Yesterday... Sept. 24 the US forest service deliberately started a fire just to the east of us here in Salt Lake City in what they call a controled burn. The wind shifted and thousands of acres are up in smoke.
This is no big deal. The earth for billions of years has burned. This is such a natural part of the scheme of things that it is hardly worth noticing. But here comes the weird part.
In Utah, each manufacturer/buisiness pays a pollution tax that is indexed to the federal government Environmental Protection Agency's polution index indicator. There are no excuses. Particulate is particulate. Their monitoring stations, in effect, determine what will be paid to the government, depending on the particulate content of the air for the year, ending June 1 each year.
The polution from this fire has tripled the polution for the year, bringing the average polution Tax for each business to almost three thousand dollars. Even me. I set at a damned computer and write code. Go figure.
If you were to write this crap up in a story, nobody would believe it. And now the guy who designed our law... the right most chipmonkish Michael C. Levitt... The guy who single handedly killed Utahs fish hatchery business by illegally shipping infected whorling diseased trout from Colorado to his privately owned fish hatchery in Utah... and selling tons of them at a profit, knowing they were diseased... is in the process of being confirmed as the new head of EPA in the US...
Scream!
😞😞