Laziness isn’t why people are poor. And iPhones aren’t why they lack health care.
"There’s one final problem with these kinds of arguments, and that is the implication that we should be worried by the possibility of poor people buying the occasional steak, lottery ticket or, yes, even an iPhone. Set aside the fact that a better cut of meat may be more nutritious than a meal Chaffetz would approve of, or the fact that a smartphone may be your only access to email, job notices, benefit applications, school work and so on. Why do we begrudge people struggling to get by the occasional indulgence? Why do we so little value pleasure and joy? Why do we insist that if you are poor, you should also be miserable? Why do we require penitence?"
For over a century, poor communities have suffered the effects of environmental issues to an extent much larger than that for the population as a whole. In fact, only when environmental issues come to roost on those of means do we see action on a large scale. America in the 1970s and China today highlight that observation.
Polluted environments kill 1.7 million children each year, WHO says
"The causes include unsafe water, lack of sanitation, poor hygiene practices and indoor and outdoor pollution, as well as injuries.
The new numbers equate to these pollutants being the cause of one in four deaths of children 1 month to 5 years old."
So for the party in power to take for granted forty-plus years of progress on environmental issues in an idealistic and utopian view that business will solve all ills smacks of arrogance. Government stalled regulation on asbestos for decades, and acted only after hundreds of thousands had died and lawsuits bankrupted the industry. Waiting for people to die in large numbers before acting does not reconcile with promoting "the general welfare".
What's at stake as the GOP moves to slash regulations? For starters, clean air
"By then, however, there was not much left for the EPA to do on asbestos, after legions of cancer victims took matters into their own hands with civil actions that bankrupted the industry. But the years of government inaction took their toll. A quarter-century later, nearly 15,000 Americans still die annually of diseases caused by asbestos exposure during their lifetime, according to the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization."
The disconcerting nature of the lack of attention to clean energy and environmental issues only grows when we consider that jobs of the present and the future will flow from these actions. Pandering to the past by sacrificing the health of the present and the future to create fewer jobs makes as much sense as trying to recreate the Ice Age.
Clean energy is now as big as pharmaceutical manufacturing in the US
"Globally, advanced energy brought in $1.4 trillion in revenue last year, which is, the report says, 'nearly twice the size of the airline industry, equal to apparel, and close to global spending on media, from newspapers to movies to video games...' What’s more, the advanced energy industry is growing much faster than the world economy overall (7 percent vs. 3.1 percent)."
Then again, maybe recreating the Ice Age will not prove such a bad idea after all.
Welcome to Pleistocene Park
"Nikita is trying to resurface Beringia with grasslands. He wants to summon the Mammoth Steppe ecosystem, complete with its extinct creatures, back from the underworld of geological layers. The park was founded in 1996, and already it has broken out of its original fences, eating its way into the surrounding tundra scrublands and small forests. If Nikita has his way, Pleistocene Park will spread across Arctic Siberia and into North America, helping to slow the thawing of the Arctic permafrost. Were that frozen underground layer to warm too quickly, it would release some of the world’s most dangerous climate-change accelerants into the atmosphere, visiting catastrophe on human beings and millions of other species."
Happy Friday!
Kevin Tong
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