Law

A public health analogy re responsiblity for air pollution, especially GHG.

 

 

One day, as you swim in your town's only public pool, you observe an ever-increasing crowd of people standing at the edge of the pool, peeing into the water.  Despite your vigorous protests, they stay there and keep peeing, and are joined by still others.   Each person says that you can't prove that their pee, specifically, is impacting you, so the lifeguards do nothing.  As the concentration of pee in the pool rises, you realize in an incisive moment of clarity that what matters is not whose pee you are in contact with at any given moment.

What matters is: Don't Pee in the Pool!

So it goes with global pollutants.  Like a collection of industrialist Alfred E. Neumans, each polluter simply points to someone else who is doing it too.  The more global the pollutant, the worse becomes the vicious cycle of irresponsibility.  The greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) is at the very top of the midden heap for blame shunting and evasion of any kind of responsibility.

We have a pivotal opportunity, right here in the Pacific Northwest, to say: Not Here.  We can stop some of that peeing into the pool, by …. ok, let's not go there.  Let's just say, that there are several billion tons of coal that, over a few decades, certain corporations want to send to China to be lit on fire and turned into pollution, especially climate-destroying carbon dioxide.  And, we can stop them.

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James Wells

We shall not participate in our own destruction