Creating the perfect world
Bookworm on Oct 03 2006 at 8:39 pm | Filed under: Media matters
Did you ever think that, if we mandated a five mile per hour speed limit, there probably would no longer be fatal car accidents? I think that would be true, but the American economy would collapse along the way? And I bet that, if we required people to eat only cold food, we wouldn’t have any deadly kitchen fires anymore. Of course, we’d have a lot more food poisoning deaths. And did you ever consider that, if we mandated that industry cannot produce any pollutants at all, many people will live longer? It’s that last consideration that interests me because of an NPR story I heard today:
Internal government documents obtained by NPR indicate that the Environmental Protection Agency could have saved thousands of lives each year if it set a stricter standard for soot in the air we breathe.
Last month, when EPA administrator Steven Johnson set a new standard for how much soot is safe to breathe, he rejected EPA’s scientific advisors recommendation to make it tougher. A draft EPA analysis shows that if he had taken their advice, the stricter standard would have saved about twice as many lives each year.
John Walke from the environmental group Natural Resources Defense Council says the documents show how deadly Johnson’s decision will be for Americans.
“What these explosive charts reveal is that by refusing to strengthen our air quality protections,” Walke said, “EPA’s political boss sacrificed the lives of five to 10,000 Americans each year, who will now die from air pollution related strokes and heart and lung disease.”
Walke provided the documents to NPR. A Bush administration official confirmed their authenticity.
The documents show estimates of how many lives would be saved by the new soot standard — and how many more would have been saved by the stricter standard recommended by the science advisors.
In estimates from 12 scientists who had been hand=picked by the EPA, all agreed that more lives would be saved if the EPA had chosen a stricter standard. Most of them put that number at more than 4,000.
Four to five thousand lives is a big number. (Although, to put it in perspective, 5,000 is at most .002% of the American population.) What this breathless story (sorry about that pun) doesn’t discuss is whether more stringent emission standards would result in significant damage to the U.S. economy. Perhaps the increased cost of doing business would result in industires vanishing, leaving more people without jobs or health insurance. These people, too, would be subject to death from stress or the inability to get medical care. The story is silent on this point because there isn’t any such information:
In most cases, the EPA releases analysis of the costs and benefits of a new standard when it announces changes. But in this case, that still has not happened.
EPA officials declined to speak on the record. In a statement, EPA press secretary Jennifer Wood did not comment on the internal documents. She said that the soot standard is the most protective in history. And she said EPA officials still are working on an analysis of the risks and benefits of the new standard.
So what we really have right now isn’t a story at all. It’s lots of accusations, without rounded, accurate information.
One can certainly fault the EPA for setting itself up for this type of attack: Why the heck didn’t it have available information explaining how the administrator decided to beef up the standards to a point stronger than they’ve ever been, but to stop short of the scientific panel’s recommendations? The answer to this question could be that the administrator is in the thrall of big business, and did the bare minimum he could get away with.
It could also be, though, that the scientists got carried away with the perfect, and forgot about the good. That’s why I started my post reminding us that even safety has to be balanced against other practical concerns. At it is, we really don’t know. It’s therefore pretty darn irresponsible for NPR to run with a story blaming the EPA for killing thousands of Americans annually. This is especially true when the EPA is actually strengthening existing anti-pollution standards — just not enough to please the Natural Resources Defense Council. (And, when all the facts are out, maybe not enough to please us either.)
UPDATE: With Earl’s help, I corrected a math error, changing 1.7% to .002%. Thanks, Earl!
Email This Post To A Friend
8 Responses to “Creating the perfect world”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
I think the U.S. population is around 240 million.
Ten percent of that figure would be 24 million, so one percent would be 2.4 million.
5,000 people is around .002 percent of the U.S. population.
Not that if it’s your loved one, it’s any less important, but we need to fight against innumeracy.
Technically, if someone is going to die from pollution in this year or the next, decreasing pollution by a “little bit” is not going to remove the accumulated damage to a person’s system. There is such a thing as causality, for the reality challenged genjutsu crowd.
If 10 years from now you die from pollution, then it is because you chose to live in Los Angeles. I tend to look at things from the beginning and the end. Forget all the stuff in the middle, too confusing and inaccurate. If the Californian system of environment protections were all to the Good, then why do their most liberal cities have huge smog problems?
Scientists ain’t Gods, not even Greek gods. They are not the fates, plucking the strings of individual lives out of the fabric, and either snipping them, weaving them, or shortening them. They cannot really tell whether or not a person would have died if X happened or not. They can guess, they can approximate the numbers, but they cannot honestly say that this will happen on this date and time, X Y and Z happened to cause A B and C.
Internal government documents obtained by NPR indicate that the Environmental Protection Agency could have saved thousands of lives each year if it set a stricter standard for soot in the air we breathe.
it’s a leak bookworm. You can’t defend against leaks by getting ready for every possible one. They weren’t ready with an explanation because they were ignorant of the danger. America wasn’t ready for 9/11 because we were ignorant of the danger. A person on the offense gets to choose the time and place for battle, and NPR chose the best environment for their shot. It is unreasonable to expect any administration, let alone the notorious Bush administration, of being able to react to surprise attacks on a dime. Bush doesn’t even do anything to stop the leaks, in an effective manner, he sure isn’t going to be able to tell his people to do what he can’t or won’t.
Of course the EPA is still doing an analysis, they didn’t release their report after all. It is an “internal document”. There’s a good reason that NPR is vague on where they got the goods and how.
I tried to post on this last night with comments similar to Ymarsakar’s. Since the topic is so interesting, this morning I turned it into a post at Cheat-Seeking Missiles.
Another in the unified effort by all and every leftwing group to discredit Bush and assign the blame for fancied notions of our putative destruction to Bushco. We know what nonsense and double standards by which we judged.
Short anecdote: We lived in a small very upscale Vermont college town from 1976 - 1990. During that period most people used wood stoves (or even coal furnaces, if you can believe that) to heat their nesting places … and I’ll bet they still do. The most lively talk at dinner parties and other occasions where we folk met would be just who kept their house coldest. Having the water in the toilet tank freeze was a source of great pride.
I know it’s redundant to say that Vermont in general. and small college towns therein, are very liberal. In fact they border on moonbattery, so you may find this hypocrisy as stunning as I do.
Wood burning stoves and/or coal burning furnaces are notorious for not being environmentally friendly. That’s why most of the country switched to clean burning oil or natural gas.
They spew fumes. smoke, ashes and even small particles of unconsumed wood into pristine Vermont knolls and valleys. Do the natives care? Absolutely not. Attempts to monitor and control the noxious smoke lying low in the low lying areas brought forth very un-pacifist cries of rage … ditto when disposal diapers were thought to be contaminants and there was talk of banning them in Vermont landfills. Both initiatives were dropped and probably never brought up again.
We lived on top of a hill overlooking one of those low lying areas and given the overcast conditions for most of every Vermont winter, we could see the unhealthy haze lingering and building up day after day and not moving off until a strong “Alberta Clipper” zoomed down on us and blew it eastward over the Green Mountains.
Erp - Colorado, decades ago, began controlling wood-stove and fireplace burning because the valleys around Aspen and Beaver Creek, as they filled with expensive homes and condos, also began to resemble downtown LA on a hot spring morning: you walked outside and your eyes burned while you had a coughing fit. If your address ended in an even number, you could burn Mon-Wed-Fri; if odd, Tue-Thur-Sat, and they tried (don’t know if they succeeded) to ban burning totally one day a week. At Beaver Creek you couldn’t see across the valley most days, for the brown crap that had settled in there - and incidentally in your lungs. Mountain air! Nothing like it!
Everybody is strongly in favor of environmental regulation until they begin to notice the impact on themselves. Disposable diapers are a disaster in landfills, but they’re never going away now, we have them for all time. They are just too convenient.
Take the long view: the leading cause of death is life; and the person who never smoked anything; never drank a drop; never ate anything that wasn’t green (except carrots); and breathed pristine air from start to finish will ultimately be buried just as deep in the boneyard as the person next to him; who lived in downtown Manhattan and fervently enjoyed every minute of it.
The long view in my view is technology. Technology is the curse and problem, and therefore technology will be the gift and solution. All is, as it began.
Y, that will be only with the consent of the willing … and willing they’re not, at least in Vermont.
jj, I was devastated some time back when we drove through the Denver area on our way back east from Yellowstone. The smog covering the city was almost as dense as in Monterey, Mexico.
On our last visit to your beautiful state a couple of years ago, we flew into Denver and drove to Boulder which was beautiful and pristine as you’d want it to be, at least the weather was. The politics there are another matter and I’m used to college students. It was 1968 all over again right down to the psychedelic battered VW vans and leftwing slogans spray painted on the walls of university building and posters of Chef!
It’ll be a toss up. Which will come first for aging hippies and their younger hanger-ons — will they get a life or get a trip to assisted living?
If they aren’t willing, then they better get out of the way. Because the World Perfect, cannot be made without breaking some Amish omelets. If Vermon volunteers to be the egg that gets dropped, I cannot truely disagree.
I vote for people get what is coming to them. Those who advocate euthanasia and abortion, should suffer the logical consequences of their decisions. I need have no part in their ridiculousness. They will either abort their future generations, or they will euthanize their current ones, including themselves. Seems a fitting end to the Tree of Enlightenment path.
As with all things, there is a greater and higher power that one is beholden to. Whether you call that God, Allah, Fate, Karma, or just Murphy’s Laws of Causality. It exists, as a power, and it should not be ridiculed and messed with by unwise shenanigans.
The Nazis thought it was a great idea to purge their genetic pool in order to get the Master Race. Well. That’s already been set in stone you know, what one should do to acquire the Master Race. Nazis apparently stumbled unto a dead end, and were made extinct for their malfeasance and disrespect.
You can’t make too many mistakes on the Road to Serfdom and actually get to where you are going. Even the Drakas of SM Stirling myth, had to have the fickle favor of their God, SM Stirling, before triumphing and acquiring the Master Race technology.
It matters not whether you are attempting to win a war, to better your society, to decrease environmental pollution, or to acquire the Master Race status. Everything you do, everything that you are, is judged and affected by that Higher Power. Is that not the very definition of omniscience?
But I do not speak of revealed religion or Holy Books. They speak of the salvation of souls and the triumph of faith. I speak only of results, pragmatic results, and the ability to project power, real power. The kind that destroys worlds or remakes cities. The environmentalists are beholden to a very dark god indeed. They do not believe as I believe, that the success of their actions are predicated upon a Higher Power. They believe that their own personal power and righteousness is all that they need, and that the natural god that they serve is all approving of their crusade to purge humanity and reinstate the rightful natural order.
Last time I checked on the Ethereal Plane, the god of nature really doesn’t care who lives and dies, so long as they win and improve. Thus the weak survive, and the righteous fallen. The Higher Power, cannot tolerate such things as the weak surviving and the righteous falling to the iniquitous legions of darkness, however.
It’ll be a toss up. Which will come first for aging hippies and their younger hanger-ons — will they get a life or get a trip to assisted living?
They will get a visit by Uncle Jimbo, to mend their ways or to be mended.