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To: Moominoid who wrote (30683)	5/4/2005 4:40:24 PM
From: GraceZ	Respond to of 306849

My rights end where yours begin. That pretty much covers the secondary effects of pollution. If I send something down the sewer that makes you sick, I should be held liable. Still, no economic activity is 100% "safe". You might have a rare but an acute allergy to some substance my biz throws off, so in making regulation, one always has trade offs. You have to legislate an acceptable level of safety and risk. My bicycle is a zero emission vehicle (if you don't count the copious amounts of sweat and carbon dioxide I throw off), but the trade off is the risk to bodily harm that I take on every time I ride it. Any company that creates a product, decides how much risk to public and employee safety is within acceptable levels. Over time, these acceptable levels of risk to bodily harm both internal and external have consistently been lowered as technology reduces the risks in the work place and else where. They do this not only because there are laws and regulations but because it is simply good business not to kill off your respective customers or your employees. Some of the worst pollution on the planet came from state run enterprises. There is a free market demand for less polluting options. If safety and low risk to others is a valuable enough attribute, there is a market for it, people are willing to spend perhaps a little more money for a car that gets better gas mileage, puts out fewer emissions and has great rollover crash tests. They are also willing to spend more for non-polluting alternatives in packaging (I know I am). Where conservatives have a hard time with environmental regulation, it is that these regulations are imposed with little regard for the cost by those who will not have to pay the cost. I stated earlier, nothing is 100% risk free or safe, so there is always cost trade off. We could theoretically make a 100% safe no pollution vehicle, just no one would actually want to drive it. One could impose a law requiring zero emission cars, but the cost would be no more cars.