LarrySpencer said:
While I respect and even agree with many of your opinions, I believe that you have taken me out of context at times. Yes, I have no proof on the numbers, and in fact am realizing that there aren't many numbers and was incorrect. However, you have missed the boat on many occassions, and this has happened from our first discussions when I wais not to just on the overreactionist's bandwagon and you accused me of calling you an overreactionist.
Actually, Larry, it was not unreasonable to assume you were aiming the charge at me, since it came in a post (#15) responding directly to me:
Asthma, I'm terribly sorry about your child being afflicted with this awful disease, but let's not jump to conclusions about the causes.
So, although your child suffers from this, don't go jumping on the environmental over reactionists bandwagon just yet.
Re-read the entire post. If you were addressing the post to anyone else, it was not apparent to me or anyone else.
2. I find it amusing that someone so intent on picking apart each of my words has substituted my words from "much", to his own "most" and "predominately," when I never once used these words. As well as east coast. I said the same who supply the east coast, meaning Texas.
You know, Larry, it really doesn't matter much whether it was Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado or the East Coast -- the point is, you claimed a fact that was not a fact, tried to use it as a lynchpin of your response.
Yes, let's talk about the Dominican Republic.
Much of the gasoline in the Dominican Republic is imported from the United States, from the same refineries that provide gasoline for much of the east coast of the US, so comparing the two fuels in not a far stretch.
I don't know if you were repeating what you read/heard/were told somewhere else, or simply made it up. But you presented it to us as fact, and damaged your credibility by doing so. Your efforts to justify it rather than admit the mistake before now did not help your credibility either, frankly.
3. Yes, it is true that I am not well as well versed on the Dominican Republic as you, and therefore I only have the models I have seen on which to base my opinions. If you go back and read my post carefully, you will see that I never once compared California to the Dominican Republic, yet only used the model to convey and idea.
I am by no means the grand authority on the DR (that's Hillbilly's job as Grand Vizier. :cheeky: LOL). I am still learning new stuff about it every day, and feel that will probably be true until I die 40 or more years from now. But by now I have learned quite a bit, especially about the peril of applying First World models and assumptions to Dominican realities -- something I, like probably most of us here at DR1, have been guilty of at one time or another. Stick around the DR and DR1, you'll learn this more and more as well.
Ideas. That's what the Dominican Republic needs because they obviously haven't come up many on their own...and if they end up coming from the US and even from California, so be it.
Well in point of fact, yes the Dominicans have come up with ideas, but many of their ideas so far on air and water pollution and waste management have not been practical/workable. So I agree. They need all the ideas we can share, and not just from the US. I like to discuss with them concepts that are being tried, with some success, in other Latin American and/or Caribbean nations. They tend to relate to them better, are more willing to listen to such ideas, and realize that the conditions in question are analogous enough that the concepts just might be do-able in the DR too....
So be careful and choosy about which ideas we promote. Frankly, some ideas from California aren't applied even in the rest of North America -- how can you expect them to apply in the DR? Example: California has a complex Rigid Plastic Container Law that some Californians think is great, but only one other US state has a RPPC law -- Oregon -- and it is far simpler. Most other states would not touch the Californian model, think it's too unweldy.
Another, non-Californian example to illustrate the point about caution in promoting First World models in countries such as the DR: the Germans have been going around Latin America for years promoting their waste recovery and packaging waste law model as the be-all and end-all that everyone should emulate. But everyone has learned that only the Austrians have imitated it, that it does not work even in Germany, it is costly, most Europeans won't touch it, so why should Latin Americans emulate it?
I believe the first place to start is through education. Public schools must have some mandate for studies on Natural Resources and their conservation and protection.
Well, actually the Environment Law of 2000 has such a mandate already.
CAPÍTULO VII DE LA EDUCACIÓN Y DIVULGACIÓN AMBIENTALES
Art. 56.- La Secretaría de Estado de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales, en coordinación con la Secretaría de Estado de Educación, llevará a cabo programas de educación ambiental –formal y no formal- con la participación de instituciones públicas y privadas que realizan actividades educativas.
Art. 57.- La Secretaría de Estado de Educación incorporará como eje transversal, la educación ambiental con enfoque interdisciplinario y carácter obligatorio en los planes y programas de todos los grados, niveles, ciclos y modalidades de enseñanza del sistema educativo, así como de los institutos técnicos, de formación, capacitación, y actualización docente, de acuerdo con la política establecida por el Estado para el sector.
Art. 58.- El Consejo Nacional de Educación Superior, en coordinación con la Secretaría de Estado de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales, garantizará la incorporación de la dimensión ambiental en los planes de estudios de pre y postgrado, curriculares y extracurriculares, dirigidos a la formación y el perfeccionamiento de los profesionales de todas las ramas, en la perspectiva de contribuir al uso sostenible de los recursos naturales y la protección y mejoramiento del medio ambiente.
During my last visit to SD in August, I was told by more than one Administration official that the Fernandez government, unlike that of his predecessor, takes this mandate seriously and is working on implementing it. I'm a bit skeptical, I am sad to say. This Administration's record so far on education does not inspire great confidence on this front.
The laws that are in affect now must be enforced. I say "the laws that are in affect now" because there is no reason to establish new laws. They didn't enforce the old ones, so why would they enforce the new?
Agreed. There is a little bit of hope on this front. I met twice with the chief of the Environment Police when in SD in August, and I was favorably impressed. If this man and his team are allowed to do their job the way he wants to, there is some hope for real enforcement. It will have to build slowly, because they are still ramping up their human resources. But he has a good strategy and something I do not see often enough in the eyes of Dominican officials: real determination to make a difference. I will be writing more on this subject on the soon-to-come Environment Blog we will be launching along with DR1.
I also take some hope by the fact that the Environment Police and Environment Prosecutor recently decided to take on a Senator and won:
http://www.ceiba.gov.do/2004/noticias/esp/oct-2005/14-oct-05.html
How often do you read a story like that in the DR? Not often enough, I think. I hope this is not the last one of this nature we see from the Environment Police.
Gross polluters must be taken off the roads and either be repaired or destroyed. What kind of inspections are there at this point for vehicles when they are registered, and for how long does this registration last?
I'll have to double-check, but I believe that the DR still only does safety inspections, not emissions. Knowing Dominican realities, I think any emissions inspection regime for the DR would have to be designed very, very carefully. For example, if you are going to do tailpipe readings in the traditional manner, you at the very least must have a system which electronically does not allow the test to proceed until the measuring wand is placed properly, and does not in any way allow the tester to change the result read-out, and probably have to have the result read-out automatically sent electronically to the office issuing the registration or sticker based on the results, so that anyone coming in with a faked readout sheet
could (notice I didn't say
would) get caught.
My guess is that in order to make the inspection system really stick you would have to have someone doing spot checks on streets and roads, empowered to give out tickets and revoke the emissions sticker then and there. But I don't foresee this in the DR anytime soon.
Better, cleaner mixtures of fuel must be created and distributed. Not just distributed, but at a reasonable cost to the consumer, meaning that the government must be willing to take a smaller cut.
Would be nice. But who is going to pay to refit Refindomsa to do it? I'm not trying to be sarcastic. It's a legit question at a time when the DR says that it does not have its own money to make such capital investments. I guess alternatively the DR could bite the bullet and allow
imports of cleaner refined fuel, perhaps with a tariff and (hydrocarbons) tax break, but then they'd be undercutting Refindomsa's partial monopoly and robbing their treasury of quite a few funds, so I doubt they'll do this either. Or maybe they should really bite the bullet and let Refindomsa become majority owned by private interests (maybe with the DR Govt retaining a "golden share" such as the UK Govt has in British Air and other firms?) with ironclad contractual obligations on their part to produce cleaner fuels in line with Environment Ministry dictates and that the government will actually enforce the new consumer law's provisions on price gouging.... Just musing here, I have no clear answers either...
And Keith, I feel for you and your daughter having to live with asthma. I know that can't be easy to live with.
Well, thanks for the sentiment, but I am not full or acute asthmatic (doc likes to call it bronchial asthmastic), nor is my daughter, thank God. And unlike me, she has not had a serious episode since we moved back to Virginia. Why? Well, near as we can tell, her triggers are linked to air quality, and I am not talking pollen or simple dust (or Nals' sand! LOL) -- I mean smog! A correlation between her pulminary troubles in SD and ambiente air quality there? Again, I can't prove it, but I have my strong suspicions.
And I know I am not alone in that -- some Dominican doctors and public health officials I have spoken to are worried there is one as well. But until good, proper, current diagnostics are done, no one -- not you, me, Porfirio,etc. -- can say with any true certainly what the air quality actually is and over what time sequence, what are the biggest contributors in order of rank, and what correlations there are to epidemological trends (the data for which is also quite spare in the DR).
So yeah, in that sense, we should not jump to conclusions. But as my dad the MD used to say, if his clinical observation and experience and instincts are telling him loudly that there is a link between a health condition and certain factors, but medical science has yet to prove it conclusively, it was still his duty to voice his concerns and suspicions to the patient. My eyes, nose, lungs, and 25 years of dealing with environment & health issues suggest to me that SD has a more serious air pollution problem than officials care to admit, that vehicle emissions are more a contributing factor than officials care to admit, and that health impacts are rising.
This needs to be
properly and scientifically diagnosed, and policies designed
on the basis of the findings, not our suppositions/biases or those of Dominican government officials.
Although there are some shortcomings I see with the preliminary study that produced these figures, and the data are several years old (2000), the charts attached below from the Environment Ministry's environmental diagnostic published in December 2002 may be of interest and help ground this thread in something closer to reality.
Regards,
Keith
