Breathe in, breathe out.
If you live in the Top of Utah, you may have noticed how difficult that simple exercise has become in recent days.
You may have noticed the nastiest winter inversion I've seen in the 6 ½ years I've lived here.
The Saturday before Christmas, my wife and I were coming home from the Harrisville Wal-Mart, heading north on Washington Boulevard. I looked up, and Ben Lomond wasn't there. Ten thousand feet of mountain wasn't there. All we could see was smog.
We live high enough up on the bench that we usually have a pretty nice view of the valley, all the way from North Ogden to South Ogden. Sunday night, we couldn't see more than one block in any direction.
Breathe in, breathe out?
It occurs to me that we really ought to do something to stop such inversions from happening. Something that would give us clean air to breathe. Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, as I've quoted before in this space, says that air pollution "shortens the life of Wasatch Front residents by about two years." Two years.
Which brings me to a piece Rep. Rob Bishop had in the Deseret News last week, arguing against a cap-and-trade bill to reduce carbon emissions.
A little background here. Carbon emissions are the primary contributor to our Top of Utah inversions. They're the glop you've been trying to breathe in and out for the last few days.
The Environmental Protection Agency has labeled carbon emissions as dangerous to your health. A cap-and-trade bill in Congress would make it more expensive for industries to produce carbon emissions. And, if a cap-and-trade bill were to make producing carbon emissions more expensive, companies would work very hard to find ways to AVOID producing carbon emissions. That would make our air cleaner, and you wouldn't have to work so hard to breathe in and out anymore. Oh, and you might get to live two years longer.
Rob Bishop doesn't want such a bill. He argues that it would Cost Us Money. And he's right. It would. Forcing industries to change the way they do business would cost money.
And if that were the end of his argument, I would still support a cap-and-trade bill. As I've written before, you can't breathe dollar bills. If it comes down to a choice between paying more money to breathe clean air and paying less money and still living in an inversion, I'm all for buying clean air. What good is my money if I can't breathe?
But that's not the end.
What Rob Bishop doesn't say is that a cap-and-trade bill would also spur the creation of new industry, new clean-air industry. So what we'd really be getting is an out-with-the-old and in-with-the-new scenario.
We'd be dumping the industries that produce carbon emissions, and replacing them with industries that don't. We'd lose old jobs, but we'd gain new ones. And in the process, we'd be losing bad air and gaining clean air.
Rob Bishop dismisses the climate change issue in arguing further against cap-and-trade, saying that cap-and-trade "will do virtually nothing to affect global temperatures in the future."
Here's a clue, Rob Bishop. Climate change is not my first priority in arguing for cap-and-trade. Neither is worldwide politics. My first priority here in this inversion is simply breathing. In and out. Forget about climate change. I. Want. Clean. Air. To. Breathe.
To get that clean air, we're going to have to reduce carbon emissions. And to reduce carbon emissions, we're going to need incentives to move industry in that direction. Cap-and-trade will be a powerful incentive.
It would seem that, as a Republican, Rob Bishop is beholden, to at least a small degree, to the oil and gas industry. Since 1990, the oil and gas industry has given more than three times as much money to Republicans as to Democrats. The FEC figures are $183,662,543 for Republicans to $59,973,970 for Democrats. That might help explain all those "Drill, baby, drill!" chants coming out of last year's GOP convention.
For me, this all comes down to a simple choice: Rob Bishop can protect the oil and gas industry, or he can give me clean air to breathe.
I don't think I'll be holding my breath waiting for his answer.
On second thought, maybe I'd better.
Stewart is a presentation editor with the Standard-Examiner. He can be reached at rstewart@standard.net.
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