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20-09-2004, 01:21 AM

In article ,
(paghat) wrote:

In article , "mulroys"
wrote:

Hey Doug,

Why didn't Clintler do anything about all that mercury?

Our pinhead Bushleaguer president squashed Bill Clinton's ten-year mercury
clean-up plan. The plan was not nearly strong enough, it is true, because
it already incorporated cave-ins to the Republican-dominated Congress that
would not permit clean-up to actually begin. But at least Clinton did get
mercury placed on the list of hazardous air pollutants. This
categorization, without the Republican interference, meant that power
plants & boiier-using, coal-burning, & waste-incinerating industries would
be forced to have scrubbers able to remove mercury that was then (and alas
still is) expelled directly into the atmosphere.

Almost as soon as the Bush administration came in, they removed it form
the list of Hazardous Air Pollutants, so that industry can continue to
release tons & tons & tons of the stuff into the atmosphere. In a
statement policy with no status as law, the Bush administration recommends
mercury-polluting industries do something about in fifteen years, which
year-count can begin in 2005.

Because the Republican Congress then Bush personally effectively kept the
half-reasonable Clinton plan from being put into effect, the Bush spin
today is that the Bush administration is the FIRST to ever have the EPA
enforce mercury air pollution restrictions. The reality of what the EPA
has been instructed to oversee is, unsurprisingly, quite the opposite of
Bush's claims:

Bush replaced Clinton's ten-year plan with an alternate "cap and trade"
policy that permitted various polluting industries to trade pollution
quotas: for example, an industry spewing arsenic can continue to do so if
it can trade its unused mercury quota to a mercury-spewing plant. Bush
claims this method will eventually reduce mercury pollution by half, or
even more than half, but as spin goes, that's a pretty pathetic lie. If
the Bush policy remains, the issue won't even be revisited for 15 years, &
in the meantime polluters will be trading in quotas to keep from reducing
any emissions at all. By comparison, 1991 EPA documents show that they
expected to reduce mercury air emmissions by 90% by 1908

heh heh, by 2008.

if the Clinton
plan could have been put into effect. The Bush plan insures 0% lowering of
emissions by permitting pollutors to trade pollution quotas.

Republicans continuously declared the Clinton plan too expensive,
technnically difficult without new clean-up science, & harmful to the
profits of the affected industries, & the ten-year count-down never
started. Yet the issue remains important to many grass-roots &
environmental movements with some powerhouse legal angles still in play,
so Bush made fake concessions in the "cap and trade policy" which is a
complete scam that effectively cancelled out any need to reduce emissions
for another fifteen years.

Even Clinton's plan was far from sufficient, but it was a start. Bush's
fakery over the issue insures nothing will be done. Not until we have far
fewer Republicans controlling these issues, & a very different kind of
president.

In the meantime, a small amount of mercury clean-up is occuring because of
reigional municipality regulations; but federal cut-backs & diminishing
tax base has not permitted even these small regionally limited hopes of
improvement to be enforced. Also on the good side, the Bush administration
has no big-business interests in altering the Clean Water Act (mercury
clean-up portion in the 1972 Federal Water Pollution Control Act
Amendments), so Bush has not reversed that part of the protection, though
industry interests in dumping arsenic directly into water did convince him
to reverse that water pollution protection. The relative effectiveness of
the Clean Water Act is also why Clinton focused his attention on mercury
as a hazardous air pollutant, one of the largest remaining areas that has
been allowed to keep polluting. The Clinton proposals would also have
hugely reduced nitrous oxide emissions (which form smog); the Bush fake
regulations put the kabosh on that too, so it's up to local municipalities
to pass their own laws if any are to exist; federally, it's open season on
polluting the atmosphere.

As for changing this with the upcoming election, Kerry's record is
wishywashy in most categories, but on health & environment he scores
fairly well. In most issues Kerry's mediocre to lousy & Bush's charge of
flipflops is alas accurate, except where the environment is concerned,
Kerry has an excellent legislative record on that, contrasting to Bush
whose policies have been downright monstrous & destructive. So in this one
area, Kerry is a strongly viable candidate for public & environmental
health. It will doubtless still be an uphill struggle with Republicans
dominating a congress & not budging until abortion is a capital crime
punishable as murder, queers are constitutionally denied equal rights, all
Jews & Moslems in the public school system are forced to pray to Jesus &
taught that evolution is a theory but God is a fact, industries on whose
boards they'll again serve when they leave office have a freehand to lay
waste to the planet while paying no taxes, & everyone's library card
registers in the Homefront office what you're checking out to read.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
Visit the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com