@realjohnboy,
realjohnboy wrote:
Do you think I made, at least, a decent start on explaining this?
Yes you did. There is a complex relationship between ozone levels and those of nitrous oxides (stuff that produces smog) and sulfur dioxide (stuff that induces acid rain but is also a very potent anti greenhous gas) and their individual effects in the atmosphere. For example, the smog threshold associated with nitrous oxides is itself variable with ozone concentrations. For this reason ozone is a target of many clean air groups interested primarily in smog elimination - the California Air Quality Board prominently among them. In my view and that of most of the enviromnental risk scientists who work for me there is no real case for reducing ozone concventrations to the 60ppb threshold involved and doing so would cut off a needed source for the stratospheric ozone we depend on to avoid order of magnitude increases in skin cancer and other UV related diseases. In addition the relatively small reduction in the allowed concentration involved in going to the so called 2008 standard will have a very large effect on electrical power generators in large areas of the country.
Nearly all of our environmental laws explicitly exclude the social and economic welfare of human beings from the formalisms associated with their bureaucratic decision-making. Despite that, Presidents and agency administrators have routinely set arbitrary limits on regulation with economic and related issues obviously in mind - and most have had the moral courage to say so explicitly.
The problem is that it is nearly impossible to prove conclusively that very low doses and exposure to reactive chemicals and radioilogical irritants have no or limited adverse effect, even though there is no statistically detectable or measurable incidence of disease associated with the exposure. This is why, for example, "scientific" studies of the incidence of cancer over the past several decades resulting from Chernobyl vary from less than a thousand to as high as 12,000 (for the latter to be accepted however, the reader would have to assume that all other cause factors for the cancers in question in the Ukrane/Belarus region suddenly and completely stopped operating - very implausible. Indeed the historical data yields no statistically significant increase in the incidence of cancer there during the period.
Many self styled environmentalists would like to see us return to the bucolic world of 1830, but with moden medicine, prosperity, etc. Given that there were only a billion people on earth in 1830 and about 6 billion today, that simply isn't possible unless large numbers of people elect to die (however perhaps their intent is for only progressives to survive). All the green propaganda notwithstanding, we cannot support our current population without fossil fuels or an economic replacement for them. Yesterday the last remaining corporate recipient of guaranteed loans for the production of the new green power (solar in this case) Obama jobs revolution, filed for bankrupcy, taking a $550 million guaranteed federal loan with it - so the prospects aren't good.
It is very sad that the first casualty in all of these debates is any prospect of creating intelligent and workable syntheses among the competing single issue absolutists now populating our political scene. That of course requires moral courage and leadership - qualities in very short supply among contemporary politicians, and given the President's ruse about seeking "greater scientific" insight about the matter, entirely absent from the White House. I also believe this strident absolutism and lack of intelligent synthesis is a significant contributor to the evident reluctance of corporations to invest their cash in any new economic ventures here today.
