I want to talk about an embarrassing question. The question is simply this some of you will remember that in 1970. There was a great real wakening in this country. Suddenly people became aware that their own livelihood their lives depended on something Collective. The environment the thin-skinned of air water and soil that surrounds this globe. That all of us live in this orcas. And that our own fate as individuals families fate depends on the fate of the environment. This is not a new idea. But in 1970 suddenly Earth week that spring in April on a campus like this. I'm sure there were teachings meetings. People are out in the street. People went out picking up cans on the roadsides cleaning up the rubbish. Suddenly there was a new sensitivity to the importance of the quality of the environment and this came about because it was obviously in bad shape smog over most of the Cities chemical pollutants in the water sewage on the beaches. There's in 1970. And this is one of the most remarkable social events because it resulted in real action. You go back and look at the history of our environmental laws and you'll find that suddenly beginning in 1970. Very comprehensive environmental laws were passed. That's when the EPA was established within your own State. You will find a reorganization of what the state was doing the development of new agencies and so since 1970 what has happened is that the country is declared. That it has a concern for the environment that it wants it cleaned up and incidentally every poll since then has reiterated that position of the American people. This is something that the American people want believe in and a trying to do something about getting Environmental Quality billions of dollars have been spent. Government money private money people have worked very hard. Well, it's nearly 20 years now since that effort began and for those of us who have been involved in generating this there is an embarrassing question. What good has it done? It's time to check up. Take your exam. You've been working learning doing something what has been the effect and that's really what I want to talk about. And incidentally, this is an interesting year in some ways because it's been a sort of mini Earth week this summer suddenly people began to think say the environment is lashing back. It's been such a powerful idea that it's created some new recruits like, mr. Bush. And people are really concerned again about the environment. So this is really the appropriate time to say, okay. What have we tried to do what has been accomplished? And what lessons do we learn from the consequences of this very big social effort. Now A couple of years ago. I decided that I ought to ask myself that embarrassing question and I began to collect the actual numbers about the levels of pollution in the United States since 1970. It turns out one of our accomplishments is that the EPA and other agencies have accumulated good data. Numbers that we didn't have before about how much sulfur dioxide is in the air and which led is in the air how much nitrogen oxides how at what levels are the fecal bacteria in water supplies. In other words. We've got a pretty good picture year after year since the early 1970s to the present and you can actually draw curves and measure rates and so on. And let me give you a quick rundown of what the numbers tell us. Let's take air pollution air pollution consists of a series of what it called. It's funny name standard pollutants. So you better get used to them dust that called particulates dust sulfur dioxide which is bad for you because it inhibits the cleansing activities of the lung nitrogen oxide nitrogen oxide is what triggers Smog and party that and sulfur dioxide cause acid rain. series of these things and EPA has measured year after year with very consistent techniques and let me tell you what the story is. They're of all the Standard air pollutants except lead. If you average the decline in the last 10 years you discover that the average reduction is 14% 14% If you look at Water pollutants, you get the same picture here the US Geological Survey has established over over the last 25 years a series of sampling points in about three or four hundred Rivers River stations across the country and they've measured the levels of various pollutants nitrate phosphate fecal bacteria sediment and the data are so numerous that they could apply very good statistical techniques to ask this question has the level improved has it gotten worse or is it remained the same? And what they discovered was that in 90% of these stations the statistical analysis and Analysis showed that either the pollutant levels remain the same or worse and only 10% Was there any Improvement? And this is the general picture. If you look at most environmental pollutants, we have managed in the last 10 or 15 years to improve things by let's say between 10 and 20 percent in some cases pollutants have gotten worse nitrate levels in the groundwater and the rivers of the United States have been rising steadily steadily year after year for the last 30 to 50 years. There is no no letting up and as many of you know here in Iowa. It's a problem in groundwater nitrate is not good for you. It causes blue baby disease. It is suspected of triggering certain cancer effects nitrogen oxide. In the last in the air, this is what triggers Smog and what contributes to acid rain has increased 40% since 1975. That is the emissions nationally. So you get this picture that well, let's say 10 to 20 percent Improvement. Now, you might say well look. This is a very tough job. You can't expect to clean up the environment very quickly. So 10 to 20 percent Improvement in the last decade or so is not bad and you could rest easy with that except for a very important fact. In a number and a small very small number of cases. We have really cleaned up the environment take lead in the air that's gone down close to 90% 90% incidentally. That's an interesting number. If you go back and look at the legislation that was created in the early 1970s. You will see that Congress declares. That we want a 90% reduction in the level of pollutants. For example, the Clean Air Act called for a 90% reduction in carbon monoxide nitrogen oxide smog Etc by 1977 in 1970. And incidentally if cities didn't act to do this, they would lose their Federal funding 1977. Almost no City had achieved this and it was delayed another five years New York City. We just had our latest delay at the end of December and still no action has been taken a third of the country is now out of compliance with the Clean Air Act standards. So what was supposed to happen What something like a 90% reduction? And in the case of lead, that's exactly what happened. And if you look around there's a handful of pollutants where we've gotten a real qualitative Improvement what we set out to do let's say 70 80 90 percent improvement over this period of time and I'll list the successes for you led in the air DDT, you know DDT was responsible for bird populations dying the Osprey at the Eastern end of long island disappeared. Well the Osprey aback, I've seen them the brown pelican is back the DDT levels in fish and in your body are now very much reduced 70% or so in the last 10 or 15 years. This is also true of pcbs polychlorinated biphenyls. Very toxic chlorinated compounds. They are down about 80 percent. Another example is mercury in fish in the Great Lakes used to be they had very high levels couldn't eat the fish. It's down now another example strontium-90. I noticed some of the young people looking up. What's that strontium-90 is a pollutant radioactive material that was disseminated all over this country. And in fact the world as a result of nuclear bombs being exploded in tests largely by us and the Soviet Union. And there were levels. Well, my children's Bones have strontium-90 in them because the time they were growing up the strontium-90 got into the milk that they drank and it's in their bones that's down twenty fold since the 1970s. So you can't argue that. Well, the best we can do is attempt to 20% Improvement because obviously we have been able to accomplish it now when you get a set of data like this is what's known technically as a bimodal distribution that is if you look at most of the pollutants while they average about 14 to 15 percent pollutant, but out here is a group that's done very well. The obvious thing to do is to ask well what worked and what didn't work. And if you examine this handful of successes you come up with a new scientific law that explains why in those cases it worked. The law is very simple. If you don't put a pollutant into the environment, it's not there. Literally, the reason why DDT is gone down is that we have stopped putting it into the environment. It was banned in the early 1970s. It used to be used by Farmers particularly cotton Farmers to control pests. Well, how do you do that? You spray DDT? That's an excellent way to put DDT into the environment. Now that we have stopped putting DDT into the environment. It's gone away slowly, but it's gone. That's true of every one of the successes. Why is there so much less lead in the air. We have stopped putting it into the gasoline. When it was in the gasoline went right through the engine out into the air. Why is there less strontium-90 well we in the Soviet Union have had the wisdom to stop blowing up nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. The Mercury situation is interesting. It tells you something turned out that the Mercury was getting into the Great Lakes from certain plants. Chemical plants that produce chlorine the way you produce chlorine is by passing electricity through a solution of salt and the chlorine accumulates at one electrode and Mercury was used to pass the current into this vat of salt. Well, it was discovered that the Mercury was coming from these plants. And so we and the Canadians went to the companies and said look you're going to have to stop using mercury and they did they did not stop producing chlorine. What they did was to change the technology used to produce chlorine. They used a semi permeable membrane instead of mercury in other words. It was the particular technological means of producing chlorine that cause the Mercury power problem. And the way it was changed was by eliminating that pollutant from the technology of production. That tells us a great deal about these successes. The reason why there's less lead in gasoline is we have changed the technology of gasoline production. Lead is introduced to prevent knocking in high compression engines. Now other substances are used here in Iowa you use a great deal of ethyl alcohol for that purpose a very good anti-knock substance. That is not poisonous. The blade is In each case what was done was to change the technology of producing gasoline change the technology of growing cotton when farmers were told you may not use DDT anymore. They had to do something else. Unfortunately in most cases they simply laid hands on a different pesticide, but the important thing is that in each one of these cases the solution the Improvement was not by putting controls on the car. For example, there is no LED control on the car. There is no lead going into the car. There is no control that removes DDT from the environment. We simply stopped putting it into the environment by taking it out of the productive process that used the pollutant and this leads to a very important generalization which is relevant to what is being discussed at this conference. You know, there is a concept of Health which deals with prevention. And in fact last night good deal of the discussion was about that that the idea of health is to keep people healthy rather than cure them when they're sick. This is the whole concept of public health of prevention. Rather than cure that the way to achieve Health generally is to prevent people from getting sick. Well the data that I've just given you lead to exactly the same conclusion about the health of the environment. What does not work in most cases? What hasn't worked is to say okay, we've produced the pollutant now, let's control it the cars produce nitrogen oxide and carbon monoxide would going to put a device on the tail pipe that will recapture the pollutant. That hasn't worked what has worked is to not produce the pollutant and very simply stated environmental pollution is essentially an incurable disease. It can only be prevented. And I think there is no way of avoiding that conclusion about our experience in trying to clean up the environment cures smokestack control devices the catalysts on the end of the car, you know, those catalysts that you have on your car. They were supposed to block the carbon monoxide coming out into the environment and I have to tell you that the Improvement in carbon monoxide emissions is of the order of 15 percent how the Catalyst don't work very well they wear out after a time more cars are driven in other words. Once the pollutant is out there. It's too late. The only thing you can do is to keep the pollutant out of the environment and incidentally I have to tell you I'm a sort of data freak and I like to do this sort of analysis and I get a good deal of pleasure out of it when it turns out that I was right previously. And if any of you were in The Freshman course, will you had to read the closing Circle? You'll discover that in the closing Circle, which was written around 1970. I ask this question. Why is it that the country is so polluted now in 1970 and what I discovered was again, I'm a data freak. I got a lot of numbers and I was able to show that most of the terrible levels of pollutants that we had the nitrate in the in the wells in Iowa the smog the carbon monoxide the lead. the pesticides that all of these problems began around 1945. I don't know how many of you will know most of you must know this or ask your father or grandfather about it before World War II there was practically no nitrogen fertilizer used in a mountain in Iowa. There were no tanks of ammonia anywhere. This is a new 2min new post World War II phenomenon. Same is true of a synthetic pesticides. The same is true of all the Plastics. The same is true of smog what has and what I said in the closing circle is very simply this between World War II the end of World War II and 1970 the country went through a transformation in the technology of its production processes. Certain things drastic things happened for example 85% of the cleansers that were used in 1945 when everybody used soap. So now 85% of the cleansers are detergents that's new and detergents have polluted the water with various chemicals before World War II. We carried our truck heart rate railroad mostly on railroads. Since World War II there has been a vast displacement of railroad Freight with truck Freight. What does that do? It takes four times as much fuel to carry a ton of freight a mile by truck as it does by railroad. That means four times as much pollution from the burning of the fuel. Since World War Two we introduced nuclear power plants the notorious source of radioactive pollutants. What has happened between World War Two in 1970 is we created new forms of production new technological forms, which introduced pollutants for the first time that we never had before and I concluded as a result of studying the rise in the pollution level at the origin was in the technology of production in the technology of agricultural production industrial production Transportation power production and so on and the reason why I was happy, I know it's terrible to be happy because we failed to clean up the environment, but I'm human I like to be right. Reason, I was happy when I saw that the answer the answer to the question of what has happened during the cleanup phase was exactly the same as the answer to the question in the rising phase and I have to tell you when you analyze a rising pollution situation and a declining one albeit not a very good one and you come to the same conclusion as to the origin of the pollution problem. You have to believe you're right. So I think I'm right. that is the pollution problem is not in the environment. The environment is the victim. the problem begins in our production of crops Freight Power Machinery chemicals In other words, the environmental crisis is a crisis that arises out of our system of production. It's not something gone wrong in the environment that changes the entire locus of the problem and it leads to some very serious consequences that I want to spell out for you now. First place let's ask the question. How have we adapted to this failure? You talk to anybody in EPA and you will see a tab Tatian Buffet. I mean after all, what do you do when you are administering a law that says they're supposed to be a 90% reduction in in urban air pollution by 1977 and it doesn't happen. Well, you begin to think of well gonna postpone it, you know, so on I want to show you some of the things that have happened as a result of the failure one is the failure itself. And I think one of the reasons for the excitement this summer was people just began to realize that the environmental campaign that began in 1970 hadn't worked on the East Coast people were seeing sewage on the beach. medical waste on the beach And then we're saying you know, what what's EPA up to what's happened to our state agencies? What's gone wrong? We'll all the money we've spent doing this in other words. The failure itself is a very important shall we say social phenomenon and and people are I think increasingly worried about it, but then they've been some very serious adaptations to this failure. Let me explain them. Let me tell you how the environmental laws work. They're written in this way. The laws come into effect EPA begins to act when you suspect that there's a dangerous pollutant in the environment. Once that happens then EPA Marshalls, it's it's chemists and physicists and they go out and make measurements and then the biologists were do experiments about the biological hazard from that level of exposure to the pollutant. Then a standard is devised. Well the pollution ought to be not here but there. And then the lawyers come into play start arguing with the industry's about whether going to do it or not. And what's it going to cost? And this is what EPA has been about in other words. It has been a struggle to cope with environmental pollution after it occurs. In fact, the laws don't come into effect until the pollutant is out there. When as I have told you it's too late. Now look at the consequences of that. Here's one. Once you say well we're dealing with pollutants out here and we're going to set up standards of acceptability. Then what you're saying is a certain level of pollution a certain level of threat to our health is acceptable. And when you ask well shouldn't we do better then your told well, if we do try to do better it will hurt the chemical industry. Chemical industry can't really reduce the levels that much or the car industry and I will remember when the bow pal accident took place. It was a little editorial in Time Magazine, which said this is the price that we pay for the god in the machine. That is our technology is beneficent gives us all of these new developments economic strength and so on and we have to pay the price of a little pollution for that. Well, that's a very interesting approach. And in fact, it's a new version of a mediaeval approach in medieval times sickness and death was looked on as an absolute requirement of life. In fact Just like Time Magazine said we have to pay for the goodies of our technology by sustaining pollution. There was a time when people said we have to suffer the pain of sickness and death because of original sin. What people are saying is the original sin of this new technology is what gives us pollution and we have to stand for it. This is the contrary to the public health approach Public Health Physicians are devoted to the notion of eliminating disease. You may say well that can't be done. It has been done smallpox is eliminated. I don't know how many years it is. Now. There has been a single case of smallpox reported anywhere in the world. This was done by prevention wasn't done by giving people antibiotics. It was done by a vaccine which prevents people getting the disease and gradually the virus has been wiped out track this sort of a ludicrous situation. There are now two vials of the virus one in Washington and one in Moscow and there's a big debate on should we destroy those two vials so that this virus is wiped out. I don't know you how many animal rights people here are any of you virus rights people should we eliminate this species or not? But I mentioned this because this is an exemplary situation. This is what public health is about, you know in the case of our standards the general standard for a cancer producing chemical is it's acceptable. If it doesn't cause more than one extra case per million people exposed over a lifetime that's considered acceptable. Now, do you suppose that the people who worked on preventing smallpox said when they got the level down to one in a million they said oh we can quit now. That's an acceptable level. They didn't quit they wiped out the disease. So there's a very sharp difference between an approach which says well we've got to live with a certain level of pollutants. And it's intently. All the different pollutants which may add up and interact with each other in ways that we don't know is a very different approach which is the one we're using then the public health approach, which says we have got to reduce pollution to the lowest possible level. So this is one one failure. I consider this return to meet evil ideas. Some of which are okay, but some aren't let me give you an example of of the moral consequences of getting into this bind, you know once you set a standard You have to say well, look how low do we go? The lower we go the more cost to get there. And what are we getting for reducing the level of cancer in the environment? Well the so you have you have an equation on one side the cost of the of the pollutant to health and on the other side the benefits that come from the industry that produces the pollutant or if you want to put it the cost of reducing the pollution level further. So you've got lives on one side and dollars on the other and if you go back to your mathematics class you discover that's not really an equation. You have to have the same dimensions on both sides of the equal sign and so a whole academic Enterprise has arisen to put a dollar value on a human life. Otherwise, you can't work this equation out. This is being done primarily in the economics department at the University of Chicago. How do you put a dollar value of a human life? Oh, they know it's very easy depends on how much you earn and so statistics are accumulated as to how much people learn. And then it turns out and that's the value of a human life. Well, it turns out then that women are worth much less than men and blacks are worth less than whites. In general poor people their lives are worthless than rich people's lives. Now you put that in the equation. And you discover. That you can accept a level of pollution that kills poor people. But not rich people. They're not. So what it does. It literally says that it's okay. It's okay, if poor people suffer from pollution more than rich people and you know what that's the case. Where do you suppose a toxic dump is put on Park Avenue in New York? No. There is a study done by the United Church of Christ which shows that most of the toxic waste dumps are next to minority and poor communities. And in fact very often that bribe to take it there poor the town doesn't have much money. So they given half a million dollars to accept a trash burning incinerator or a toxic dump. in other words pollution raises this this idea of the acceptable level the risk-benefit erases a very serious moral question, which is far from being resolved. And this is a result of the failure to set up a system where we simply Drive the pollution level down as far as we can go without worrying about what your life is worth. There are various ways that people deal with this and that one of the most unfortunate comes about in the following way. This is a problem. I'm sure you have here trash is now become a very serious problem and people trying to figure out what to do with it. And the new industry has sprung up to build incinerators to burn trash. In fact, it's not a new industry. What it is is a branch of the power plant industry, which suddenly discovered that it was losing business. Nuclear power plants and been an order in the last 10 years and even conventional power plants in our bill being built very much. So companies like Westinghouse and Consolidated engineering and combustion engineering that were building power plants including nuclear power plants suddenly discovered. Oh, there's something else we can burn and we can keep our Engineers going building these things and it turns out that these things when you burn trash a lot of funny chemistry takes place and inevitably when you turn on the furnace, you get new toxic material produced dioxins and you find in the ash for example, lead and cadmium which are toxic and a number of states have analyzed and EPA have analyzed the Ash and found that their levels of these toxic Metals cadmium and Lead that qualify as hazardous. Substances a hazardous substance is defined in the EPA laws as a substance. That is so toxic that it must be disposed of in a special hazardous waste landfill. In other words, it's a formal designation and the ash from these incinerators matches that designation. Well when that was discovered. Most of the people in the industry said look if we have to put the ash in a hazardous waste landfill the cost is prohibitive prohibitive and it will no longer be possible to operate the incinerators and what has been done in my state New York state of Washington that I know of and probably in other states and EPA is preparing to do it straight out of Alice in Wonderland. You remember an Alice in Wonderland Humpty Dumpty analysis having conversation about the meaning of words and Humpty. Dumpty says a word is whatever I say it means Well, that's exactly what the commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection said in New York state. He said I declare this ash to be special waste not hazardous waste. Therefore it doesn't have to go into a hazardous waste landfill and the incinerators can operate economically. So what I'm saying is this we started in 1970 recognizing and adopting as a uniform social intent. That the environment is to be qualitatively improve 90% better than it was we adopted that. We then went ahead and wrote laws and adopted procedures that ignored what was already known then about the origin of pollution and instead the laws dealt with the symptoms the pollutants out there and it hasn't worked. It hasn't worked and as a consequence of that there have been all of these new problems created the failure in the environment has created the moral problem of what a person's life is worth. Which is unresolved the failure and the environment has created the shall we say administrative fault of what of changing the terminology about something what I call linguistic detoxification of the ash. These new problems emerge because we haven't solved the basic one. And so the last thing I want to talk about is how come we haven't solved. I think what I've said makes a certain amount of sense surely people in Congress and so on able to recognize this what stands in the way of solving this problem. Well is a very big barrier. a taboo in fact because now let's carry the argument one step further what I've told you is the only way To deal with environmental pollution is to alter the technology of growing corn and soybeans building cars producing electricity and so on. For a social purpose it is a social purpose to clean up the environment Society. Therefore has to invade what is until now a purely private area the area in which decisions are made as to what kind of car to produce? That's done in the strict privacy of the corporate boardroom or in the farmers living room. No farmer wants to be told. how to deal with the insects on his farm or how much fertilizer to use and General Motors doesn't want to be told what kind of card to build now you're going to tell me right away. That the corporations are not the ones who decide what kinds of cars to build. You and I decide the consumer is King. They respond to our demands we can discuss that in the question period but I want to make a preemptive strike here and give you and give you my answer to that just to give you an example of a change in the technology of production, which is clearly not a response. To Consumer demand, I wear a size 12 sucks. I go into a store and I asked for size 12 socks. The last time I went into Bloomingdale's they said oh they're on special order. What do I do over there are socks that are size 10 to 13? Right, you know about that very hard to buy sighs sucks. Now that's a change in the technology of producing socks. It used to be they were ten ten and a half eleven eleven and a half. Well right with some of you people never even remember that Now they may even be tubular. Now I ask you a question. Do you know anyone who walked into a store and said listen my feet change size every week. I need variable size sucks. Or I have a peg leg and I need a tubular sock. This is not a response to Consumer demand. This is a response to a very simple well-known economic idea. It's called profit maximization. If you can cut down the inventory of socks. Then you have less in inventory and it'll be easier to make a bigger profit. Now. I you say well that's an exaggeration. Let me give you a another way of looking at it suppose you go into a store and buy a refrigerator and Europe. You've been convinced by me about railroads and trucks and you tell the store owner. Listen. I want a refrigerator that was delivered by Railroad. It's ecologically better you the guy will look at you as nuts. Yeah, how do I know? He doesn't know how it was delivered came and truck from the jobber. Is he going to call up the job or it's going to come by and do you have any control over that? No, in other words what I'm telling you is the decisions as to what is produced and how its produced which are the decisions that determine the quality of the environment in our economic system are solely the prerogative of the owner of capital. They alone have the right to decide how to invest their capital. Which determines what they produce several years ago the president of Standard Oil of Indiana that it just decided to move out of a good deal of the oil industry into the chemical industry was interviewed. And he was asked why are you shifting from oil to chemicals? And he said and I quote pretty exactly we're not in the energy business. We're in the business of making the best return we can on our stockholders investment. That's why we switched now suppose a have discovered. They make a bigger profit out of chemicals and they do. Suppose he had said to the reporter we weave our engineers and economists have just shown us that we could make a bigger profit by going into chemicals, but we're not going to do it because they're nasty things. We don't want to pollute the environment, you know, what would happen the stockholders would sue him and they'd win? Because his responsibility to the stockholders is not to produce oil is to produce profit. Now I'm telling you. This is a very well-established notion, but I tell it to you in a critical sense because it is that isolation of the decision from social interest, which is led to the pollution of the environment. And in effect if we want to carry out the stated social National interest in improving the environment then we have to have social intervention into the decisions that normally take place in the privacy of a boardroom. That immediately raises a taboo. We're not supposed to even think about that and let me tell you. I don't know if I can well, I don't want to give away the story but you'll see why. About three or four years ago a person whom I assert. Is generally regarded as the most prominent human being on Earth. Issued a statement in which he said that for his own reasons. He thought that the population as a whole. Had the right to determine in many cases how Capital was invested in production processes in other words he agreed with me. Most prominent person on Earth. I don't know of a single editorial written either for or against this idea. I don't know of a single National politician who ever mentioned it on the floor of Congress. You know who that person was. It's okay to say it here. Who's the Pope? The pope issued encyclical on human labor several years ago and it's the basis of the Cardinal Bishops economic letter in which he raised this question. Now, I would have thought that this would lead to some discussion it did with in Catholic circles. But have you ever has it been a debate in the Iowa legislature about the possibility of social intervention into what the farmers are doing? I don't think so. You can correct me. In other words. We've run up against a barrier. Which is political it's not economic and I'll tell you why because most of the changes that need to be made in the technology of production for the sake of environmental Improvement will improve the economy. Let me show you the reverse. Nuclear power was a change made in the technology producing electricity that has had very bad environmental consequences. It is also an economic failure and economic failure. The industry is essentially dormant and dying. Why because the because of public concern the environmental hazards were recognized and the industry was forced to spend money on one control system after another until the cost escalated tenfold and they price themselves out of the market. In other words forced to be environmentally sound. They were on economic. Let me give you an example of a case in which this has not yet been recognized the petrochemical industry. Is probably responsible for the most serious pollution. We have toxic chemicals. I'm not talking about the old dumps the Superfund sites. I'm talking about the toxic chemicals released by the industry. Every year several hundred million tons, a year of toxic chemicals are produced by this industry. Where does it go 99% of it goes right into the environment half of it goes into deep Wells they may be deep but they're still part of the environment and eventually stuff will leak out half as in lagoons on the surface one percent is destroyed, which is you have something toxic and lasts a long time. Well, you gotta destroy. It's the only way to deal with it. Okay? If all hundred percent were destroyed and we know what it costs to do it the cost of destroying the annual output of hazardous waste from the petrochemical industry would be larger than the total profit of the industry. Now, what does that mean? It means that the profitability of the petrochemical industry its ability to expand our economy. Exists only because it hasn't paid its environmental bill. where pain We're paying in the Bill of treating cancer patients, for example. So what I'm saying is we have to confront this taboo and recognize that not only for the sake of the environment, but for the sake of the economy, we are going to have to do a new technological transformation to undo the damage both economic and environmental caused by what happened between World War Two in 1970. I know you're going to say we've benefited enormously sure by these new technologies the petrochemical industry the the trucks the the heavy production of corn and soybeans with chemicals on the farms. Yeah. But it's short term and is creating an enormous debt. In the environment that is going to have to be paid eventually so we have to undertake now. We have to confront this taboo and begin to find ways of getting Into this area in which society has something to say and do it as I was admonished to breakfast this morning without curtailing our freedoms, right? Sure, you know, you begin to worry commissar and Washington telling the farmers how much fertilizer to use Well, let me give you a tell you my answer to this is look the real reason why we haven't solved this problem is that we don't know it exists and I'm content to say let's figure out how to do it. And I think after a while people figure out how to do it. But a lot of people are impatient with that sort of relaxed attitude and I want to give you a suggestion about how we could do this without a bridging anybody's Freedom. Okay? In 1974, there was an engine developed and it was in the hands of the Ford Motor Company that prevented smog. It didn't produce nitrogen oxide. So it didn't trigger the smog reaction. To produce the engine the factories would have to be changed and it's never been produced. Suppose that instead of the Ford company producing it suppose that EPA were charged instead of trying to figure out how to get along in a polluted World EPA was given will need new laws given the job of devising those Technologies of production that will prevent the creation of pollution. And one of them is one charge they have is design a smog free car. So EPA sits down and devises this so-called stratified charged engine, which is a smog free car then what do you do? Well, it turns out that the United States government spends five point four billion dollars a year to buy cars and trucks. That's a lot of cars and trucks and when they buy them, you know a bid goes out specifications tires have to be this paint that Etc suppose you then said we're putting the EPA specifications for smog free engine into the bids. I guarantee you some private entrepreneur, maybe Japanese somebody's going to come along and say I bid for these cars and I will give you a smog free engine. In very short order the country as a whole the other companies would be forced to follow along and you say well isn't this a putting the government on our backs? Isn't this just what mr. Reagan has warned us against and so on. Well, the government's already done it. The only reason why we have cheap computers is that the government did this in the 1950s when those little chips were invented? They cost $50 each. And you couldn't have had a little handheld or laptop computer built it be too expensive. Well, the government placed big orders for these chips, unfortunately from missiles, but the orders were so big that the industry was able to Tool up rationalized production and brought the price down very quickly to 50 cents. That's when the computer industry was born. In other words, we used our Collective taxes our Collective wisdom our Collective morality and said this is a good thing to do. And the result was that it created this huge Economic Development. Well, there's no reason why we can't do that. For example with smog free cars with solar energy equipment photovoltaic cells that produce electricity directly from the Sun. In order to deal with the greenhouse effect, which will require us to get rid of all of the combustible fuels. There's no reason why we can't use the size the power the strength of the government and hopefully the wisdom of some of our elected officials in order to get out of this bind without getting into the trouble of establishing or commissariat in Washington to have Harmony in the world and in our country. Not only with the environment but among ourselves we have to deal with our Collective responsibility. Not only for our own health, but for the health of the community and the ecosystem because that's what we depend on. Thank you.