A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America

by Bruce Cannon Gibney

What accounted for earlier achievements? Certainly, the absence of Boomer power helped, but former success did not come simply because it was easy. In the early years of the environmental movement, the United States was more dependent on heavy industry than it is now. And the United States of 1960 was neither as rich nor technologically advanced as it is today, making the costs of environmental regulation proportionately higher. It is true that conventional pollution then was more tangible to voters than invisible and incremental warming is now. The Cuyahoga River in Ohio repeatedly burst into flames due to industrial pollution, for example, which proved hard to ignore. Nevertheless, the CAA regulated both visible and invisible pollution, at considerable cost to living taxpayers (having been passed before the era of unrestrained intergenerational reshuffling via debt). The older generations paid up and cleaned up, even when legislation might never have direct or obvious benefits for those footing the bill.