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| [NEWS] Republican bill will reduce free school lunch |
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| Cappytaino:
--- Quote from: PhantOS on February 24, 2017, 06:02:40 PM ---my post was unrelated to the school lunch aspect, it was a response to red spy. safety environment regulations. --- End quote --- The problem with environmental regulations is that they're usually proposed by politicians that have no background in environmental science, so many of them are in effect useless. A great example is the Clean Water Act, which was proposed by Edmund Muskie, a Maine politician with no apparent education in environmental science beyond that of the average citizen. The clean water act is intended to protect sources of fresh water and wetland habitats, but defines protected waters as "[waters] with significant nexus to navigable waters," which is such a general definition which leaves so much to the interpretation of the legal system. For instance, there is a marshy sand patch in the back of my house that extends about 300 yards to a small tributary of a local river. Nothing lives in this patch of sand, and it's effectively just a giant "sponge" that absorbs water from when the river floods or if rain falls onto it and it's able to hold this water for a long time because it is in the shade of some trees growing on the sides of it. We wanted to drain and fill part of this sand with dirt and cement to build a shed on it. No can do, because when we applied for a permit we were told that the area was too close to the river and anything we do there could run off into the river. That would be great if this sand patch even sloped the right way, because it mostly slopes towards my house and ends in a small "bluff" at the edge of the river. The water table also is not particularly high, it's 35 feet below this stuffty sand patch, so the chances of leaching into groundwater supply are slim to none. Essentially, this regulation leaves us stuck with 1/3 of our land being effectively useless because the law won't let us do anything with it and nobody will buy it for exactly that reason. Obviously this is a super anecdotal example but environmental regulations turn into a clown fiesta that hurt more than they help if too much is left to the discretion of judicial authority. Before you accuse me of only being against these things because they are inconvenient to me, I'm an environmental earth sciences major with a specialization in sustainable energy and fluvial geomorphology, so this situation while personal does fall into my area of expertise and future career. |
| Tactical Nuke:
politicians in general are stupid and should not be making decisions that they don't exercise advanced knowledge in hence conservatism |
| Lego lad:
i should make all the desicions |
| Cappytaino:
--- Quote from: Tactical Nuke on February 24, 2017, 07:21:45 PM ---politicians in general are stupid and should not be making decisions that they don't exercise advanced knowledge in hence conservatism --- End quote --- Particularly around the subject of the environment the ideological "high horse" that progressives think they have is so God damn evident and only more so as I learn more about environmental science and in particular how human activity affects the environment. Progressives love to confuse acknowledging something with being educated about it. It's like they believe that if you acknowledge that human activity does negatively affect the environment, you are suddenly an expert and can say whatever bullstuff you like about the environment because you are on the "proper" side of the argument. Al Gore and the movie An Inconvenient Truth are a great example. He made this ludicrous projection that the ice caps would melt by ~2020 which had zero foundation and just got people in a frenzy over nothing. Whenever politicians, particularly those on the left, talk about anything having to do with the environment, I just assume they're grandstanding until proven otherwise because some of the things they say are just so asinine it makes my head spin. Yea the environment is fragile but I hate to burst everyone's bubbles, driving a hybrid and recycling your water bottles doesn't mean stuff unless China stops burning lignite. |
| PhantOS:
we can't force china to limit their impact on the environment, but that doesn't mean we should wait on them to do something before we start making changes. we produce half as much pollution as china, but that's still a great amount, and we should at least start somewhere. i'm not educated in environmental sciences like you are, but i'm sure there's something that can be done to limit our impact on various ecosystems |
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