Forty years ago today, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was born, a child of the federal government. Just a few years before that I graduated with a Masters Degree in Environmental Engineering. My timing was perfect. I joined a small company in Brisbane, California that had 28 employees and had never had sales of more than $2 million per year. Because its products were needed to clean up the nations water systems and because the EPA allocated billions of taxpayer dollars to this goal, the small company I joined grew to have annual sales of $500 million and 5,000 employees in 4 years. The company is long gone, but the EPA is still around.
The EPA was launched from a main stream media passion for chicken-little type narratives about doomed American lakes and rivers. I witnessed the EPA's scientific methodologies, first hand. The EPA set the standards for clean water. No one actually knew what standards were needed so the EPA set quality standards to the lowest level that could be measured. For example,phosphates could be measured to 0.5 mg/l ( that is a very small amount) so the clean water standard was set to 0.5. As we developed better measuring techniques, the standard was lowered. Not too scientific. There was never any study done, nor has there been any, to show what phosphate levels were needed to improve water quality.
And now we have global warming. I believe that Obama will soon create the Global Warming Protection Agency to save us all from getting too hot. And the standards will be set in the same un-scientific manner as the EPA standards. A few years ago, Obama created the Consumer Protection Agency and we all are aware of who that protected. No one. The most notable thing the CPA has done is to require banks to print their credit card interest rates in larger type.
And once a protection agency is born, it lives forever.
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