George J. Hochbrueckner Quotes
We have done extraordinary things to destroy our waters. We can never do enough to research and coordinate cleaning these waters up.
George J. Hochbrueckner, U.S. Congressman (Democrat, NY), New York Times, August 7, 1988
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Many pollution control standards are created by specifying a maxilum allowable proportion of a toxic substance in any waste. So what many polluters do is to dilute their toxic waste with enough water to lower the pollution proportion to meet the standard and then dump the waste into the ground where it runs into the streams, rivers, bays and aquifers. This is “pollution by dilution”. When this is done, the same amount of toxic material is dumped and nothing is improved.
This was the first time that the Environmental Protection Agency had vetoed a permit for a mountain top removal coal mining project that had been granted by the Army Corps of Engineers. The proposed project, Spruce 1, would have removed the entire top of a mountain. It would have created a number of jobs, but it also would have polluted a number of streams in the area and would have affected the ground water of people in the area. What made this a most difficult political decision was that the economic damage was clear as was the science showing the water damage. The people in the community were split over which was the worse alternative.
Smith was the author of a major biography on Nelson Rockefeller who although a Republican advocated higher taxes to pay for what the pubic wanted from government and was one of the first politicians to seriously deal with assuring clean water.
This statement of the problem was so eloquent and universal that it is even used a century later. For example it was quoted by James Inhofe, on his Senate Speech, October 4, 2004.
The major reason for not yet harvesting waste is the labor, caital, and energy costs of recycling relative to the value of the resource is too high. Technology improvements and greater shortages continuously change the equation in favor of harvesting more and more resources.
Islamic modernists like Serageldin are many among the educated Muslims but their views are often drowned out by the violence and extremist statements of the fundamentalists.
Many developing counties have much of their population whose livelihood depends on use of resources and methods which are damaging to the environment, and the majority of the citizens of the country would rather damage the environment than not develop. Some leaders observe that the United States and most affluent nations historically developed in large part by destroying much of the environment, and they have a right to develop also.
George Joseph Hochbrueckner is a former Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives from New York.
