USA, THE ULTIMATE NIMBY NATION

THIS MORNING'S SUNRISE

CHEQUAMEGON ROAD AT DUSK

Wednesday, 9:00 AM,  7 degrees F, wind SSE, light.  The sky has a high overcast.  The humidity is 82% and the barometer is steady, at 29.86".  We had a fantastic sunrise, and it isn't snowing at present.
   Most folks will pay it little attention, even if they hear about it; the last American primary lead smelter, The Doe Run Company, of Herculaneum, Missouri, which has been in operation since 1892, is being shut down by the EPA, with the loss of 250 good jobs.  One of its products over the years has been lead for ammunition, which has led (no pun intended) some conspiracy theorists to see its demise as part of a plot to do away with lead bullets  That is evidently not the entire case, as most lead for bullets is obtained from recycling.
   There are numerous other industrial uses for newly mined and primary smelted lead, however, and that demand will henceforth be met by virgin lead mined and smelted in other countries (think China, Russia and other places where the EPA has no influence and where there will be few if any environmental or human health safeguards built into the process).
   Once again the USA is proving itself to by an international NIMBY(Not In My Back Yard), and the consequences will be that pollution, which  is better regulated and abated in our own country than anywhere else in the world, will be caused to be far worse somewhere else, thus actually increasing planetary pollution, and ensuring that sickness and death will be the lot of many people far less fortunate than ourselves.
   And, since justice is ultimately meted out to every one sooner or later, we will be the recipients, at some point, of the pollution from those very same plants as it is wafted to us on the prevailing west winds.
   We are outsourcing geniuses.  We have become for the most part an effete people, not willing to soil our hands or our environs, leaving such unsavory tasks to seemingly lesser mortals and their benighted countries. We have outsourced most of our manufacturing jobs, our engineering and our technology; we are racing to kill the coal industry, and the mining of iron, zinc, copper and other essential metals; now we are outsourcing even our pollution.  We are the ultimate NIMBY nation.