It’s not what you do: it’s who you are – never more so than now. In a country that’s still covering up for their biggest polluters; how far away are we from doing anything about it? If they can’t have the world: no one can.
TDML [Total Daily Maximum Load] sets the maximum amount of pollution bearable without serious consequences; and then tells polluters they should TRY to get below it.
In Tompkins County; one of the biggest polluters was tasked with studying and deciding what that maximum was — immediately following that; the NYSDEC announced the deletion of the Schedule of Compliance, and elimination of the just completed Cayuga Lake Water Quality Model Plan and Outfall Redesign schedules and conditions for that polluter.
If you make evil legal; you can hide your actions behind the law.
My John Deere tractor mower has been stored until next year. After blowing all the trapped grass from the deck mechanism, I made sure the tank was topped up with stabilized gas. This brought to mind a problem I had several years ago.
While I was mowing, the engine would start running rough and then stop. Diagnosing this as due to water in the gas tank [helped in part by the slopping ground and bouncing around] I bought and added a gas treatment; and it worked . . . for a while. Every so many minutes, the engine would conk out and adding more treatment would get it going again for a while. Why?
The answer was simple: the gas cap vent had gotten clogged; and depleting the gas created enough of a vacuum in the tank to hinder the flow of gas to the engine.
Every time I put in the gas treatment, I removed the cap, and it destroyed the vacuum. . . For a while.
If only I had thought of connecting removing the cap with the engine restarting, I would have known.
It was a lesson I never forgot: Even a valid explanation may not be the correct explanation — and a solution that seems to promise success may not have any effect on the problem at all. And that it is easier not to bother to think things through, but just to buy a packaged solution that “experts” have already thought out.
The pollution that is impairing our lake is overwhelmingly from only one source; an unregulated source; Agriculture — and neither our politicians, nor our colleges, nor our environmental agencies and conservation committees want to regulate it, or even mention it.
The Governor’s Task Force has publicly stated that they are only working to keep “some of the uses” of the lake; and have adopted that answer to a polluter’s prayer: the TDML paradigm.
“TDML” stands for the Total Daily Maximum Load of pollution that the lake can handle without complete impairment. Or in the vernacular: You’re not drowning in shit if you can still keep you head above it.
The correct TDML levels will be set by Cornell; one of the bigger polluters, and a whole-hearted partisan supporter of all Industrial Agriculture methods [even those banned in other state due to environmental risks.] Cornell has a very close working relationship with the NYSDEC; so you can be sure their TDML study will max out the max, with more quibbles and offsets than there are Zebra Mussels.
Once the TDML plan is adopted; our lake will never get clean.
What do you think about that “expert” solution?
We could be in deeper shit — the lake bed could collapse from the salt mining. Now how deep is that?