This reality is especially stark when dealing with environmental issues, where emoting replaces thinking, and where the neuroses of activists drives policy more than anything else. It's one thing to spend hundreds of millions of tax dollars to, say, actually clean up some land or a waterway, quite another thing to spend the same amount to accomplish little more than boosting the self-esteem of activists.

Yet here in Orange County, residents are doing just that: paying additional fees to fund a costly new program that cleans something that doesn't need to be cleaned as a sop to vocal environmental activists who are impervious to scientific data proving them wrong.

It's policy as psychology, yet it's costing taxpayers plenty.

The program I refer to goes by the name of "full secondary treatment," and it relates to sewage treatment. The story about how Orange County embraced it is a disturbing reminder of how hard it is for politicians to stand up against organized interest groups that fly the flag of mom, apple pie and environmental purity.

In the summer of 2002, the Orange County Sanitation District board voted 13-12 to embrace this extra level of treatment for sewage the district pumps 4.2 miles out past the Huntington Beach coast. Since 1985, Orange County had operated under what is known as the "waiver" - a section of the federal Clean Water Act that allowed it to treat half of its sewage to primary treatment standards and the other half to secondary standards, rather than all of it to secondary standards.

Primary standards remove "70 percent of bacteria and microscopic solids," according to a Register article, whereas secondary treatment removes 95 percent of the bacteria. The biggest particle released, by the way, is about the size of a grain of sand, yet critics of the arrangement made it sound as if the district was pumping untreated turds into the ocean.

In fact, organized environmental interest groups and their allies on coastal city councils argued deceptively that the sewage plume, as it is politely called, floated back to the beach, and was the cause of the high bacteria counts that routinely shut down the surf at Surf City. It was a plausible argument, but testing by OCSD proved fairly decisively that it wasn't true. The likely culprit, researchers argued, was not the treated sewage but urban run-off carried down the Santa Ana River especially following a storm.

The district even treated the plume in the ocean with disinfectant, thus killing 80 percent of the bacteria. The result: nada. In other words, bacteria levels were still high at the beach even after the bacteria was killed in the plume, so clearly the plume wasn't causing the bacteria spikes. It didn't matter. The environmentalists had an issue - and they were organized to pursue it.

The district assembled a blue-ribbon panel in 2002, explains Blake Anderson, OCSD general manager. The panel found no observable link between the sewage plume and beach pollution, although in the interest of fairness the panelists said they could not unequivocally state that the sewage caused none of the bacteria problem.

Such calm, informed voices were drowned out by the environmentalists who, in my view at the time, seemed impervious to any sort of rational argument. "There was a growing community that said, 'We insist on full secondary treatment,'" said Anderson. They not only showed up by the hundreds at the sanitation district board meetings, but the busload at council meetings in local cities.

Norman Eckenrode, the Placentia councilman who chaired the board at the time of the secondary-treatment vote, said "They were saying the same thing over and over again. ... We're killing fish, we're the cause of the beach closures, people are going to die." It wasn't true, Eckenrode added, and referred to these activists as "environmental wackos."

I agree with his description, although I also blame weak-kneed politicians who echoed the claims. Republican supervisors Tom Wilson and Jim Silva ardently defended secondary treatment in a July 28, 2002 Register column, making an emotional argument: "The board of directors of the sanitation district has to recognize the devastating impacts of polluting the ocean ... even four miles out. There is a significant financial requirement, but saving our coast is more important than dollars."

But what if those dollars don't "save" the coast, but merely build an unnecessary project?

The latest evidence is in, and it only confirms evidence that was widely available at the time of the vote. "Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, report ... that most of the bacteria that pollutes the surf zone at Huntington come from the Santa Ana Rivers and the Talbert March," reported the Register's Pat Brennan last week. Another study released that week "shows that over the course of a year, less than one percent of the bacterial contamination from storm drains is captured by systems designed to divert the polluted water into sewer systems."

The co-author of the studies, Professor Stanley B. Grant, originally theorized that the plume was heading to shore, but then he changed his view after research concluded that urban run-off was the culprit. His American Chemical Society studies released last week provide extensive backup to his revised opinion.

"Surprise, surprise," said Mark Leyes, the Garden Grove councilman who had joined Eckenrode and 10 other board members in opposing the costly new treatment plan. "It was always more about politics than science. The stars aligned to bring that about. A very vocal group was impressive in its continual pressure to the board and letters to the editor."

The cost for full secondary treatment? Anderson pins the number at about $271 million plus an additional $10 million a year to operate the new system, once it is in place in about a decade. Eckenrode said the actual vote authorizes $400 million in costs, and argues the final cost 10 years from now will be over $500 million.

Last summer, the OCSD board voted in favor of a 15 percent annual rate hike on sewer bills for the next five years to pay for $2 billion worth of infrastructure improvements, a substantial portion of which is related to the secondary treatment proposal.

Soon, ratepayers might be looking at a push to increase rates to pay for the real and necessary solution to the beach-closing problem: measures to divert urban run-off into water treatment facilities. Anderson agrees that another proposed rate hike is possible, but pins the run-off clean-up costs at about $30 million. Eckenrode, who is still on the board but is no longer the chairman, believes that to fix the run-off problem correctly, the county will have to pay at least $100 million.

He said he would like to have a new vote on secondary treatment, but predicts he would not even get a second on any motion to reopen this old debate.

It is too late to revisit the issue now. The waiver, for instance, cannot be reinstated, according to the OCSD staff. And we're on to other things. Anderson is right that the county needs to move forward to deal with urban run-off, especially given the latest evidence.

But I'm left shaking my head at the fact that Orange County residents will pay several hundred million dollars for a system that is, by most measures, unnecessary. Of course, it is necessary to make the county's "environmental community" feel better about themselves and their beaches. In this nutty day and age, that probably makes it worth the cost.