In July, 1968 I was driving north over the Raritan River on the Garden State Parkway when I decided that my work toward a degree in Chemical Engineering could be best utilized in doing something to clean up our environment. At the time, the Raritan River was a literal sewer and the air above it was choking me so badly I was forced to roll the windows up—a real sacrifice in the middle of a New Jersey summer.

Since that time I have spent nearly forty years researching, designing, installing, operating and selling air emission control systems for industrial operations—many of them very much like the polluting factories that so impressed me on that hot summer afternoon. The four decades that have passed since then have been very rewarding because I have been able to make a good living and do something real to help improve the environment. This time has also given me the opportunity to watch the growth of the environmental movement from its nascent days to the megatrend of the 21st century.

Progress So Far
Since Earth Day, April 1970 and the subsequent passage of the Clean Air Act mandating the Federal Government’s supervision of environmental regulation through the EPA, the environment has improved dramatically. The emission and ambient concentrations of virtually every regulated and recognized pollutant has been reduced to the point that the word pollution simply does not mean what it once did. Gone are the days of choking, eye-watering smog with direct, debilitating health effects. Also gone are the days of polluted rivers and lakes; the Cuyahoga river does not burn, striped bass are routinely caught in New York harbor, Lake Washington is now safe to swim in, and so on. Yes, there are new concerns about lower level toxins in the environment but from this engineer’s point of view we should all take a step back and a deep breath and recognize the very tangible and beneficial progress that has been made so far.

Who Runs The Show
I continued to be dismayed that lawyers and politicians lead the environmental movement. I was stunned when President Nixon appointed William Ruckelshaus, a lawyer, as the first EPA administrator. I thought it was a foregone conclusion that an engineer or a scientist would be put in charge of what is, by and large, a technical realm. I suppose the legal/political flavor of our environmental efforts was inevitable, but I still wish there was more hard science and less regulatory minutia in our drive to create a sustainable biosphere. (No offense is directed to Mr. Ruckelshaus who did an excellent job in his two tenures as the EPA administrator and continues to be a constructive force in the environmental world.)
My fear is that the EPA and the various state and local agencies will become more and more like the IRS, dropping the legal hammer down hard on so many businesses and individuals and causing unjustified damage to some.

The Next Four Decades
What will have transpired by the year 2047? First, in the developed world, vestiges of the pollution of the 1950s and 60s will be a thing of the past. Sooner or later people will realize that the benefit of collecting that last molecule of pollutant X is simply not worth the cost. This will make the decision to resist further costly controls easy.
Second, even though there is plenty of controversy over whether the present warming trend is caused by human activity, CO2 emissions will be curbed and we will begin to see a reduction in the rise rate of ambient CO2 or maybe even a decrease. The reason for this is obvious: regardless of your opinion no one can argue that pumping 70 million tons of greenhouse gas into the troposphere every day is good and as long as there are reasonable and economical ways to stop burning so much fossil fuel, then why continue to do it?

As it turns out there really are reasonable and economical ways to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels; e.g. nuclear, biomass, wind, tides and solar power will all work. All we need to do is realize that it’s all about economics and given the right incentives, these sources of power for civilization will be widely employed.

Steven A. Jaasund is a registered professional engineer and manager of the Geoenergy
Division of A. H. Lundberg Associates, Inc. in Bellevue, WA, a supplier of air emission control and energy recovery equipment.