The muscle car with the loud muffler roared through the quiet development at 3 am. The two young men inside were busy chugging beers and tossing the empties out the open windows. The extremely loud rap music playing made them have to shout to be heard by each other. The cops had already stopped them once tonight but outside of giving them a warning just let them go. Jimmy the driver smiled thinking about that cop’s face when he saw who were in the car. In a small college town like this having a judge as an uncle pretty much guaranteed that jimmy could do whatever he wanted. His partner Billy slapped him on the shoulder as he turned the sound system up to the max. They were about to pass that asshole professor Barret’s house. He heard from another student that his wife and new baby were back home from the hospital after a difficult recovery. With a little luck Jimmy figured they could get the baby to wake up crying again. That will teach the professor for giving them an F in class for cheating. If it wasn’t for his dad calling the Dean he could have been kicked out of school over it. As they got closer to Barret’s house the car’s electric system stated going haywire, the electric windows suddenly rolled up and the stereo began making a horrible intense screeching sound. It just seemed to explode in their ears. Screaming Jimmy slammed on the breaks as he and Billy desperately tried to shut off the stereo or unlock the car doors to get away from it. Hours later at the hospital Jimmy learned he and Billy’s eardrums had burst and they would be lucky to get back partial hearing.

* * * * *

Daniel watched Sammy hug her Grandma and tell her multiple times how she would be back by tomorrow night and not to worry. It had taken some persuasion but Daniel finally managed to convince Sammy to make a visit the state college. Daniel knew how much she wanted to be a vet but worries about her grandma and the cost of it kept holding her back. Daniel finally decided to talk to Grandma directly about taking her to the campus to check it out. A catalog from the school with the financial aid options and the section on the veterinary medicine track being highlighted did the rest. With one more hug to her grandma Sammy finally got into the car to leave.

As she was buckling up Grandma came around to the driver side and in a quiet but chilling voice said “Take care of her Danny and ‘do not’ let anything happen to her”.

With a loud gulp Daniel assured her he wouldn’t and they headed out. Glancing to the side Daniel saw Sammy had tears in her eyes as she looked back. He stayed quiet and let her slowly get back to her normal cheerful mood. Stopping at a diner for a late breakfast Sammy was excited and kept looked all around. Her excitement and wanting to see everything was understandable after all. Sammy had never left the town she was born in so it was all new and that including eating at this fairly standard looking diner. After eating she dug out the well thumbed catalog and started pointing out everything to me she wanted to check out at the school. Looking up Sammy saw the amused look on my face.

She somewhat defensively said “Do you think we will have enough time” Slightly embarrassed she also added “I guess we could skip the animal nursery if we have to”.

“Don’t worry”, I said “we have almost two days there, more than enough time to see everything you want”.

Her smile got even bigger as she hugged me. As I hugged her back I promised myself to make this road trip the best time she’s ever had. After we finished our meal I took her for a quick look around the town before we continued our trip. The town was very much like the town she grew up in but with one difference that she noticed. No one knew her or called her by name as we walked around. Back home everyone knew Sammy and we couldn’t walk a block down the street without getting a dozen greetings. I decided that when she did get to college I would make an effort to help her get some friends there.

When we got away from the mountains and close to the larger town Sammy started to rub her nose and sniff. I had forgotten the difference in air quality between the two.

“That’s air pollution” I said to Sammy as she rubbed her nose. “We’re out of the mountains now, it’s not as bad as in cities especially ones like Los Angeles or Beijing.”

Sammy looked surprised as she said “You’re kidding!”

“No” I said “this is very mild, you’ll unfortunately get use to it and not notice it after a while”

I then told Sammy about the 2008 Olympics in China and what the government did to temporarily reduce the smog just for the competitions.

“You’re kidding, right?” Sammy said

“No, sad to say I’m not“ I used my phone to pull up some pictures from the internet to show her. This is Beijing city with the people wearing masks. When they have bad smog alerts some people actually have to remain inside so they don’t pass out”

Looking at the pictures she said with a sad look “Somebody should do something about that”..

“Somebody will” I said quietly under my breadth.

We got to the college just in time for Sammy to join the campus tour. It was a two hour tour so I had enough time to start thinking about how to deal with the smog issue. I hunted around for a private place to talk to Hawk. Hawk always had a micro portal near me to stay in touch but pretending to be conversing using a Bluetooth headset was annoying. I finally found an empty study room over at the campus library where we could talk. It was probably only for students but since no one said anything I just claimed it.

The coal issue would be hard to do anything about. Countries like China rely on coal for two big reasons; it’s usually cheaper and available locally. China and most other heavy coal users do have environmental rules and regulations for their coal burning plants. These plans all seem to include requiring anti-smog type devices on furnaces and smoke stacks to reduce the pollutants. The problem with those efforts was they were often violated by companies, surprisingly mostly by the state-owned companies. From what I could tell the violations were usually done by falsifying data, exceeding emission standards or even just operating them in locations not actually approved for them. Thinking about it I decided that China, India and every other country burning coal needed a wakeup call about the issues. I now just needed to find a way to do it.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

After Sammy finished her tour I took her to the book store and brought us matching school hoodies to wear the next day. She was ecstatic and immediately put hers on. After dinner we started driving around town to find a hotel for the night. It was an uncomfortable feeling in the car as we both thought about sharing a hotel room. Neither of us had gone that far yet and we hadn’t even talked about it. I was sure she was a virgin and we were basically only at second base in our relationship. Looking over at how uncomfortable she appeared I was sure she wasn’t feeling ready to go any further yet. As I found a hotel and pulled in she got more and more nervous. When I turned of the car I could see her twisting the bottom of her hoodie her hands and biting her lower lip. The last thing I wanted to do was pressure her for something she wasn’t ready for.

So, casually as I got out I said “wait here I’ll go get us a ‘couple’ of rooms”.

I didn’t look back to give her privacy but I’m pretty sure that was a sigh of relief as I walked away. Next day after a nice breakfast we went back to the campus to see the animal nursery and checked out the dorms before heading home.

Good morning, I said to Hawk a few days later as I sat down in my chair before the bank of monitors. I was constantly underestimating what Hawk understood and could do. So when I got back from our campus trip I decided to just ask Hawk for the information and see if he could get it.

“How far back have you gone so far on the coal plants and factories?” I asked.

He answered “sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, particulate matter (soot), carbon dioxide, mercury and other heavy metals were measured for 5.3 years with cross check against coal usage for the same time period. The level of containment efficiency was calculated and compared against international plant average around the planet. Additional information on bribery and favors trading by plant managers has been incorporated into data with indication that parameters should be expanded to friends and/or family in 18.4% of those cases.”.

I had a momentary thought about how Hawk took historical measurements of the pollutants discharge. Temporal portals couldn’t pass anything according to Hawk but why then could I still see through them? I glanced back at a prairie scene from the 1700’s to see an enormous flock of passenger pigeons flying bye. I decided I needed to discuss it with Hawk later; something didn’t seem right about his temporal portals.

“Take the top 100 of the dirtiest plants or factories and give me the list please.” I requested as I swivels my chair back to face the screens.

With a bit of frustration Hawk responded back with a request for the indicators to be used to rate the “dirtiest”. After some thought I told him to use the amount of pollutants released as a percentage of the amount of coal burned, bribes made to inspectors, ties to any government agency and both historical and estimated future damage to the environment. He then almost immediately provided me with 100 ‘dirtiest’ plants and factories. Looking at the list he created in just a few seconds I realized I was still underestimating his capabilities. Putting a report together with accurate numbers for each plant going back five years was startling. Checking the numbers especially after I compared them to the public numbers a few of them had listed was startling. Some pollution release numbers where 2 to 3 times higher than what was listed. It was obvious that those public numbers were completely fabricated.

The next step now was to make everyone aware of the issue with these plants. I did understand that even if shutting down all coal plants would be the best for the environment it would also be impossible to do it now with the worlds energy needs. What I wanted was for them to be more efficient and less pollutants. The technology did exist for cleaner burning coal but was seldom implemented for cost and profit reasons even if it was mandated by a country’s policies and laws. Publicizing these 100 worst should get the attention needed to greater enforce those laws, at least that was my hope. To do that I needed to get both the country and international watchdog groups involved as well as public awareness. I really didn’t expect major or immediate progress with pollution. It was a very long term project to be solved and one that would require the whole world to work on it. This would be my first step to push it in that direction.

The list of the dirtiest coal burning plants and factories was from 18 countries with almost half of them in China and India. Identifying the local versions of the EPA in those countries was straight forward. The different agencies in those countries had different levels of enforcement and policies but all had some legal standing policing pollution. groups had. There were international groups who did monitoring of air pollution and were outside of local politics. No actually enforcement from them but I didn’t actually need that yet. There were three groups that seemed to do the majority of monitoring. I decided to see how I might include them in my wakeup plan.

I was a bit disappointed when I checked the groups out. None of them seemed very accurate with the monitoring they did. In most cases they took as face value the pollution numbers published by the countries themselves. Numbers I now knew were mostly made up and had no relation to reality. Of the three the International Union of Air Pollution Prevention and Environmental Protection Associations (IUAPPA) had the greatest potential to eventually push enforcement policies between countries. They had over 40 national member organizations working towards that. Unfortunately at the current point they were more of a paper tiger in their efforts. The Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC) as larger and had over 160 governments and organizations. That should have made them a better choice but instead for some weird reason they were committed to only short-lived climate pollutants. The odd one though, was the World Health Organization (WHO). They were a very powerful group that everyone seemed to listen to with regards to medicine. Their focus in this area was on the medical dangers of breathing smog. The problem with them was a strong policy of not getting involved with internal affairs of the different countries.

I went ahead and had the report on regional plants and factories sent out to all the country EPA types of organizations. To make sure it didn’t get buried multiple copies were emailed to every employee at management level and above. With that many people getting a copy I was sure the information would continue to be spread. Once it reached the general public and any local population living around the plants and factories I might see some protesting as well. For the international groups I included the full list of all 100, but I set the email source as being from one of the other groups. Someone from a group like the DDOE might ignore an unsolicited report with dubious data but not if they thought it came from the WHO organization. This gave the report both credibility and helped confuse the actual source of the data.

With Hawk’s help I then monitored the responses to the emails. Most of them ignored it but a small percentage did open and read the report. A few were alarmed by both the discrepancy in the numbers and much later from the accuracy of them. A surprising number of people forwarded the email on to others. Tracing the recipients of those I saw that some were other employees or news sites and some went to the different plant and factory management teams. The last group the email was to either request the management validate the numbers or to warn them that they were being monitored. Afterward, sitting back in my chair I decided it was going relatively well and all I could do now was wait to see how it all panned out.