x-cetra:fuckingconversations:flowisaconstruct:imathers:themightyglamazon:jumpingjacktrash:
x-cetra:fuckingconversations: flowisaconstruct: imathers: themightyglamazon: jumpingjacktrash: oh my god. let me share a memory with y’all. it’s from i guess 1978 or thereabouts. it’s high summer. i don’t remember where my mom was driving me, in our avocado green chevette, i just know there was a traffic jam that turned 35w northbound into a parking lot from horizon to horizon. picture it – wait, you don’t have to use your imagination, this happened all the damn time back then. every one of those damn cars was burning leaded gasoline. there were no emissions regulations. there were no safety regulations. there were just thousands and thousands of detroit steel shoeboxes belching visible smoke as they idled, engines loud and hot, here and there a radiator giving up in the heat, a cloud of burning oil rising. i, a smeet of five or six, was choking on toxic smog. i reckon it was about a half hour into the traffic jam that i first threw up. i remember a blinding headache, i remember being confused, i remember dry heaving with my arms and head hanging out the window, the green metal of the car burning my hands and my chin. i don’t remember passing out, but i’m told i lost consciousness before mom was able to get to an off-ramp, because there were no emergency lanes on the highways back then. i lived. and life went on. what were we going to do, complain? if i’d died, the cause of death probably would’ve been recorded as heatstroke, not carbon monoxide poisoning. i know i’m probably preaching to the choir here on tumblr. but i really wish i could tell that story to the people who think deregulation is no big deal. i wish they’d put themselves in my mom’s shoes. or even just look at some old pictures, then look out the window. ever notice how cityscapes used to have that orange tint and hazy aura? yeah, that’s poison gas. remember how the mississippi river used to be a stinking soup of baby-shit yellow sludge covered with disturbingly stiff rafts of light orange foam? i can’t even find pictures of the sludge and foam, i guess they didn’t end up on the internet. the smell was indescribable. that oily shimmer. the reek of dead things. people didn’t boat on the river for pleasure; it smelled too bad, it was too ugly, and you could get super super sick if you touched the water. and now look at it. i still wouldn’t want to drink it, but if i fell in i wouldn’t bolt for the shower in a panic, you know? if the thieving billionaires get their way, we can kiss those sailboats goodbye, and learn the smell of toxic foam once more. the ultra-rich won’t even feel the extra money, they’ve already got more than they could ever touch, they just stash it in offshore accounts to rot, but the rest of us will return to a time of neverending nausea and weird cancers. a time when every elementary school class had at least one kind who’d been born with no fingers or their heart outside their body, and this was just… the way things were. i’m sorry. i didn’t mean to longpost. it’s just. god. y’all have no idea how CLEAN everything is now, compared to when i was a kid. and these rich old men are counting on that, on people not knowing or not remembering how bad it was before regulation, not realizing how much we need these protections until it’s too late. I enforce federal worker health and safety and pollution regulations. When I was learning my trade, when my classmates and I were having a chuckle over the “well duh” level of specificity written into the Code of Federal Regulations (try “no hazardous material shall be stored in crew berthing” on for size), I will never forget the silence that followed when our instructor spoke these words: “Your regulations are written in blood.” These regulations were not written on a whim. They were written because someone thought they could cut costs by storing however many more pounds of a radioactive, toxic, carcinogenic, or whatever else material in the same rooms where the human beings they paid to transport those materials slept, and then did that, because no one was telling them not to. They were written because people died. Horrifically. Because unregulated capitalism values profit over human life and suffering. Can I say it again, for those not paying attention? Unregulated capitalism values profit over human life and suffering. Please note the recalls etc. we’re already seeing with the current US government going after those regulations, and please see Doug Ford up here trying to weaken our water safety regulations again - the last time that happened, under another Conservative government, Walkerton happened and people died. Some died quickly, some lived for years with debilitating illnesses and then died. Are there occasionally some regulations that seem arbitrary? Sure. But the only people who profit from deregulation as a general philosophy are companies that want to cut corners. The Koch brothers fight to deregulate oil pipelines, and theirs fail PLENTY. They don’t give a fuck. When I was in middle and highschool, Acid Rain was a VERY BIG issue that we covered in EVERY science class. Cement buildings and marble historic statues were warped smooth from acid eating off the details. Paint was steadily stripped off cars. Sidewalks had fun little rivulets where lots of water flowed. The rain around big cities, due to the poisonous, low-PH smog, was literally acidic. Sulfur- and nitrogen-based air pollution and acid precipitation as well as the dissolution of important nutrients from the soil are still causing the spruce and fir trees of the forests to die, while brush and other forms of wildlife struggled to survive in the areas where the water cycle pushed city smog and precipitated it into rainfall. The first phase of emission reductions ordered by the U.S. Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 was begun in 1995 - So, I was 4 years old when we STARTED regulating coal-fired power plants and vehicles. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide smog was reduced by about 88%, and Hey! It’s 2020 and there’s no ACID falling from the SKY! Environmental Regulations are IMPORTANT. I remember when the forests in Canada just north of the border were dying and brown from the acid rain from the US. My family used to go camping in Ontario in the summer, and the last trip it was just shocking. No more dark green pines and spruce. Those huge pike and trout we used to catch? Gone, not from overfishing, but from acid rain. We’d catch fish no bigger than my finger and have to put them back, and they were probably the same age as the ones we used to catch on previous trips. The acid rain was stunting their growth. And that was just over the course of the seventies and early eighties.And boy howdy do I remember that amber haze. I was lucky enough to live out in the country, but I remember it whenever we drove down to Delaware or Baltimore or up to Philadelphia.Violent crime dropped significantly about 20 years after lead in gasoline was outlawed, long enough for kids to grow up whose brains hadn’t developed under lead exposure. I wonder if we’ll see a similar change in the upper echelons of government when these old farts born during the height of leaded gasoline and nuclear testing and an unregulated mix of all sorts of toxic household chemicals from DDT to red dye #3 finally die off. -- source link
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