Connectedness of Climate and Healthcare

  • Pundits say President Obama is putting all his political chips in the fight for health care. And, if he loses, he'll have almost nothing left to spend on climate change. (Photo by Bill Branson, courtesy of the National Cancer Institute)

The health care debate is sucking
up most of the energy in Washington.
So it makes sense that the world is
concerned the US might show up at
global climate talks in December empty
handed. Conrad Wilson explains how
the heath care debate is threatening
the chances of a global climate treaty:

Transcript

The health care debate is sucking
up most of the energy in Washington.
So it makes sense that the world is
concerned the US might show up at
global climate talks in December empty
handed. Conrad Wilson explains how
the heath care debate is threatening
the chances of a global climate treaty:

European countries, along with China and other big global polluters, are wrestling with
how to deal with global warming. But as the world gears up for the climate change
conference in Copenhagen, Washington is focusing on health care.

The timing of Washington’s health care debate has many countries scratching their heads.
And it has environmentalists and climate folks nervous. All agree health care is
important; but globally, they say, it’s out of step.

And when you ask Americans what the President is working on, few mention climate
change.

Person 1: “Probably health care and fixing the economy.”

Person 2: “On the economy. And fixing the economy. Actually, no, I’ll change that.
Actually, what I think he’s focusing on is the health care issue.”

Person 3: “This week, Afghanistan. Last week, health care. The week before, the
economy.”

Person 4: “He’s focusing on health care primarily, which is very important. But he also
needs to maintain his focus on the economy.”

What’s not being talked about is climate change and the global talks coming up in
Copenhagen.

Dan Esty is a professor of Environmental Law & Policy at Yale University. He also has
experience as a climate negotiator. Esty predicts the health care debate will continue
through the end of the year.

“I think it’s going to be very difficult, given the political effort that’s going to be required
to achieve success on health care, to imagine that climate change can be taken on during
the same time period.”

Esty says there’s only so much President Obama and members of Congress can take on at
once. Climate change and health care are two major issues that can’t be resolved
overnight.

As time wears on, the talks are shaping up for an outcome that looks more like the failed
Kyoto climate agreement from a decate ago. After Kyoto, Congress refused to join the
rest of th eworld in capping carbon emissions. Esty fears that could happen again.

“The health care debate, at the present moment, is occupying all the political oxygen in
Washington and that means there’s really nothing left with which to drive forward the
response to climate change. And, as a result, our negotiator will go to Copenhagen
without any real game plan in place for how the United States is going to step up and be a
constructive part of the response of the build up of green house gases in the atmosphere.”

A lot of people say the US needs to pass a climate change law before going to
Copenhagen. But others say maybe not. They argue it’s not a bad idea for the US to go
into global climate talks without a law because it could allow negotiators to be more
flexible.

Regardless of how it’s done, cutting greenhouse gases is now more pressing than ever
before. With Washington paralyzed by the health care debate, the timing is just bad for
climate change.

“If there were ever a time. You can say that about health care and about climate policy.”

That’s energy analyst Randy Udall. He says President Obama has a lot of his plate and
should be ready to compromise.

“Obama’s not going to get nearly as much as many of us had hoped for in terms of health
care reform. And he’s not going to get nearly as much as many of us had hoped for in
terms of energy policy. He will get something. But it not going to be a half a loaf, it’ll be
a quarter of a loaf.”

Pundits say President Obama is putting all his political chips in the fight for health care.
And, if he loses, he’ll have almost nothing left to spend on climate change.

For The Environment Report, I’m Conrad Wilson.

Related Links

Climate, Health Care Bills Connected

  • The climate change bill is currently in the Senate, awaiting the Senators when they return from August recess. (Photo courtesy of the Architect of the Capitol)

Experts are saying the fate
of the climate change bill
is tied to health care reform.
Mark Brush has more:

Transcript

Experts are saying the fate
of the climate change bill
is tied to health care reform.
Mark Brush has more:

The climate change bill squeaked through the House of Representatives. And now it’s waiting for action in the Senate. But the Senate has full plate right now with health insurance reform.

And some experts are saying the fate of the health care bill will have a big impact on the climate change bill.

Nicky Roy with the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

He says if the Obama Administration manages to do well in the health care debate, that will carry over to the debate on climate change.

“On the other hand, if the health care rallies succeed in fatally wounding the whole healthcare process, I think that’s going to make it tough for energy and climate because it’ll show that that tactic has worked.”

Some lobbying groups are using the same tactics being used in the health care debate. We’re already starting to see some anti-climate change legislation rallies in big energy states of Texas and Colorado.

For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

Related Links

Paying for Risks on the Rails

  • This train in Graniteville, South Carolina, crashed while carrying chemicals called "toxic inhalation hazards." Transporting these chemicals is extremely dangerous, and rail companies think chemical companies should share some of the insurance burden. (Photo courtesy of the Environmental Protection Agency)

Toxic Inhalation Hazards are a class of chemicals with a notorious name: if you inhale them, you die.
On the flip side, they’re useful: Take chlorine. It purifies drinking water. Another is anhydrous ammonia. It’s used for corn fertilizer.
The government feels some toxic inhalation hazards are so important it forces railroads to ship them, even though insurance is expensive.
Shawn Allee says rail lines now want the chemical industry to chip in:

Transcript

Toxic Inhalation Hazards are a class of chemicals with a notorious name: if you inhale them, you die.
On the flip side, they’re useful. Take chlorine: it purifies drinking water. Another is anhydrous ammonia. It’s used for corn fertilizer.
The government feels some toxic inhalation hazards are so important it forces railroads to ship them, even though insurance is expensive.
Shawn Allee says rail lines now want the chemical industry to chip in:

To understand why the railroad industry wants help with insurance, you should know what happened in Graniteville, South Carolina.
Phil Napier is Graniteville’s fire chief. Napier tells me, one night in January 2005, he got paged about a train wreck.
He hopped in his truck and before long, he found the train engineer.

“I stopped to roll the window down and this gentleman told me they had a chemical leak and he couldn’t breathe and he fell to the ground. And immediately, it hit me. It basically took my breath and all I remember is taking a U-turn heading north but I ended up south. There’s a time-zone in there that I have no memory.”

When Napier came to, he got word from his radio: the train carried chlorine and a toxic cloud was spreading.
Napier evacuated Graniteville. Later, he got a look by helicopter.

“We did a flyover. I mean, it was like a Twilight Zone – you could see cars all up and down the highways, with the doors open.”

Nine people died in the Graniteville derailment and chlorine spill. Since then, the railroad industry worried an accident like this could ruin them.

“The lesson we drew from that was, if there is a major catastrophe by the railroad carrying this material, could be forced into bankruptcy and be forced out of operation.”

That’s Ed Hamberger, the head of the Association of American Railroads.
Hamberger calls the Graniteville accident a tragedy for the town and a financial mess for the railroad responsible – Norfolk Southern.

“The accident in Graniteville resulted in damages of 400 to 500 million dollars.”

Norfolk Southern won’t confirm the figures, but consider this: it’s still in court over an incident involving nine deaths.

Experts say if a similar derailment happened in the middle of a big city like Chicago, it could kill at least 10,000 people.
Hamberger says railroads can’t insure against that.
You might think they would refuse to carry toxic inhalant hazards, but the government says they have to – because rail has the best safety record.

“The freight railroad industry has what is known as a common carrier obligation to carry these toxic by inhalation materials. Several of our members have said if they were not forced to, they would not carry it because of that liability threat.”

Hamberger says if the government won’t lift the obligation, it’s fair to require chemical companies to pay some insurance.
And, he says, it would make the public safer.
The argument goes, if chemical companies paid more to insure against transportation accidents, they’d create safer chemicals.

“With regard to the argument the chemical industry needs an incentive to make safer products, frankly, we have all the incentive in the world.”

Marty Durbin is with the American Chemistry Council.
He says chemical companies already pay insurance against accidents in their factories.
And they are looking for alternatives to chlorine and other toxic inhalant hazards.
Durbin says, besides, when trains leave their factories financial risk should be out of their hands.

“You have to have liability throughout the chain that helps motivate safety improvement.”

The chemical and railroad companies will battle this out in front of government agencies for a while.
In the meantime, each year, trains will make 100,000 shipments of toxic inhalation hazards along the nation’s railroads, even if some freight rail companies don’t want to.

For the Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Green Insurance for Your Home

  • Homeowners can now purchase green insurance (Source: Immanuel Giel at Wikimedia Commons)

Some homeowners are paying a little
extra for a green insurance policy. Mark
Brush has more:

Transcript

Some homeowners are paying a little
extra for a green insurance policy. Mark
Brush has more:

Fireman’s Fund Insurance says it’s the first company to let you buy this extra coverage.

If your home is destroyed, they’ll pay to build you a new one using standards certified by
the U.S. Green Building Council.

That means things like using wood that is certified
sustainable, energy efficient appliances, and recycling the materials from your old house.

Don Soss is with Fireman’s Fund. He says the decision to offer the green insurance
policy was driven by the market.

“We’re very interested in offering products and services around sustainability. And there
was customer interest for it, so this was really in response to customer demand.”

Soss says their insurance policy will also cover homeowners for partial losses.

For The Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

Related Links

Adapting to Climate Change

Businesses are beginning to talk about climate change in different
terms. Instead of debating whether humans are causing it, there’s a
lot more talk about what climate change might mean to the business
climate. Lester Graham reports there are questions about what might
happen to affect business as global temperatures and weather patterns change:

Transcript

Businesses are beginning to talk about climate change in different
terms. Instead of debating whether humans are causing it, there’s a
lot more talk about what climate change might mean to the business
climate. Lester Graham reports there are questions about what might
happen to affect business as global temperatures and weather patterns change:


For the last couple of decades, the people who’ve been arguing that we
have to do something to reduce the greenhouse emissions causing global
warming avoided one subject:


“People did not want to talk about adaptation or coping with climate
change because that was seen as a cop-out.”


That’s Rosina Bierbaum. She was a science advisor during the Clinton
administration and is now the Dean of the School of Natural Resources
and Environment at the University of Michigan.


The fear was, if you could figure out a way to cope with global
warming, you wouldn’t do anything to reduce the emissions causing it.


But Bierbaum says with concensus among the majority of the scientists in
the world that global warming is happening and humans are contributing,
the point has been made. Time to move on:


“It’s only really been, I would say, in the last two years that the
science has become so clear, that the changes are occurring so fast.
And we’re seeing them already… that society is realizing we’ve got to
cope with those changes now and there are more in store for us.”


Actually, Bierbaum thinks we’re really kind of behind in thinking about
the consequences of global warming. It’s not just the polar ice caps
melting and the rising sea levels. There are a lot of everyday sort of
things that will likely change.


For instance, what kind of plants should you put in your home
landscaping? Will the tree you plant today survive in the changing
climate? How flexible is your business if the climate changes weather
patterns?


Thomas Karl is the Director of the National Climatic Data Center at the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He says people have
to start thinking about things like that. And Karl says it’s not just
higher temperatures, but sudden dramatic changes, such as maybe no snow
in the Northern states for a couple of years at a time. Or dry spells
that could make rivers so low that barges can’t travel up and down
them:


“What really has important impacts are the extreme events. I think the
questions being asked along these lines are ‘How vulnerable am I to
these episodic conditions?’ and ‘What do we need to do to prepare
ourselves for the possibility that things may not change gradually, but
could be quite abrupt change?'”


Some of those extreme events are heavier storms. As hurricane Katrina
showed, that could affect a lot of things. For example, the oil
industry is looking at its refineries in the Gulf of Mexico. With more
and more intense hurricanes, could it be worth building
refineries somewhere else?


There’s a lot at risk.


Franklin Nutter is the President of the Reinsurance Association of
America: the insurers of the insurance companies. He says with more
forest fires in the West, and unpredictability in agriculture, and more
violent storm surges on the coasts… all due to climate change, it’s
going to cost:


“Someone has to pay for the repair and recovery. If the insurance
mechanism is going to be the intermediary that translates those costs
into people’s premiums, then the answer is insurance premiums are going
to have to match those.”


And that means we’re all going to pay higher insurance costs because
some people and businesses are going to ignore, or miscalculate, how
climate change is going to affect them:


“The Association of British Insurers did a study looking at just the
effect of climate change on insurability and held steady population
growth, property values, all of those things. And they concluded that
you could see insurance premiums rise by 60% by mid-century just as a
result of climate change.”


That means if nothing changed: no inflation, no currency change…
nothing except global warming, insurance rates go up 60% during the
next 30 to 40 years. You’re already seeing it.


Some climate change experts say we can slow the impacts of global
warming by reducing greenhouse emissions now. But we’re already
seeing change… and we will see more.


There will be winners in global climate change. Some growing seasons
will be extended. Some areas will get more precipitation. But there
will likely be a lot more losers as businesses and people either can’t
or won’t adjust to the changing climate of their region.


For the Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.

Related Links

Report Warns Insurers to Face Climate Change

Insurance companies are being urged to face the risks associated with climate change. The world’s oldest insurance market says recent natural disasters have shown the need for new pricing and underwriting models for insurers. The GLRC’s Erin Toner reports:

Transcript

Insurance companies are being urged to face the risks associated with climate change.
The world’s oldest insurance market says recent natural disasters have shown the need
for new pricing and underwriting models for insurers. The GLRC’s Erin Toner reports.


Lloyd’s of London’s new report says the costs of climate change could put insurers out of
business if they don’t make some changes. The report says insurance companies have
been slow to manage the financial risks of emerging threats, such as rising sea levels and
the build-up of greenhouse gases. Rolf Tolle is with Lloyd’s of London.


“You will have maybe certain changes in coverage which is available. You will see
changes in pricing. And you may have for certain, very exposed risks, a situation
that insurance is flatly no longer available.”


Tolle says insurers should take climate change predictions into account when setting
rates, rather than simply relying on historical weather patterns. Last year was the costliest
year ever for the insurance industry – mainly because of hurricanes that hit the U.S.


For the GLRC, I’m Erin Toner.

Related Links

INSURANCE RATES DRIVING SPRAWL? (Short Version)

Some big city mayors and urban legislators say insurance rates are unfair to people who live in cities. The GLRC’s Lester Graham reports, state legislatures are reluctant to change insurance rate structures in fear of angering suburban voters:

Transcript

Some big city mayors and urban legislators say insurance rates are unfair
to people who live in cities. The GLRC’s Lester Graham reports, state
legislatures are reluctant to change insurance rate structures in fear of
angering suburban voters:


Insurance rates are higher in cities than they are in suburbs. Often
they’re much higher. Peter Kuhnmuench is an insurance industry
spokesman with the Insurance Institute of Michigan. He says there are
more risks and more insurance claims in the cities that drive up the costs.


“We see a higher incidence of fire and burglary and theft in the urban
areas typically than you do in the suburban areas.”


And although suburban residents typically drive their cars farther to
work, drivers in the city have more collisions and theft claims.


Legislators in cities want the insurance costs tp be spread out across a wider
population, but suburban legislators don’t want their residents to have to
subsidize urban insurance rates. Those in the city say the irony is:
through tax dollars, their residents are forced to subsidize more lanes of traffic for
the suburbanites who commute to work in the city.


For the GLRC, this is Lester Graham.

Related Links

Car Sharing Gets Profitable

  • Through car sharing programs, users rent cars on an hourly basis. (Photo courtesy of Zipcar)

There’s nothing unusual about renting a car by the day.
It’s commonplace at airports nationwide, but for most Americans,
renting a car by the hour is a strange notion. Renting a car by the hour
is often called “car sharing.” Car sharing is good for the environment
because its users only get the car when they need the car. They usually
take buses and bikes to get around. Car sharing has caught on in a few big
cities on the east and west coasts. That’s largely due to the efforts of a pair
of private companies, Zipcar and Flexcar. Now those firms are poised to
expand their operations. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Todd Melby
has this report:

Transcript

There’s nothing unusual about renting a car by the day. It’s
commonplace at airports nationwide, but for most Americans, renting a
car by the hour is a strange notion. Renting a car by the hour is often
called “car sharing.” Car sharing is good for the environment because its
users only get the car when they need the car. They usually take buses
and bikes to get around. Car sharing has caught on in a few big cities on
the east and west coasts. That’s largely due to the efforts of a pair of
private companies, Zipcar and Flexcar. Now, those firms are poised to
expand their operations. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Todd
Melby has this report:


For the past six months, a nonprofit called the Neighborhood Energy
Consortium has had the Minneapolis/St. Paul car sharing market to itself.
The non-profit group has raised about $450,000 to buy 12 cars. Those
energy-efficient hybrids have attracted about 140 people to join the
HourCar program. That’s Hour with an “H.”


(Sound of bus stop and rumble of passing truck)


On this Saturday morning, Mary Solac is shivering at a bus stop, waiting
for a ride to go pick up her HourCar. Despite the obvious inconvenience,
she says it’s worth it.


“You don’t have to worry about insurance. You don’t have to worry
about gas. It’s like okay, I’m paying what I’m paying and I don’t have to
worry about fixing the blasted car either.”


After a short bus ride, Solac does have to worry about more mundane car
concerns… such as scraping the ice and snow off the window.


(Sound of ice/snow scraping on the windshield)


To date, Solac’s only choice for renting a car by the hour has been
HourCar. That’s about to change.


The nation’s largest car sharing company — Zipcar of Boston — is
invading HourCar’s Minneapolis turf. Nearly 50,000 people now take
turns driving about 500 Zipcars, mostly in Boston, New York and
Washington, D.C.


Scott Griffith is the CEO of Zipcar.


“Over the last several years, we’ve really focused on those cities and getting
them past profitability, past the break even point, to prove that at the
metro market level, that we can make money in this business.”


That track record enticed a venture capital firm to invest $10 million in
Zipcar.


Another big new company is also getting an influx of cash. The nation’s
second-largest car sharing company — Flexcar of Seattle — is about half
as big as Zipcar. It too has a new investor: AOL Founder Stephen Case.
He rented a Flexcar, liked it and bought the company.


In Chicago, Flexcar has paired with a local nonprofit to put 47 cars on
the street.


Zipcar, meanwhile, is also trying to get into Chicago. It wants
government agencies in the Windy City to commit to using its cars
before entering the market. The company hopes that happens sometime
this year.


Business professor Alfred Marcus at the University of Minnesota says it’s
not unusual for emerging businesses to seek government help like this.


“To get this sector going, to stimulate it, it makes sense for their to be
some public involvement, but you would hope this could take off on its
own. I think this is transitional – these public and private partnerships,
and that’s very typical when industries start.”


In Minneapolis/St. Paul, the University of Minnesota is guaranteeing
Zipcar a $1,500 per month per vehicle subsidy, but once Zipcar meets the
$1,500 minimum, that subsidy goes away. Zipcar says it expects to do
just that in three months.


At the moment, Zipcar is growing fast. It had revenues of about $15
million in 2005. CEO Griffith says it expects to double that this year, but
Alfred Marcus with the University of Minnesota says over the long-term,
Zipcar faces big hurdles.


Zipcar has only had success in large, densely-populated cities. Its target
market is young people without cars who are highly price sensitive, and
then there’s the question of where to keep the cars. They have to be
conveniently located to the people who might want to use them.


Marcus says that if these start-ups continue to grow, someday they might
be gobbled up by bigger companies.


“The ultimate aim of Flexcars or Zipcars may be to build up a fringe
business, get it going and have a rental car company buy them or have even
have a conventional automobile company by them.”


But the car-sharing company owners say they have other plans. Zipcar
boss Scott Griffith says he’s working on a 10-year plan to make Zipcar an
international company. Flexcar owner Stephen Case says he bought that
firm “to build it” and not to “flip it.”


For the GLRC, I’m Todd Melby.

Related Links

How Long Do You Keep a Polluting Heap?

  • Motor oil dripping from cars can add up and end up contaminating waterways and sediments. (Photo by Brandon Blinkenberg)

Industries and companies get labeled as
“polluters.” But what do you do when you find out you’re a pretty big polluter yourself… and you find out it’s going to cost you a lot of money to fix the
problem? As part of the series, “Your Choice; Your
Planet,” the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Rebecca
Williams finds herself in that dilemma:

Transcript

Industries and companies get labeled as “polluters.” But what do you do when you find out you’re a pretty big polluter yourself… and you find out it’s going to cost you a lot of money to fix the problem? As part of the series, “Your Choice; Your Planet,” the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Rebecca Williams finds herself in that dilemma:


(sound of car starting)


This is my ‘89 Toyota Camry. It has 188,000 miles on it. Pieces of
plastic trim fly off on the highway, and I have to climb in from the
backseat when my door gets frozen in the winter. But I got it for free, I get good gas mileage, and my insurance is cheap. But now, it’s leaking oil – lots of oil. I knew it was bad when I started
pouring in a quart of oil every other week.


I thought I’d better take it in to the shop.


(sound of car shop)


My mechanic, Walt Hayes, didn’t exactly have good news for me.


“You know, you’re probably leaking about 80% of that, just from experience, I’d say
you’re burning 20% and leaking 80%.”


Walt says the rear main seal is leaking, and the oil’s just dripping
straight to the ground. Walt tells me the seal costs 25 dollars, but he’d
have to take the transmission out to get to the seal. That means I’d be
paying him 650 dollars.


650 bucks to fix an oil leak, when no one would steal my car’s radio. There’s no way. Obviously, it’s cheaper to spend two dollars on each quart of oil, than to fix the seal.


“Right – what else is going to break, you know? You might fix the rear main
seal, and your transmission might go out next week or something. Your car,
because of its age, is on the edge all the time. So to invest in a 25 dollar seal, spending a lot of money for labor, almost doesn’t make sense on an
older car.”


That’s my mechanic telling me not to fix my car. In fact, he says he’s seen
plenty of people driving even older Toyotas, and he says my engine will
probably hold out a while longer. But now I can’t stop thinking about the
quarts of oil I’m slowly dripping all over town.


I need someone to tell me: is my one leaky car really all that bad? Ralph
Reznick works with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. He
spends his time trying to get polluters to change their behavior.


“That’s a lot for an old car. If you were the only car in the parking lot,
that wouldn’t be very much. But the fact is, there’s a lot of cars just
like yours that are doing the same thing.”


Reznick says the oil and antifreeze and other things that leak from and fall
off cars like mine add up.


“The accumulative impact of your car and other cars, by hitting the
pavement, and washing off the pavement into the waterways, is a very large
impact. It’s one of the largest sources of pollution we’re dealing with
today.”


Reznick says even just a quart of oil can pollute thousands of gallons of
water. And he says toxins in oil can build up in sediment at the bottom of
rivers and lakes. That can be bad news for aquatic animals and plants.
There’s no question – he wants me to fix the leak.


But I am NOT pouring 650 bucks into this car when the only thing it has going
for it is that it’s saving me money. So I can either keep driving it, and
feel pretty guilty, or I can scrap it and get a new car.


But it does take a lot of steel and plastic and aluminum to make a new car.
Maybe I’m doing something right for the environment by driving a car that’s
already got that stuff invested in it.


I went to the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan
and talked to Greg Keoleian. He’s done studies on how many years it makes
sense to keep a car. He says if you look at personal costs, and the energy
that goes into a making a midsize car, it makes sense to hang onto it for a
long time… like 16 years.


No problem there – I finally did something right!


Well, sort of.


“In your case, from an emissions point of view, you should definitely
replace your vehicle. It turns out that a small fraction of vehicles are
really contributing to a lot of the local air pollution. Older vehicles
tend to be more polluting, and you would definitely benefit the environment
by retiring your vehicle.”


Keoleian says if I get a newer car, it won’t be leaking oil, and it won’t
putting out nearly as much nitrogen oxide and other chemicals that lead to
smog. Oh yeah, he also says I really need to start looking today.


And so doing the right thing for the environment is going to cost me money.
There’s no way around that. The more I think about my rusty old car, the
more I notice all the OTHER old heaps on the road. Maybe all of you are a
bit like me, hoping to make it through just one more winter without car
payments.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

Taking Bite Out of Canine Confrontations

Humans have been living with dogs for some 12,000 years, using them for hunting, protection, and friendship. Yet as both human and dog populations have grown, so too have the problems between the species. Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Julia King has discovered that with warmer temperatures, the furless and the furry often find themselves nose to snout in public places:

Transcript

Humans have been living with dogs for some 12,000 years, using them for hunting, protection,
and friendship. Yet as both human and dog populations have grown, so too have the problems
between the species. Great Lakes Radio Consortium commentator, Julia King, has discovered
that with warmer temperatures, the furless and the furry often find themselves nose to snout in
public places:


Fifty-three million dogs live in the United States – more per capita than in any other country in
the world. One out of every three households here includes a canine companion.


Despite the fact that they drink out of toilets and roll in a wide range of things unspeakable, we let
them sit on our sofas, give us big slobbery kisses and ride in the front seats of our cars.


We like to think of our dogs as our better halves. And sometimes they are, with their wagging
bodies and their penchant for forgiveness. And because they forgive us our trespasses, we’re
inclined to do the same for them.


“Oh, don’t you worry,” said a gray-haired lady in the park recently. “My Rover wouldn’t hurt a
flea!” Meanwhile, her dog snarled at my left thigh. Eventually Rover grew bored of tormenting
me and I jogged (ever-so-gingerly) into the sunset unharmed.


But each year some four and a half million other Americans aren’t so lucky; that’s how many dog
bites are estimated annually in the U.S, according to canine aggression experts. Nearly 335,000
victims are admitted to emergency rooms each year. The insurance industry estimates more than
a billion dollars in dog-related liability claims annually.


Despite all the chew toys and rawhides we shower on them, dogs bite us. Not because they’re
bad, but because they’re dogs. They don’t know any of the good swear words. They can’t pound
their fists on the kitchen table, or throw plates when they’re really mad; instead, they have sharp
teeth.


We should love our dogs. But loving them doesn’t mean expecting them to be human; it means
acknowledging that they’re not.


As the weather warms up so, too, does the likelihood that humans and dogs will “mix it up” out
on sunny sidewalks and in public parks. That means those of us with dogs have some added
responsibilities.


Yes, yes… we know… Fido is a perfect dear, wouldn’t harm an ant. Just the same, please do us
all a favor and keep him on a leash.


(Bark!) Hey, ( Bark! Bark! Bark!) get back here!


Host tag: Julia King lives with a man, a kid, and a dog in Goshen, Indiana. She comes to us by
way of the Great Lakes Radio Consortium.