Pollution Control Quotations

Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites.

I spend a year at the Hoover Institute at Stanford, researching market approaches to air pollution control.

When discussing overall impacts on employment, it is important not to overlook the new technologies and industries that can be driven by pollution control standards.

Environmentally, business in America in 1970 was very similar to business in China today. Even if a CEO wanted to be a responsible corporate citizen, he (and they were all "he's" then) simply couldn't invest a billion dollars in pollution controls to produce a product that was indistinguishable from those of his competitors. His products would be priced out of the market. Passing laws that created a clean, level playing field for whole industries had to be a core focus of the 1970s.

The Los Angeles Air Pollution Control Board is established in 1946 in an effort to discover the cause of the brown cloud hanging over the city and decide how to combat and disperse it. In 1949, after intense lobbying from both the automobile and oil industries, and against the recommendations and position of the Los Angeles Air Pollution Control Board, the public rail system, which at one time was the largest in the world, and still serves a majority of the city's population, is decommissioned and torn out. It is replaced by a small fleet of buses.

The potential savings in the national budgets from the elimination of police, criminal courts, standing armies, pollution control agencies, drug enforcement, and many poverty programs is almost beyond calculation.

Many state governments have launched innovative steps such as Ladli Laxmi scheme of Madhya Pradesh, PDS reform scheme of Chattisgarh, computerization of land records in Karnataka, free computers to students passing 10th standard exams, pollution control efforts in Himachal, power sector reforms in Rajasthan and Mumbai - Pune Expressway in Maharashta. These excellent innovative schemes are examples of good governance.

The important thing to understand is that the case for pollution control isn't based on some kind of aesthetic distaste for industrial society. Pollution does real, measurable damage, especially to human health.

One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.