okay uh could you tell me what you think contributes most to uh air pollution
well it's hard to say i mean while it's certainly the case that things like automobiles and factories uh pollute a lot um if you
look at how much pollution is say kicked up by an active volcano uh it's certainly less than clear that anything man can do in this sort of scale of things has much effect at all
what do you think
um well
you talked about uh volcanos i'm not sure how many active volcanos there are now and and what the amount of material that they do
uh put into the atmosphere i think probably the greatest cause is uh
vehicles
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especially around cities um uh do you live right in the city itself
uh no i'm more out in the suburbs but i certainly work near a city
uh okay so can can you notice well it's it's i live in a rural area
how about you
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uh it's mainly farms and uh no heavy industry uh Attleboro itself i live in Rhode Island
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oh i see
and it's in the north i live up in the uh northeast corner and Attleboro sits in just over the line
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where TI's plant is but there isn't a lot of heavy industry there's the freeways and we get an occasional well it depends which way the wind's blowing from Boston because we're only like about forty miles south of Boston so we'll pick up that
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and uh i've noticed
over the past say maybe five or six years uh we live
about twenty miles away from the state airport and i notice the fly patterns now of the jets are they getting bigger they're swinging wider so that now they're coming over the over the our homes
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and it seems like uh um we're catching all their residue i'm not sure if it's kerosene or what that's dropping
but other than that you know we don't have the unless we're catching it from the midwest the emissions yeah from the power plants
yeah
um
don't you mean like from the coal
yeah yeah we generate one of our our biggest electrical plants in Rhode Island uses coal to uh generate electricity um
hm
there doesn't seem to be much emission from them but i'm not sure about the rest of the country
yeah i've noticed locally a major problem is Kodak um it's interesting because in order to uh keep with the EPA standards which which tend to be visible
uh what's coming out of your smokestack they do all their emissions at night uh so people get up
is that right
yeah people get up in the morning in that neighborhood and they've got this black ash on their cars which you know seems to be
yeah yeah yeah yeah surprise surprise
yeah i mean i really think if the EPA had anything on the ball they'd go in there with a few phosphorous grenades light up the sky photograph the emissions at that point and uh
yeah them there must be uh um some of the some of the uh
you know
uh larger plants up around up around one twenty eight um we've got reports that uh during the night too like they blow off their their stacks from uh the
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right
the boilerhouse for powerhouses and they do that at night too because employees been complaining that the cars have been pitted and you know spots all over them
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right
yeah
yeah
so you're right they could do something about about that i guess
yeah that seems a little ridiculous
how are your uh
your lakes and uh
oh they've been getting cleaner
they have
sure but um
yeah i'm not sure how much the water pollution is is directly related to the air pollution other than acid rain yeah
acid rain yeah that's that's what i was uh
i mean the stuff i've read recently in Technology Review basically indicates that acid rain may be a little bit
um overstated that a lot of the die off they've seen in forests may not really be due to acid rain at all um yeah i'm not an expert
yeah no didn't they just have an article oh on uh they were dumping lime up upstate New York somewhere
hm
um over over huge areas and and they thought that was more beneficial because you know and it some of it does soak in and some of it runs off right away into the into the streams and rivers and some of the fish were supposedly making a comeback
i haven't read that
oh yeah
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i can't remember where i i read that recently somewhere and i can't remember where but i thought it was up there so that's interesting because New Hampshire
you know it's interesting
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and parts of Vermont um they showed pictures of of extensive tree damage that they attributed to acid rain um
hm
do you kind of think it's something else then
well that's what the environmentalists were claiming in this article so that
oh they didn't say they didn't say what though they just said they thought it was
they didn't say what they just said they thought acid rain's contribution may be less than was previously suspected um but it may be other natural things at work
um
hm natural disease
yeah so it's it's less than clear like i said i don't remember the article that well
yeah yeah
but um i don't know i mean what do you think we can uh i guess as individuals or as a group do about uh air pollution
uh we can demand uh more efficient automobiles for one thing i still think that's that's uh one of our major causes of pollutants
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uh how we go about that it's uh uh it's a little bit difficult
so you think it's just up to individuals to ask automakers for uh less polluting vehicles
yeah you need you need i think you need a a uh vehicle something like uh
uh Ralph Nader uh Nader's Raiders or uh where uh or uh uh AARP
yeah
which has a lot of members uh if you can get those types of groups
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do you really think new vehicles though is a
big problem i mean i remember reading an article that said like it's the older polluters the the twelve and the fifteen year old cars you know contribute like ninety percent of the automobile pollution and the new cars it's hardly it's hardly anything
yeah
they're better but how about all the trucks and buses that are out there uh when when was the last time you saw a truck that didn't belch
smoke or uh or
yeah but doesn't that just mean they're out of tune
uh
i'm not really sure you think that that the uh the trucking industry uh industry is that uh incompetent that they wouldn't
you know fuel is is one of their biggest costs
right
so you would
but diesel engines
yeah diesel engines
it you know it's it i mean they do generate a lot of soot but that at least you know that kind of particulate comes out of the air pretty quickly
yeah
yeah we could also uh push for legislation for uh rapid transit systems uh this country seems to be a little behind on that
yeah on the other hand most people don't use rapid transit because it's so inconvenient
hm
yeah but only because we got used to uh
single person single car driving a lot of people don't even like to carpool
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but we could do that that'll help
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pollution air pollution
the uh United States and Canada are i guess is is uh it going into uh some types of agreements to limit uh what's being given out by power plants
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i guess Canada's quite concerned that we're sending a lot of our stuff up there
yeah sure
so that's helping
well what do you think about like a device a meter on right on a tailpipe and you paid a tax based on how much you polluted
now that's an idea
don't say that too loud though because uh every city and town will have a meter on your tailpipe generate generate revenue
well it just means that if you don't pollute right or you pollute very little you don't have to pay any tax or you just buy one of these things and it it um i mean you could you could probably devise them so that it slowly closed off your tail pipe
and uh the less you pollute the longer the device lasts and if you pollute a lot then it closed off your tailpipe and you couldn't start your car anymore
that's a that's an interesting concept is that your idea
yeah but uh you know it's uh
i guess the difficulty would be to somebody could obviously just take it right off the tailpipe again so you'd probably have to build it right into the muffler or something
well i was gonna to say right you could put it in you could you could it could be installed like a catalytic converter i mean i guess you could take those off too but
right
you could take catalytic but mufflers would be a little more obvious if you took that off
yeah if you can take a muffler off and only replace well not unless it was built into every muffler
right
and that's
but if you were just talking about something which was more or less universal that uh buses and any kind of vehicle had to pay a pollution tax
um this would penalize the heavy polluters and not penalize the light polluters
that's a that's quite a concept
you should uh pursue that i think or patent it you know
yeah patent it that's a good idea
if you could come up with a device that's the thing
right
but it shouldn't be too hard to do something like that but that's a that's a thought no you're right and that will solve uh a lot of problems i don't know if you uh
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if you approached the automobile industry if they would be too keen on installing something like that
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uh but
you know a proposal to uh uh
i guess the proper authorities well you might uh generate some
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yeah the automobile regulatory agencies or something
yeah you might generate some interest in it but that's a that's a good idea other than that i'm not sure what what individuals can do other than like i said get involved through a group or an organization
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