Just wondering out loud here, how many of you people old enough to remember back to say 1965 when Chet & David would report on a river ran through Cincinnati, Ohio being on fire again or a story about a coal mine fire under a river in Pennsylvania where they were pushing old railroad cars into in hope of plugging up the hole in the river bottom?
I dang forsure am, old enough to remember Federal trucks that belched black smoke so thick you spaced yourself a quarter mile back from it so the smoke didn't make you puke. I even made a living before the OSHA, or EPA came along.
I tell you one and all that things have got a whole lot cleaner, both air and water, and places of work have got much safer too, and both them are good things. Problem is in my mind most people doing a lot of jumping up and down about clean got no memory of what dirty was. I drove plenty of heavy trucks over the years, did my best to not make smoke showing off, and I'll tell you straight up the trucks being made in 2013 have gone past insane with the pollution stuff. Something just flat ridiculous when a truck that is 99% smoke free has to carry along a box the size of my new icebox to make that truck 99,1% smoke free, and that there contraption burns more fuel to regenerate itself. Talked to a fellow with JB Hunt, pretty big fleet there, and he tells me they need to own 1.3 trucks just to keep moving what one truck should, because of all the breakdowns.
NO, I ain't in favor of going back to 1960, but lets at least look at where we were, where we were in 2000, and where we are today before the dang fool government kids get to writing any more regulations on things they got no idea about beyond what some professor told them. Guarantee you that professor never operated a Diesel unless it was in a fancy lab, and he sure never shifted 18 gears.
There's a whole lot of jobs of work leaving the United States because of regulations that don't accomplish spit.
