Clean Enough

It's a long standing axiom in engineering that the last 10% of improvement costs the same as the first 90%.

It can be rephrased as, "perfect is the mortal enemy of good enough."

I was a kid in the 70's.

I remember all the pollution my, not liberal at all, parents talked about.

I got to experience the change in air quality as it was happening in the suburbs of Chicago.

The pollution was real.  The improvement was real.

I've worked in water and wastewater treatment.  One of our bread and butter items was selling treatment plants to places that had run out of grandfathering.  The pollution was real.  The improvement was real.  Seeing how little a 1960's plant did to make the water better compared to a late '90's plant was sobering.

One of the things you get to see is the little chart of what's allowable.  Get a substance below x parts per million and you're legal and it's good.

What if x is arsenic?  Arsenic is poisonous!  That's bad!  Get rid of all of it!

Reducing it below the threshold where your body can deal with it is fairly simple and very cheap.  Getting rid of all of it is not.

And that's where we are with the environmentalists.

We've gotten rid of most of the air and water pollution.  Gotten it down below the harmful thresholds and life should be good.

But perfect is lurking, waiting, to kill off good enough to make life impossible.

That the environmentalists don't really seem to care about pollution but forcing a non-industrial lifestyle on everyone is evident in their making up new pollutants.

I am also old enough to remember when the goal was to get combustion from cars down to carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and water vapor.  The GOAL!

As soon as the automakers had pretty much done that and horsepower was returning to cars...  Nope!  Carbon emissions need to be zero!

Plus, food crops cannot be counted for carbon absorption.  Can't have man benefit from carbon in the air.