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It is simply economically impossible to require controls that even approach zero emissions.

Barry Commoner

Environmental quality was drastically improved while economic activity grew by the simple expedient of removing lead from gasoline – which prevented it from entering the environment.
BARRY COMMONER

Entering Environmental Quality Simple
My entry into the environmental arena was through the issue that so dramatically – and destructively – demonstrates the link between science and social action: nuclear weapons.
BARRY COMMONER

Environmental Issues Links
In every case, the environmental hazards were made known only by independent scientists, who were often bitterly opposed by the corporations responsible for the hazards.
BARRY COMMONER

Environmental Hazards Independent
Nothing ever dies, nothing ever goes away.
BARRY COMMONER

Advice Die Information
It reflects a prevailing myth that production technology is no more amenable to human judgment or social interests than the laws of thermodynamics, atomic structure or biological inheritance.
BARRY COMMONER

Inheritance Law Technology
The AEC had at its command an army of highly skilled scientists.
BARRY COMMONER

Army Command Scientist
Science is triumphant with far-ranging success, but its triumph is somehow clouded by growing difficulties in providing for the simple necessities of human life on earth.
BARRY COMMONER

Difficult Growing Simple Triumph
Recycling is a good thing to do. It makes people feel good to do it. The thing I want to emphasize is the vast difference between recycling for the purpose of feeling good and recycling for the purpose of solving the trash problem.
BARRY COMMONER

Differences Feel Good People
What is needed now is a transformation of the major systems of production more profound than even the sweeping post-World War II changes in production technology.
BARRY COMMONER

Profound Technology War
Sooner or later, wittingly or unwittingly, we must pay for every intrusion on the natural environment.
BARRY COMMONER

Environment Natural Pay
Seen that way, the wholesale transformation of production technologies that is mandated by pollution prevention creates a new surge of economic development.
BARRY COMMONER

Development Prevention Technology
World War II had a very important impact on the development of technology, as a whole.
BARRY COMMONER

Impact Technology War
Technologists practice faith too; ‘Faith that problems have solutions before having the knowledge to solve them.’
BARRY COMMONER

Practice Problem Solve
The AEC scientists were so narrowly focused on arming the United States for nuclear war that they failed to perceive facts – even widely known ones – that were outside their limited field of vision.
BARRY COMMONER

Facts Vision War
In general, any productive activity which introduces substances foreign to the natural environment runs a considerable risk of polluting it.
BARRY COMMONER

Environmental Risk Running
Air pollution is not merely a nuisance and a threat to health. It is a reminder that our most celebrated technological achievements-the automobile, the jet plane, the power plant, industry in general, and indeed the modern city itself-are, in the environment, failures.
BARRY COMMONER

Achievement Air Cities

It is simply economically impossible to require controls that even approach zero emissions.

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It is simply economically impossible to require controls that even approach zero emissions.

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