Pernicious Deception

The only other thing I have formal training in, besides theology and ministry, is Environmental Science.  I hold a Bachelor of Science Degree in Environmental Resource Management from The Pennsylvania State University.  I tell you this, not so that you will consider me an expert, because I'm not, I was a pretty mediocre student and found out rather quickly that I was actually being called to something rather different.  But there is one certain area where my two educations overlap, and that is when it comes to stewardship of our environmental resources.
See, you might think that studying environmental science would make you one of those "tree hugging" types, who think we all need to ride bikes everywhere and eat nothing but organic vegan diets.  Not so, actually what I ran across over and over again was the idea of responsible use of resources.  Pristine wilderness is great and all, but you know what else is great?  Corn, wheat, rice, beef, chicken and these days even fish, these things are all a part of human agriculture.  I also am a fan of man made things: textiles, machinery and electronics.  In the heat and humidity of a Maryland summer, I love me some air conditioning, and in the cold of winter I like to sit by a warm fire.  I understand that life in an industrialized society requires a certain amount of impact on our environment.  I also understand that the impact we have on the environment can be mitigated to a large extent through technology and simple common sense.  Actually, "Green Sector" jobs are kind of a big thing in this country, and you know what, most of them are good paying, stable and sustainable sorts of jobs. It would be great if we could really turn our focus from growth that destroys our environment and helps us make better weapons, to learning things that actually help us improve the world for all of us, future generations included.
There are two things we will always need that are currently in some degree of peril: clean air and clean water.  If we don't have those things, our continued existence on this planet is not a tenable proposition.  Climate change is a problem to be sure, and I'm going to be terribly anthropocentric here, but polar bears going extinct is really a rather small problem compared to humans going extinct.
I saw a commercial on the TV yesterday, sponsored by some political action group representing manufacturing industry, which was bemoaning the arduous restrictions that the EPA puts on pollution, particularly air pollution.  The thing is blood-boiling, filled with misleading information and downright prevarication.  It starts with the fact that China doesn't impose any regulations on their emissions of smog causing substances, and that, in their opinion, puts us at a competitive disadvantage because all of this concern for the quality of the air we breathe is costing the good and holy 'Merican companies lots of dollars in the rather futile effort not to give our children asthma, pulmonary dysfunction and lung cancer.  And what good is it doing anyway because China's dirt is blowing all the way across the Pacific Ocean anyway?  It's costing us jobs people: JOBS!
Economic arguments against environmental protection are not only terrible morally, but also do not make real sense in the long run.
You know what else hurts the economy?  A parent who calls in sick every other day to take care of a kid with chronic bronchitis.  Someone who goes on disability because they lose a lung.  All the myriad respiratory illnesses that come with poor air quality.  Outbreaks of dysentery and cholera from polluted water supplies.  Severe drought that leads to crop failures and wildfires.  Massive soil erosion and non-point source pollution that leads to dead zones in the Cheaspeake Bay.  Destruction of riparian areas that make us more vulnerable to floods and catastrophic levels of pollutants in the water supply. I could go on.
Did I mention that people in Bejing have to wear respiratory protection against the smog?
Did I mention that the Yangtze river is an irreparable environmental catastrophe?
China is not a valid arguing point when it comes to environmental sanity.  I don't care how good their economy is or how much money we owe them.  I'm going to make a new rule, similar to Godwin's rule about using Hitler in an argument about violence or racism.  If you're talking about the environment and you bring up China as anything other than a bad example, you lose.
I'm a little out of date here, but when I was a youngin there were these things called the Kyoto protcols, some of the strongest international environmental standards that had been attempted by the human race up to that point.  They were an attempt to level the playing field when it comes to the environment.  They were scaled to be more restrictive on already industrialized nations like the US and European nations, because we got our shot to grow dirty.  Developing countries were given more latitude, however, standards were in place.  Almost every nation in the world signed and has since ratified the protocols, including China (doesn't mean they're playing by the rules).  Take a guess who didn't. Scroll all the way to the bottom.  Yep, it was us.  We signed but never ratified.  Canada signed, ratified and then backed out.
Our reasons?  People (meaning nations like China) aren't going to follow them anyway.  Which is sort of like saying, "Let's not put up speed limits, because we know people are going to break them anyway."
Here's the thing though, if we only ever passed laws and standards we knew wouldn't be broken, we never would have even gotten the Magna Carta.  We never would have gotten the Ten Commandments.
The thing that troubles me most about the whole situation is that I know many people, good people, who will buy the whole "it's not fair" argument, hook line and sinker.  But fairness is relative.  You know who environmental de-regulation is really not fair to?  My kids, my grandkids, the entire human race.
Mitigating our environmental impact requires a certain willingness to look beyond the immediacy of a balance sheet.  It requires a sense of duty and obligation to something more than just the here and now.  That is why stewardship of our resources should and must be a concern.  That is why it matters, that's why we need to speak, and vote, and stop drinking the Kool-aid offered to us by those with a vested interest in running dirty, it's probably got PCB's in it.