Hi – welcome to my blog! I’m not going to properly introduce myself because of the political implications of some of what I have to say, and because some of my work history that I will share in other parts of this blog includes sensitive information. I do not intend to share anything that I don’t have a legal right to share, but it’s important to me that I minimize my family’s exposure to the blowback that could arise from sharing what I know. I consider the trust of anyone who takes the time to read what I have written to be sacred, and I will attempt to be forthright and honest with everything I say. I have made many mistakes in my life, and will surely make many more, but I hope that readers will engage with me if they see anything that looks wrong or misleading. With that said, let me tell you a little about myself and my background, so that you can see where I’m coming from in approaching the topics covered in this blog…
I was raised by two politically conservative parents from the Midwest to be a moral, Christian person, and to always do what was my “highest sense of right.” My mother was a teacher and pushed my siblings and me to study hard and get ahead in school. I grew up in a house with very few financial resources, and my dad taught us to have a work ethic that would allow us to outcompete most people through hard work. He chose jobs that were not very lucrative, mostly because he was repulsed by the amount of deception in the jobs that he had which paid well.
I grew up spending a lot of time outdoors, because my dad pushed me to become an Eagle Scout. As a result, I went off to college interested in Environmental Science. My uncle pushed me to pursue Environmental Engineering, instead, because he saw my aptitude for math and thought it would be a more profitable career path. I have been grateful to him for that advice ever since leaving college and noticing the difference in career opportunities.
After college, I began working as a consulting engineer for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). At first, I focused on helping EPA study industries and assess the need for new regulations. I also worked for the Department of Defense, helping them understand how to comply with complex environmental regulations for groundwater monitoring and other specialized subjects at their test ranges and waste disposal facilities. About two years into my consulting career, I became a contractor inspector for EPA with a federal inspector’s badge. I spent more than a decade traveling the country, inspecting all different kinds of industrial and waste disposal facilities. I served as an expert witness for EPA’s enforcement cases and for third-party mediation of technically complex environmental issues. I really loved doing that work, but the travel was hard on my wife and children, and the stress of dealing with attorneys in high-profile cases wore on me. My favorite thing about that phase of my career was constantly learning new things about industrial processes, from treating lumber to refining crude oil. I worked very hard at that job and used my free time to build a home with help from my family and friends.
Soon after finishing my house, I decided to use the financial freedom I had gained from all the hard work to take a couple of years off from full-time work, to spend more time with my kids and focus on volunteering and personal projects. After my kids got a little older, I started my own consulting company which eventually led to me working directly as an environmental engineer for a large electric car manufacturer. That work was both fun and difficult, and once that opportunity came to an end I decided to start writing about my experience. My goal was to help elucidate some of what I saw as the poorly understood parts about the intersection between environmental policy and industrial manufacturing. I started writing partially to better understand what I thought about these abstract and important subjects, and because I became increasingly aware of some problems that I saw with modern environmentalism. I want to help people better understand the tiny piece of the universe that I feel uniquely qualified to speak about.
Any frank discussion about these topics eventually leads to controversial political implications. While helping coach my son’s little league baseball team with two men near retirement age, one of them found out about my vocation and said, “that gets pretty political, yeah?” I can’t say it any better than he did. The truth is, I would like to make this blog as apolitical as possible. But almost anything I can tell you about my profession will be colored with some inherent political bias.
With that in mind, I want to be honest with you about my general political views. My parents indoctrinated me, as all parents inevitably do, with a certain degree of their own political views. But as I got older and went to college, I drifted a little too hard to the left. I am ashamed now to admit I even bought a Che Guevara tee shirt on a vacation to Costa Rica.
Making money working for a consulting firm soon disabused me of many of my previous political illusions. I no longer think Che Guevara was the type of guy that I want to celebrate. My views now can be roughly described as what most people today call libertarian, at least with respect to U.S. foreign policy and the domestic policies that affect small businesses. That’s based on reading voraciously about U.S. history and a wide variety of subjects (mostly through audiobooks while working with my hands), as well as my brother’s difficult experiences as a U.S. Marine serving in Afghanistan and the Middle East. I am lucky to be married to a wonderful and patient woman who grew up in Europe with more left-leaning political beliefs. Every day she helps me develop by constantly calling me on my blind spots and pointing out the ugly side of some of my poorly thought-out political beliefs.
Turning now specifically to environmental politics, I believe that the state of environmental regulations in the U.S. is unnecessarily complex and overly burdensome to small business. More importantly, I see the potential to radically improve human health and the environment while reducing the burden on the private sector, but the task of regulatory simplification is a daunting one – one section of this blog called “Cutting the Green Tape” will provide more on this subject. I also think regulations should be more results-based, because modern environmental regulation often shies away from hard-to-regulate substantive issues and focuses on things that are easy to regulate. This results in companies incurring many paperwork-type violations without having significant environmental impacts, and other companies being able to significantly impact the environment while meeting all permit-required reporting requirements. Furthermore, the existence of many hypocrisies in environmental regulations creates a moral hazard that does not serve human health or the environment. For example, the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) under the Clean Water Act, does not actually work toward the goal of eliminating pollutant discharges. But its very existence leads people to believe that our water bodies are protected when they often are not, and private companies that discharge industrial wastewater with NPDES permits can use the permit as a shield when citizens try to sue them for destroying local water quality.
I will leave this discussion of my political views here, because it quickly becomes too abstract to be useful to most readers. I will attempt to elaborate on specific issues in future posts to draw attention to concrete measures that we can take to improve for the future. The main objectives of this effort are to close loopholes and simplify the rules for small businesses without the legal resources to understand how to comply with more than 27,000 pages[1] of federal environmental regulations.
I want to make one final note about my political views on environmental regulations, because I am afraid the foregoing discussion has been too critical of EPA’s efforts. It is unwise to allow educated bureaucrats and technocrats to enact rules about industries when many of them have never made a product for commerce and don’t understand all the daily tasks and obligations that go into making a profitable business. EPA has historically sorted this out by seeking industry input, litigating rulemakings with industry and environmental groups, and providing special exemptions to reduce the regulatory burden where appropriate. This is inherently a messy process, and it’s not for nothing that the rules have become so complicated. The real challenge for me and others like me is to simplify the rules with a scalpel, and not a chainsaw. I’ll end with a quote that has been attributed to Albert Einstein, which was mostly likely a paraphrased version of his actual statement: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
[1] https://blog.stpub.com/u.s.-epa-regulatory-outlook-yesterday-today-and-tomorrow#:~:text=The%20total%20page%20count%20for,for%2090%25%20of%20that%20total.