Here is a
REALLY smart liberal. I am sure he is saying things your right wing mind is incapable of understanding.
Environmental injury is deficit spending. It's a way of loading the cost of our generation's prosperity onto the backs of our children.
The free market is the most efficient and democratic way to distribute the goods of the land, and that the best thing that could happen to the environment is if we had true free-market capitalism in this country, because the free market promotes efficiency, and efficiency means the elimination of waste, and pollution of course is waste. The free market also would encourage us to properly value our natural resources, and it's the undervaluation of those resources that causes us to use them wastefully. But in a true free-market economy, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community.
But what polluters do is they make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering the quality of life for everybody else, and they do that by evading the discipline of the free market. You show me a polluter; I'll show you a subsidy. I'll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and to force the public to pay his production costs. That's what all pollution is. It's always a subsidy. It's always a guy trying to cheat the free market.
Corporations are externalizing machines. They're constantly figuring out ways to get somebody else to pay their costs of production. That's their nature. One of the best ways to do that, and the most common way for a polluter, is through pollution. When those coal-burning power plants put mercury into the atmosphere that comes down from the Ohio Valley to my state of New York, I buy a fishing license for $30 every year, but I can't go fishing and eat the fish anymore because they stole the fish from me. They liquidated a public asset, my asset.
The rule is the commons are owned by all of us. They're not owned by the governor or the legislator or the coal companies and the utility. Everybody has a right to use them. Nobody has a right to abuse them. Nobody has a right to use them in a way that will diminish or injure their use and enjoyment by others. But they've stolen that entire resource from the people of New York State. When they put the acid rain in the air, it destroys our forest, and it destroys the lakes that we use for recreation or outfitting or tourism or wealth generation. When they put the mercury in the air, the mercury poisons our children's brains, and that imposes a cost on us. The ozone in particular has caused a million asthma attacks a year, kills 18,000 people, causes hundreds of thousands of lost work days. All of those impacts impose costs on the rest of us that in a true free-market economy should be reflected in the price of that company's product when it makes it to the marketplace.
What those companies and all polluters do is use political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and to force the public to pay their costs. All of the federal environmental laws, every one of the 28 major environmental laws, were designed to restore free-market capitalism in America by forcing actors in the marketplace to pay the true cost of bringing their product to market.
I would love him to provide actual examples of widespread disregard of the environment among corporations, but he can't. I guess he isn't as smart as you think he is.
I live three hours south of the Adirondack Mountains, the oldest protected wilderness on the face of the earth. It's been protected since 1888. We had a right, the American people, to believe that we would be able to enjoy those pristine landscapes, the forests, the beautiful lakes for generations unspoiled. But today, one fifth of the lakes in the Adirondacks are now sterilized from acid rain, which has also destroyed the forest cover on the high peaks of the Appalachians from Georgia all the way up into Northern Quebec, and this President has put the brakes on the statutory requirements that those companies, those coal-burning power plants, clean up the acid rain. As a direct result of that decision, this year for the first time since the passage of the Clean Air Act, sulfur dioxide levels went up in our country an astronomical four percent in a single year.
The person who gave me this t-shirt talked about mountaintop mining a few minutes ago. A year ago in May, I flew over the coal fields of Kentucky and West Virginia, and I saw where the coal is coming from. If the American people could see what I saw, there would be a revolution in this country, because we are cutting down the Appalachian Mountains. These historic landscapes, where Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett roamed, are the source of our values and our culture, and we're cutting them down with these giant machines called drag lines. They're 22 stories high, they cost half a billion dollars, and they practically dispense with the need for human labor. And that, of course, is the point.
I remember, when my father was fighting strip mining back in the 60s, a conversation I had with him at the dinner table where he said that they are not only destroying the environment, but they are permanently impoverishing these communities because there is no way that you can generate an economy from the moonscapes that they leave behind. He said they're doing it so that they can break the unions, and he was right. In 1968, when he told me that, there were 114,000 unionized mine workers taking coal out of tunnels in West Virginia.
Today there are only 11,000 miners left in the state, and almost none of them are unionized because the strip industry isn't. Using these giant machines and 25 tons of dynamite that they explode in West Virginia every day -- a Hiroshima bomb every week -- They are blowing the tops off the mountains. They then take these giant machines and scrape the rubble and debris into the adjacent river valley. Well, it's all illegal. You cannot dump rock and debris and rubble into a waterway in the United States of America without a Clean Water Act permit. So Joe Lovitz sued them, and he won in front of a great crusty old West Virginia judge, Judge Charles Hayden, who recently died. Charles Hayden said the same thing I said: "It's all illegal, all of it," and he enjoined all mountaintop mining.
Two days after we got that decision, Peabody Coal and Massey Coal, which had given millions of dollars to this White House, met in the White House, and the White House rewrote one word of the Clean Water Act. Their new definition of the word fill changed 30 years of statutory interpretation to make it legal today in every state in the United States to dump rock, debris, rubble, construction, garbage, any kind of solid waste into any waterway without a Clean Water Act permit. All you need is a rubber-stamp permit from the Corps of Engineers that, in many cases, you can get through the mail. It has none of the safeguards that the Clean Water Act provides. And this is what we're fighting today. This is not just a battle to save the environment. This is the subversion of our democracy.
The industry and the great big polluters and their indentured servants and our political process have done a great job. And their PR firms and their faulty "biostitutes," and all these think tanks on Capitol Hill, have done a great job over the past couple of decades of marginalizing the environmental movement, of marginalizing us as radicals, as tree huggers or, as I heard the other day, pagans who worship trees and sacrifice people. But there is nothing radical about the idea of clean air and clean water for our children. As I said before, we're not protecting the environment for the sake of the fishes and the birds and the trees. We're protecting it for our own sake, because it's the infrastructure of our communities, and because it enriches us.
If you talk to these people on Capitol Hill who are promoting these kind of changes and ask them, "Why are you doing this?" What they invariably say is, "Well, the time has come in our nation's history where we have to choose between economic prosperity on the one hand and environmental protection on the other." And that is a false choice. In 100 percent of the situations, good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy. [applause] Especially if we measure our economy, and this is how we ought to be measuring it, based upon its jobs and the dignity of jobs over the generations, over the long term and on how it preserves the value of the assets of our communities.
If ,on the other hand, we want to do what they've been urging us to do on Capitol Hill, which is to treat the planet as if were a business in liquidation, to convert our natural resource to cash as quickly as possible, to have a few years of pollution-based prosperity, then we can generate an instantaneous cash flow and the illusion of a prosperous economy. But our children are going to pay for our joyride. They're going to pay for it with muted landscapes, poor health, and huge cleanup costs that are going to amplify over time, and that they will never, ever be able to pay off. Environmental injury is deficit spending. It's a way of loading the cost of our generation's prosperity onto the backs of our children. [applause]
One of the things I've done over the past seven, eight years, since 1994, since this whole movement, the anti-environmental movement got a foothold, a beachhead in Congress, is to constantly go around and confront this argument that an investment in our environment is a diminishment of our nation's wealth. It doesn't diminish our wealth. It's an investment in infrastructure, the same as investing in telecommunications and road construction. It's an investment we have to make if we're going to ensure the economic vitality of our generation and the next generation.
...thanks for playing....
