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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 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 |
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