Clean Air Quotes
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 is a very unusual quotation in that a cabinet secretary tried to discuss the method or the opposition’s analysis and thinking regarding man induced climate change. At the time the overwhelming proportion of scientists in the world had concluded that the data showed that in addition to the normal vicissitudes of climate change, there was a definite additional warming effect. Some conservatives, opposing any government action regarding global warming, found a few scientists, mostly unaccomplished who themselves did not believe the data supported the global warming hypothesis. Chu gave this rhetorical analysis.
This scientific quotation is politically important because it defines the difficult problem of setting acceptable and safe environmental and work standards for air or water quality and contact with potentially toxic substances. As this quotation illustrates, everything is toxic if given in large enough doses. Table salt can kill a human if enough if ingested. Tiny amounts of even a poison will do no harm. What makes setting of standards still more complicated is that human beings differ in the amount of a substance it would take to produce a toxic reaction. Allergies are the best example, but the variability of sensitivity always exists.