Victory Over Pollution parade needed

The Clark Avenue Bridge was Cleveland’s longest bridge for 70 years. It rose into the orange skies above the steel mills. In July 1973 — 50 years ago — it became an illustration of air pollution in the USA. Cars and factories were killing us, the media told us. Only the federal Environmental Protection Agency could save us.

Apparently it did. I mean, we are still here, aren’t we? Created in 1970, the EPA has defeated air pollution. Toxic emissions are down to minuscule amounts.

Well, the private sector did it. The EPA passed regulations aimed at shutting down industry and the private sector responded by surprising the government through better engineering.

The original muscle cars all died of regulation — convertibles died in the 1980s over safety concerns. And yet today, thanks to modern engineering and a need by Ford to still sell cars to baby boomers, I ride around the Greater Poca, West Virginia, area in a 2010 Mustang GT with the top down and 350 horses chomping at the bit to take me to a hefty speeding ticket. Thank goodness, I am a sensible old man or the fines would break me.

According to the EPA, America beat air pollution.

The EPA said, “Between 1970 and 2020, the combined emissions of the six common pollutants (PM2.5 and PM10, SO2, NOx, VOCs, CO and Pb) dropped by 78%. This progress occurred while U.S. economic indicators remain strong.

“The emissions reductions have led to dramatic improvements in the quality of the air that we breathe. Between 1990 and 2020, national concentrations of air pollutants improved 73% for carbon monoxide, 86% for lead (from 2010), 61% for annual nitrogen dioxide, 25% for ozone, 26% for 24-hour coarse particle concentrations, 41% for annual fine particles (from 2000), and 91% for sulfur dioxide.

“These air quality improvements have enabled many areas of the country to meet national air quality standards set to protect public health and the environment. For example, all of the 41 areas that had unhealthy levels of carbon monoxide in 1991 now have levels that meet the health-based national air quality standard. A key reason is that the motor vehicle fleet is much cleaner because of Clean Air Act emissions standards for new motor vehicles.”

Some of the EPA’s claims are laughably absurd.

It said, “A peer-reviewed 1997 EPA Report to Congress reviewed the benefits of the Act from 1970 to 1990, and concluded that in 1990 alone, pollution reductions under the Act prevented 205,000 early deaths, 10.4 million lost IQ points in children due to lead exposure, and millions of other cases of health effects.”

How do you measure lost IQ points?

Given that there are 50 million schoolchildren in America, 10 million points would mean 0.2 IQ points per pupil. Only a dummy would fall for that claim.

But the EPA’s other measurements seem on the up-and-up. The EPA’s data actually makes the case against replacing the proven, reliable internal combustion engine with electric vehicles that are still under development.

The EPA said, “Compared to 1970 vehicle models, new cars, SUVs and pickup trucks are roughly 99% cleaner for common pollutants (hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides and particle emissions), while Annual Vehicle Miles Traveled have dramatically increased.

“New heavy-duty trucks and buses are roughly 99% cleaner than 1970 models. In August 2016, EPA and the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration jointly finalized standards for medium- and heavy-duty vehicles that will improve fuel efficiency and cut carbon pollution, while bolstering energy security and spurring manufacturing innovation.

“Starting in the 2014 model year, locomotives are 90% cleaner than pre-regulation locomotives. In March 2008, EPA finalized a three part program that dramatically reduces emissions from diesel locomotives of all types — line-haul, switch, and passenger rail. The rule cuts particulate emissions from these engines by as much as 90% and nitrogen oxides emissions by as much as 80% when fully implemented.”

We have defeated air pollution but the EPA lives on because the bureaucrats have shape-shifted their mission from fighting airborne pollutants to fighting airborne nutrients.

Life on our planet would cease were it not for carbon dioxide and water. Only a federal official with a lifetime job guaranteed by Civil Service would go after carbon emissions. Given CO2’s role in sustaining life on this planet, we should increase those emissions, but the only science the EPA follows is political science.

June 22 marks an anniversary very important to the EPA — the last debris fire on the Cuyahoga River in 1969. Socialists posing as environmentalists used it in propaganda and falsely claimed water pollution caused the river to catch fire. Water doesn’t burn. Flotsam and jetsam do.

Nevertheless, the incident helped Democrats push for the creation of the EPA to fight air and water pollution.

There is a tad irony the government going after water polluters because the government is the chief polluter of water. Witness my first trip to Edgewater Park in Cleveland in the summer of 1965. I was 11. My mother had just purchased her first automobile — a brand new 1965 Corvair — and she took me, a couple of sisters, and two of her granddaughters to the beach.

It was nice until I told my mother, “You should see the neat dead rat I saw floating in the water.” She had us pack up and leave. I wasn’t too popular on the ride home.

The city of Cleveland dumped raw sewage into the lake. This attracted rats.

The first person to stop polluting the Cuyahoga River was oil magnate John D. Rockefeller. In the 1870s, he had oil refineries in the Flats where the Cuyahoga pours into the lake. His refineries turned crude oil into kerosene, which gave the masses cheap lighting. One of the byproducts of refining was a volatile liquid that they just dumped in the river.

Rockefeller was a tightwad. He tried to find a use for the liquid. He tried using it to power his machines that ran the refinery. It worked. The machines were internal combustion engines. The liquid was gasoline. This became important 25 years later when electric lamps began replacing kerosene. The automobile saved Rockefeller, who had made the automobile practical by introducing the internal combustion engine to gasoline.

You see, pollution is a waste of resources to a capitalist like Rockefeller.

Harvard gave a shout-out to him in 2015, reporting, “Historically, the 40% of crude oil that was not kerosene was often discarded by kerosene refiners. Standard Oil extracted and sold the other byproducts (e.g. paraffin wax and gasoline) to other refiners of those products. Furthermore, some of the gasoline was used to power Standard Oil’s plants, thereby reducing waste and expenditures on coal power.”

He also saved the whale by replacing whale oil to light homes with kerosene.

On November 5, 2010, Warren Meyer wrote in Forbes, “In the last half of the 19th century, whales were facing extinction. They were hunted in large part because their oil was the best, most affordable illuminant available to growing western nations. One man more than any other headed off their extinction, a man whose picture should be in on the wall of every Greenpeace office: John D. Rockefeller, founder of the Standard Oil Company.”

He wasn’t trying to save the world. He was trying to make a buck. No one really wants to save the world. Those who say they do just want to grab power.

The EPA is a good example of that.

We have defeated air pollution and water pollution. So why do we still have a $10 billion-a-year agency that employs 15,000 people?

Let us declare victory on the Burning River’s anniversary on June 22, throw a parade and shutter the EPA. Let states handle it from here.

Or maybe we should hold it on July 8, the 186th anniversary of Rockefeller’s birth because he was the first American to fight water pollution. Plus he saved the whale.