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Mount St. Helens is WA state's No. 1 air polluter
John Patrick Luethe writes "The Seattle Times
has run an article on Mount St. Helens' recent massive pollution. The article
claims that since the start of the recent volcanic activity starting in early October
the volcano has pumped out between 50 and 250 tons of sulfur dioxide each
day and has become the states largest polluter."
Obviously the solution is to cut taxes for companies that engage in volcanic activity.
And throw in some more tax cuts for plate tectonic activity too.
[o]_O
This is way over the 250 ton/year limit for SO2 for it to be considered a major source, and I cannot find any record of the EPA region 10 approving an air permit for the National Park Service at that site.
Shame, shame on the NPS to operate an attraction that is so polluting. It should be shut down.
There is no hard evidence that 250 tons of sulphur dioxide per day contribute to pollution. Rather than burden volcanoes with unnecessary restrictions, we should lower taxes on them to stimulate growth and create new jobs.
How can anyone say that Mt. St. Helens actually pollutes? I mean, isn't this just a natural volcanic reaction, and if so, how can a planet pollute itself with it's own elements? Isn't this just part of being on this planet?
Joshua 24:15
I took the liberty of creating a link for a Google search for you, since you're too busy trolling to do it yourself.
Your claim was that 'The eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, for instance, launched more stuff into the atmosphere than all human activity during the 19th and 20th centuries combined.' . Even at a subset, that means you are claiming that the eruption put more CO2, SO2, Nitrogen oxides and particulates into the atmosphere than all human activities for the past 200 years. You've made an absurd claim that you can't back up in a couple of sentances, which looks a lot more like trolling than my post.
A good starting point..
Mt. Pinatubo put around 17 Million tonnes of Sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere (17Tg). Humans emit 66Tg PER YEAR. However, volcanic emissions are injected higher than human ones, making the contribution for a single year approxamately equal.
Mt Pinatubo put around 44 Million tonnes CO2 into the atmosphere. That's around half a day's worth of human emissions. 3 Million tonnes HCl, the vast majority of which rained straight out.
And the effect was a short lived pulse of cooling; the particulates come out in a few months. This is why you don't see anything about longer term effects. There are none.
So, contrary to what is endlessly repeated and recycled, volcanoes do not have anything near the impact of humans and the figures - could you be bothered to research them - support this entirely.
We should realize that this particular case of natural greenhouse gas emission is not at all representative for the relative importance of human and natural effects. If you restrict to a small enough area and timespan, any effect becomes important. Why say that Mt. St. Helens is WA state's biggest pollutor, and not that volcanic effects dwarf human contributions in the whole US (or the whole world)? Because if you look on a bigger scale than just the area around the volcano, volcanic effects are just not that important. I'm not saying they are unimportant, only that industrial effects are at least as important.
And then I'm not even talking about the extremely short timescale this volcano is active (only for a couple of months, while industrial activity continues 24/7).
By the way, I absolutely do not regard myself as overly green or left-wing. I would like to believe that everything's going to be alright, but the facts are unfortunately too obvious to ignore.