Gore: Polluters like big tobacco

By GottaLaff

Hal Sparks made an interesting point on the Radio Machine a few days ago: If we frame the global warming issue as a polluting issue, there could be a broader understanding and eventually, a willingness to accept the dire consequences of the abuses to Mother Earth.

In other words, the naysayers who deny the existence of man-made climate change might be more amenable to accepting responsibility for polluting our environment, and be more inclined to understand that concept.

Former Vice President Al Gore, citing tobacco industry campaigns of years past, told CBS that disinformation from industrial polluters has made achieving political agreement on climate change more difficult.

“Some of the largest carbon polluters have been vigorous and try to convince people — as the tobacco industry did years ago on the link between smoking cigarettes and lung disease — that there really isn’t a link between global warming pollution and global warming,” Gore said in an interview broadcast Thursday on CBS’s “The Early Show.”

People pollute. Industries pollute. And now their words pollute.

There is no denying that pollution dirties up our air, our water, and as a result, our bodies. It is universally accepted that this is a bad thing, despite how one feels (or believes) about the somehow hard-to-grasp concept of global warming.

By reframing the arguments, and by comparing polluters to the tobacco industry, Hal Sparks and Al Gore may be on to a thing or two.

VIDEO: Coal ash from U.S. blamed for Dominican town's birth defects

By GottaLaff

This is excruciating to watch, but it's a must:

Villagers in the Dominican Republic say coal waste from a U.S. power plant has caused birth defects. [...]

It has been six years since a contractor from Delray Beach, Fla., brought the black dusty residue to the province of Samaná, and three years since the ash was cleaned up. Several civil lawsuits and criminal cases later, just when everyone thought it was over, the other shoe has dropped.

A civil lawsuit filed Wednesday in Delaware charges that toxic levels of waste dumped at the Arroyo Barril port has made people nearby sick. After years of repeated miscarriages, women whose blood levels show abnormal levels of arsenic are giving birth to babies with cranial deformities, with organs outside their bodies or missing limbs.

The case highlights the debate over coal ash, an unregulated byproduct of coal energy, which when processed and recycled is used in everything from cement to the foundation for golf courses. Popular Mechanics magazine this month calls a concrete made from coal ash one of the "10 Most Brilliant Products of 2009.''

The ash, a concentrated form of naturally occurring contaminants, is what is left over from burning coal for power. It usually contains arsenic, lead, cadmium, chromium and nickel. But as towns in Tennessee and Maryland clean up massive spills of the substance, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is poised to rule on whether it should be classified as hazardous -- which would be a tremendous blow to influential power companies that have long lobbied against such a classification.

Much more here.

"Clean" coal, my ash.

Controversial Bush-Era EPA E-mail Released

By GottaLaff

The Bush Stains. They never seem to get eradicated.

Today's lesson, kiddies? If you never open an e-mail, it ceases to exist:

A controversial e-mail message buried by the Bush administration because of its conclusions on global warming surfaced Tuesday, nearly two years after it was first sent to the White House and never opened.

This was a very special e-mail. It had a document, a 28 page one, attached.

You see, the EPA says that back in 2007, they figured out that several gases, six to be exact, were linked to global warming. And guess what? All six were toxic and came from cars and gasoline and were not good things for us to breathe in. The EPA wanted to ::dun dun dun-n-n!:: regulate them.

But BushCo poo-pooed that. Clean air? Pfft. Regulation? Getoutahere! Global warming? Ha!

As a result, the Dec. 5 e-mail sent by the agency to Susan Dudley, who headed the regulatory division at the Office of Management and Budget was never opened, according to Jason Burnett, the former EPA official that wrote it.

See? If you do this, it doesn't exist:

Poof! Out of sight, out of (their) mind.

More here.

VIDEO- Inhofe: Oil And Gas Usage Doesn’t Create Any Pollution

By GottaLaff



::Cough!:: Oh wow, excuse me, I live in the L.A. area and the pollution here is just ::wheeze!:: awful! There are so many cars out here ::hack!:: and I've always been told that they are a major source of my ::wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeze!:: pulmonary issues, but Inhofe says otherwise:

This afternoon, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) took to the Senate floor and basically made a pitch for the oil and gas industry. He said that to ensure “energy security,” the United States should increasingly “extract our own resources.” According to Inhofe, this solution would not only achieve energy independence, but it would also be pollution-free [...]

Inhofe is an anti-science senator who thinks that global warming is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

Gee, I'm not a smoker, so that's sure not the cause of my ::hack! wheeze!:: lung irritation.

Hmmm. I guess I need to do more research. It's embarrassing how wrong I've been all these ::cough! hack! wheeze!:: years.

By the way, what's up with all this crazy weather? It couldn't be due to all that pollution, could it? Nah...

House passes the American Clean Energy and Security Act

Kagro's got the goods.

In a squeaker, the House passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act, by a vote of 219-212, with one super-courageous Dem voting no at the very last possible minute, just for fun!

44 Dems voted against the bill, and 8 Republicans crossed the aisle in support.

Where the Senate takes this, no one yet knows. Then, in all likelihood, conference. So there's a long road ahead yet, with plenty of opportunity for the bill to turn in either direction (though we know what direction the Senate usually turns).

Another BushCo cover-up: High lead levels in D.C.

By GottaLaff

BushCo does it again. Concerns about putting people's lives and health at risk? Meh. To BushCo, it was simply one more opportunity to play Chicken with the justice system, regulatory measures, and America's well-being:

An investigation by Rebecca Renner of Salon has revealed that the Center for Disease Control(CDC) had withheld evidence of dangerously high levels [of lead]. An influential CDC report released in 2004 (and since cited by officials in Seattle to calm nervous parents) downplayed the role that chloramination played in the D.C. lead crisis, saying that it "might have contributed a small increase in blood lead levels." However, according to Renner, "the results of thousands of blood tests that measured lead contamination in children were missing from the report, potentially skewing the findings and undermining public health. Further, the CDC discovered in 2007 that many young children living in D.C. homes with lead pipes were poisoned by drinking water and suffered ill effects. Parents wondered whether the water could have caused speech and balance problems, difficulty with learning, and hyperactivity. Yet the health agency did not publicize the new findings or alert public health authorities in D.C. or other federal agencies that regulate lead, such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency or Housing and Urban Development." [...]

The parents of young twins, who believe lead exposure caused developmental problems with their children, filed a $200m lawsuit in February.

Let's say it one more time, in unison: Oversight.

Seems like old times, though, doesn't it? M-m-m, nothing like reminiscing to make you really.... sick.

The full Salon article can be found here.

The ugly Bush stain: Hazardous waste edition

By GottaLaff

Hey kids! Time for your daily dose of sewage! Here's the latest from our Excrement in Chief:

The Environmental Protection Agency issued a new regulation yesterday exempting an estimated 118,500 tons of hazardous waste annually from strict federal incineration controls, and it separately exempted factory farms from a requirement to report hazardous air pollution to the federal government.

Gee, this isn't stressful at all. Deeeeep breath. ::cough! hack! wheeze!:: Never mind.

It allows companies that create hazardous chemical wastes in industrial processes to burn them as fuel in their own incinerators, instead of paying highly regulated incineration firms to destroy them.

Well now, that's forward-thinking. I hope Jenna and Not-Jenna's future kids appreciate the gifts from Grandpa George.

But Ben Dunham, associate legislative counsel for the nonprofit advocacy group Earthjustice, said that "everything about this rulemaking was flawed," including "the logic that says, 'If you can burn it, it's not a hazardous waste.' " He said it would allow firms with poor environmental records "to simply throw their hazardous waste in the company boiler" and burn it without strict monitoring, sometimes in populated areas.

Mmmm, there's nothing like the smell of smoldering toxic waste in the morning.

The ugly Bush stain: Endangered Species Act edition

By GottaLaff

I guess using Shout didn't work on this one yet. What passes for New Rules are nothing more than toxic tailpipe emissions billowing from multiple Bush orifices, including the hole in his tiny little head:

The Bush administration on Thursday eliminated 35-year-old regulations in the Endangered Species Act that required an independent scientific review of proposed federal projects to determine whether they imperil protected plants and animals.

Instead, federal agencies undertaking projects like road and power plant construction or oil and gas drilling will make their own assessment. Without the independent reviews, such projects could be accelerated.

As part of the changes announced by Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne in the final days of the Bush administration, the department finalized an interim rule that allows oil and gas drilling in polar bear habitat off Alaska's coast. The rule change is designed to prevent the Endangered Species Act from being used to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, essentially making climate change policy. [...]

H. Dale Hall, director of Fish and Wildlife, said he had concerns about how fast the estimated 235,000 public comments were processed. Staff assigned to the job spent eight hours a day tabulating the comments. Working under strict time restraints, agency employees had nine seconds to read each letter, according to one calculation.

Officials said that more than 200,000 of the comments opposed the rule change. [...]

President-elect Barack Obama said he would reverse the rule changes, as have some members of Congress. But that requires a lengthy rule-making process. In the House, members can invoke the rarely used Congressional Review Act to overturn the regulations.

I'm sure Also Palin is thrilled. She was never a big fan of polar bears.

The ugly Bush stain, eradicated: Coal and power plant edition

By GottaLaff

Got a stain? Shout it out!

The Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday abandoned its push to revise two air pollution rules in ways that environmentalists had long opposed, abruptly dropping measures that the Bush administration had spent years preparing.

One proposal would have made it easier to build a coal-fired power plant, refinery or factory near a national park.

The other would have altered the rules that govern when power plants must install antipollution devices. Environmentalists said it would have resulted in fewer such cleanups.

EPA officials had been trying to complete both before President-elect Barack Obama is sworn in Jan. 20. But an agency spokesman said Wednesday they were giving up, surprising critics and supporters.

Shout!

The ugly Bush stain: Fishing industry edition

By GottaLaff

Bush's latest New Rule smells worse than dead fish:

Sen. Ted Stevens may be leaving a final holiday gift behind for one of his most loyal constituencies: the Alaska commercial fishing industry. Using loopholes in the Magnuson-Stevens Act, the outgoing Bush administration is looking to allow fishery management councils, dominated by fishing interests, to determine whether new policies would harm the environment.

I'd have used the "something's fishy" line, but this isn't funny.

A bipartisan alliance of more than 75 lawmakers and dozens of interest groups are protesting the proposed rule change, saying it lessens protections that keep U.S. fisheries from harming the environment. [...]

The Joint Ocean Commission, Greenpeace and other environmental groups say that up until now, the environmental law has helped protect endangered sea turtles and rebuild shrinking fish populations.

But Bush’s proposed changes would significantly weaken those protections, they say, by allowing the interest-group-heavy councils to be in charge of the environmental compliance.

Currently, the commerce secretary has the final say on proposed fishery management activities. But the National Marine Fisheries Service is responsible for ensuring the environmental reviews are done properly and the councils provide recommendations.

This proposed rule would instead allow the councils to ensure the review is done fairly.

“It doesn’t take much to decide how the fishing industry is going to review their own fishing activities and decide whether they’re environmentally friendly,” said Lee Crockett, fisheries policy director for the Pew Environment Group. “They’ll do a full NEPA analysis and then promote alternatives that they want to do.”

Environmentalists argue that this could weaken the environmental regulatory process in the Interior Department and other agencies.

For instance, greens say it would allow special interests to decide whether fishing-related activity would threaten wildlife protected under the Endangered Species Act.

The only thing Bush wants to keep alive is profit.

The ugly Bush stain: Watchdog group's List of Bush Failures edition

By GottaLaff

This list is of Bush failures is astounding, but not unexpected. Here's the background:

The most comprehensive guide to these and other Bush administration failures is a new list compiled by the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), a non-profit investigative journalism group which recently "set out to document just how off-track things have gone," assigning thirteen reporters to document the worst failures of the last eight years.

Working from government investigations, news stories, and suggestions from experts and government employees, the team compiled a list of 250 failures, which it then narrowed down to just 128 "that attracted bipartisan criticism and had major impacts on the lives of ordinary Americans."

The results of the investigation, which are summarized at CPI's PaperTrail blog and presented in full at its Broken Government project, are stunning in their scope even for those who have been following the scandals of the last eight years.

Here's the list, in part. No amount of scouring, scrubbing, detoxifying, or sanitizing can compensate for the following:

• 730,000 backlogged patent applications
• 760,000 Social Security disability claims
• 806,000 Veterans Affairs disability claims
• A recurrence of recent losses of hundreds of laptops containing sensitive law enforcement information
• The decision to keep plowing $12.5 billion into a joint civilian-military weather satellite system that is still incomplete and may leave gaps in crucial climate monitoring as older satellites fail
• $300 billion over budget for Defense Department weapons acquisitions
• $100 billion lost every year to corporate offshore tax shelters
• Faulty National Security Administration computer system, which carries a price tag of $4 billion
• The complete failure of a $100 million attempt to create a new system of internal information-sharing for the FBI in the wake of 9/11
• The record $9.91 billion spent on government secrecy in 2007
• The dismissal of all but 17 out of the 1273 whistleblower complaints filed from 2002 to 2008
• Pollution that causes 20,000 deaths a year
• Pollution that puts 60,000 newborns at risk of neurological problems
• A two-thirds dropoff in the cleanup of toxic waste sites
• 2.5 million toxic toys recalled in the summer of 2007

This isn't a stain, it's a cancer.

The ugly Bush Stain: Water toxin edition

By GottaLaff

The toxic stain known as BushCo cares nothing about Americans. Nothing:

Among the Bush administration's final environmental legacies will be a decision to exempt perchlorate, a known toxin found at unsafe levels in the drinking water of millions of Americans, from federal regulation. [...] It could take years to reverse.

Anila Jacobs at the nonprofit Environmental Working Group:

"We know that breast milk is widely contaminated with perchlorate, and we know that young children are especially vulnerable."

Nice, huh? Can't get more pro-life than that.

The ruling is one of dozens planned for the final days of the Bush administration. Others include a relaxing of air pollution standards for aging power plants, and a reduction of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's traditional role in evaluating the impact of federal projects on endangered species. [...]

It is known to lower thyroid hormone levels in women; it poses a particular threat to pregnant women and breast-feeding children, whose long-term neurological development can be stunted by youthful hormone imbalances.

Bush is the human equivalent of the most virulent malignancy imaginable. Between wars and environmental destruction, he has done more to threaten and/or end lives than Al Qaeda and Big Bad WMD-wielding Saddam Hussein put together.

Nursing mothers of infants everywhere are thanking you, W. Take a freaking bow.

H/t: Chris

The ugly Bush stain: Comprehensive list edition

By GottaLaff

I've been posting about the malodorous BushCo's intentional, last-minute ambush, using an onslaught of New Rules as their most recent, desperate weapon against their own "homeland" (let's lose that word forever, please). The residual effects will leave a stubborn stain on this country, but hopefully, not an indelible one. However, some of the stench emanating from this bunch of thugs may be harder to eradicate than we think.

Here's a partial list, via Huffington Post:

• EPA would not regulate a contaminant in drinking water (Kool-Aid from our government to us)
• Mining permits near Grand Canyon and other national parks (blasts from the past)
• Gut the Endangered Species Act (the hell with biodiversity or consideration for creation's creatures. Shoot 'em.)
• Power plants could be exempted from installing pollution controls, allowing an added 70 million tons to be released into our air (what's a little cough among friends and who needs to see anyway?)
• EPA narrows the definition of solid waste (now there is a regulation to savor)
• Less reporting on animal pollution proposed
• Rules for dumping mine debris erased
• EPA lowers air quality standards for lead
• Fisheries rule calls for less public input (the czars had a way with public input, too.)
• Loaded guns possible in National Parks( not if the Park rangers have anything to say about it)
• Public lands may be leased for the development of oil shale (public, not to be confused with proprietary)
• Interior Department rules could limit public environmental comments (so much for the First Amendment)
• EPA lets factory farms decide if they need a permit to discharge animal waste into waterways (or large concentrations of dung dumped into our rivers and streams) [...]

It is hard to imagine the state of mind in our officials that produces this kind of malice. [...]

There are remedies. One, of course, is the will of the new administration to override this treachery and destructiveness. The other is the Congressional Review Act. Items published in the Federal Register before Nov 21st take effect 60 days from that date.
House and Senate leadership has already stipulated that they will use the Review Act in a similar way that a Bush administration action used it to undo a Clinton regulation in 2001. Reversal probably cannot take place without scrupulous effort, but we should all encourage the new administration and Congress to do everything they can to defeat these ruinous regulations. [...]

To write midnight regulations that sabotage human health is to see Charles Dickens scribing away by candlelight, as one of his most rapacious and vile villains rises from the candle flame and defiles humanity and its landscape.

Sanitizing sewage of this magnitude won't be easy. Thank you, BushCo, for relieving yourselves publicly all over a country that has tried to maintain some sense of cleanliness, beauty, and pride, despite your relentless maneuvers. You've done your level best to vulgarize it.

We will now unite to collectively scrub America clean until it sparkles again.

H/t: Chris

Sarah Louise Palin doesn't care about my state

By GottaLaff

Hands off, Caribou Barbie, this state is green-friendly. Sarah Louise Palin is doing what she can to influence Arnold Schwarzenegger and my state's effort to fight pollution. Here's an idea, Sarah: Get your oil-soaked moose nose out of our business:

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican candidate for vice president, has urged Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to veto a fee on cargo containers going through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, setting off a wave of criticism from California environmentalists. [...]

Though the issue might otherwise be viewed as a relatively parochial port matter, Palin's newfound status as a national political figure has raised the stakes in what state environmentalists consider to be their most important pollution reduction effort this year. They say Palin has no business getting involved in the California issue.

"Why should Gov. Schwarzenegger take into account what out-of-state interests are saying?" said Lisa Warshaw, a spokeswoman for the Coalition for Clean Air. "It's unfortunate that she is using her popularity to push her agenda on this state."

The bill's author, state Sen. Alan Lowenthal (D-Long Beach), said Palin appears not to appreciate how important the proposal is for the health of Californians.

"She certainly displays a lack of understanding," Lowenthal said. [...]

Schwarzenegger has not yet responded to Palin's letter, nor has he made a decision about whether to sign or veto the legislation, said spokeswoman Rachel Cameron.
[...]

"We are losing about 3,400 Californians each year because of pollution," Lowenthal said. "No matter what Gov. Palin would like to see happen, the impact is killing Californians. I don't think Gov. Palin truly understands the impacts going on here."

John Casey, a spokesman for Lowenthal, added: "Maybe Sarah Palin doesn't care about Californians."

Palin's office in Juneau did not return calls late Thursday seeking comment.

This tells me at least two things: One, Sarah Palin has once again demonstrated her lack of interest or knowledge of the impact of pollution; and Two, her new-found political ascendancy is already going to her head. Add to that, she is tone-deaf and too inexperienced to have made such a brazen request without realizing the repercussions.

I could go on. Maybe you'd like to.

Your turn.

"Black is the new green"

By GottaLaff

Black is green. Up is down. Dirty is clean. Bush is Gore.

Speaking to USA Today, Gregory Boyce, CEO of Peabody, the world’s largest coal company, “shrugged off any worries” about coal’s enormous greenhouse gas emissions or moves to make energy more environmentally friendly, declaring the U.S. would never move away from coal [...]

“There’s a perception out there that coal is dirty, and we have to change that,” he adds, noting that coal plants already have cut emissions of some pollutants and boosted efficiency to slash CO2 discharges. “Black is the new green.“

Though Peabody is swimming in green — with profits soaring so far this year to $290 million — it’s a lie to suggest coal is somehow clean. Burning coal “adds a significant amount of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere per unit of heat energy, more than does the combustion of other fossil fuels.” What’s more, though Boyce boasts of a $9 million investment into “clean coal” technology, he fails to note that the coal industry’s largest front group has vowed to pour $40 million into efforts to block climate change and alternative energy legislation.

And guess who contributed to Newt Gingrich's American Solutions for Winning the Future, the 527 corporation promoting the "Drill Here, Drill Now" campaign? Right.

The humiliation of George W. Bush

By GottaLaff

I meant to post this earlier today, but forgot, probably because I couldn't bear to think about it:

George W. Bush ended his time at the G8 summit, the last that he will attend as U.S. presidency, with the following statement.

Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter.

What a card. What a freaking laugh riot. Wow, poking fun at the very preventable cause of illness, destruction, and death. Why, that's almost as funny as when he made this joke about his failure to find WMD.

According to the Telegraph reporting,

He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.

It is impressive that, after all these years of idiocy and bad policy making, that George W Bush is able to shock me as well.

And, it wasn't only national leaders who were in shock:

One official who witnessed the extraordinary scene said afterwards: "Everyone was very surprised that he was making a joke about America's record on pollution."

Nothing surprises me about that contemptible excuse for a human being any more. Check that: He's beneath contempt.