Illegals Dump Their Trash in the Picnic Area of the Local Park

Plastic pollution in our national parks

Photo: Wikipedia

On sunny weekends and national holidays, the local park closes very early as the parking occupancy reaches its full capacity. The park is then closed to cars and boats but left open to foot traffic. The road leading up to the park entrance becomes crammed on both sides with parked cars. The occupants with their large families drag or carry on their backs coolers on a two-mile trek to the marina side of the park where a large picnic area and a fishing pier are located. Nobody speaks a word of English, only Spanish.

The park happens to be a historical site as the heavily wooded land was donated by illustrious families who have contributed many generations of great Americans to the state and to our country and have left an indelible print in our country’s history.

But our picnickers are only interested in cooking outdoors, drinking beer, and fishing. They are legal and illegal aliens who have flooded the area in the last ten years, crossing the border to find Americans who are willing to employ them. Additionally, they receive welfare and earned income tax credit for their children in the U.S. and even for those left behind south of the border.

Most work off the books and never pay income taxes even though the government has created ITIN with the IRS. The Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) was established for the use of individuals who are not U.S. citizens or permanent legal residents.

Illegals pay sales taxes and the fees to wire money via Western Union back to their home countries. But, in one given year, our federal government has paid $4.1 billion in earned income tax credit to foreign nationals who entered our country illegally. The earned income tax credit is not a tax “refund” but a direct, free cash payment from the U.S. Treasury to low-income immigrants who owe no taxes. “It is a dramatic cash transfer from lawful resident to unlawful residents.” https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/immigration/item/20149-illegal-immigrants-eligible-for-earned-income-tax-credit-other-benefits

They enjoy picnics for the day and leave behind a lot of food waste, wrappers, and plastics, which they seldom take to the many garbage bins conveniently located throughout the parking areas. Illegal aliens just leave the trash be – the rivers and creeks are going to carry them out to sea, they think. It is how they grew up – dump garbage out the window into the streets where they live, the creeks, on the side of roads, in the woods, lakes, and wherever they happen to be.

I have seen this irresponsible behavior on my trip to Mexico. In a very busy outdoor restaurant in Tijuana, frequented that day by many locals, there was human feces on the floor of the restaurant, buzzed by flies, but nobody seemed to notice or care and kept eating. The smell of urine and feces was quite pungent around bridges and walls.

When the park closes early in the day to car traffic, American locals who pay taxes for the maintenance of this and other parks cannot take their boats to the marina and put it on water to enjoy the weekend with their families. Canoers cannot take their canoes out for the day either. The fishing pier is crowded as well, even though signs clearly state in English that the fish is not fit for consumption.

The population in our county has grown by leaps and bounds, 40 percent since the last census, and, according to officials, the growth was mostly due to illegal aliens. Wherever they go, they leave trash behind.

Take the beaches in Florida. When they get off work, they picnic on the beach on late afternoons and leave their trash behind. The people hired to clean the beach behind them, know that they are the principal culprits who leave recyclables, cigarette butts, and food packaging behind. The taxpayers in the area dedicate a large budget for beach cleanup from food, drinks, and recyclable containers left behind.

Some Americans leave trash behind as well, especially on beaches. But ours is a culture that teaches children to pick up refuse after themselves. Third world cultures that do not have trash pickup at all and do not emphasize the importance of having a clean environment, contribute greatly to the pollution of rivers and eventually of oceans.

Floating marine debris, at all depths, include plastics, paper, wood, metal, and other manufactured materials. The Ocean Conservancy Trash Free Seas Alliance estimated that “8 million metric tons of plastic such as containers, bottles, shoes, are dumped into the ocean each year.”

Among the items collected during the International Coastal Cleanup Day in 2017: cigarette butts, food wrappers, plastic bottles, plastic bottle caps, plastic grocery bags, other plastic bags, straws, stirrers, plastic take-out containers, foam take-out containers, and plastic lids.

Other strange items found were appliances, toothbrushes, shopping carts, mattresses, underwear, toilets, wigs, hair extensions, pregnancy tests, condoms, and even hot tubs. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/06/27/ocean-beach-pollution-plastic-trash/738173002/

Could we possibly educate people of the importance to keep our roads, parks, rivers, and streets clean? It takes generations to change a person’s mentality and what they are used to doing because they think, if it was good for my parents and grandparents, it is good enough for me.

Economically speaking, a beneficial externality such as parks and waterways are not private property and belong to no one in particular. People use waterways and parks as free dumping grounds for their waste. A beneficial externality for the enjoyment of all, i.e., a park or the use of it, becomes a detrimental externality when it is polluted deliberately.

It is a known fact that the centralized, socialist governments that these people have fled from have a dismal environmental record and an equally dismal record in teaching its citizens not to abuse and pollute nature indiscriminately, not caring that they leave a worse environment behind for their children and grandchildren.  Illegals abuse nature because they are not directly responsible for paying for its enjoyment unless one counts the small entrance fee per car. Those who walk in, do not pay.

It is sad to see the beauty of nature surrounding us being spoiled by people who stole into our country but have no interest in “once in Rome, do as the Romans do.” Once in Rome, they carry their bad, third world habits, behavior, and life with them. You cannot force civilized behavior on someone by giving them money, welfare, and the opportunity to evade the law.

Bacon and a Year Without Summer

Photo credit: www.pofta-buna.com

I’m placing the thickly sliced uncured bacon in the pan and, when it begins to sizzle, the marvelous aroma fills the house. It is a memory from my childhood when Grandma Elena would render bacon fat into lard in her tiny kitchen. It was a preservative for chunks of pork she would seal with wax in glass jars that would feed us for an entire year. It was stored in the cellar, the dank, damp, and constantly cool place. We did not need refrigerators and could not have afforded one anyway.

My dad eventually saved enough money when I was in 12^th grade and bought a small refrigerator for our tiny apartment in the city. It was empty most of the time because we did not have food to store, mom shopped daily and we ate what she purchased, no leftovers. We would cool a watermelon in the fridge in summertime or keep a small glass bottle of milk if we were lucky enough to have found the liter bottles sold in the government-run dairy stores.

Like everything else, shelves were bare as soon as the morning delivery was put on sale and the long line of shoppers dissipated with their laden expandable jute string shopping bags.  In winter time we had the window sill for cool storage with plenty of ice and snow.

I could have this bacon now every day if I wanted to but I don’t have to because I believe that I can find it any day in the grocery store and I don’t have to fight others for it like they do in socialist Venezuela.

We trust blindly that our local stores will always have a good stock of food every day. As a realist, however, I know that most grocery stores have enough stock for three days, but who wants to have negative thoughts when this country is so rich and the shelves are a cornucopia of abundance? We have fewer and fewer farmers, less than 3 percent, feeding 330 million. Nobody ever starves in America today but could they in case of terrible inclement weather?

What if we would experience another year like 1816, also known as the Year without a Summer?  Major food shortages occurred across the Northern Hemisphere due to the massive 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies, preceded by the 1814 eruption of Mayon in the Philippines. (Oppenheimer, Clive, 2003. "Climatic, environmental and human consequences of the largest known historic eruption: Tambora volcano (Indonesia) 1815.” Progress in Physical Geography. 27 (2): 230–259. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1191/0309133303pp379ra

Volcanic winters are not something new, they have occurred across the millennia but nobody was keeping track then. Evidence of inclement weather disasters and probable food shortages can be found, among others, in studies of soil strata and in ice core samples.

Reports in the U.S. described a persistent “dry fog which turned reddish and dimmed the sunlight - it could not be dispersed by wind or rainfall.”  Scientists termed it a “stratospheric sulfate aerosol veil.” It affected crops, particularly at higher elevations such as Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, New York, and even the garden state, New Jersey. In early June snow fell in Albany, New York, and in Maine. New Jersey’s crops were damaged by five continuous nights of frost.

Those who push the idea of an anthropogenic global warming conveniently leave out the historical data of the Vostok ice core samples taken by Russian, American, and French scientists. Global warmists have now switched to climate change which all sides agree that it does occur but it is not necessarily man-made. We should not confuse deliberate environmental degradation and lack of conservation of natural resources with CO2 gases emitted by humans and animals existing and breathing. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ice-core-data-help-solve/

The Little Ice Age that lasted approximately 500 years is another important occurrence worth mentioning that the global warmists conveniently leave out from their narrative. It caused tremendous agricultural hardship and famine in Europe from around the thirteen hundreds to the eighteen hundreds, affecting the Norse settlers and even Napoleon’s campaign in Russia in 1812 where they encountered such an unusual bitter-cold winter and a lack of food for which they were ill-prepared.  The culprit of the severe cold stretching over centuries was the diminished solar flare activity, a solar minimum, not CO2.

Long winters are not unusual in Russia or in the United States for that matter, it is the inability to have a long enough and warm enough growing season in order to produce sufficient food for its population.

Climatologists who argue when this cooling period actually began, dubbed Little Ice Age by Francois E. Matthes, are more definitive that it ended around 1850-1870. https://www.history.com/news/little-ice-age-big-consequences

In our 20^th century communist society, it was not the surprise of weather changes that we had to worry so much about but the unwise economic and agricultural central planning that bore no resemblance to reality or to the ability of humans to produce what was ordered and the fact that most food was used for export in order to buy industrial equipment needed for development. People starved, foreigners ate well, and the communist party had its factories that produced goods that nobody wanted to buy because they were so poorly made.

But we had bacon thanks to my grandparents who always raised a pig for Christmas slaughter, a beautiful animal that kept four-five families alive through winter, spring, summer, and fall until the next year.  If it was not for grandma raising this pig, raising chickens and ducks for eggs, keeping a cow for milk, and planting a garden, several families would have starved because there was not enough food provided by government in groceries stores for the size of the population. Communists do not recognize the law of supply and demand and are not particularly adept at planning centralized economies based loosely on Marxist ideology.

 

 

Mount Everest and Pollution

Mount Everest, en.wikipedia.org

Environmentalists have switched their assault on the world economy to a new frontier, previously unaffected by their agenda – peaks, Mount Everest to be more specific, located between China and Nepal in the Himalayas. The 29,029 feet mountain is in danger. What is the crisis? According to the National Geographic team, the mountain is “overcrowded with inexperienced climbers and polluted with waste.”

The nature of the pollution includes human corpses, human excrement, garbage leaking from glaciers, abandoned equipment, and overcrowding. How crowded could it be? Mark Jenkins described at 26,000 feet the dangerous inconvenience of more than 100 climbers moving slowly, forcing everybody else to move at the same pace. 

The humans who perished were left where they died; some were pushed by wind and ice by the side of the trail and some wound up in crevasses. Mark said that the “mountain is mobbed” by inexperienced climbers. “The two standard routes up Everest are not only dangerously crowded but also disgustingly polluted.”

He bemoans the days when in 1963 only six climbers made the arduous trek compared to 2012 when over 500 “mobbed the summit.” The National Geographic team reached the summit on May 25 but was unable to stand due to overcrowding.

Climbing the highest peak is not as glamorous as it used to be, he said. The club is no longer rarified – there are almost 4,000 who successfully reached the peak, some more than once. Guided climbers who pay $30,000-120,000 on expeditions to reach the top have created mounds of human excrement and left behind discarded equipment, other trash, and corpses.

Nepalese Sherpas remove their own trash, leaving little footprint behind. They even pick up some of the garbage left by climbers even though collection work is difficult in sub-zero temperatures.

What kind of micro-management do environmentalists propose in order to save this natural wonder, the mammoth toy that tests the mettle for the few and moneyed?

-          Restrain low budget outfitters by limiting the number of total permits per season and the size of each team (perfect weather data causes crowds on the mountain, all vying to reach the top during the same nice weather conditions)

-          Show respect for the mountain (I would think, that would be hard to do when caught in a storm and trying to survive)

-          Issue ID scanner tags with every permit (QR code) that might save a climber’s life (Would that reduce corpse pollution?)

I would never understand why humans push themselves to test the limit of their survival endurance in unforgiving environments, often paying with their lives, but it is a remarkable accomplishment that few have attained and I am not trying to minimize the extraordinary physical shape these men and women attain and the grueling training and dedication involved.

Previous pioneers have escalated peaks and treacherous territories trying to find new lands, develop maps, rescue lost teams, or to find mines of gold, silver, and other precious resources. They left behind discarded equipment, wagons, tools, ships, tents, and cooking utensils.

I wonder if environmentalists consider mountains polluted if they are covered with wildlife, their poop, and their carcasses. Animals are killed off, die of natural causes, sometimes partially or completely eaten; their remains and fecal matter decompose scattered on the ground. Is that environmentally hazardous to the mountain?

Civilized people love a clean environment and strive to keep it that way. At the end of the day, is it about pollution really and “showing respect for the mountain,” or is it about denying and controlling access to a natural wonder so that future climbers with a big ego, plenty of cash, and a burning desire to reach the peak, survive, often cheat death, and live to brag about it?

EPA, the Enforcer of Federal Pollution Control Laws

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), created in 1970, is the primary federal agency and key player with boundless authority to develop and enforce regulations to allegedly protect human health and the environment from harm caused by pollution. EPA regulations are issued based on the following Acts enacted by Congress:

-          Clean Air Act

-          Clean Water Act

-          Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (Superfund)

-          Safe Drinking Water Act

-          Solid Waste Disposal Act/Resource Conservation and Recovery Act

-          Oil Pollution Control Act (1990)

-          Environmental Planning and Community-Right-To-Know Act

-          Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act

-          Toxic Substances Control Act

-          Pollution Prosecution Act of 1990

“EPA promulgates national regulations and standards” with help from the Department of the Interior, Army Corps of Engineers, states, tribes, and NGO stakeholder groups. (CRS Report RL32240, The Federal Rulemaking Process: An Overview, Maeve P. Carey)

EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance in coordination with the Department of Justice and EPA’s 10 regional offices provide day-to-day federal enforcement activities, monitor compliance, provide incentives, and fines.

Disagreements between the federal EPA and state governments occur in regards to environmental priorities and strategy, compliance assistance, and enforcement.

Enforcement issues debated in congressional hearings and legislation:

 

      -          Constant increased compliance monitoring and reporting

-          Environmental enforcement and penalties to the Department of Defense and the Department of Energy

-          How to measure success – via measurable health and environmental benefits or via total dollar value of penalties

-          Are penalties enough to deter polluting or too harsh, causing economic hardship? The EPA and environmentalists say that it is not enough while Americans believe that penalties not only cause hardship but actually harms business, freedom, and property rights.

-          How effective is pollutant trading programs and enforcement?

-          Are punishment and pollution deterrence effective through litigation?

“There is no readily available, current, comprehensive list and description of the complete universe of those who are regulated under all of the major pollution control statues. EPA has been criticized for not adequately defining the regulated universe, a step that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) determined to be a critical component necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of enforcement.” (p. 15, www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34384.pdf)

The EPA monitors 31 economic activities and industries: aerospace, agriculture, automotive, chemicals, computers/electronics, construction, dry cleaning, education, federal facilities, food processing, furniture, health care, local government operations, marinas, metals, minerals/mining/processing, paints and coatings, petroleum, pharmaceuticals, ports, power generators, printing, prisons and correctional institutions, pulp/paper/lumber, ready mix/crushed stone/sand and gravel, retail, rubber/plastics, shipbuilding and repair, textiles, transportation, and tribal.

EPA monitoring is achieved by:

-          Self-monitoring/reporting

-          Review of records

-          Full and partial inspection/evaluations

-          Area monitoring of the vicinity of a facility

EPA enforcement includes:

-          Notice of violation (the initial process)

-          Requirement of a violator to take specific action

-          Revocation of a violator’s permit to discharge

-          Penalty for non-compliance

-          Negotiated settlements through civil administration actions

-          Civil judicial process (lawsuits filed in federal district court by DOJ on behalf of EPA and for states by State Attorney General)

The EPA’s criminal enforcement program had an estimated 191 investigators assigned in 2013. In 2009, the EPA built the “EPA Fugitives” website http://www.epa.gov/fugitives/) which

contains “photographs and information about alleged violations of individuals who have avoided prosecution for allegedly committing environmental crimes.” (p. 26, CRS Report RL34384)

Finally, some members of Congress showed interest in the sanctions and penalties imposed by EPA in settlements that require redress of environmental damages known as “injunctive relief,” fines, “permanent or temporary closing of facilities or specific operations, increased monitoring/reporting, revocation of existing permits, denial of future permits, and barring of receipt of federal contract funding or other federal assistance.” (CRS Report RL34384, p. 27)

Fines collected by the EPA are deposited with the U.S. Treasury. But, under the Superfund and Clear Water Acts, money collected for replacing or restoring natural resources must be used to restore the resources. In the November 6, 2013 Federal Register, the EPA published the “Civil Monetary Penalty Inflation Adjustment (Final) Rule. www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2013-11-06/pdf/2013-26648.pdf

EPA and DOJ use the following templates to calculate civil penalties:

-          BEN, to calculate economic advantage/savings if the violator does not comply

-          ABEL, to measure a corporation’s ability to afford compliance, cleanup, and civil penalties

-          INDIPAY, to assess an individual’s ability to afford compliance, cleanup, and civil penalties

-          MUNIPAY, to gauge a municipality’s ability to comply, to cleanup, and to pay civil penalties

-          PROJECT, to evaluate a violator’s ability to fund instead a Supplemental Environmental Project (SEP) to mitigate pollution compliance such as a public health project, an emergency preparedness project, etc.

Waiving “sovereign immunity” the EPA assessed nearly $615 million in penalties in 2012 against 61 federal agencies. Regulated businesses and individuals were charged in 2012 $9 billion for judicially mandated pollution controls, cleanup and “beneficial” SEP projects.

In 2012 EPA claims that 2.2 billion pounds of pollutants were removed from air and water, $208 million were levied in civil penalties (administrative and judicial) and $44 million in criminal fines and restitution. EPA issued 1,780 penalty orders and referred 215 civil cases to the DOJ. (Congressional Research Service, RL34384, December 16, 2013, Robert Esworthy, Federal Pollution Control Laws: How Are They Enforced?)

To fund the EPA’s enforcement/compliance activities, the President FY 2014 budget request was $625 million, more than the previous year’s $615.9 million. Detailed allocations for the EPA were not available. The DOJ’s FY2014 budget request funding for its Environment and Natural Resources Division was $112.6 million and 520 FTEs.

According to Robert Esworthy, one important issue for the 113^th Congress regarding EPA should be “additional oversight hearings,” review of grants award process associated with EPA-states’ partnerships, and “statute-specific legislation to address long-standing concerns that affect certain aspects of EPA enforcement/compliance activities under the various pollution control laws.”

American taxpayers, business owners, and some members of Congress are concerned about more legislation that would further expand the overreaching power of the EPA while environmental groups (NGOs) are upset about reining in and constraining the enforcement/compliance power of the EPA.

EPA’s unchecked power has been blamed for destroying economic prosperity, the supply of food, Americans’ means of support, and preventing the exploration of much needed resources that fuel the economy, in an effort to protect the habitat of a small fish, a rare bird, a mouse, while wind and solar farms are given federal permission to chop and fry thousands of birds with their “green” wind turbines and solar panels, including the endangered bald eagle in California.