We pay for power plant pollution through higher health costs.
The U.S. limits mercury, arsenic, and soot from power plants. Yet, astonishingly, there are no national limits on how much carbon pollution these plants can dump into our atmosphere.
Seriously, American pop culture must be the most predominant force on the planet, next to pollution and poverty.
Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution.
There is a societal cost of increased pollution, and that's what I'm passionate about as a mother.
Seen that way, the wholesale transformation of production technologies that is mandated by pollution prevention creates a new surge of economic development.
The biggest tab the public picks up for fossil fuels has to do with what economists call 'external costs,' like the health effects of air and water pollution.
I always saw pollution as theft, and I always thought, 'Why should somebody be able to pollute the air, which belongs to all of us, or destroy a river or a waterway, which is supposed to belong to the whole community?'
When I was 7 years old, I announced that I was going to write a book about pollution. I didn't get around to it until I was 29, but I always recognized that pollution was a theft. That it was a way of stealing something from the public - the common earth.
Think about how tangible it would be to the citizens of Washington State to finally have the Hanford nuclear site cleaned up. Think about how tangible it would be to the citizens along the Hudson River to fix that pollution. These are some of the most direct things we can do to benefit our environment.