Green Lobby enthusiasts usually botch all of them. Conservatives are AWOL on 90%.
With the general topic of “the environment” being highly important to millions of voters and a planet of 8 billion hungry people biologically inclined to various forms of pollution, it often helps to step back and take a wider perspective on this volatile issue.
Even people who claim to have zero interest in environmental affairs (a common attitude for conservatives) should take note because extremists on both sides of the debate are putting all of humanity (not “the planet”) at risk with foolish demands and passive avoidance.
The millions of kids instructed at government schools to hate “corporate polluters” are just part of the problem. A subset of those misguided youths—like that girl who screams “how dare you!” and some ignorant street protesters—grab the attention of lazy journalists, both supporters and critics alike, who want easy click-bait.
But a more sublimely toxic dose of green paralysis comes from the millions of adults molded by the partisans of AM Talk Radio, Fox News and other conservative pundits to despise “The Left” and ridicule “environmentalist wackos” for sport. These right-wing conformists and corporate apologists are arguably just as bad, in different ways.
What conservatives don’t seem to grasp is that the crazed climate alarmists of today are largely a response to decades of right-wing excuses for plainly obvious corporate ((and government)) pollution that had been fouling the air, land and water in America for generations before the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.
It was the rampant pollution throughout the 1940s and 50s that triggered Rachel Carson’s emotional screed Silent Spring in 1962 and the media-inspired Environmental movement that launched soon after. Lake Erie was thought to be “dead” in the 1960s—mostly from government sewage dumping and phosphate laundry detergents—and that was a legitimate inter-state catastrophe that warranted a federal response.
Pro-business conservatives failed to advance any coherent position on the Lake Erie debacle back then—or any intelligible strategy on pollution in general.
Rushing in to fill the vacuum of principled leadership, opportunistic left-wing “environmentalists” and like-minded politicians exploited that inter-state pollution event along with scattered instances of urban “smog” to impose federal restrictions on all local air and water pollution (particularly the industrial variety) ever since. And the cost has been tremendous.
As the radicals had always desired—besides their standard fundraising theatrics—federal controls soon made new factories (once the engine of mighty “capitalism”) almost impossible to build. In the U.S., this was accomplished via harsh and arbitrary “New Source” mandates of the so-called Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act and other dubious legislation.
Those federal laws—and the countless thousands of pages of pre-approval “permissions” and self-incriminatory “regulations” they spawned—often prevented existing factories from expanding as well.
As a result, America’s coal power, petroleum refineries, steel plants, paper mills, cement kilns and other heavy industries shut down by the hundreds—and puritanical eco-zealots celebrated every bit of it.
The resulting inflation, instability, compliance mandates along with union goonery, school taxes, welfare taxes, etc. eventually spread to thousands of plant closures in U.S. manufacturing. And many still blame NAFTA, Mexico and China for that!
More recently, conservative failure to come up with ANY alternative position on what to do about pollution—beyond “me too” mumbling on “clean air and water”—doesn’t fool anyone. Conservative incompetence on environmental topics now pushes moderate greens into the radical camp of anti-human, anti-growth fanaticism that dominates most real and imaginary pollution topics today.
Unfortunately, millions of mainstream voters drift into the radical green ranks as well, since the GOP option on environmental affairs is so uninspiring.
The table below offers a brief synopsis of some actual environmental problems that are spoiling human enjoyment of nature right now—as opposed to futuristic doomsday predictions of climate alarmists.
You will quickly notice a trend that conventional villains of private industry now have very minimal impact on ecological damage in the West, hence the lack of interest on these topics among Green Lobby militants and their reflexive supporters in legacy media.
I address air pollution and climate change last, since those issues are fraught with political mischief yet cannot be entirely dismissed. Longer explanations of each of these topics follow after the table.
Top 10 Summary Table
| Topic | Main Culprit(s) | Why It Matters |
| 1. Coastal and Inland Plastic Pollution (not a “Great Pacific Garbage Patch”) | Poor urban planning, third-world squalor, distraction of blaming consumers and industrial productivity | When it comes to a legitimate global catastrophe couched in dishonest political narratives, nothing tops the international phenomenon of coastal plastic pollution and related inland trash dumping. Since this is a crisis almost entirely caused by corrupt third-world nations—where open trash disposal is flushed out to sea or left for people to trip over—some prefer to call this the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (hint, hint… right next to evil American polluters). But thin layers of floating debris far out at sea are the least of the problem. It’s the sprawling piles of plastic waste right along (Indian and third-world) shorelines and on the streets of impoverished cities that pose the far bigger threat to human enjoyment of nature and the “environment” in general. The common argument that U.S. plastics manufacturers and high-volume distributors (Coke, Pepsi, Nestlé, etc.) are responsible for what some of their reckless third-world customers do with their products is like blaming GM and Ford for selling cars to people, some of whom use their vehicles for drunk driving. As usual, the ones who make these foolish arguments absolve their cherished “victims” of all personal responsibility. And they make any chance of progress more elusive. |
| 2. Beach Closures and Sick Swimmers | Gov’t sewage and storm water dumping | From a domestic viewpoint, America’s ongoing struggles with keeping sewage out of public beaches ranks high on the list of environmental failures. EPA’s 2023 Beach Report (full of excuses) quietly admitted 62,000 days of closures and advisories against swimming, based on their lax standards and self-monitoring at government beaches in the U.S. The millions of illnesses caused each year by this fiasco is another problem. Europe, China, India, Brazil and many others struggle with this ongoing “global” issue in need for state and local solutions. |
| 3A. Colorado River “Disappearing” Completely | Subsidized farming (rampant irrigation in arid West, parts of Mexico and throughout the U.S.) | For nearly a century (well before climate hype) the Colorado River has literally disappeared before reaching its end point at the Gulf of California. This is one of the most naked acts of ecocide in the U.S. as well as a slap to our Southern neighbors, who are part of the problem too. |
| 3B. Other Farm Lobby Water Wasting | Big Ag uses an incredible 118 billion gallons of water each day to drench their crops and boost easy profits, by far the #1 taking of this abundant resource victimized by artificial scarcity. Productive industries and urban citizens pay too much for water since socialized farmers are given a free pass for almost limitless abuse. Meanwhile, eco-zealots still fuss about the tiny fraction of this “precious resource” used for private golf courses and bottled water. | |
| 4A. Lake Erie “Dead” Again | Subsidized farming (Ag fertilizers) and gov’t sewage discharges | Ground zero for the 1960s Green movement, Lake Erie was once thought “dead” because of phosphate laundry detergents and the inability of gov’t sewage plants to remove them (not “industrial polluters” who got all the attention). Now Lake Erie is once again a septic blanket of green ooze in the summer. Without an evil industrial ogre to blame, most Greens have lost interest. |
| 4B. Other Aquatic “Dead Zones” like Chesapeake Bay, Gulf of Mexico, etc. | While gov’t scientists quietly write cryptic research papers, nutrient pollution is wreaking havoc around the U.S. and the world. Far out of the public spotlight, EPA staffers let slip: “Over 166 dead zones have been documented nationwide, affecting waterbodies like the Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.” A separate EPA website provides a summary count of “hypoxic ecosystems” totaling over 400 in various coastal and Great Lakes states (e.g., 108 stressed ecosystems in Florida, 39 in Texas, 30 in Maryland, 27 in New York, 19 in California, etc.). Legacy media often blame the disaster on “heavy rains” and usually can’t bring themselves to say “farm pollution.” | |
| 5. Nitrate Water Well Poisoning | Subsidized farming (reckless use of Ag fertilizers) | The millions of tons of synthetic nitrogen pulled from the sky and deposited on U.S. farms each year are great for boosting crop yields. Over time, nitrate fertilizers accumulate in the soil and seep into nearby groundwater wells in rural communities—which is not so great. With USDA complicity on maximizing fertilizer usage and EPA refusal to set *any* limits on fertilizer runoff… the toxicity starts to add up. |
| 6. Fish Kills | Subsidized farming (Ag fertilizers, bulk animal waste) and gov’t sewage discharges | Thanks to the torrent of filth from at least 2 billion tons per year of animal waste in the U.S. (about 50 times the amount of human waste generated) along with uncontrolled runoff from around 20 million tons of chemical fertilizers, spectacular fish kills are now common along coastlines, rivers and lakes in America. Although a few states like Iowa and North Carolinaloosely track this issue, EPA could care less and has no national database for reporting this fiasco, much less any plan to fix it. |
| 7. Destruction of Natural Wetlands | Subsidized farming (filling and draining natural swamp lands) | Resourceful farmers have never let a patch of trees or a few acres of swamp land get in their way of harvesting corn, cotton or wheat. But as the U.S. population grew, throngs of farmers draining over 100 million acres of wetlands (precious ecosystems according to environmentalists) for their own personal gain altered the landscape in a detrimental way. Ongoing fish kills, aquatic dead zones and other ecological damage all attest to their careless behavior. |
| 8. Farmland Erosion | Subsidized farming (sod busters, poor soil management, failure to control storm runoff) | If the excuse that “we’re not as bad as we used to be” impresses you… well, consider it problem solved. If you’re not a USDA Farm Lobby apologist, then consider the muddy beaches of Galveston and the rest of Texas, which are just part of the problem. Also factor in the expensive river dredging and dam sedimentation from farm erosion. Remember the 1930s Dust Bowl? Farmers were the culprits then too, not the victims as FDR’s Migrant Mother campaign would have us believe. Massive erosion is not “natural.” EPA’s habit of blaming private developers for the sins of socialized farming demonstrates how shameless the agency can be in deflecting attention away from government failure. |
| 9A. Historical Air Pollution in U.S. Cities | Home heating with coal/wood/animal waste, high-emitting autos, dirty old factories | You’d never know it from listening to EPA or academics, but America has had tremendous progress on air pollution over the last century. EPA now uses the excuse of trivial U.S. air pollution to block nearly all attempts to build or expand heavy industry (coal power, cement, steel, refineries, etc.) with arbitrary permitting delays, mandatory self-incrimination and fictitious “potential to emit.” |
| 9B. Major Air Pollution in Foreign Nations | While U.S. air pollution is negligible throughout most of the country, billions of people in other poor nations suffer from energy poverty and related air emissions from cooking with wood and animal dung. These practices lead to millions of deaths each year from indoor air pollution. Hundreds of foreign cities rank worse on air emissions (such as fine particulates) than even the most polluted U.S. cities. | |
| 10. Climate Change | Reliable energy, private industry and personal auto use… all well controlled in developed nations | Eco-zealots, anti-capitalists, media shills and subsidized academics exaggerate this alleged crisis to extract trillions in wealth to study and “solve” it. Their selective outrage leaves little doubt that their righteous anger is nothing more than a self-serving racket. For Big Finance and other globalists, climate crisis is a great excuse to bail out the $100 trillion in U.S. total debt and solidify control of all human activity. |
Next, I’ll provide evidence and analysis on those ten identified environmental issues.
1. Coastal and Inland Plastic Pollution
Like so much of modern politics, understanding the world-wide phenomenon of plastic pollution requires watching out for many false narratives. In this case, blaming productive first-world economies for the failures of third-world despots should be recognized as major gaslighting. But that doesn’t mean the entire topic should be ignored.
According to the Green Lobby, which has always been saturated with Marxist ideologues, wealthy producers must be punished for nefarious activity (often exaggerated) that has perpetually “oppressed” weaker civilizations.
Exhibit A in this continuous Show Trial is well-run Western companies that collectively employ millions of contented workers and serve billions of satisfied customers who freely choose to purchase their products—in this case, products that come in disposable plastic containers.
Scores of Green Lobby websites are happy to shock people with misleading rankings of Western businesses like Coke, Pepsi and Nestlé who gainfully serve the public with “too much” clean and convenient packaging. This, we are assured, is a crime against nature.
Far-left Sierra Club trolls for donations with a “new study” from 2024 that Just Five Companies Produce Nearly 25 Percent of All Plastic WasteWorldwide. Never mind the ocean of dissonance between “produce” and “waste” that these non-profit crusaders overlook.
The subtitle to this Sierra Club gem pushes their dishonesty to the next level: “Thanks to Big Oil, plastic pollution is everywhere, including inside our bodies.”
Smithsonian magazine gets in on the scam, announcing that “The U.S. Is the World’s Number One Source of Plastic Waste,” echoing the narrative from dozens of other Green Lobby agitators.
The fact that the vast majority of plastics in America are managed in secure landfills or highly controlled energy-recovery incinerators escapes their dragnet, as they give a free pass to the actual polluters causing this giant mess: reckless third-world nations.
Thankfully, on this topic there is occasionally some factual reporting if you look for it. A good example of legitimate scientific observations invading the public domain comes from a 2021 Daily Mail headline that “80% of all ocean plastics come from more than 1,000 rivers with hotspots in Asia and West Africa, study finds.” The embedded video supports their findings.
According to World Population Review, dozens of nations openly dispose over 95% of their waste to the “environment,” meaning open dumps and uncontrolled burning that leaves trash susceptible to being flushed out to sea after a heavy rain. I summarized some of the worst:
Admittedly, the term “improperly managed” can be very subjective. But other listings of plastic pollution “emitted into the environment” confirm the trend: third-world countries are making a mess of the planet and treating their own citizens with contempt.
America is far from perfect on this and other environmental topics. But its productive companies should not be blamed for the incompetence of Washington or other nations.
There are dozens of other third-world countries that “mismanage” over 90% of their waste but were omitted from my table due to their economies being so poor that their citizens didn’t generate 100,000 tons of rubbish.
Besides the environmental impact of all that trash randomly strewn across the land and seas, the stench of rotting waste and the insult of walking along streets lined with junk is a terrible way to live.
Unfortunately, the human cost of third-world plastic pollution doesn’t receive anywhere near the attention it deserves—thus any “solution” remains elusive.
In the case of America, extremely little of its allegedly 8.7% “mismanaged” waste makes it out to open sea. We can be sure of that due to an abundance of photo evidence from our hundreds of popular beaches.
It is safe to assume there isn’t a single beach in the U.S. that looks like any of these third-world slums. And there are hundreds of similar photos available on the internet, usually accompanied by vapid excuses and blame-shifting to American prosperity.
2. Beach Closures and Sick Swimmers
Considering the hundreds of billions of dollars that U.S. industries and taxpayers have spent to reduce water pollution since the 1970s, you might think it was safe to go to the beach by now. That’s exactly what the 1972 Federal Water Pollution Control Act (or “Clean Water Act”) promised.
Authors of that 1970s law—passed over Richard Nixon’s veto—told us pollution discharges would be “eliminated by 1985” in return for vast taxing, spending and rulemaking powers to do almost anything in the name of clean water.
How badly have they missed their mark? EPA’s 2023 Beach Report quietly admitted to 62,000 days of closures and advisories against swimming, based on their lax standards and self-monitoring at government-run beaches in the U.S.
If even one day of that debacle had been caused by industrial pollution, we likely would have been treated to widespread green protests and a media “perp walk” resembling their vilification of Enron and Big Tobacco.
The last time private industry was associated with any discernable amount of beach closures was during the late Spring and early Summer of 2010 following the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. That freak accident occurred despite a company probably spending billions on environmental compliance—even before the spill.
And the damage was so brief and isolated… if you waited a few weeks, nature and BP’s response efforts took care of it.
Frustrated eco-zealots in 2010 were so lacking in real beach damage that they had to get creative with made up dramatizations on perfectly clean shorelines, as shown below. All four images (and many more like that) were vigorously promoted by legacy media.
And the saturation media coverage took its toll on the American psyche. Despite the minimal impact on humans, wildlife and beaches, a Fox News poll in June 2010 revealed that 95 percent of American voters “say they feel heartbroken about the people and wildlife affected by the spill” and “83 percent are angry at those responsible.”
Today is very different. Routine beach closures and massive fish kills (see item #6) trigger only yawns from greens activists and media provocateurs.
Since U.S. beach closures this year, last year, and every year for as long as records have been kept are almost entirely caused by sewage and storm water dumping from government-run utilities, the usual alarmists typically lose interest.
A notable exception to that norm was the Natural Resources Defense Council, who had been gathering beach closure data and publishing its annual Testing the Waters report since 1991, which was apparently discontinued after 2014.
While those reports were rather bland by Green Lobby standards, they did eventually prompt EPA to acknowledge the issue many decades later with its own uplifting annual beach closure assessments. But the overall lack of interest from EPA and environmentalists has kept this national embarrassment off the headlines.
The technical problem of beach closures stems from the sad fact that local wastewater utilities can’t manage to assemble a network of sewer pipelines without encountering massive leaks every time it rains, inundating the treatment plant beyond its capacity.
Another legacy issue is that hundreds of older cities in the Northeast and industrial Midwest installed Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) generations ago, most of which still remain. CSOs are designed to combine storm and sanitary sewer lines and “overflow” directly to the environment during heavy precipitation.
After a heavy rain, many (probably most) of the nation’s sewage plants dump partially treated wastewater into the nearest receiving water body, usually out of sight from the general public.
According to EPA, CSOs annually discharge 850 billion gallons of untreated sewage and stormwater—equivalent to 13 days of flow from Niagara Falls. And that’s nothing compared to the torrent of 10 trillion gallons of urban stormwater discharged to public rivers, lakes and beaches by municipalities each year, per EPA figures.
This tsunami of dirty street runoff is tainted with gasoline, oil drippings, food scraps, animal waste, tire residues and usually receives no treatment whatsoever. (The figures in this paragraph come from EPA’s 2004 Report to Congress on Combined Sewer Overflows and Sanitary Sewer Overflows; the agency has been mostly quiet on the topic since then.)
The political problem of beach closures stems from four easily recognized aspects that rarely get mentioned in public:
- The nation’s roughly 16,000 sewage treatment plants are almost always run as local fiefdoms of political patronage. Here we have the intersection of the corporate cartel of the American Society of Civil Engineers and the faceless blob of civil service unions, with both sides constantly agitating for more federal “infrastructure” handouts, lobbying politicians to block any meaningful reform and maintain zero accountability for their decades of malfeasance.
- In the 1972 Clean Water Act, Congress tasked EPA to manage the political disbursement of over $120 billion (2000 dollars) in federal “construction grant” pork to local government offenders to upgrade their shoddy sewage handling systems.
- Nearly all U.S. beaches are run by state or local governments as “profit centers” for the heavily taxed tourism industry (e.g., the California Coastal Commission says the state has a “$45 billion a year coastal economy”).
- Items 1 through 3 create a rather obvious conflict of interest with the government “regulating” itself, in addition to violating their own core principle to never “pay polluters to pollute.”
It should surprise no one that EPA has been making excuses to cover the increasingly egregious misdeeds of those same federally funded polluters that Washington helped with handouts in the 1970s and beyond.
If Washington had ever been serious about government sewage dumping—which was a major problem in the 1960s—they could have established “scientific” and uniform pollution limits (we don’t have that) and merely enforced those limits in some objective fashion (we don’t remotely have that).
EPA further helps their government friends in the sewage taxing/treating/dumping business and at government-run tourist destinations by refusing to set anything close to “health-based” standards on exposure to human sewage at public beaches.
For instance, the feds say it’s perfectly safe to swim in freshwater fouled by anything under 400 counts of fecal coliforms per 100 milliliters—which could make you sick from one mouthful.
Although I think a strong argument can be made that EPA’s voluntary and cryptic “action value” beach guidelines (better summarized by California) are a joke, this is a tedious scientific exposition that I’ll skip for today. I think the EPA’s conflict of interest speaks for itself—and weak beach standards are just one example.
If thousands of beach closures are an embarrassment to EPA and other health officials, the millions of American swimmers who get sick from exposure to sewage at public shorelines each year could qualify as a potential humiliation—if the topic ever gets its due attention.
Here we have a wide range of numbers to choose from despite a paucity of scientific interest.
On the lower end of the spectrum, the June 12, 2000 issue of U.S. News and World Report mentioned a preliminary study done for the EPA (never finalized) that estimated over 1 million Americans get sick each year just from sanitary sewage overflows. (That excludes CSOs and the vastly greater volume of urban storm water runoff.)
In another brief disclosure, EPA pitched similar figures—strictly as an opportunity, though, not a problem. Buried in a 1999 report to Congress, EPA claimed that “up to 500,000 cases of illness will be avoided annually” just by “reducing” stormwater pollution with their programs.
Stepping up a bit, the NRDC’s 2014 Testing the Waters report states: “The EPA has estimated that up to 3.5 million people become ill from contact with raw sewage from sanitary sewer overflows each year.” EPA later withdrew that estimate.
More recently, Environment America’s 2019 report on Water Quality at Our Beaches states: “Each year in the U.S., swimmers suffer from an estimated 57 million cases of recreational waterborne illness.”
Their figure comes from a study by public health scientists at the Universities of Illinois and Indiana, published in the January 2018 issue of Environmental Health (Table 3). But if millions of Americans get sick and our news media ignores it, then the public can’t possibly respond in any meaningful way.
No matter whose figures we use on U.S. sewage dumping and associated sick swimmers, we have a major problem that EPA and most of the Green Lobby has been neglecting for decades. And other countries like England, France, Mexico, Chinaand elsewhere probably have similar or worse problems in this area.
But the lack of attention makes scientific comparisons between countries nearly impossible. For additional background on the problems associated with government sewage dumping, I went into greater detail in an essay from five years ago.
- Swimming in the Government Sewage
Steve Penfield • February 2020 • 14,300 Words
3A. Water Wasting: The Colorado River “Disappearing” Completely
The routine disappearance of the Colorado River rightly qualifies as one of the most glaring assaults on nature in the U.S. as well as a small slap to our Southern neighbors (who join in the looting).
With remarkably little fanfare, the once mighty Colorado has been dammed up and siphoned off primarily to give cheap water to wealthy farmers in the deserts of Arizona and California where too little rain falls for sustainable agriculture.
For nearly a century (long before climate hype) the river has literally vanished before reaching its end point at the Gulf of California.
Understanding this topic is pretty straight forward, so I’ll go with a visual presentation of the evidence. First, the man-made diversions.
Now, the agrarian magic trick of making a river with an average flow of about 4.5 trillion gallons per year (at northern Arizona, before the 1930s) completely disappear by the time it reaches the southern edge of the state. Generous diversions from California and Mexico along the way help with the vanishing act.
At that noted flow rate, the natural Colorado River would have filled Lake Erie in under three decades. This water once created a vibrant ecosystem along its delta at the Gulf of California, according to historians. That ecosystem of wetlands vegetation, fish, shrimp and birds is nearly gone now. The possibility of humans actually enjoying that natural wildlife has also vanished.
This is just one of the many ecological assaults inflicted by socialized farming in America. And the remarkably low value of crops grown in the deserts of Arizona and California hardly justify this incredible loss—particularly if you listen to “naturalists” who claim there is no justification for any man-made alteration of nature, no matter how many jobs it costs the economy.
The pittance of U.S. farm jobs protected by generous “water privileges” is another weak argument for wasting this resource.
Shameless “environmental reporters” love to blame “climate change” for the depletion of the Colorado River. But that’s a farce. The alleged 1°C rise in temperature over the last century has almost nothing to do with this river running dry. (Or the near depletion of the 1,900-mile Rio Grande as it comes out of New Mexico and into Texas. Same agrarian cause, same political gaslighting.)
It’s all about subsidized agribusiness and their reckless overuse of cheap water to irrigate almost worthless crops, which only appear to be economically “viable” due to massive property tax breaks and other political favors.
This desert mirage is propped up by the free pass that the USDA, feckless greens and legacy media give to pander to the powerful Farm Lobby while extending their fury against private-sector “industrial polluters.”
As we will see further, with government on your side… you can do just about anything.
3B. Water Wasting: Other Farm Lobby Extravagance… and their Accomplices
If the vanishing Colorado River was an aberration to otherwise sensible water policy, that might be excusable for its interstate and multi-national complexities. But agrarian water wasting is quite common in America, particularly in Western States.
Thanks to generations of special treatment, Big Ag extracts an incredible 118 billion gallons of total surface water and groundwater each day to drench their fruits, nutsand veggies while boosting easy profits for a select few.
This is by far the #1 taking of this plentiful resource that has long been victimized by artificial scarcity.
And of course, all of those watermelons, almonds and tomatoes can be grown elsewhere than the 17 arid Western States (from California to Texas to Idaho) that hog most of America’s water supply. Those foods can easily be produced in other states or nations where rain and surface water are more abundant—and tax subsidies aren’t “required” to enrich desert agriculture.
As to the incredible wasting of so much water by so few people, how has this brazen “theft” (as greens call trivial private-sector water usage) been allowed to endure for so long? And where are the federal regulators who are supposed to be protecting the environment from wanton exploitation?
Actually, our trusted public servants—thousands of them—know all about it. And they help obscure the malfeasance, in large part to maintain “family farm” sainthood to which over 95,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture bureaucrats owe their job security. But Washington’s Farm Lobby apologists don’t only work at the USDA.
The nation’s primary accountant of water concerns is the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), part of the U.S. Department of Interior’s 63,000 employees. For better or worse, the USGS keeps (or once kept) two sets of data for monitoring aquatic resources: total “withdrawals” and “consumptive use.”
Water withdrawal is a politically charged concept that means almost anything. This broad category includes power plants that move high volumes of surface water for non-contact cooling and mines that raise the elevation of their pit water to keep the quarry floor from flooding. In both cases, clean water is briefly “withdrawn” from nature then pumped to nearby rivers or lakes, where anyone else can still use it.
In contrast, water used by the public (showers, sinks, toilets, etc.) ends up as filthy sewage that requires costly treatment, which often fails when it rains.
Water consumedby farm irrigation either evaporates directly from channels or wetted soil, transpires from plant leaves, or gets incorporated into crops that often could not be gainfully grown without subsidized diversions.
Unlike the treated and clean discharges from most industries, agricultural “return flows” are a nasty byproduct with a huge “social cost.”
Farm runoff typically receives no treatment whatsoever and is frequently contaminated with viruses, bacteria, toxic nitrates, ammonia, phosphates, etc. that cause major environmental harm (aquatic dead zones, fish kills, poisoned wells, etc.).
Starting with the Water Year 2000 report (released in 2004), USGS stopped publishing “consumptive use” data entirely for the next 14 years, breaking with decades of prior scientific methods.
This abrupt change fit well with the agendas of Democrats and the Green Lobby to demonize “fossil fuel” power. It also diverted attention from longstanding federal failures on subsidized water wasting.
In the most recent USGS water report, a single sentence mentioning agricultural water consumption slipped past the gatekeepers, revealing a continued imbalance on water usage.
The agency’s National Integrated Water Availability Assessment for 2010-20 has multiple colorful maps and charts highlighting misleading “withdrawal” data and the “climate” hustle, with a lone sentence buried amidst a wall of text that of the 84 billion gallons per day of total U.S. water consumption:
Crop irrigation accounted for 90 percent of the consumptive losses whereas thermoelectric and public supply accounted for much smaller loss amounts (3 and 7 percent, respectively). [USGS 2010-20 report, page 13]
Although irrigated farming consumes 30X the water that thermoelectric (coal, gas, nuclear) power plants do, for decades the USGS has chosen to distract people with ecologically irrelevant power plant movements of clean water (e.g., from a river or holding pond to non-contact heat exchange, then to cooling towers and right back to the same stream or pond) that they prominently advertise as “withdrawals.”
This perversion of the data just happens to vilify productive industry while obscuring decades of lax agency oversight.
With their anti-power plant distractions prominently featured in many USGS reports for generations, they do occasionally drop a few “truth bombs” about agricultural water wasting. For instance:
The 17 Western States are located in areas where average annual precipitation typically is less than 20 inches and is insufficient to support crops without supplemental water. … In Arizona and Idaho, application rates exceeded 5 acre-feet per acre. [USGS 2005 Water report, page 23]The 17 Western States cumulatively accounted for 91 percent of total surface-water irrigation withdrawals and 71 percent of total groundwater irrigation withdrawals in the Nation. [USGS 2015 Water report, page 28]
But these tepid warnings are ignored by mainstream journalists, green activists and the general public. And the wholesale degradation of the Colorado River and Rio Grande proceed with reckless abandon.
Showing no logical consistency whatsoever, the same federal policy that defends the complete obliteration of the Colorado River supports releasing 543 billion gallonsper day (USGS figure) of valuable fresh water into the Gulf of Mexico, primarily via the Mississippi River.
Certainly, 20-30% of that flow (perhaps during flooding events) could be diverted, treated to remove silt and nitrates, and put to productive use for tens of millions of residents in the arid Western States.
But greens would certainly fight it, bureaucrats would drag their feet for decades, and any private beneficiaries would run out of funding in the meantime.
So one river runs dry and another spews nutrients into a New Jersey-sized “dead zone” while oozing mud onto the downwater beaches of Texas. (I’ll get to dead zones and erosion in a bit.)
SIDEBAR
Primer on Farm Lobby Politics
To understand Washington’s gross double standards regarding harsh treatment of private industry vs. its absurd coddling of agribusiness requires some historical awareness of American farm policy.
Once upon a time a few centuries ago, farmers were independent, hardworking and averse to public handouts. Gradually, with landed aristocrats seizing large tracts of real estate, Midwestern radicals demanding loose money and free soil, and New Deal berserkers pushing their programs on any holdouts in the farming community, all of that would change.
Washington D.C. eased itself onto American farms in 1862, when Lincoln established the U.S. Department of Agriculture to conduct “research and development” on the nation’s food supply during the Civil War. After the war ended, the fact that the Constitution grants no federal authority on agriculture or the food supply never got in the way of DC farm planners.
Washington kept its hand on the plow and rewarded Northern loyalty with about 270 million acres of free “homestead” land—on the condition that the new owners “improve their plot by cultivating” it.
This inevitably meant tearing down forests and uprooting millions of acres of native prairie grasses (which were resilient to drought) with no hint of federal caution. That bit of social engineering would prove disastrous a few generations later when the Dust Bowl darkened the skies for large parts of the U.S. and destroyed rural communities for nearly a decade.
Throughout the late 1800s, Farm State radicals would agitate for other foolish policies from rubber-dollar inflation to Alcohol Prohibition to more free land. Federal intervention in farming went into overdrive during World War 1, with generous price guarantees creating an artificial boom that enriched farmers for a while before markets collapsed in the 1920s from massive surpluses.
James Bovard’s excellent 1989 book The Farm Fiasco recounts that:
In 1930, the New York Times, surveying the wreckage of agricultural markets after the federal government tried to drive up wheat prices, concluded, “It is perhaps fortunate for the country that its fingers were so badly burned at the very first trial of the scheme.” (p. 1)
But their faith in DC humility proved mistaken. In the 1930s, farmers betrayed millions of starving Americans to accept federal payments to destroy perfectly good animals and crops in an effort to boost farm income. The Supreme Court struck down that bit of folly in 1936, but other costly farm supports persist to this day.
One of the more perplexing farm policies deals with the 1990s phrenzy over ‘Big Tobacco.’ While private-sector cigarette makers were vilified and extorted to sign a roughly $250 billion “settlement” in 1998, subsidized tobacco farmers were spared from any responsibilities for growing the “poisonous weed” used for making cigarettes.
Tobacco farmers even got rewarded with a generous $10 billion “buyout” to cap off decades of easy profits from their protectionist quota system. So in Deep State wisdom, tobacco is good but cigarettes are evil.
The incredible double standard applied to Big Tobacco vs. Big Farming gives a glimpse to Washington’s longstanding duplicity when it comes to Ag water wasting and other farm pollution.
But that barely scratches the surface compared to past looting of taxpayers to build Farm to Market roads, New Deal Rural Electrification programs and the Hoover—Roosevelt projects of building giant dams to bring unnatural farming to the vast Western wilderness.
It also overlooks the ongoing farm welfare of price supports, loan guarantees, crop insurance, ethanol mandates, export assistance, protectionist tariffs, quotas and more government contrivances than anyone can fathom. Let’s not forget the reckless USDA program of giving free junk food to millions of overweight Americans.
Americans have forked over trillions in tax support and higher food prices to these relics of a culture long gone. And corrupt politicians of both parties hide behind folksy mythology of the “family farmer” to keep those failed programs running.
In Washington and nearly all 50 state capitols, politicians and bureaucrats have substantial prestige tied to promoting farmers as paragons of American virtue that need to be protected with endless handouts, tax breaks and loopholes.
The esteemed “family farmer” is now a human shield to protect tens of thousands of jobs at the bloated USDA (FY2023 spending of $290 billion, over 95,000 staff), the floundering U.S. Dept of Interior (63,000 staff) and similar state agencies.
To speak openly on the immense water wasting and ecological damage from socialized farming puts all of that governing prestige at risk. And it would challenge the easy profits for a small group of agrarian elites.
Accordingly, socialized farming gets away with greed and graft in broad daylight while productive industries get nothing but contempt for much lesser infractions. And all that makes sense once you look at the critical question of democratic tribal politics: Are you a protected Insider or just some vulgar Outsider?
Subsidized agribusiness has been in The Big Club of U.S. power for over a century. As loyal members of the federal plantation, they have special rights that don’t apply to independent businesses and ordinary citizens.
And how does this help the average American—who could easily buy food grown elsewhere (if the feds got out of the way)?
U.S. farming in 2023 took about 880 million acres to yield $222 billion in gross sales, or less than one penny per square foot. Even the slums of Newark and Detroit generate more income and pay far greater property taxes than that.
That gargantuan block of real estate trapped in low-yield agribusiness created less than one full-time farm job per 500 acres. Again, not too impressive.
Annex to the Sidebar
Are there heroes of the food business? Absolutely.
Those would include the innovators who brought us farm tractors that ease the burdens of planting and harvesting, fertilizer manufacturers and biotech firms who boost crop yields and pesticide makers who prevent many billions of dollars in crop losses every year.
Improvements in U.S. Farm Productivity (5-year averages)
| Item | 1909-13 | 1935-39 | 1939-43 | 1955-59 | 1968-72 |
| Cotton | 188 lb/acre | – – | 260 lb/acre | 428 lb/acre | 467 lb/acre |
| Corn | – – | 26 bu/acre | – – | – – | 84 bu/acre |
| Wheat | – – | 13 bu/acre | – – | – – | 31 bu/acre |
Source: Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson, page 92.
Thanks to farm machinery, pesticides, fertilizers and biotech, nearly all U.S. food prices have declined dramatically in real terms over the last century. Farmers had almost nothing to do with those productivity gains, since innovation frequently made farming easier.
The roughly 20 million Americans who work in other non-farming food businesses deserve our gratitude as well. Those include everyone from grocery store clerks to meat packers to truck drivers to restaurant staff who almost always bring us our meals with a smile and no expectation of government handouts.
All of them could continue handling and processing foods grown in other countries—or grown in the USA without subsidies. Populous nations like Singapore, Taiwan and the island of Hong Kong have virtually zero domestic agriculture yet they financially thrive and eat healthier diets than most Americans.
So the coddling of landed aristocrats and spoiled agribusinesses is a lose-lose scenario to the vast majority of Americans no matter how we look at it. But Washington won’t give up the con no matter how much evidence contradicts their wasteful programs. And the EPA-USDA-Farm Lobby cabal will never speak candidly on farm pollution.
As a consequence, farm pollution (and also government sewage dumping) have gotten a free ride for generations. Legacy media is too fossilized to figure that out. Leftist greens focus all of their rage—and fundraising theatrics—against private-sector “industrial polluters.” And conservatives are totally AWOL on environmental affairs… other than complaining about the antics of environmentalists.
4A. Lake Erie “Dead” Again
After decades of neglect, Lake Erie is now headed backwards to routine beach closures, fish kills and floating green algae blankets most summers. But with no evil industrial ogre to blame, most greens and university researchers have lost interest.
And public officials have conveniently buried the important history of why Lake Erie was once thought “dead” to begin with: phosphate laundry detergent and the inability of government sewage plants to remove it.
The last instance I could find of any federal agency acknowledging phosphate water pollution history was in 1999 with the U.S. Geological Survey report “Review of Phosphorus Control Measures in the United States.”
That USGS report gives background on the 1967 Congressional Joint Industry-Government Task Force on Eutrophication and the effective statewide bans on phosphate detergents starting in the 1970s, as discussed in my prior Swimming in Government Sewage essay.
The Ohio State University provides a brief history on the overall size of the Lake Erie dead zone. Their single-screen website goes light on farm pollution but has an informative set of 15 thumbnail plots of the lake’s zero-oxygen “anoxic” extent from 1930 (when the dead zone was miniscule) to 1982.
Moving on to modern times, it’s unclear if Lake Erie has fully regressed to the point of the 1960s due to a conspicuous absence of Green Lobby and university interest. Expensive improvements on industrial wastewater management and sewage treatment since the 1970s and the phosphate detergent ban have certainly helped.
But the millions of tons of toxic chemical fertilizers sprayed and injected into the soils across the Lake Erie watershed—with no federal limits on the harmful inter-staterunoff, and probably no state limits either—have taken their toll.
The pictures below ran in the Spring 2015 edition of the quarterly magazine of the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo, under the title of “Green Menace.”
The long gap between these photos taken in September 2011 and SUNY Buffalo’s publication about 3.5 years later gives an indication to how seriously they take Lake Erie farm pollution. Buffalo sits on the eastern edge of Lake Erie, so one might think SUNY Buffalo might show greater interest.
The western basin of Lake Erie looked just as sick in 2017, based on satellite photos published in 2019 by Mother Jones, who also reproduced an algae bloom severity chart for 2002 to 2018 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. That chart of western Lake Erie shows algae blooms getting worse over the last two decades, although individual years vary to a large degree.
The scant attention paid to the Lake Erie dead zone is dwarfed by the saturation media coverage and tens of thousands of university research papers clamoring for more federal grants to study “climate change.”
For that endeavor, government officials and their allies want to extract trillions from taxpayers and energy users to address this alleged crisis.
4B. Other Aquatic “Dead Zones” like Chesapeake Bay, Gulf of Mexico, almost Everywhere
With a massive man-made dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico nearly the size of New Jersey, another large dead zone in Chesapeake Bay every summer, and at least 400 other ecosystems documented as suffering from “hypoxia or concern for hypoxia” around the country, one might think the EPA and the Green Lobby would show some more interest. But that’s not the case.
Actually, aquatic dead zones are now a global phenomenon. This map of over 500 dead zones around the world originated from Science magazine in 2018. The magazine reports that aquatic dead zones have increased tenfold since 1950, when synthetic nitrogen fertilizers became commercially available.
In America, oxygen-stealing algae blooms fed from animal waste and chemical fertilizers—veritable rivers of “farm sewage”—wreak havoc at estuaries and beaches from California to Ohio and from Florida to Texas. The topic of aquatic dead zones was explored at length in my 2020 Swimming in Government Sewage essay, so I’ll move on to other matters today.
5. Nitrate Water Well Poisoning
Since the 1950s, U.S. farmers have increasingly relied on synthetic nitrogen fertilizers to boost crop yields and personal incomes. With USDA complicit in promoting that practice and EPA steadfast in their political crusade against “industrial” pollution, the problems of unchecked agricultural wastes have built up.
One such result is unnaturally high concentrations of nitrates (admittedly “toxic” per the EPA) in millions of groundwater wells in rural communities. This pollution comes almost entirely from chemical fertilizers.
The 2010 USGS report “Nutrients in the Nation’s Streams and Groundwater” provides the following historical chart of commercial fertilizer usage in the America.
The same USGS report estimated that “about 15 million people live in areas where nitrate concentrations are predicted to be greater than 1 milligram per liter in wells” and “more than 1.2 million people live in areas predicted to have moderate nitrate contamination of groundwater (greater than 5 mg/L but less than or equal to the MCL [maximum contaminant level] of 10 mg/L).”
The agency’s “moderate” qualifier on nitrate contamination is suspect, given the immense government coddling of socialized farming and the high amount of federal prestige on the line from its decades of micro-managing the food supply. EPA’s self-serving demonization of private industry for much lesser infractions also plays a role.
The U.S. Geological Survey provided an informative national map of nitrate pollution in a white paper from 2006. The graphic is based on sampling from about 2,300 shallow groundwater wells, which they define as typically less than 5 meters deep, and associated computer modeling.
To get groundwater nitrate levels to jump from below 1 mg/L (normal) to even 3 or 4 mg/L (light blue on the map)—over a few square miles, let alone an entire state—requires enormous chemical inputs. Therefore, this map gives an indication of present harm (not futuristic projections) caused by farm pollution—unlike so many doomsday predictions of “climate” apocalypse.
Par for the course, EPA has lax “acute” standards (if you survive, it’s “safe”) and no long-term standards for the common occurrence of nitrate water well contamination. Their interest level in alerting the public to this significant threat is between low and non-existent.
The “Dangerous Double Standards” section of my 2020 environmental essay explores some of the inconsistencies here on associated public health standards:
The profound double standards on public-sector vs. private-sector pollution go beyond petty politics. When it comes to industrial pollution as well as pesticides, EPA and other public health officials use high-dose animal toxicology tests to project a dubious one-in-a-million lifetime adverse human response.
That ostensible “extreme caution” quickly melts away when it comes to the major sources of government-subsidized pollution. For the trillions of gallons of urban stormwater discharges, municipal sewage dumping, and the foul runoff from socialized farming, associated pollutants like nitrates in drinking water, bacteria at public beaches and low-oxygen in lakes and estuaries are deemed completely “safe” unless they immediately sicken or kill large numbers of people or fish.These double standards are problematic in all areas mentioned above.
One particular discrepancy… is Washington’s refusal to establish ANY long-term (or “chronic”) exposure limits to its controversial 10 milligram per liter (mg/L) short-term (or “acute”) nitrate standard for drinking water, established in 1962 and now managed by EPA. That short-term nitrate standard is apparently exceeded by many thousands of groundwater wells in the nation—where people may be consuming polluted water for years.
And EPA’s duplicity doesn’t stop there. When it comes to private industry and food processing facilites, EPA has no problem identifying nitrates as “toxic” and ammonia as “extremely hazardous,” with detailed annual Right to Know reports required for both chemicals since the 1990s.
Somehow, farm pollution and government sewage dumping of those same two chemicals are totally exempt from EPA Right to Know reporting. Closing that loophole is the bare minimum that EPA should now be pursuing… if it has any intent on “protecting” the environment.
6. Fish Kills
If a few fish—or perhaps a few thousand fish—die on the side of some remote rural stream or an abandoned beach… how much does it really matter?
If you follow Green Lobby logic, it entirely comes down to fundraising potential.
When a few dead fish washed up along beaches in the general vicinity of the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, that made for instant photo ops and thunderous pontificating from the usual cast at MSNBC, CNN, Fox News and network majors. It didn’t matter that those remarkably few dead fish often showed no sign of oil pollutionand may have died from natural causes.
It might seem surprising to those outside of the environmental compliance profession—where I’ve worked for the last 30 years—but when many thousands and sometimes millions of fish die in America from obvious or suspected government pollution sources… those same media and Green Lobby “defenders of wildlife” quickly lose interest.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is so ambivalent to routine fish kills that they don’t even bother to keep anything vaguely resembling a national tracking system for these garish occurrences. Instead, all we have is voluntary reporting from a few states like Iowa and North Carolina that merely go through the motions.
The heavy presence of Big Farming in both regions, the inherent conflict of interest in states monitoring their own success, and the lack of independent third-party oversight all cast a shadow on public reporting from those and other states that routinely experience significant fish kills.
Anecdotal news clippings and occasional scientific studies give some additional indication of the magnitude of this problem. For instance, in the farming district of Upstate New York, state experts are “uncertain what killed thousands of Oneida Lake fish” in 2023.
Over in Washington state, where farmers drench their crops with 1.8 billion gallons of surface water each day on average according to USGS, local officials blame “low flows” and “climate change” for killing thousands of salmon in recent years.
Research published in Nature magazine cited 502 reported “die-offs” of fish “distributed over 359 different lakes” between 2004 and 2014 in Wisconsin, with no mention of farm pollution.
Maryland’s involvement in the Chesapeake Bay cleanup effort has prompted a cursory effort in tracking fish kills around the state. The Maryland Department of the Environment’s 2022 and 2023 Fish Kill Summaries report dozens of mortality events with about 392,000 and 170,000 dead fish in those years, respectively.
Both annual totals were well below their statistical average of about 1.1 million dead fish per year, which is skewed by some years with high death counts. The lower recent numbers may also be affected by “several very large kills” in the 1980’s leaving less fish around as targets. In the words of the MDE:
As menhaden [native feedstocks for larger game fish] schools became smaller and less plentiful in the Chesapeake Bay, the number and magnitude of these kills fell.
All of those states tread very lightly on farm pollution and government sewage dumping as potential causes of their fish kills.
Florida is a classic example of bureaucratic bungling that seems intentionally deceptive. In an effort to look concerned (and protect its tourist tax revenues) while doing nothing of substance, the Sunshine State has multiple websites for collectingpublic reports of fish kills and algal blooms. But I can’t find any honest disclosures of the results.
Instead, Florida issues this generic Fact Sheet that says nothing about annual counts of dead fish or the number of fish kill events—a bare minimum for legitimate “scientific” monitoring.
This Florida wildlife website—the best one I could find—has those same two glaring omissions, but does link to a Fish Kill Map Gallery that shows scores of tiny red dots for the general locations of monthly fish kill events. Even that website gaslights heavily on the “natural causes” meme along with the distraction that “Hurricanes are major forces of natural destruction.”
Nowhere among those state agency websites is there any acknowledgment of the heavy amount of chemical fertilizers used by Florida farmers (73,000 metric tons of nitrogen, 21,000 tons of phosphates) in 2017, according to this bland EPA database.
Another section of that same database shows an additional 103,000 tons of nitrogen and 31,000 tons of phosphorous in animal manure spread by Florida farmers in 2017, the most recent year available.
They also left out the unnatural remnants of the 470,000 acre “Everglades Agricultural Area” that enriches the Florida sugar cane empire at the expense of everyone. In a more general sense, the claim of “mystery” fish kills might be less mysterious if politicians in Florida—or any other state—closed the gaping loopholes in existing Right to Know laws that allow unlimited farm pollution and government sewage dumping to proceed in secrecy.
But even with the limited data available, it is known that American rivers, lakes and beaches experience many hundreds of significant fish kill events every year.
Some of those are probably triggered by natural causes (e.g., droughts, sudden temperature changes) but many are caused by low oxygen from nutrient pollution caused by “unregulated” farming activities and “untreated” urban storm water dumping, or the associated toxic algal blooms themselves.
EPA’s failure to publicly address this problem should be a fireable offense for many hundreds of career bureaucrats from its Office of Water.
7. Destruction of Natural Wetlands
If you listen to any documentary on nature, you are bound to hear a somber lecture on the awesome power of wetlands to breed an abundance of wildlife—along with the importance of protecting those “fragile” swamps, bogs and marshes from human development. Wikipedia describes wetlands as “among the most biologically diverse of all ecosystems.”
To some degree, this is true. If you have vast regions of wetlands, those can promote thriving quantities of insects, frogs, fish, birds, beavers and other creatures. Wetlands also act as a natural shock absorber to adverse weather—both floods and droughts.
A few acres of isolated puddles or swampy soil are another story. Zealous environmentalists usually fail to comprehend this distinction.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued a Report to Congress in 1990 that shed light on the topic of wetlands losses in the U.S. since the 1780s. Their following map specifically focuses on “artificially drained agricultural land.” Each dot equals 20,000 acres lost.
Under the Figure 5 heading is a note that “87 percent of the wetland losses from the mid-1950’s to the mid-1970’s were due to agricultural conversion.” Since agricultural land conversion had slowed considerably by the 1950s compared to prior centuries, one would reasonably assume that wetlands losses to agriculture prior to the 1950s were significantly higher than 87 percent—probably close to 100 percent.
The USF&W report bluntly summarizes that “the vast majority of wetland loss have been due to agricultural conversion.”
The USF&W report further states: “Over a period of 200 years, the lower 48 states lost an estimated 53 percent of their original wetlands.” Total wetlands losses during that period were about 107.5 million acres. (For comparison, the state of California occupies roughly 100 million acres.)
In contrast to the whopping 107,500,000 acres of wetlands drained overwhelmingly by farmers, disturbing as little as 0.1 acre of wetlands for commercial development now triggers long permitting delays from a host of EPA-USACE and state bureaucrats, all looking to burnish their agency’s reputation at the expense of private enterprise.
Chantell and Michael Sackett were subjected to nearly two decades of legal harassment, including 2012 and 2023 Supreme Court decisions, for the petty offense of trying to develop 0.63 acres of disputed “wetlands” to build a house in Idaho.
Another EPA “trophy kill” came from a 2005 case where the defendant, Robert Lucas, was “caught” developing 0.4 square miles of wetlands to build “driveways and septic systems” for a housing subdivision in Mississippi—all without EPA permission.
Mr. Lucas, his daughter Robbie, and their engineer were convicted on 41 counts of violating “the Clean Water Act, mail fraud and conspiracy.” Each one was sentenced from 87 months to 108 months of prison. And the trio was slapped with fines and restitution totaling over $9.5 million. Twenty years later, EPA still gloatsabout it as the “most significant criminal wetlands case in the history of the Clean Water Act.”
Green activists overwhelmingly back Big Government over small developers in all such cases. Countless other Americans probably forfeit the use of their land—out of fear of EPA persecution—to avoid such hassles.
But farmers are fully “grandfathered” for their vastly greater crimes against nature, as well as their ongoing efforts to routinely drain bogs and marshes on their enormous land holdings.
My point is not to argue the absolutist position on property rights, ponder the proper use of “eminent domain,” or advocate the folly of animal rights. My main observation here and for other sections of this essay is that the Deep State and its green allies only use the “environment” as a weapon for advancing their anti-human, anti-growth, anti-liberty agenda.
The hypocrisy on wetlands concern is galling.
8. Farmland Erosion
Another problem across most states in the nation is farm erosion—and Washington’s persistent coddling of the offenders. With EPA-USACE-USDA and other federal agencies willfully complicit in shielding farm pollution from public view, it’s difficult to quantify the public loss of natural resources and taxpayer money spent to clean up after farmland erosion. But even the anecdotal information available suggests major impacts.
Hydroelectric dams and reservoirs are filling with sediment (not only from farming) and hundreds of millions of dollars are spent dredging U.S. rivers each year. Midwest farmers use the Mississippi River as their public sewer and muddy downstream beaches in Texas all pay a price.
Farm sediment with fertilizer and manure residues contribute to large “dead zones” in Lake Erie, the Gulf of Mexico, Chesapeake Bay and elsewhere. But farm pollution, once again, gets a free pass.
While any private-sector construction site disturbing over 1 acre of land is subject to EPA permitting and pollution abatement requirements, ranches and crop farms of all sizes—even massive 10,000 acre plots of tilled soil—are completely exempt from EPA regulations.
As a result, millions of tons of farm sediment muck up rivers and beaches, or end up getting trapped behind the concrete walls of hydroelectric and flood-control dams each year.
Of the 1.7 billion tons of (admitted) cropland soil erosion per the USDA, how much agricultural mud gets washed up on murky beaches (like Galveston, Texas) is a mystery, since neither victim nor perpetrator wants to confront this embarrassment.
Erosion and farm pollution are major problems in the Susquehanna River that feeds the Chesapeake Bay. The Baltimore Sun reported in 2019:
When the Conowingo Dam opened to fanfare nearly a century ago, the massive wall of concrete and steel began its job of harnessing water power in northern Maryland. It also quietly provided a side benefit: trapping sediment and silt before it could flow miles downstream and pollute the Chesapeake Bay, the nation’s largest estuary.
The old hydroelectric dam spanning the lower Susquehanna River is still producing power, but its days of effectively trapping sediment in a 14-mile-long reservoir behind its walls are over. Behind the 94-foot-high barrier lies a massive inventory of coal-black muck—some 200 million tons of pollutants picked up over decades from farmlands, industrial zones and towns.
With nearly 8,100 major dams in the U.S. (see next link for definition), the overall impact from farm erosion sediment buildup is potentially enormous. However, national assessments are elusive. The Wikipedia entry for U.S. dams and reservoirs doesn’t have a single word on erosion, silt or sediment.
With Congress and federal agencies all catering to Farm Lobby pressures, it may require a few enterprising lawyers to step up and force America’s biggest polluters to accept responsibility for what they’ve done. I know of at least one Texas engineer who would gladly assist with such efforts.
9A. Historical Air Pollution in U.S. Cities and Ongoing Harassment over Trivial Emissions
Long before the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency came into existence in 1970, American businesses, consumers and state agencies were all working to improve air quality—which was and is overwhelmingly a *local* issue. As a result, air pollution gains prior to EPA’s birth were significant.
The following nugget was buried in an otherwise anti-industry article from the Air & Waste Management Association’s EM Magazine of February 2000:
Between 1931 and 1932 the U.S. Public Health Service found that the average level of particulates for the year in cities was 510 µg/m3(micrograms per cubic meter). By 1957, the average had dropped nearly 5 fold to 120. Today that number is below 100.
These dramatic improvements were primarily due to homeowners switching from using coal to oil or natural gas for heating their homes. Some of the gains were likely due to state programs for air emission control, but that history has long ago been forgotten.
Although air pollution in the U.S. is now trivial by any objective health measure, federal authorities continue to use their weaponized “permitting” process to destroy American industry and hamper our energy independence.
My SCOTUS essay from last Fall elaborates on some of the abuses of the Clean Air Act (over 34,000 “must” and “shall” mandates in that law’s MACT standards, 13,000 pages of policy documents interpreting the maze of “New Source Review” requirements, etc.).
Those arbitrary and voluminous rules now make it nearly impossible to build or expand heavy industry in America. In turn, those obstacles push millions of people into dubious service and retail jobs where no real wealth is created.
Coal power has been a tremendous benefit to the general public, yet one of the leading targets of Green Lobby opposition. Using various EPA permitting and compliance mandates, environmentalists’ blind rage against affordable energy has led to the unnecessary closure of hundreds of U.S. coal power plants in recent years.
Relentless air permitting harassment—not “unfair” trade with China—has also been a leading cause of the decline of other heavy industries in America such as cement, steel and petroleum refineries.
Those losses in heavy industries created inflationary pressures and supply chain disruptions throughout the economy. When that instability combined with other voluminous EPA mandates, union fanaticism, wage controls, welfare taxes and smothering hyper-legalism in all facets of daily life… the mountain of obstacles helped destroy the U.S. manufacturing base.
The sick irony of all the contrived concerns over U.S. air quality is that “science” tells us that most air pollution is local, thus the federal EPA has no legitimate role in imposing their obnoxious permitting delays on what should be a state and local decision.
[And if local authorities are smart, industrial air quality decisions should focus more on objective LIMITS on air pollution levels (similar to speed limits) to be enforced uniformly on everyone. For everyone’s benefit, local air pollution governance should not rely on voluminous pre-crime “permitting,” self-monitoring, self-reporting and self-incrimination that only benefits lawyers and consultants.]
As discussed in my SCOTUS essay about the local nature of air pollution:
You will notice on the Texas map below that even in “severely” polluted regions like greater Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth, which have combined metro populations of 15 million, smog (ozone) impacts do not cross any state lines. And those tiny green boxes of SO2 hot spots—caused by heavy industries like oil refineries and coal power plants—are so trivial that the (minor) nuisance conditions rarely cross a county border.
Yet the much greater problems of aquatic dead zones, fish kills and water wasting all have obvious inter-state ramifications, thus warrant federal action. But in all of the first eight legitimate environmental debacles outlined in this essay, Congress and EPA are either nowhere to be found or actively gaslighting the public to distract people from their failures.
Green Lobby and EPA hype over U.S. air quality further falls apart when compared to other public safety and health concerns. Reckless driving combined with poor law enforcement and shoddy design of government roads leads to around 40,000 deaths per year.
If public officials were serious about their “Safety First” mantras, they could easily change the national speed limit to 20 mph and save tens of thousands of lives. But without some external ogre to blame, personal convenience and “greed” quickly derail such considerations.
Despite America’s catastrophic obesity problem that costs our economy $1.4 trillionper year and causes nearly 500,000 excess deaths annually, Washington politicians are still shoveling billions of dollars of Food Stamps for free junk food to buy votes from poor people, no matter how obviously overweight they are. If health officials can’t admit that (say) a 5’-6” person weighing 250 pounds is not “starving,” how can they possibly manage the vastly greater complexities of socialized medicine?
Most people probably know someone who has died from a car crash or obesity. Do you know anyone who has died from air pollution?
9B. Major Air Pollution in Foreign Nations
The folks at Real Clear Energy put it well, recently saying: “About 3 billion people in emerging economies lack electricity and running water, and cook over wood and dung.” Since air pollution is overwhelmingly a local concern, I don’t have much else to say here about air quality in foreign nations. The blurb in the initial table will suffice for today.
The same developing countries that care nothing about plastic pollution care very little about air quality, in most cases. If people in those countries want to improve their conditions, I would suggest more gas-fired turbines and less burning of animal waste. (Leave the coal power option to rich countries that can afford expensive emission controls.)
10. Climate Change
I purposely left this one for last for a bunch of reasons. First of all, if you spent more than a few minutes skimming items 1 through 8 of this essay, it should be apparent that eco-zealots care very little about actual pollution or the wasting of natural resources. The moment environmental stewardship puts Big Government on the defensive, most nature enthusiasts evaporate like a parking lot puddle in the summer sun.
As of 2014, the top 10 organizations in the Green Movement “collectively have 15 million members, 2,000-plus staffers and annual budgets of more than $525 million,” according to environmental journalists at Inside Climate News. The vast majority of these tax-favored “non-profits” are preoccupied with raising money to keep themselves in business.
To do that, environmental groups concoct a steady message of anti-industry, anti-growth and often anti-human narratives to keep their followers perpetually angry and eager to help fund the fight against imaginary demons with negligible impact.
Green Lobby silence or dishonesty on other legitimate environmental concerns highlighted in this essay should conclusively demonstrate: Big Green is now corrupt. Most leaders of that cause are more anti-industry than anti-pollution.
Honest environmentalists should abandon hate groups like Greenpeace, NRDC and Sierra Club and start something better… or perhaps try a job at an “industrial polluter” to see how compliance really works.
The university caste gets in on the climate hustle as well. Many billions in federal funding for climate research has led to at least “88,125 English-language climate papers published between 2012 and 2020,” according to a study from Cornell University. Most of these people should be defunded immediately and probably fired for making a mockery of the education system.
Legacy media is even more partisan in their climate theatrics. For at least the last 30 years, no single topic has received more hysterical, one-sided coverage as “global warming,” which collectively morphed into “climate change” along the way.
Establishment media’s practice of pushing for maximum alarm on protecting the world from perhaps 1 degree of elevated temperatures quickly melts to complete ambivalence when confronted with the harsh realities of governmental pollution sources.
The media’s “instinctive deference to true power” (to borrow a phrase from Tucker Carlson) explains a lot of the difference. The trillions of dollars of wealth transfers demanded by climate alarmists (and their Wall Street backers) helps as well.
Reacting to that media onslaught, conservatives and libertarians too often make the mistake of trying to argue the negative on climate change… as if anyone can talk sense into enraged eco-zealots. Yes, of course, there are many scientific problems with man-made climate doom that green activists and university researchers fail to admit.
Those include the urban heat island effect and biased weather stations—not to mention over 50 years of failed apocalyptic climate predictions. The Green Lobby’s demand for over $100 trillion to supposedly “fix” this problem is another indication of the nature of their ambitions.
But focusing environmental discussions entirely on refuting climate paranoia just makes conservatives look like corporate lackeys—which many GOP leaders certainly are. If conservatives can’t speak up against the many ills of government sewage dumping and socialized farm pollution… then maybe they do hate the environment, as Democrats have long contended.
Conclusion
With many real environmental challenges facing America and the world, it will take significant effort to educate the public and begin to get serious on developing practical solutions.
Progress will require competent leadership to correct course from decades of reflexive anti-industry and anti-growth ideology to science-based policy that minimizes human impact on the environment—no matter who is creating the pollution—while respecting economic efficiency in implementing smarter enforcement strategies.
For generations, establishment politicians in America have proven themselves to be incapable of honestly dealing with the realities of government sewage dumping, socialized farm pollution and the many ills they create.
Washington insiders have also done a terrible job with oversight of entrenched bureaucracies of EPA, USGS and USDA, which are now rotten to their core.
If there is any hope of progress on the environmental fiascos outlined in this essay, I expect it would come from an outsider with legitimate business experience and the courage to stand up to permanent Washington.
At this point in time, there are very few people who might fit that bill. At the top of that short list of potential reformers would most visibly be our current president and his aids at the Department of Government Efficiency… if they are interested in accepting the challenge.
Trump’s Legacy on the Environment: Donnie the Downer or Something More?
In President Trump’s first few months of his current term, he has made impressive moves to expose fraudulent “green” corruption and roll back U.S. commitments for wasting trillions on exaggerated threats from climate catastrophe.
He also deserves credit for working to streamline the cumbersome National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) review for infrastructure projects like transmission lines, highways and pipelines. But every one of those examples involves fighting rear guard attacks from misguided political extremists.
As important as those tasks are, focusing exclusively on the negative will be a hugedisservice to the American public. And it would harm his own legacy and the future of the Republican Party—which has almost zero credibility on environmental affairs.
New EPA Administrator, Lee Zeldin, will impress no one with his claims of being for “Clean Air, Land, and Water for Every American” unless he actually takes positivesteps to make that happen.
With coastal plastic pollution spoiling lakes and oceans around the world, beach closings ruining millions of Americans’ vacations and making people sick, disgraceful water wasting from subsidized farming, aquatic dead zones around the world and at home, rampant nitrate water well contamination, frequent fish kills and other legitimate environmental disasters… Zeldin and Trump have almost unlimited opportunities to outperform so many other failed administrations from the last 50 years.
They could recast the broken EPA model of anti-growth and anti-industry fanaticismand turn that bloated agency into something resembling “science” in the service of public interests.
With the dense fog of TDS propaganda clouding the Trump administration over hazy “green” complaints, scoring some genuine Green victories could slowly clear the air from those deceitful narratives. And for the first time in generations, Americans might actually experience the “clean” environment that we were promised in the 1970s.
For those who like visual evidence, I’ll end with a widescreen of the broader picture of some real environmental issues that America and most of the world now face.
Mr. Penfield has over 30 years of experience in the environmental compliance business. He has worked with a variety of productive industries, state and federal regulators, local government entities, lawyers and a multitude of consultants.
Email: spenfieldNY@gmail.com
Published by Unz.com
Republished by The 21st Century
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of 21cir.com