What if...?

Our Air Would Never be this Clean Without the Government

Imagine an alternate American history, one in which the Clean Air & Water Acts were never passed -- despite industry pumping such massive amounts of pollution into our skies, lakes, and rivers that one of those rivers eventually caught on fire. What happens next, after 1970? According to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank and prominent idea-generator for the GOP, those polluting industries begin cleaning up their acts on their own accord, because it's the right thing to do. The nation gets cleaner and cleaner, thanks to technological improvements and good ol' American innovation. There's really no need for the Clean Air Act, Heritage argues in a recent paper, and there never was -- polluting emissions were already declining before it was passed, driven by improving technology, which would have continued to this very day. That's a nice, patriotic vision of a world driven by free enterprise, right?


It sure is -- and if it weren't for lousy government regulations getting in the way, we'd have probably invented coal plants that only emit rainbows by now, too. Except that the vision put forward by the Heritage Foundation is very, very wrong -- both conceptually and factually.

Heritage Foundation a think-tank? With reports like this? Creating new technologies to clean the air would cost money. Do we really believe that industry would do that because it was the "right thing" even though it would cost them bucks?  Crazy Train - all aboard!!!