Op Ed Pipe Dreams

Pipe Dreams

By ROBERT D. MORRIS
Published: October 3, 2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/03/opinion/03morris.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin

Seattle

IN a time when we endlessly scrutinize the ingredients of our food and insist on pesticide-free peaches, why are we still mixing carcinogens into our children’s lemonade? From herbicides to arsenic, the Environmental Protection Agency has set standards for 80 different chemicals, specifying how much of each should be allowed in our drinking water. Yet no regulations exist for thousands of other contaminants that make their way into our drinking water.

The author has fallacies in this text. First, by saying that we are still mixing carcinogens into our children’s lemonade. With that comment he appeals to tradition by saying that we are all doing it. He also uses fallacies when he writes that because he makes us feel inferior but invites us to join the elite of the human race, those who don’t put carcinogens into the children’s lemonade. I cant remember the name of that approach but I think its called Snob.

These unregulated contaminants include industrial byproducts, agricultural chemicals, drugs and even most of the toxic compounds that are formed when we add chlorine for disinfection. The combined effect of these contaminants has never been evaluated.

In this paragraph, he uses logos to prove his point, that the chemicals that we often drink aren’t healthy and he uses fallacies in the last sentence because he blames indirectly scientists and the FDA for providing us chemicals that may not be healthy for our body.

There is nothing we ingest in greater quantities than water. In light of this, here’s a radical concept. Our drinking water should be water. Nothing more. Paradoxically, the best way to make that happen is to purify less of it. Here’s why.

I cant find any fallacies in this text but I am starting to get interested. I am one of those persons that drinks “fake” lemonade on the daily bases and I cant wait to see what is wrong with it.

The technology exists to remove all of these chemicals from our water. But the E.P.A. balks at insisting on the elimination of all hazardous chemicals and microbes from the 10 trillion gallons of water we use every year because the cost would be so great.

I can see a slight fallacy where he says that E.P.A. disagrees with the purification of water because although he explains why they don’t agree with it, he makes them look as the bad ones.

Merely maintaining our water systems will cost $274 billion over the next 20 years, according to the E.P.A. Upgrading our water supply to eliminate all public health risks from chemicals and microbes in our drinking water would be far more expensive.

I have to discredit what I wrote before, he now explains why they cant do it and I don’t see any kind of fallacies in this paragraph.

But money is an obstacle to clean drinking water only because the E.P.A.’s assumptions rely on old ways of thinking. Our water infrastructure is old and decayed, and so are the fundamental ideas behind it.

Now I don’t know what to say. He attacked once again the E.P.A. Basically what he says is that they are in charge of it so there is nothing that we can do but that they are doing it all wrong. I have to say that he attacked violently the E.P.A: and for all of us that aren’t quite sure about what it is, we are seeing as if they are wrong and that there is something else that most be done.

Every drop of water produced by water treatment plants must meet E.P.A. standards for drinking-water quality. But we drink less than 1 percent of that water. Most of it goes down toilets, into washing machines, onto our lawns or down the drain.

Again he is using fallacies against the E.P.A. and now I understand what is his problem with it. We should concentrate on purifying fully the 1 percent of water that we are drinking and the rest of it, shouldn’t be purified as much because after all, dogs are content enough with the water they’ve been drinking.

The largest single consumer of water in most cities is not a consumer at all. Water pipes, often more than 100 years old, leak millions of gallons per day in every major city in the United States. Because of damage from Hurricane Katrina, the water pipes in New Orleans alone now leak 50 million gallons each day.

Once again, fallacies. He blames the US because they haven’t fixed the pipes in New Orleans since the Hurricane and not only in new Orleans but everywhere in the U.S. Ask me but I`d say that these facts are absurd. More than 50 million gallons per day are wasted and there are people out there dyeing for lack of water.

Right now, improving the quality of the water we drink requires extraordinary expense to improve the quality of the water we flush. This adds enormous costs to any effort to improve the quality of our drinking water and forces us to tolerate the presence of chemicals in our water that we would ban if they were food additives. It forces New Yorkers to drink unfiltered water even though 114 wastewater treatment plants dump treated sewage into the city’s water supply.

In this paragraph, he is saying that there isn’t much that we can do about the waste of the pure water because the costs are absurd.

The underlying systems for our water supplies were laid out more than 100 years ago. Over the past century we have made incremental improvements to these systems, adjusting their design and operation as new threats to our health were identified. We now have terrific water for irrigating lawns and washing cars. Our drinking water, however, falls short.

I cant see any fallacies. Maybe that he says that they’ve done it all to improve water and therefore you could say it’s a patriotic approach and makes Americans proud of their country when in a way, they shouldn’t. (they should but not in regards to their water purification system)

To improve the quality of our drinking water, we need to rethink our entire approach to providing it. Our drinking water should have a different status from the water used to flush toilets.

What a coincidence, I said that before! Our drinking water should be separated from the water used to flush the toilets. I don’t see any fallacies on this piece.

Pure water will require filters in restaurants and workplaces and at the tap where children fill their glasses. Millions of homes already have these filters, but they are installed haphazardly. To avoid a two-tiered water supply in which safe water goes only to those who can afford it, these filters must become a universal, integral part of the water supply system.

In this paragraph he uses same approach he used in the first paragraph. He separates those who have a filter into higher superior beings. There is not much that others can do about it, if they don’t have the money, the cant have it but he suggests them to get one because after all, that’s the only way to drink safer water.

Utilities should select, install and maintain point-of-use water filters. Design improvements can make the filters more effective. These changes are possible and affordable. Americans already spend more than $15 billion each year for bottled water.

One fallacy could be that he says that we are all wasting lots of money in bottled water while if we bought a filter, I’d be much more cheap. It is a fallacy although he is right because after all, who is he to tell us what should we do?

The need to replace aging pipes and equipment over the next two decades offers an opportunity to reinvent the way we deliver our drinking water. We cannot allow the water we don’t drink to prevent us from purifying the water we do.

I agree with the last paragraph, there is something that needs to be done although its hard to do. I don’t think that he is going to make much of an impact with this op-ed but its good to see that there are people out there who care for our health. If our drinking water was purified, we’d live longer for sure.

I tend to become aggressive against the writer of these articles but its because my job is to do that. I have to prove that his supports are mistaken and that we shouldn’t believe what he says. I have to say that I totally agree with what he wrote but I think that he ended up writing a bunch of paragraphs without coming with an exact and flawless solution. Maybe his job is only to write about it, let the scientists and the government to the rest of the work.

Robert D. Morris is the author of “The Blue Death: Disease, Disaster and the Water We Drink.”