Wednesday, December 5, 2001
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Wednesday, December 5, 2001 |
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Profit vs. environment? Not necessarily By DAVE HAMRICK An expert testifying in Fayette County's lawsuit against Tyrone and Fairburn the county's attempt to stop the two cities from contracting for sewer service said something interesting. Charles C. Corbin Jr. of Keck and Wood consulting engineers said that when Fairburn finishes building its new sewer plant, the water that is sprayed over the ground in the currently fashionable method of disposal will be basically comparable to what you get out of your tap. He also pointed out in answers to lawyers' questions that the spray application is required by the Environmental Protection Division, which allows no treated sewage water to be pumped back into the streams from whence it came ... or any other stream for that matter. It's not the first time I've heard this, but it does provide such a perfect example of the mania that passes for environmentalism in this country that I couldn't pass it up. Now don't write me with the litany of past sewer plant failures and past practices that turned Georgia's rivers and streams into toxic open sewers Obviously we still have a ways to go in cleaning things up, partly because of gross mismanagement by a single entity the city of Atlanta and partly because the standards in past years weren't stringent enough. I have no problem with requiring that sewer plants clean up the effluent, completely. Eventually, not only will the effluent be of sufficient quality that we could drink it ... we're truly going to be drinking it, and that's not a bad thing. But to require cleaning it to that level and then to ban the practice of discharging it into the streams brings up questions in my mind that no extreme environmentalist would ever ask. For instance, instead of open sewers, in spells of dry weather will our neighbors to the south be confronted with open and empty ditches? Would it not make more sense to return the effluent to the rivers, to be collected downstream, rather than fight constant legal battles over who gets to take how much water out? Maybe there's a perfectly rational argument for the EPD's insistence on spray application. I'm sure that when the sewage is sprayed onto the land, much of it eventually finds its way back into the water table and the surface water, and it has time to reach a more natural state by then. Certainly there's room for argument about what's the best policy long-term, and I don't claim to be any sort of expert. But my point is that, with environmentalists, there's no rational way to even discuss these issues. It's kind of like when you take your kids to the store to get a new pair of shoes, and the only criterion they use to choose is the price tag. They get the most expensive, or you get a tantrum, regardless of the actual merits of the shoes in question. Now environmentalists are tearing their clothes and dumping ashes on their heads over the Alaska wilderness and plans to suck out the oil that's under it and use it to heat our homes and power our cars. Extremists argue that there's not enough oil under there to make any kind of dent in the overall demand, and I'm sure that's true. But it's not the point. If we were talking about going in with 10,000 bulldozers and digging up the landscape until we found oil, I'd be the first to rant and rave. But we're not. The oil industry and the government have demonstrated in recent years that they can cooperate to get oil out of the ground without permanent harm to the environment, and there's simply no rational reason to leave it unused. Does that mean that some folks in Texas who are friendly with the president will get to make a profit? Well, golly, I guess it does. And your point?
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