain issues that shouldn’t find a partisan cast but should instead unite us in a common cause.