Environmental protection

Non-Interventionist Viewpoint

Point

If someone pollutes your property, and it has a real effect, then they should owe you money. Likewise, if someone pollutes public property (e.g. air), then they should owe a fine. Regulating what people can do with their own property is wrong, as is preemptive regulation that hurts industry (e.g. the ban on drilling in ANWR).

Counter-Point

Fines are still intervention. Where public safety is concerned, it is ill-advised to be reactionary with punishments after the crime. Environmental accidents and intentional events can and do cause irreversible damage that cannot be adequately recompensed. Additionally, some environmental abusers do not have the funds to clean up after their abuse and force tax payers to clean up their messes long after abusing entity has dissolved. Proper proactive regulation can limit these events, prevent damage and decrease the cost to future citizens in both dollars and health.

Interventionist Viewpoint

Point

Citizens, either singly or in small groups, cannot effectiviely police the environment in a way that will ensure the safety and quality of life of themselves and their families. Modern industry and commerce can create toxic events that affect large geographic areas, outside of, but including the jurisdiction of municipalities or state governemnts who are powerless to control them. The Federal Government has a responsibility to ensure that if someone cannot make/sell/mine a product within its borders without harming the citizens, their property or the shared properties of the government, then that entity shall not do their business within its borders. Also, environmental toxicity can and does have global affects. If a foreign business/individual wants to engage in business within a government's jurisdiction, then they should follow the environmental guidelines of both governments: their own and that of the product's destination.

See also

• Climate Change
• Landfills

External links

• Global Warming: Fighting Off the Ice Age
• Make an Informed Decision - An Overview of Each 2008 Presidential Candidate's Record and Plan to address Global Warming and Energy Reform
• Help Stop Global Warming Small changes, big impact. Learn the small changes you can make today to help stop global warming.
• A Recycling Revolution Recycling doesn't have to be just another household chore. We can use it as an opportunity to connect with our family, raise funds for our churches and schools, and educate our students.

Perspectives

What's your perspective?

As a way of starting a deeper conversation around Environmental protection, please post your "Perspective" below. This will give us a clear structure for looking at all the diverse and interesting perspectives we all hold. Each Perspective may be formatted as follows:

"I am _______, and I believe _______."

What counts is what we believe. I am may be used to put your statement in context.

Remember to "sign" your comment with four tildes (~~~~)

• I am professor Israel from jerusalem high school student, and I think the solution to our problems is to reduce the number of cockroaches -- both the six and two legged varieties -- on the planet, thereby limiting our natural resource consumption. HS Student

• I am Harold chua and I know from history's examples that the right thing to do is not democratically popular. We must save our environment not just from global warming but from pollution and overuse. We are extinguishing animal, insect and plant species daily. We are leaving less than 10% natural land for nature's order. The main threat to our environment is the expanding human population. We have too many people, and too many of them are thoughtless (generally correlated with low intelligence). Thus the only way to save our environment is vigorous eugenics and an end to third-world aid. Nazi 19:19, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

• I am Engineer Marc joseph Mapalad and I believe that if we do not make the Fight to reduce Global Warming our most important Priority we would be left with anything to live for .

• I am Alvin Dela Cruz the executive officer of a socially conscious venture capital firm and I believe we need to invest in a wide variety of sustainable technologies for meeting the needs of a civilized society.

• I am a college student and I believe we need to invest more in public transportation, rather than relying on automobiles to get us around.

• I am an attorney in Chicago, and I have reluctantly come to the belief that we should raise the tax on gasoline to ensure that it stays over $3 per gallon, and use the funds for public transit. This would increase the relative competitiveness of alternative sources of energy. I do not believe that the government ought to pick winners and losers among those alternatives -- solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, natural gas, and even coal each have a role to play in achieving cleaner air and energy independence.

• I am a college student in California, and I believe that we should address the problems of over-harvesting natural resources, providing alternative fuel sources and the changing environment rather than argue about whether global warming exists.

• I am a university student in Germany and I think, that anybody who pollutes the environment should have to pay for the damage. If someone blows a ton of carbon dioxyde into the air, he should pay exactly the amount of money that it costs to remove a ton of co2 from the atmosphere. In this way, it is just economic reason to protect the environment. As long as it is cheaper to burden others with your own dirt, nobody will have a real interest in saving the environment.

• I am a college student in Maryland, and I believe that the mayors of all the major U.S. cities should work with car sharing programs such as zipcar and flexcar to reduce the number of cars on the road, and invest in other forms of public transportation.

• I am a college student in Rhode Island, and I beleive that we need to invest in the development of alternative strategies and technologies to oil/gasoline powered cars, power stations, etc.

• I am a software engineer in Los Angeles. Rather than wait 10 years for subways that will never be built, I'd like to see more public space devoted to bike lanes, more park-n-rides, and some creative thinking to get more people out of their cars and onto mass transit. Monorails anyone?

• I am a freshly-graduated digital designer and I think we need to make agressive campaigns to change, one at a time, the basic/simple parts of American lifestyles in a sustainable direction. We need to change America from the roots up and go one small root at a time.

• I am a research scientist and I believe more of the government's research budget should be invested in photovoltaics research to try and solve the energy crisis.

• I am an electrical engineer, and I believe we must look for investors not already in the energy business if we want to find necessary capital to solve our energy problems. The current energy power elite have no natural reason to change the status quo, and every reason not to change.

• I am a producer in Portland, OR. I am concerned about the environmental and local effects of the biodiesel craze. Big GM farms, lots of petro-fertilizer and contaminating run-off, loss of topsoil, erosion, short-sighted deforestation or the altering of natural environs in developing countries and the continued use of the internal combustion engine. I think we need to re-tool our crumbling infrastructure in a more sober, less big business/Washington elite sort of way.

• I am a software engineer and I believe that overreacting to global warming is just as dangerous as underreacting. The people who will be most affected by any sort of climate change, anthropogenic or not, are the poor. Any policy that does not increase the wealth of the poor, or worse reduces it, will ultimately not help anyone except the few special interest groups who benefit from whatever technology the government forces on us to combat global warming.

• I am a college student and I believe ethanol will not save us from the oil crisis. First, ethanol relies on coal for its production. Second, as Shell came out and said today, we use food to make it. When other nations are facing famine and hunger, is this moral?

• I am a collage student and I believe that industrial nations risk underestimating the extent and damage of global warming, humanity faces many challenges in the near future, water shortages & exhausting fisheries for example – not just an oil shortage, there is no chance of "underreacting."

• I'm a student from Oklahoma and I believe that, in large part, environmental activism is a scare tactic used by politicians to try to swing votes. This has become increasingly obvious to me mostly due to the branding of those that are doing the most to try to protect the environment (for instance, loggers who plant many more trees than they cut down) as being its enemy. In addition, I am becoming increasingly frustrated by the sky-is-falling mantra promoted by both politicians and the media no matter what we do. The clean air program worked (supported by all sorts of 'evil companies'), and last I heard they were whining that the air was so clean it was causing global warming. Compaqdrew 20:19, 13 July 2006 (UTC)

• I am an old printing company exec and now an academic. I believe that politicians on the "right" or "left" naturally use whatever they can to get elected. It's only their job. You can't really blame them, as "energizing the base" is the tried and true method of getting elected. But fixing real problems are merely a happy accidental by product of their activity. The good news is that real solutions are being improvised on the ground all over the world. Brazil is energy independent. Some folks are starting to make some real money from wind farms. The job now is to encourage practical solutions, go from improvisation to scalable innovation as fast as possible. Global civil society and innovative businesses will point the way to appropriate solutions that can be delivered in sustainable ways to the people living in very different situations.

• I am an old software engineering war horse, when I was in school we used punch cards, and my first "Personal computer" was an Apple ][.

I am also a BSA Assistant Scout Master, and always vote for the candidate that will "Promise" or at least show that he/she will at least sustain the environment we have. If I can find a candidate that will actually advocate improving this environment then I actually campaign for that candidate. However I am a registered Republican, and also continually advocate the economic atitutde that no one is owed a living. I was a proponent of workfare until the bureaucrats turned the program into a living nightmare where the individuals were trained in jobs that could not even support themselves above the welfare line.

My current crusade is limiting to the point of non-existance off shore oil wells, unless the oil companies can be made to/ forced to pay for any and all environmental problems or situations. Preferably through contract without any if ands or buts.

(Insert your perspective here)