In my experience in as a former Director of Environmental Affairs, as an Environmental Engineer with NYSDEC, and a Trustee of a PRP group for the Union Chemical Superfund site I find most environmental activists to be totally uncaring, bigoted scientific idiots. In all the state and federal superfund sites I have been involved with where the risk based analyses are 10 to the minus to in NY 10 to the minus 6 of dying from the environmental pollutants on a site continually I hear, oh, my baby, is going to die if there is 5 ppb drop dead doo doo in the water, none of which the brat will drink anyway, but not once did I ever hear ANY concern for the workers who spent often 30 years working at the site with drop dead doo doo.
Since as an engineer I had strong beliefs on recycling and knowing almost every landfill in NY would qualify as a Superfund site when I moved up here there was a group called Orange Environmental who stated 90% of solid waste could be recycled and pushed recycling, so I called them up and asked where I could bring my recyclables.  No clue, I found a recycling location in the City of Newburgh.  When recycling became mandated I recycled and wushed for penalties for those who failed.  A woman up the street refused, saying she never separated her garbage for 60 years and she was not going to start now.  So I called Orange Environmental and stated they should start an action to put her in jail, you would think I has asked them to fornicate with small animals, "Oh, we cannot put grandma in jail."
Orange Environmental and Riverkeeper were at this time railing vs. the trash to cash plant in Peekskill and the Indian Point nuclear energy plant, there was of course no landfill left in Westchester County, they had as proven no clue how much solid waste was produced in Westchester County, directly across the river was an O & R coal burning power plant called Lovett.  Today Indian Point, which produces 2000 MW with no emissions and is 90% reliable is closing, so hut, hut, hut, now they are shifting vs. a fracked gas plant in Orange County which produces reliable power with more emissions than Indian Point, but less than a coal or diesel burning power plant.  Their solution, wind and solar way up on the Canadian border which produced reliable power at most 1/3 of the time.  They are abjectly unaware as engineers know that if you are going to build 100 MW of wind and solar you need to built 100 MW of gas fired so there is reliable power.
None of them ever consider non-technical solutions, such as cogeneration (they have no clue as to what it is), demand power pricing (power plants have little turndown capacity, so they produce power during the early day and night high demand times while producing the same power during low demand sleeping night hours, meters could price higher dependent upon demand) and simply pricing power on a monthly basis progressively for-- those who keep their air conditioning on for their -right now almost all power is price in the opposite direction, the more you use, the less your last kilowatt costs you.
When I was a trustee myself and EPA Region 1 Superfund employees used to joke that for $40MMM a year we saved 28 lives, while in my county that many likely died each year from radon since most of the county is on the Reading Prong. 

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