Polluter pays?
Hey, I've been meaning to write this for ages. There was an editorial in the Daily Astorian a while back about a project that lengthened an outflow pipe from a seafood processing plant in Warrenton. This editorial praised Warrenton and the seafood company for essentially taking our (i.e. taxpayer) money and using it to pay a fine on the company for polluting the water in the Columbia River estuary. This quite outraged me at the time, but I didn't immediately write a letter to the editor.
I worked for 12 years at the Washington Department of Ecology helping companies to prevent waste, and my experience there should have prepared me for this, but I stubbornly hang on to my idealistic values, especially of the "polluter pays" doctrine enshrined in our environmental laws. This case is especially irksome, because the "solution" to the problem, which was essentially dilution, used in this case is not really an improvement on the problem (it was equivalent to extending a smokestack to a higher elevation so the pollution is further from our noses). So, what we have here is a company obtaining $1 million from the federal government to help local government and the company comply with state and federal regulations. So much for the polluter pays principle. This just sets a precedent for more of the same (I'll be talking about another case in this vein soon).
The really aggregious part of this episode is the local paper's praise for the project. Basically, the paper is saying that it's OK (or rather, good) for local companies and governments to soak the federal government (that's us!) for money to correct problems that put our environment in jeopardy. This "us vs. them" attitude is self-defeating and certainly not the attitude that should be carried by the press, supposedly the "third estate", watching over our government and reporting objectively. Yeah, right...
I worked for 12 years at the Washington Department of Ecology helping companies to prevent waste, and my experience there should have prepared me for this, but I stubbornly hang on to my idealistic values, especially of the "polluter pays" doctrine enshrined in our environmental laws. This case is especially irksome, because the "solution" to the problem, which was essentially dilution, used in this case is not really an improvement on the problem (it was equivalent to extending a smokestack to a higher elevation so the pollution is further from our noses). So, what we have here is a company obtaining $1 million from the federal government to help local government and the company comply with state and federal regulations. So much for the polluter pays principle. This just sets a precedent for more of the same (I'll be talking about another case in this vein soon).
The really aggregious part of this episode is the local paper's praise for the project. Basically, the paper is saying that it's OK (or rather, good) for local companies and governments to soak the federal government (that's us!) for money to correct problems that put our environment in jeopardy. This "us vs. them" attitude is self-defeating and certainly not the attitude that should be carried by the press, supposedly the "third estate", watching over our government and reporting objectively. Yeah, right...
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