Political Correctness imposes high costs on society, not only in preventing the honest discussion of important questions, but in preventing reasonable cost/benefit analyses from being made.
Everyone is bemoaning the high coat of energy, primarily gasoline (but just wait for the home heating season to start!) A significant part of the shortage has to do with limited refining capacity, which is why the Hurricanes in the gulf have been so effective at squeezing energy supplies. Building new refineries is close to impossible in the current climate, but the refineries apparently have done an excellent job of increasing their capacity over the last 30 years. Unfortunately, the EPA has rules in place that may make it impossible, or at least much more costly, for further expansion to take place. Steven Milloy reported last Thursday on this:
In 1997, the EPA made air quality standards across the country more stringent.
No one has a quarrel with clean air, but it is not unreasonable to question how clean, at what cost, and what standards we should use to measure the cleanliness of our air.
Although the EPA’s 1997 rules have not yet been fully implemented, states are already being held hostage by them. States where air quality standards fail to meet (or “attain” in air pollution lingo) EPA air quality standards can be penalized through loss of federal highway funds — a coveted source of revenue to states.
But the EPA stands ready to penalize the states before the 1997 rules have had the chance to have an impact on air quality. In the language of the National Petroleum Council report, “As currently structured, [air quality] attainment deadlines precede the benefits that will be achieved from emissions reductions already planned.”
The effect of enforcing the EPA rules before they’ve had a chance to have an effect on air quality will be to force states to take action that will discourage refinery expansion.
States may require refineries to implement more costly emissions controls that further reduce the economic attractiveness of refinery expansion or reduce the viability and profitability of existing domestic refining. Less domestic refining means greater reliance on imported gasoline, which can be more expensive and more difficult to obtain.
So the EPA is threatening state's highway funds (the lifeblood of politicians) of any state that fails to implement new rules that will not affect air quality until some time in the indefinite future. The fact that the increasing market driven reliance on better and better hybrid cars will almost certainly do more to decrease air pollution than any future rules of the EPA is never considered in such situations. Bureaucracies exist to make rules and when their "goodness" is unquestioned, their rules can never be questioned. Under the heading of "better safe than to lose highway funds and be really sorry" the states will, naturally, enforce more and more stringent rules on potential polluters, which will, of necessity, increase the cost of expanding refinery capacity (and probably will increase energy costs in other areas as well.)
What does this have to do with PC, you might wonder?
Since PC is, at its roots, a Utopian ideology, critiques of a "perfect goal" (pristine air, in this case) are seen as evil attempts at harming the victims PC is meant to protect. A politician who stands up to question the EPA attempts to mandate such pristine air will be savaged by the environmentalists, the media and the opposition for harming the American people at the behest of the "corporations." The argument that we need to balance people's ability to get to work, and have the jobs they need, versus the increasing cost of clearing the last traces of impurities out of the air is too complex for the simple minded media, et al, to convey to the American people who they see as too stupid to recognize what is in their best interests.
The PC need to split the world into pure evil and pure virtue thus interferes with our ability to discuss the issue and ultimately costs us all a lot of money for a questionable gain.
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