Air Pollution Policy and Controversy Rachel Carson boldly warned the American people in 1962 that if the United States continued its agricultural and industrial practices, songbirds would cease to exist. Losing an important part of the ecological food chain would have repercussions, possibly worse than we could imagine. While literature like Silent Spring helped bring attention to environmental concerns in the mid to late 1900s, several fatal disasters struck a stronger chord. Smog in Pennsylvania and the fire-lit Cuyahoga, for example, illustrated just how dearly the environment needed policy reform. However, these incidents didn’t build up over night: Air pollution damages the earth’s ecology, human’s health and economy every day. The
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The government already has the power to tax companies through the constitutional interstate commerce clause, so a push to tax these industries harder to clean the environment might not require such wholesale changes. Taxing industries creates incentives to find cleaner energies, like the cap-and-trade system. Instead, more focus should be placed on the energies that do not have so many negative externalities. States like Florida that outlaw solar energy leasing should change their policies in order to drastically decrease their pollution output from factories and homes (Dickinson). According to National Geographic, the sun beams enough energy each hour to satisfy global energy needs for an entire year. However, solar energy produces less than one-tenth of one percent of global energy demand. Congress needs to prevent states from allowing a ban on solar leasing. Air pollution travels more easily than water and solid waste pollution, meaning the policies on air pollution need to be uniform throughout the nation. Scientists continue to find evidence to the world’s decimation from human’s carbon footprints due to coal and gas energy. If the United States continues its current energy policies, humans will not die from the sun’s explosion in five billion years: we will perish far earlier from lack of clean
The government already has the power to tax companies through the constitutional interstate commerce clause, so a push to tax these industries harder to clean the environment might not require such wholesale changes. Taxing industries creates incentives to find cleaner energies, like the cap-and-trade system. Instead, more focus should be placed on the energies that do not have so many negative externalities. States like Florida that outlaw solar energy leasing should change their policies in order to drastically decrease their pollution output from factories and homes (Dickinson). According to National Geographic, the sun beams enough energy each hour to satisfy global energy needs for an entire year. However, solar energy produces less than one-tenth of one percent of global energy demand. Congress needs to prevent states from allowing a ban on solar leasing. Air pollution travels more easily than water and solid waste pollution, meaning the policies on air pollution need to be uniform throughout the nation. Scientists continue to find evidence to the world’s decimation from human’s carbon footprints due to coal and gas energy. If the United States continues its current energy policies, humans will not die from the sun’s explosion in five billion years: we will perish far earlier from lack of clean