Shutting down the EPA

One of my major concerns about anti-environmentalists is they only look at the cost of environmental regulations, and don't care a fig for the benefits. These so-called conservatives have never seen a cost-benefit analysis, and frankly don't care to look at one. They much prefer their own ignorance to facts.

The loss of American jobs overseas has everything to do with vulture capitalism, and almost nothing to do with environmental regulation. Vulture capitalists don't care about you, and they don't care about your job, and they don't care about your rights. The only thing they care about is money.

False. After factoring inflation, real estate prices were essentially flat from 1950 to 1995.

How is it even possible to build a road that "accidentally" passes through a wetland? If it passes through a wetland, you can bet your booty it's deliberate.

No, he's going to lose his job when a vulture capitalist outsources it to India.

Name me one person in this country who lost his land because a federal agent discovered a mud puddle on it. Just one. ONE. Can't? Didn't think so. Next time, try sticking to the truth.

Yeah, because conservatives believe in privatizing profits while socializing costs. The people whose livelihood depends on the salmon can just go hang: they have no rights. In conservative America, only corporations have rights.

 

Other than smog, which was cleaned up 40+ years ago, I don't see much benefit. Most of the "benefits" are in the protection of obscure fish species and spotted owls. I don't mind reasonable protections, but when you look at the supposed benefits to humanity from these regulations, they aren't there. Most of it is about saving species, not people.

Yes vulture capitalism is a problem, but I don't think as many jobs would be leaving the country if the cost of making products in America was lower. Even if you only care about money, it does cost some money to build a plant in china, and ship your goods to America. Unfortunately, it costs much less than complying with ever more complex regulations in the US. You cannot ignore that part of the picture and pretend that you understand the issue. When you have to spend millions of dollars complying with a carbon emissions cap placed by the government, China, India, and South America start to look like good places to build a factory.

By federal law, a wetland only has to be wet for about 3-4 months to be declared a protected wetland. I think it's entirely possible for someone to miss it.

Name me one person in this country who lost his land because a federal agent discovered a mud puddle on it. Just one. ONE. Can't? Didn't think so. Next time, try sticking to the truth.

Property rights advocates had reason to be optimistic this week, as the Supreme Court heard arguments in Sackett v. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. At stake is landowners' right to challenge bureaucratic control of their lands without redress or any meaningful right to appeal. The Justices seemed receptive to arguments on behalf of the plaintiffs, Mike and Chantell Sackett. A ruling in their favor would help restore some of the property rights protections that have been eroded over the past century.

The Sacketts had purchased a small lot in Priest Lake, Idaho, to build their home. The lot was in a residential area and they obtained all the necessary permits, graded the lot, and dumped gravel for the foundation. Then the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) suddenly declared their lot a federally protected wetland under the Clean Water Act, and told the Sacketts they must restore it to pristine condition or face a fine of $37,500 per day.

They were told they could not appeal until they had exhausted all administrative remedies. Therefore, they must restore the land at considerable cost and then appeal for a permit, a process which could take years and cost tens of thousands of dollars -- and likely result in a denial of their appeal. Only then would they be able to go to court -- by which time they might be facing bankruptcy.

Really???

NO, the SALMON have no rights. The people who fish for them have the right to sue for damages if they can prove in court that a factory is the proximate cause of the distruction of their privately held fishing gorunds. What they DON'T get to do is use the federal government to shut down the factory with regulations. They don't get to protect every wadi that *might* be a stream if there's enough rain on the chance that it *might* under some conditions have a single salmon in it. They certainly don't have the right to demand that the government protect darters and minnows which have no actual value.

 

To Poor Debater: You better take a good look at who has all of the Rights. It’s the government not the corporations. If you want to reduce the Rights of corporations you must start with the government. The best way to do it is to reclaim the individual liberties and property Rights that were stolen by the government through bureaucracies like the UNEPA.

To Caeia Iulia Regilia: Precisely. And the wealthiest of them usually live in, or on the edge of, a “nature preserve” far from the poor. It is not only the poor that offends them. Their environmentalism begins and ends with keeping everyone else at arms length.

Their favorite scam is: “I want to hand a pristine world to future generations.” Not a one of them ever says “I want hand freedoms to future generations.” The only freedom they respect is their freedom to use the government as they see fit.

 

False. Clean air regulations prevent 23,000 early deaths per year in the US. The benefits of clean air regulations outweigh the cost by a factor of 30 to 1. That's an actual cost-benefit analysis.

The low price of labor in Bangladesh has nothing to do with environmental regualtions. Labor cost was lower there before the Clean Air Act was passed.

But you're more than happy to ignore the consequences and costs of the lack of environmental regulation. Here is America the way you wish it was: a giant toxic dump for corporate polluters. Take a good look at your utopia.

If you do a land survey that incompetently, your road gets flooded for 3 months a year. Get real.

Really. Oddly enough, the Sacketts still own their land, in spite of your false claim to the contrary.

Since when are the courts NOT a part of government? And this is your solution for the lack of an EPA? A million lawsuits by a million injured parties, cluttering up the courts for years on end? Subjecting both corporations and injured parties to the uncertain crapshoot of trial after trial? If you want a cost-benefit analysis, do this one for me: compare the cost of a million lawsuits, and the damages they entail, to the cost of one regulation that prevents that damage from occurring in the first place. You will find that the BIG BIG BIG government solution is lawsuits, and the little government solution is regulation.

Oh, I forgot: conservatives want tort reform too. So you don't actually get to sue corporations any more, either. The conservative solution is: heads, the corporations win; tails, the individual loses.

Brilliant solution.

In conservative America, corporations have all the rights, and you have none.

 

If a corporation comes onto my land by road and dumps a truckload of toxic waste on my land without my consent, is that a violation of my rights as a landowner? If a corporation flies over my land in an airplane, and dumps a load of toxic waste on my land without my consent, is that a violation of my rights as a landowner? So why is it perfectly OK, in your view, for a corporation to deliver a load of toxic waste to my land without my consent, as long as they deliver it by smokestack?

Why isn't that a violation of my rights as a landowner?

 

To Poor Debater: Cartoonish scenarios and clever questions rate one response:

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXSvsEGlf84&feature=player_detailpage"]Woody Woodpecker Laugh - YouTube[/ame]

 

Right. You've got bupkus.

 

Poor Debater makes some sweeping and unfounded generalizations.

My angle is not corporate profits. My angle is the increased costs imposed on consumers by enviro-regs. Having many different “boutique” gasoline formulations makes all of them more expensive. Eliminating R-12 made air conditioning and refrigeration less energy efficient. The consumer pays, not corporations.

Land taken off the market by swamp protection laws makes the price of the rest of the land more expensive for the consumer.

Does it not bother you that:
1. The EPA makes sweeping but undefendable statements about pollution and public health? Just who is it that is dying because of miniscule concentrations of pollutants in the air or water? Does the EPA eliminate smokers from their studies. I can answer that. No they don’t. Cigarettes have not been exonerated, its just that a smoker dying of COPS is a “two-fer” for the EPA. Thus their cost justifications are nothing but bold faced lies.
2. The EPA makes laws. I thought that was the job of elected legislators.
3. The EPA enforces the laws they make.
4. The EPA levies taxes (Title V fees)
Those four items makes the EPA rather independent of Congress.

I do not favor a complete shutdown of the EPA. What I favor is stripping them of their biased “research” (done mostly to justify their own existence), stripping the EPA of the ability to promulgate regulations without specific authorization of congress, and stripping the EPA of their independent revenue stream. Their proper role is as a law enforcement agency. The FBI does not manufacture junk science, nor make law, nor levy taxes. The FBI enforces laws passed by Congress. Period. Such should be the role of the EPA. Nothing more.

BTW, get the facts right, PD. The ecology of the Chesapeake Bay was not affected by industrial waste, but by sewage effluent discharged by all the government-run sewage treatment plants, caused by the population increase in the DC suburbs. The old Sparrows Point steel mill and shipyard has long since closed down and the jobs went first to Japan then China.

 

Flanders,

I'm sorry I don't fit neatly into your idea of "right wing." I say that I am right-wing because I generally believe in the power of capitalism to make this world a better place.

You should realize, however, that you're the one calling the EPA a UN conspiracy, and rivers have in fact caught fire before:

http://www.cleveland.com/science/index.ssf/2009/06/cuyahoga_river_fire_40_years_a.html

And it's not so much that the river was on fire (the fire was relatively minor and lasted but two hours), it's that the river turned into a cesspool of trash and industrial filth that was, in fact, more fuel than water. I am glad that we cleaned this (*)(*)(*)(*) up, and I do not think that going back to how it was would be a good idea.

Oh? So we should enforce environmental protection through the courts? It's already been pointed out that that would cause a quagmire of litigation. But let me add this: your proposal that "stall tactics" should be illegal, and time limits imposed on court cases is completely un-implementable. What is a stall tactic in one case is a crucial point of justice in another. How would you distinguish between the two? Simply putting a deadline on cases is equally problematic: in many cases is just does take a lot of time for the courts to figure out what's going on.

Having blanket regulations that everyone knows about, and that are guaranteed to be enforced provides businessmen much more clarity and certainty of the hurdles facing them than endless queues of court cases.

The courts are designed to clarify points of law, not to become the law themselves.

 

ANd has posted before EPA regulations save 30 times mroe money then the costs imposed by those regulations
BUt as usuall right-wingers dont let reality and facts get in the way of their massive ignorance and stupidity

 

To Haplo: Okay. Let’s do away with elected officials and let bureaucrats make the “laws/regulations.”

To Oakchair: That sounds like an EPA talking point. If not, who enjoys the savings you cite? The government? Corporations? The public?

 

As mentioned before, clean air laws save $30 for every $1 in costs. So if your angle really is cost (and I doubt it), you should be in favor of regulation.

A classic example of saved cost. Going to unleaded gasoline saved thousands of people from early death. Apparently you either don't care about that, or the AM radio dittohead you listen to hasn't informed you of that fact.

Do smokers somehow get less air pollution than non-smokers? Of course not. You ask who is dying because of miniscule pollutants in the air? Before EPA, air pollution wasn't at all miniscule: it was massive. And the people who were dying were, basically, everybody. Anyone with asthma, anyone with COPD, anyone with pneumonia, is more likely to die breathing polluted air. Healthy persons breathing polluted air are more likely to get sick. Sick people breathing polluted air are more likely to get sicker. So in addition to excess deaths, you have a lot of excess health costs too. Thirty-to-one isn't an "indefensible" number as you claim: it's right, and it's entirely defensible.

False. EPA makes regulations that Congress allows it to make. It has no power at all, except the power that Congress gives it.

False. EPA enforces the laws Congress makes. It also enforces its own regulations.

I hope you will remember that "fees" count as "taxes" when you're evaluating Mitt Romney's record as governor of Massachusetts.

The Party of Ignorance in favor of more ignorance? I'm shocked.

They already have specific authorization from Congress to promulgate regulations.

Nearly all Title V fees go to the states that issue the permits, not to the EPA. The only ones EPA issues are in special cases like Indian reservations. And by law, the fees collected (whether by states or by the EPA) can only cover administrative costs. So I don't see that you have much to complain about here.

First, show me one piece of "junk science" produced by the EPA, and tell me why it's junk. And if it's just because you don't like the answer, that's not good enough: the paper has to be provably incorrect. Second, the FBI collects administrative fees too, for processing fingerprints among other things.

If the EPA does a good job of enforcing bad laws, then the EPA is doing a good job. Don't blame them for bad laws.

 

Cute, a study by the EPA that justifies the existence of the EPA. I have a bridge I wanna sell ya.

I'm not saying that labor cost isn't an issue, however, the cost of regulations does impact the building of new factories. It's a pretty simple equation --

cost = cost of regulations + cost of materials + cost of labor

The more you add to the cost of hiring labor, the more a company looks to cut labor. It's why it's getting harder to find full time jobs -- the cost of full time benefits outweighs the benefits received. The cost of regulations in America is having an impact for much the same reason -- the cost of making the product in another country is much less trying to make it here and having to comply with reams of regulations. It's not that labor costs aren't making overseas markets more attractive to businesses, but that environmental regulations are making a bad situation worse. I don't think you solve the issue of too much environmental regulation by saying that bad labor practices make it worse. I'm sure that your injured leg is a problem, that doesn't mean that your broken arm isn't.

I dunno, why don't you ask unemployed poor people. Since we've lost most of our EEEEVIL polluting factories, most of them work for minimum wage. I bet if you honestly asked in poor areas whether they'd rather have a bit of smog and a job that paid them enough to raise a family of four, most would jump at the chance. Those factories aren't unpopular in the third world where they give poor Chinese and Mexicans and Indians a middle class existence. It's sometimes a trade off that people make -- having a factory gives you a middle class wage, but it means that you might have a bit of smog.

But the value of that land is destroyed. That's the power of the government. They pay maybe $100,000 for the land -- intending to build a home. They not only have to pay to restore the land to a wetland, (or face $37,000 in fines probably resulting in bankruptcy) but the value of the land is essentially $0. They couldn't give that land away. It's literally worthless, and they've lost most of their life savings to buy a piece of land that the government -- by fiat -- declared to be protected and rendered useless. It destroyed that family's finances. I mean yes they still have a deed that says they own the land, but the EPA got all the value of that land.

No, the standard here is that a person must actually be harmed by pollution. If your ability to fish your own land is damaged, that's a legitamate lawsuit. The standard of law is that you prove in court that you have been injured by the other party. It's a more workable standard than having a bunch of unelected agents deciding that an act that harms no one should cost a business hundreds of thousands of dollars in equipment and paperwork. It's not just the cost to the EPA of creating a new rule, it's the cost of complying with current laws, reams of paperwork to prove that you've complied, and attempting to predict what regulations will be in place next year -- because regulations are always changing, and what was perfectly legal last year will likely be illegal this year. Then you spend millions in taxpayer money to inspect the factories, read all of the paperwork, to prove that the mandates were followed. The lawsuits are better, because the law can only deal with actual damage to actual people. That's what the EPA was supposed to prevent, except that they've gone far beyond the original mandate.

I don't personally favor tort reform, so I'm not sure that it's relevent what "conservatives" want to do. My concern is that by allowing the EPA to regulate things that don't actually harm people they hurt the poor by giving the rich one more reason not to hire people in this country.

 

I've got evidence, you've got bupkus. If you believe the study is flawed, show me where. Otherwise, I win this one.

And here is where conservatives make their huge, giant, colossal mistake. They leave out a HUGE cost, which they like to pretend doesn't exist. The REAL cost equation goes like this:

cost = cost of regulation + cost of materials + cost of labor + EXTERNAL COST

And what's external cost? That's the cost that everyone else pays, that corporations socialize, to avoid paying. That's the cost that I pay when my health goes bad from air pollution. That's the lost value of your home when gas fracking makes the tap water burn. You and I didn't incur that cost: the corporation did. But you and I pay for it, and the purpose of EPA is to avoid those kind of damages.

So the real cost question is: which is more? The cost of regulation? Or the external cost? And the answer is, the external costs are far, far, FAR higher than the regulatory costs that avoid them.

The cost of labor is huge, and the cost of regulation is tiny. You're claiming that the Titanic sunk because of the ice in the martini glasses made the situation so much worse.

So you think it's morally acceptable for a corporation to dump its external costs onto the backs of the general public? What's the moral foundation of that? 'cause it sure looks like stealing to me. Just because they're stealing from Chinese doesn't make it any better.

So you admit they still own their land, and your original statement was false. I'm not defending EPA in this case, because I agree it looks like overreach. But your description of it was overreach too.

Exactly: if your wife dies of lung cancer, the corporation hires 20 lawyers to prove it was someone else's fault. So the little guy gets screwed, and the corporation skips away scot-free, having suckered another average American into paying the cost for the corporation's pollution. Or occasionally, the little guy wins, and the corporation pays millions to one victim, while others get zero. And you, of course, think that's perfectly fair and just. Meanwhile, the regulation that would have saved her life is branded as "costly" and "burdensome". Your wife's death by some conservative magic, doesn't cost anything, or burden anyone.

What a moral universe you inhabit: corporations have all the rights, and individuals have none.

Once again, you take far too narrow a view of cost, looking only at the corporation's cost. The rest of society has costs too, caused by the corporation, that the corporation wants to socialize rather than pay for. And your complaint of uncertainty is ridiculous, considering that your "solution" is after-the-fact and after-the-injury lawsuits, which are far more uncertain (and far more costly) than regulation.

 

Not only do EPA regs save lives but they save trillions of dollars yearly

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/...ke-bay-create-many-jobs-keystone-xl-pipeline/
^EPA rules requiring a 25% reduction in pollution in the Chesapeake Bay has so far created 40 thousand jobs

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/12/08/385329/epa-mercury-rules/
^EPA mercury reducing regulations save 50-130billion yearly

http://www.ogj.com/index/article-di...n-its-new-regulations-on-toxic-emissions.html
^EPA regulations limiting benzene content in gasoline will save 5 billion a year by 2030.

http://www.apple-pie.org/ttp/default.asp?articleid=42
^EPA regulations limiting emissions from engines used for recreational non-road purposes saves a net of 3 billion dollars each year. Through lowered health care costs and higher mpg efficiency.

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/aug/10/nation/la-na-cement-epa-20100810
^EPA regulations reducing mercury emissions and other major pollutants from power plants (excluding Nox and So2) save 10 billion a year; due to lower health care costs.

http://articles.latimes.com/2008/mar/15/local/me-ships15
^--EPA Regulations limiting ship and train emissions such as Nitrogen and soot save 300 lives and a net of 300 million dollars a year.

http://mainstreetalliance.org/wordp...of-CAA-literature-review-final-10-04-2010.pdf
^The Clean air act amendments of 1990 saved the country a net of 510 billion dollars over 20 years (or around 25 billion a year).
The act used regulations to reduce 5 pollutants by 41%
^The stratospheric Ozone protection act saved the country a net of 510 billion over 20 years (or around 25 billion a year).
The act reduced emissions of CFC's.
^Major new regulations starting in 1992-2002 are estimated to have saved the economy a total of 50 billion dollars in ten years. (or 15 billion a year).
1^Environmental regulations lead to the creation 1.3million jobs over ten years.
^Costs of regulations were exaggerated estimates for
Acid and rain cap and trade said that the costs would be between 2-4 billion when in reality it was 800 million, or 60-120% less.

http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpres...5ea39929f1ac1c42852574ba005c95ec!OpenDocument
^--EPA regulations limiting Hydrocarbons and NOx emissions from lawn mowers, and personal watercraft save 300 lives and 80 million dollars a year.

http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpres...c045295ced7dcf6885257758005b74bb!OpenDocument
^EPA regulations reducing SO2 and NOx emissions in 2010 from power plants estimated to save thousands of lives and tens of billions of dollars a year.

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/...s-workers-hostage-to-stop-pollution-controls/
^EPA regulations requiring energy companies to reduce poisons pollution such as arsenic, mercury and lead would create over 350,000 jobs over a period of 5 years.

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/...uire-sunsetting-of-all-federal-regulations-2/
^New EPA regulations under Obama have a 4-1 to 22-1 benefit cost ration.
^Two new air quality rules made by the EPA will create 1.5 million jobs over the course of 5 years.

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/07/22/276416/power-companies-air-toxics-rule/
^New EPA standards that reduce Mercury emissions by 91% and SO2 emissions by 55% will save 17,000 lives a year prevent 12,000 heart attacks and 120,000 asthma attacks each year and will provide 140 billion in health benefits. These new regulations and the Clean Air transport rule will create 1.4 million jobs over the next 5 years

http://thinkprogress.org/green/2011...candidates-on-the-epa-threaten-iowa-families/
^In total EPA regulations save over 160,000 lives each year.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/09/02/1012933/-EPA-regulations-create-jobs,-save-lives?via=blog_1
^New EPA regulations would save 12,000 lives a year and create a net of jobs. Also since the economy has a low capita utilization rate, high unemployment, large corporate profits/idle money and is at the zero bound investments that occur due to new EPA regulations are simulative given that the without the new regulations the money paying for the investments would be sitting idle and going to waste.

----Lead

http://ehp03.niehs.nih.gov/article/info:doi/10.1289/ehp.0800408
^Regulations banning and limiting lead in paint, toys, gasoline and other materials save provide net savings of 181-269 billion. Each dollar invested in lead paint hazard control/keeping lead out of products produces more than 17 dollars in return.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-lehner/new-smog-standards_b_923369.html
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/paltman/lets_save_thousands_of_lives_-.html
^Proposed EPA smog/ozone standards would save a net of 17 billion dollars yearly
^It could also save 12,000 people a year reduce asthma attacks by 58,000, and reduce hospital visits by 21,000.

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/09/12/317257/gop-epa-job-killers/
^The clean air act has prevented 230,000 deaths, 3.2 million lost school days and 13 million lost work days each year. The benefits of the act are 30 times higher than the costs

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-14921740
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/09/14/318759/low-carbon-businesses-double-profits/
^Business that took measures to reduce Carbon emissions performed better in the stock markets, also 60% of actions to reduce Carbon emissions were paid back in 3 or less years.
^Companies that emit less Carbon and who took more measures to reduce Carbon emissions returned double of what other companies returned.

Awesoem yet again reality destroys conservatives and republicans

 

The enclosed article in two parts is about “sustainability.” If you are like me you never heard of it until now. Nevertheless, it’s so important to environmental freakazoids:

The Environmental Protection Agency recently spent $700,000 on a study entitled Sustainability and the U.S. EPA.​

If the EPA likes it you can be sure it will become a permanent part of the scam —— cited far and wide by hustlers looking for a spot at the public trough.

Now Playing: The Sustainability Con
By Ron Ross on 1.18.12 @ 6:09AM

Endless streams of gibberish and pseudo-science from the well-established neo-Malthusian establishment.

Although the issue of "sustainability" has been around a while, recently it has grown in popularity and influence. The way it's happening follows an all too familiar pattern.

There are several common ingredients in how the left enlarges its control over our lives. The first is the selection of some aspect of reality -- global warming, carbon footprints, population growth, inequality, diversity, for example. The second element involves designating the selected aspect of reality as a crisis. The third step is to explain that the only way to avoid Armageddon is by reducing everyone's freedom and by giving more centralized power and control to those who understand the magnitude of the crisis. The rest of us are told that our freedoms are a luxury we simply can no longer afford.

Another common element of the process is defining the crisis as ambiguously as possible. Ordinarily, a desirable characteristic of a definition is that it draws a bright line between what is included and what isn't. Clarity, however, is contrary to the objectives of the crusaders -- in regard to defining the problem, the slipperier the better. For example, climate change (or climate disruption) beats global warming. Global warming is too quantifiable in comparison to climate change. No one is quite sure what "climate change" is or isn't or how it can be measured. Sustainability is even more ambiguous than climate change and thus has more sustainability as a ruse.

Ideally the designated crisis is as expansive and open-ended as possible. A vague, loosely defined crisis provides politicians and bureaucrats with what amounts to a blank check or a no-limit credit card, a credit card where someone else gets sent the bill. A problem having no clear definition is a problem without borders.

At Arizona State University you can get a B.S., M.S., or Ph.D. in sustainability. ASU has an entire "School of Sustainability." The school's website offers several answers to the question, "What is sustainability?" Here are four of the answers they offer:

"Sustainability is a concept with as much transformative potential as justice, liberty, and equality."Michael Crow
President
Arizona State University

"Sustainability is larger than one person, one company, or one country. Its scope, scale and importance demand unprecedented and swift solutions to environmental protection and other complex problems."
Julie Ann Wrigley
President
Julie Ann Wrigley Foundation

"Sustainability is living in harmony with our social and natural environment, based on a sense of justice and equity."
Sander van der Leeuw
Dean
School of Sustainability

"Sustainability is a process that engages every discipline to provide dynamic solutions to complex problems."
Brian McCollow
Student
School of Sustainability​

Are you clear now on what sustainability means and why a "School of Sustainability" is of paramount importance?

Academic papers on the topic of sustainability often include such concepts as "intergenerational equity" and "inter-temporal welfare." The left somehow manages to insert its obsession with inequality into every imaginable issue. Inequality is not only a problem at a point in time, but also between time periods.

The Environmental Protection Agency recently spent $700,000 on a study entitled Sustainability and the U.S. EPA. The abstract of the report states:

Recognizing the importance of sustainability in its work, the U.S. EPA has been working to create programs and applications in a variety of areas to better incorporate sustainability into decision-making at the agency.… This framework provides recommendations for a sustainability approach that both incorporates and goes beyond an approach based on assessing and managing the risks posed by pollutants that have largely shaped environmental policy since the 1980s.… EPA should also articulate its vision for sustainability and develop a set of sustainability principles that would underlie all agency policies and programs.​

Obviously the EPA sees sustainability as a golden opportunity in its quest for more power, control, and funding. The EPA's new lease on life is going to diminish everyone else's lives.

What is sustainability, really? It is actually an old concept that has once again been warmed over for the umpteenth time. Sustainability is simply the latest incarnation of Malthusianism. Writing in 1798, Thomas Malthus warned that England's population growth was going to outstrip its available endowment of resources such as agricultural land and coal. The specter that Malthus described was summarized as population increases geometrically, food increases arithmetically. Based on that logic, starvation and suffering were seen as inevitable. Malthus, in other words, was saying that England's economic growth was not sustainable. It was that profoundly pessimistic theory that resulted in economics being described as "the dismal science." England, of course, has gone on to experience over 200 years of historically unprecedented economic growth.

As John Maynard Keynes later observed, "Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." Although Malthus certainly ought to be defunct, his diagnosis of the world continues to have broad appeal.

Obviously, Malthus's predictions did not come to pass. Why not? Malthus's error, in a nutshell, was failing to appreciate the impact of an increasing stock of knowledge and the resulting technological revolution. The sustainability crusade is wrong for essentially the same reasons Malthus was wrong.

A CLOSE RELATIVE OF SUSTAINABLE is "renewable." An obsession with renewability has resulted in many of our silliest and costliest public policies -- subsidies and mandates for ethanol, windmills, and solar panels, for example. A reflex response has been ingrained in public policy that renewable is always and everywhere better than non-renewable. Buzzwords like renewable and sustainable act essentially like thought-stoppers.

When in the history of civilization have we actually exhausted or totally depleted any significant resource? The answer is never. What makes us believe we will in the future? Somehow we buy into the notion that something that has never happened in history is going to doom us in the near future. It is another reflection of the inflated self-importance and myopia of the current generation.

The Stone Age did not end because of a stone shortage. It ended because an expanding supply of knowledge created superior alternatives to stones. That dynamic represents a central theme in the history of civilization. Iron ore was around before and during the Stone Age, but the information needed to make it useful did not exist at the time. Petroleum was not even a resource until we knew how to access it and refine it. We also invented new ways to use it, especially for transportation purposes. Sand was not a resource until we learned how to turn it into glass and concrete. As the late Julian Simon observed, "Resources in their raw form are useful and valuable only when found, understood, gathered together and harnessed for human needs. The basic ingredient in the process, along with the raw elements, is human knowledge."

 

PART TWO:

In the 19th century lanterns were the main source of illumination and whale oil was the main fuel for lanterns. If that had continued we might have driven some whale species to extinction. Why didn't that happen? (It certainly wasn't because Greenpeace was harassing whaling vessels.) We invented ways to convert coal to kerosene and later, petroleum to kerosene. Kerosene was about a tenth as costly as whale oil and smelled better. Then lanterns as a light source were made obsolete by Edison's invention of the incandescent light bulb.

Copper is an important resource with many uses. It could be categorized as a finite, non-renewable, exhaustible resource. How big a problem is that? To answer that question, consider the numerous ways we have developed superior alternatives for many of the traditional uses of copper. For example, copper wires were once the only alternative for long-distance communication -- namely, telephones and telegraph. Now most communication is sent, not through wires, but through the air (cell phone towers and satellites, for example). A single satellite does the job of hundreds of tons of copper. What information is still sent through wires is likely to be done not with copper but rather with fiber-optics (glass). Glass is made with sand or, more specifically, silica. Is sand a non-renewable resource? What's the likelihood we will ever use it all up?

Whether a particular resource is or is not renewable or sustainable is often not what matters. The most important consideration to bear in mind is this: if there are good or even superior substitutes for a resource, its non-renewability is essentially irrelevant and inconsequential.

Another reason we shouldn't worry so much is that all resources are not equally valuable or important. Information is the resource that is far and away the most important in terms of generating human welfare. The foremost reason our current generation is so much better off than previous generations is our access to a greater stock of information and knowledge. We truly are living in the Information Age. In a sense all previous ages have been defined by the amount of information available at the time.

Information is the polar opposite of a non-sustainable resource. Information has the almost magical property of being able to spontaneously generate and expand exponentially. Information gives us the power to create resources and to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of all other resources. The resource that is the most powerful and valuable in regard to human welfare is also the resource that has the most fortuitous characteristics. How lucky could we get?

Coming generations of humans are as likely to be as creative and inventive as the past ones have been. Again to quote Julian Simon, "The ultimate resource is people -- skilled, spirited, and hopeful people who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefit, and so, inevitably, for the benefit of us all." A necessary ingredient for exercising our wills and imaginations is, of course, a large degree of freedom.

Rather than stressing about hallucinatory anxieties and imaginary problems that are unlikely to ever become real problems, we ought to be celebrating how blessed we are. And we especially should not be giving up our freedoms on the basis of the disproven theories of "some defunct economist."

About the Author

Ron Ross Ph.D. is an economist who lives in Arcata, California. He is the author of The Unbeatable Market. Reach him at rossecon@gmail.com.

http://spectator.org/archives/2012/01/18/now-playing-the-sustainability

 

Who (other than the bloated government) would ever hire a person with a degree in Sustainability?

 

Pretty much any architectural firm, agribusiness, or energy company. Sustainability degrees, majors, and minors are offered around the world these days, from Harvard, to the London School of Economics, to the Australian National University.

 

LOLOLOL.....the ignorant gullibility of anti-environmental reality deniers never fails to amuse....quoting clueless drivel from some random rightwingnut just underscores how brainwashed you would have to be to swallow BS like this.

"When in the history of civilization have we actually exhausted or totally depleted any significant resource? The answer is never."
- When in the history of civilization have we had seven billion humans on the planet using up the natural resources at unprecedented rates? The answer is never. -
"What makes us believe we will in the future?"
- Evidence of resource depletion, logic, and the testimony of the experts. -
"Somehow we buy into the notion that something that has never happened in history is going to doom us in the near future."
- Retard logic - 'if it ain't never happened before, it ain't never gonna happen'. -

In the early 1900s, Earth’s total population is estimated to have been about 1.7 billion people. Now it is over 7 billion. Every 3 years the equivalent of the population of the United States is added to the planet. The experts tell us that during the next decade, we will use more oil, gas, iron, and other mineral resources than were consumed throughout all of previous human history. Do rightwing nutjobs like this Ross character think that all of our resources are infinite and will never run out, no matter how fast we use them up or how many people are consuming them?

The Rise and Fall of Civilizations
(excerpt)
The speaker was Parker Havron, a multidisciplinary scholar of archeology and sociology. He pointed out that throughout the history of mankind, civilizations have repeatedly been built in fertile areas where community growth was fueled by the availability of ample resources. In each case, as the civilization grew, a point was reached where resources were used faster than they could be replenished. If the society continued to grow, producing a population "overshoot," one or more essential resources eventually disappeared, leading to economic and societal collapse.

Mayan civilization collapsed because of resource depletion, not disease or warfare
(excerpts)
New evidence, in the form of inferior wood in ancient temples, has emerged for the theory that the Mayan civilization collapsed because they ran out of resources, rather than, say, disease or warfare. According to a report in New Scientist, the evidence was found by researchers led by David Lentz, a palaeoethnobotanist at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, US, in wooden beams and lintels from all six major temples and two palaces within the ancient city of Tikal in Guatemala. The builders of the ancient Mayan temples at Tikal in Guatemala switched to inferior wood a few decades before they suddenly abandoned the city in the 9th century AD. The shift is the strongest evidence yet that Mayan civilization collapsed because they ran out of resources, rather than disease or warfare.


Ron Ross gets shown up for the fool that he is - http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wKR4CmZD5OI

 

To Taxcutter: Good question.

It looks like sustainability has become a category of parasites being created to prop up the failing environmental scam. Nobody believes the UN’s pseudo-scientists and fictional reports anymore. I expect sustainability “experts” will be cited as the final word on every environmental fraud.

And what better way for wannabe parasites to acquire expert status than to be educated by parasites in higher education. It’s win-win for the parasite class. Anyone with a sustainability degree is the ideal government employee. In order to succeed they must secure a spot at the public trough. Once a tax dollar income is secure the expert can appear on TV enlightening the rest of us.

To Poor Debater: Did you notice this in the link you provided?:

“UNIVERSITY LEADERS FOR A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE”

I know I’ll regret asking, but what the hell does that mean?

 

I do think that Global Warming is happening, I'm just not convinced that it's going to end the world as we know it. Some places have it worse than others, I get that. But, at the same time, we can't just shut down modern civilization for a moderate sea rise. Without modern civilization, you can't make or distribute much of anything. And this is a big problem since we have 7 billion humans to feed.

More people die from lack of access to the benefits of modern civilization than could possibly die from global warming. Things like modern medicine and modern food production are literally impossible without industrial civilization. We can't grow enough food using promitive organics and plowing with a donkey. And as far as modern medicine, you can't make or sterilize modern surgical equipment, you can manufacture medicines, you can't distribute bug nets in Africa without cars and roads. You can't distribute food without roads either. So either we deal with sea level rise, or we sentence a billion people to death by starvation and disease.

 

To Caeia Iulia Regilia:

“Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial "we." Mark Twain

In short: You are not speaking for anyone except yourself and your tapeworm.

Incidentally, I notice that you have an American flag and a UK crest on you messages. I’m not sure which one commands your first loyalty. If it is America you might start defending against Third World attacks on America’s sovereignty engineered by the United Nations instead of worrying about feeding them.

 

You're "not convinced" because you have been bamboozled by the clever propaganda campaign that the fossil fuel industry has been running for some time to confuse the public about the reality and dangers of anthropogenic global warming/climate changes. The world top scientists are all warning us that AGW is, in fact, "going to end the world as we know it".

American Association for the Advancement of Science As the world's largest general scientific society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science adopted an official statement on climate change in 2006:
The scientific evidence is clear: global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now, and it is a growing threat to society....The pace of change and the evidence of harm have increased markedly over the last five years. The time to control greenhouse gas emissions is now.


In 2006, the Geological Society of America adopted a position statement on global climate change. It amended this position on April 20, 2010 with more explicit comments on need for CO2 reduction.
Decades of scientific research have shown that climate can change from both natural and anthropogenic causes. The Geological Society of America (GSA) concurs with assessments by the National Academies of Science (2005), the National Research Council (2006), and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007) that global climate has warmed and that human activities (mainly greenhouse‐gas emissions) account for most of the warming since the middle 1900s. If current trends continue, the projected increase in global temperature by the end of the twentyfirst century will result in large impacts on humans and other species. Addressing the challenges posed by climate change will require a combination of adaptation to the changes that are likely to occur and global reductions of CO2 emissions from anthropogenic sources.


American Chemical Society's position on Global Climate Change:
Careful and comprehensive scientific assessments have clearly demonstrated that the Earth’s climate system is changing rapidly in response to growing atmospheric burdens of greenhouse gases and absorbing aerosol particles (IPCC, 2007). There is very little room for doubt that observed climate trends are due to human activities. The threats are serious and action is urgently needed to mitigate the risks of climate change. The reality of global warming, its current serious and potentially disastrous impacts on Earth system properties, and the key role emissions from human activities play in driving these phenomena have been recognized by earlier versions of this ACS policy statement (ACS, 2004), by other major scientific societies, including the American Geophysical Union (AGU, 2003), the American Meteorological Society (AMS, 2007) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, 2007), and by the U. S. National Academies and ten other leading national academies of science (NA, 2005).


The American Meteorological Society (AMS) statement adopted by their council in 2003 said:
Despite the uncertainties noted above, there is adequate evidence from observations and interpretations of climate simulations to conclude that the atmosphere, ocean, and land surface are warming; that humans have significantly contributed to this change; and that further climate change will continue to have important impacts on human societies, on economies, on ecosystems, and on wildlife through the 21st century and beyond. Focusing on the next 30 years, convergence among emission scenarios and model results suggest strongly that increasing air temperatures will reduce snowpack, shift snowmelt timing, reduce crop production and rangeland fertility, and cause continued melting of the ice caps and sea level rise.

LOLOLOL.....what kind of idiotic straw-man argument are you trying to set up here? The notion that working to reduce mankind's carbon emissions means "shutting down modern civilization" is an artifact of the fossil fuel industry's propaganda campaign and also incredibly stupid. If anything, it is the climate changes mankind's activities are producing that have the potential to shut down modern civilization. The sea level rise we're looking at is not "moderate" as you so ignorantly presume. Trillions of dollars of coastal infrastructure is at risk from the projected sea level rises. It is precisely because we "have 7 billion humans to feed" that AGW/CC is such a huge and urgent problem. Climate changes disrupt the patterns of rainfall that sustain global food production and this will increasingly put billions of people at risk of starvation.

That's just your ignorance talking. You couldn't be more wrong.

Your straw-man arguments are ridiculous and your supposed choices absurd. You have no idea what is going on or what the dangers are that the world is facing.

 

A false dichotomy. We don't have to end civilization to deal with global warming, we just have to address the issue in a serious way. The cost of mitigation has been estimated at 2% of global GDP; the cost of doing nothing is 10% of global GDP.

There is no rational case for doing nothing.