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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: oconnellc who wrote (15531)	1/4/2002 5:44:35 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

It was clean when I was 4 [because few people lived in the area]. Then, industry, housing, cars, sewage treatment, rubbish dumps and abattoirs developed. Muck gushed into the harbour. It died. Then, about 15 years ago, they started getting the idea that polluting our lives is NOT the best way to live. So, pollution has been gradually reduced. Other areas had been polluted long before 1953, but it was confined to areas where people lived and worked, so everywhere else was pristine. Now, pollution is akin to answering a cellphone in a movie. It's not a good look. Even my old company, BP Oil, adopted the philosophy I was pushing in the mid 1980s = environmental rules are GOOD for profits. Until recently, their attitude was capital expenditure was bad and pollution control, which meant more money being spent, was bad. I argued that for large companies like BP Oil, provided the environmental rules applied to everyone, then rules create barriers to entry, [making it harder for competitors to enter a market due to the need to figure out, invest for and comply with rules], increase oil consumption, profits and make life better for everyone. I argued that BP should promote to government rules which would improve public life. For example benzene control reduces leukaemia, lead control reduces brain damage, volatility control reduces fire deaths in crashes and evaporative losses of polluting substances, aromatic control reduces particulate and carcinogenic emissions, Many of those controls also improve engine performance and reduce engine and lubricant pollution. Catalytic converters increase fuel consumption, which oil companies like. They also increase CO2, which many people dislike, so there are some balances to be achieved between one problem and another and costs to motorists and the community. It was a real laugh in the early 1980s. Any environmental issue was treated like plague [run a mile]. By 1989, there was at least a lot of posturing and some serious work on investigating pollution and control via Concawe for example. [The European oil industry environmental, health and safety group]. There are few international environmental issues with oil. CO2 is the biggie. Acid rain seems to be a thing of the past. George W made a lot of people grumpy by ditching the Kyoto stuff. Good riddance say I. It seems like a huge boondoggle to me. Mqurice