This is why I always said people need to quit pushing "Climate change". It should always have been and should be about "air pollution".
Look at SLC, the air there with the inversion is horrible, its almost becoming unlivable. I was just visiting there last week and my lung were killing me.
bizarre ignorance is an eternal feature of the human condition. We see it sometimes when, on a rumor or two, someone thinks we know what some people did in some place far away and long ago, that just strikes us as the ultimate of "silly". We almost always deny that what we think now might someday be discredited and ridicules for a future generation of equally self-assured humans.
Well, Beantown, welcome to the human condition.
I happen to agree that the issue we should concern ourselves about is putting scrubbers on smokestacks and making use of our waste, and isolating our flow of commodities and materials from becoming mountains of trash or significant pollutants where nature would otherwise go on pretty much according to natural events. Reclaiming and recycling all our junk is the smartest thing we can do. Requiring manufactures and others to reduce outflows of stuff into the air, water, and land is smart too.
I have lived more or less regularly in SLC across 43 years. My grandfather lived in Murray under a smelter smokestack, where he contracted tuberculosis in 1910, and was advised to move to a warm desert climate, and he chose to go to Clark County, Nevada, outside of where Las Vegas is today, and lived another 43 years, getting around on a wooden leg. At one time the Salt Lake Valley was the smelting capital of the world, and the inversions were truly choking and laden with dusts of heavy metals which are still in the soil valley wide. When I came here in 1969, the Kennecott smokestack was still very significant, along with all the car exhaust carrying lead from the gasolone then used. Everyone was using lead-based paints and such.
I got sick, was blind and paralyzed in 1975, and the doctors still could argue about why. Without giving me even an aspirin, the head neurologist at the University of Utah advised me to go home in southern Utah and eat good food and let my mother take care of me. He did not expect any improvement, he just knew he had nothing he could do that was going to make any difference. I recovered dramatically, and when I came back for a scheduled follow-up six week later, I was walking and reading.
I studied it all, and came to believe ozone was something that affected me in a way that set off an autoimmune disease. I made it my diet to include fish and sunflower seeds, lots of fruits and veggies, and only moderate amounts of processed stuff like bread, packaged meat, and anything with preservatives. I continued to experience improvements in health while living in Salt Lake and observing better eating as an antidote to whatever. However, I was very pleasantly surprised after I bought a ranch and began spending two to four days a week in a completely isolated place where there are maybe three or four cars going by in a day. My health became better and better.
The new Kennecott smokestack made a tremendous difference. I'm sure there have been many significant improvements as a result of public concern and government agency policy implementations. And Yah, I never liked the idea of public transit like TRAX or even the buses because I know it just burns up hours of productive time for many people, and is bureaucratically inefficient. But I have for many years been on the UTA van pool program that takes people driectly from a convenient pickup point to their jobs. Most larger employers have some of this. But as much as I dislike government meddling and bureaucracy and political power being absorbed by the "elite" of our society. . . .. any effort at efficiently allowing people to get around with less car engines running in the valley is a good thing.
what I'd like to see is laws that allow smaller entrepreneurs to get into the van business with grants from the tax revenue that's supposed to fund the endless expansion of UTA. Hey, there are youngsters who are unemployed who can find oh say ten people in the neighborhood who go basically downtown to work, and he can get a grant, buy a van, and give them the ride on a contractual basis. . . . Point A to Point B. One less kid without a job.
So, anyway, Bean. . . . I know you live in southern Utah somewhere and you know what clean air is. But you need to appreciate what has been and is being done to improve Salt Lake Valley too. And we all need to get behind some things that will make it better with a minimum of beaucracy and stupid government overlords.
