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

To: American Spirit who wrote (27205)	4/26/2002 12:17:37 PM
From: aladin	Respond to of 281500

A S, As for your 1st paragraph - agreed. Ok? However, the fact that clean air should be a goal does not make all policy on clean air reasonable. For example - its often stated how we produce some huge percentage of the worlds pollution, but trips to Japan, China, Thailand and India all make LA look good. Maybe I only see the bad places - maybe some governments produce cooked statistics :-) Now don't get me wrong - I don't like smog - but I also don't like bunk. A good environmental policy would clean the air. Not just future air by looking at new cars. It would also account for industry displacement and prevent the export of pollution. Pittsburg is clean now and lots of environmentalists feel good about that, but they haven't seen the mills in Brazil or Korea (or breathed the air in their vicinity). On the jobs issue - I agree - if its fairly deployed new policy will create jobs, but displacements do occur and the costs need to be examined. A good example is coal - it produces clean electricity - but has huge costs in impact to the countryside (strip mining), to workers (deep coal mines) and in pollution when burned. There is no such thing as clean coal (even if it were possible to burn it completely clean - there is still the mining). So lets say, for the sake of argument, we find an acceptable new power source and outlaw coal - we need to account for the conversion and the people left behind. John