I get called lots of names. Liberal, Loser, Lush. From people who don’t know me, to
friends, to family, to Facebook…even my wife. But one of
the few things Christina never calls me, who is around me 24/7, is wrong.
AGAIN, since I need to say it over and over. I don’t have
skin in this game…and I call it a game because that is what this has become. I
just hope they don’t blow up the planet in the next 20-25 years and I’m good. I
don’t have kids, I won’t have grandkids. I won’t have nieces or nephews. You
Trump voters will. YOU have skin in the game…but you bow to a Reality TV star
that has stretched the truth to get where he is. You are not even sure he’s a
billionaire. But I digress. My point is he is dismantling everything that will
protect your children and your children’s children. I am not sure why you are
in such denial.
Let’s start with the environment. This is an easy one, all
you have to do is go back to the 1970’s to see when big business ran unchecked.
Long before #MAGA there was Keep America Beautiful. Remember the Indian in the
commercial. Maybe next time it will be YOUR descendant questioning what
happened. Somehow the post Baby Boomers seem to have forgotten the pollution
that ran rampant. But here we are, ready to do it all again. Let’s look local
for us New Yorkers. This summer I spent a lot of time on the Hudson River. Before
cleanup, sewage, paper mill discharges, and other organic wastes fed bacteria,
swelling their populations. Bacteria consumed the dissolved oxygen that the fish
needed to breathe. Near Albany in summer of 1970, a study found so little
dissolved oxygen that the few fish seen were "swimming slowly at the
surface, gulping air, and a disturbing oil film which covered the water
surface." The Clean Water Act (CWA) passed in 1977, THE ONE TRUMP IS REPEALING, is
the primary federal law in
the United States governing water pollution. Its
objective is to restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological
integrity of the nation's waters by preventing point and non-point pollution
sources, providing assistance to publicly owned treatment works for the
improvement of wastewater
treatment, and maintaining the integrity of wetlands. It is one of the
United States' first and most influential modern environmental laws.
In the years following the law's passage, polluters
gradually came into compliance. The Hudson's color at Tarrytown once matched
the paint applied to vehicles at the General Motors plant there. Now such scenes
are unthinkable…amazing activity is everywhere. Waterfronts have popped up up
and down the coast. And you forget that it was not so long ago that this was impossible.
Between approximately 1947 and 1977, GE, another plant on the Hudson, released
between 500,000 and 1,500,000 lbs of PCBs into the river. In 1983, the EPA…THE EPA WHICH TRUMP WANTS TO DISMANTLE…
declared a 200-mile stretch of the river, from Hudson Falls to New York City,
to be a Superfund site
requiring cleanup. In 2001, after a ten-year study of PCB contamination in the
Hudson River, the EPA…THE EPA… proposed a plan to clean up the river by dredging more than
100,000 pounds of PCBs… and GE had to pay about $460,000,000 for it…NOT THE
MEXICANS. In 2014, the EPA …THE EPA…stated that "the incredible work" from The Clean Water Act helped make the Hudson River cleaner than it has been in decades.
Go take a look for yourself.
This is just one example, in one state, of one natural recourse…water.
I have not even touched on the air and the land. It's ironic that the man whose carbon footprint was labeled “Tyrannosaurus Rex”… looks like the only one who cares. But
in reality, since I won't be around, I don’t.
But you should.
