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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsCharles P Pierce- The Toledo Water Crisis
Nowhere has the abandonment of reason and of science on the part of half of the American political system had such serious consequences as it has had on our attempts to craft national responses to our cascade of interconnected environmental problems, most of which have some basis in the Great Climate Change Hoax, which half of our political system believe is a scam to suck up that sweet grant money or, as Paul Ryan so brilliantly put it last week, to raise taxes. I don't know but, maybe, if a half-million people still don't have potable drinking water in a couple of weeks, we might take the whole thing a little more seriously than we have, and we might conclude that the planet's getting genuinely pissed at us all.
We stopped this kind of thing back in the 1970's, because that's when we passed the Clean Water Act, and had Earth Day, and we and our Canadian friends were willing to spend $8 billion to save Lake Erie. However, that was before Ronald Reagan was elected to save us all from the dead hand in the jackboot of over-regulation, and to demonstrate to us all that unleashing the power of American corporations was the fast lane to glory. Under Bill Clinton, deregulation became "regulatory reform," which meant finding ways to do the damage more slowly.That was before science became a political drawback. Does the GCCH figure into this? Of course, it does.
I guarantee you that anyone who makes that argument -- that climate change is involved because it results in heavier rainfall and, therefore, more sewer systems flooding into the lake, carrying Christ alone knows what-all -- will find someone standing up and telling them, "You're blaming climate change for everything," as though there were nothing connected in the ecology of the planet at all. And that is not even to mention the role played by the invasive zebra mussels, that kill the animals that eat the algae. Every way you can screw a planet, we have.
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http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/The_Toledo_Water_Crisis
djean111
(14,255 posts)allowable amount of microcystis-bacteria-laden algae in drinking water.
Of course, if Nestle owned Lake Erie we would be all over stopping that bacteria, because it would affect profits.