Respectfully submitted by Lawrence Rafferty (rafflaw)-Guest Blogger
It seems that you can’t go anywhere on the Internet and not read an attack on the EPA by a Republican member of Congress. The Hill; McClatchey Unfortunately, I was not surprised how many of the Republican Congressmen were attacking the EPA and its attempts to control and eliminate air pollution. However, I was surprised by how many of those Congressmen were physicians.
“What would you think if your physician told you, “Keep smoking because quitting would kill tobacco and health care jobs.” Or, “Don’t take your high blood pressure medicine, you can’t afford it.” And, “Don’t lose weight, no one has proven obesity is bad for you.” That’s exactly the quality of medical advice we are getting from the 18 Republican physicians currently serving in Congress. Some of the most well known are the father and son team of Rep. Ron Paul and Sen. Rand Paul, and Sen. Tom Coburn. Almost all of these physician/Congressmen have been key soldiers in the Republican war on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), calling it a “job killer,” pronouncing relevant health science “unproven,” claiming we “can’t afford” their regulations.” Truthout
The “unproven” science that claims that air pollution is deadly comes from over 2,000 medical studies is significant in its numbers and content. “In the last ten years, over 2,000 scientific studies published in the mainstream medical literature have revealed that air pollution has much of the same physiologic and disease consequence as first- and second-hand cigarette smoke.(1, 2) Those studies show that just as there is no safe number of cigarettes a person can smoke, there is no safe level of air pollution a person can breathe. Even pollution at “background” levels still causes health consequences, including increased mortality rates.(3, 4)” Dr. Brian Moench
Dr. Moench’s Truthout article provides a plethora of citations to studies that confirm the need for and importance of taking the steps that the EPA has outlined in its August, 2010 report titled, “The Benefits and Costs of the Clean Air Act, 1990-2020”. EPA I guess some people can deny the science behind the studies and the EPA report. We have seen the climate change deniers put ear plugs in their ears when legitimate and voluminous studies are presented. Maybe I am naive, but I cannot understand how medical doctors can claim that we can’t afford the regulations needed to save lives of adults and children.
Over 1,800 medical doctors, nurses and health care professionals signed a letter to Congress imploring the Congressional members to honor the original intent of the Clean Air Act and allow science to trump politics by implementing the needed regulations to save lives. “The result is saved lives and improved quality of life for millions of Americans. But the job is not finished. Communities across the nation still suffer from poor air quality. Low income families face the impacts of toxic air pollution every day. From smog causing asthma attacks to toxic mercury harming children’s neurological development, far too many people face a constant threat from the air they breathe and the impacts of climate change. Please fulfill the promise of clean, healthy air for all Americans to breathe. Support full implementation of the Clean Air Act and resist any efforts to weaken, delay or block progress toward a healthier future for all Americans.” Lung.org
As someone who has Asthma, this fight to allow for the full implementation of the Clean Air Act has special meaning. I can only hope that Congress, including the Doctors who are in Congress will hear the call to do whatever is necessary to save lives. Politics should never get in the way of common sense and achievable changes and improvements in the air that we breathe.
Do you believe in the science behind the Clean Air Act and if not, where is the science to refute the claims of over 2,000 studies from all over the globe? Is there any health issue that can trump the vitriolic politics of our time? As quoted above, the original Clean Air Act and its amendments enjoyed bipartisan support. Why can’t that same bipartisan support be found for the full implementation of the Clean Air Act knowing it will save lives and create jobs? How many more must die or suffer before political gain is put aside?
Trying to silence me again? So soon after your oh so eloquent back peddling too.
rafflaw 1, March 11, 2012 at 5:50 pm
Elaine and AY,
I welcome Bdaman’s comments . I was merely trying to steer him to the issue at hand.
rafflaw 1, March 11, 2012 at 6:03 pm
I understand Bdaman, but we are talking air pollution that cause health issues in this thread.
Your reading comprehension is not so good for someone who is smarter than the 99 percent.
Also, Bdaman, let me remind you that you were the one trying to silence me just now before you realized you’d just crapped and stepped in it and issued your hasty addendum.
Oh really.
I guess the water and the ground aren’t part of the environment that the Environmental Protection Agency is supposed to protect then, is it?
Don’t let the fact that the hydrological cycle is intimately related to the atmosphere stop you from denying it either.
Nothing stops you from denying facts once you’re on a roll.
Also Gene, let me remind you that you are free to say whatever you like and I’m free to respond however I like. That is unless there something or someone compelling your actions. Those are factors under your control. How I respond to your pablum isn’t under your control.
If you’ve got a problem with that, it is entirely your problem and please don’t you forget it.
Gene H. 1, March 13, 2012 at 4:35 am
Farming communities facing crisis over nitrate pollution, study says
Gene we are talking about the air not the ground.
From Raffs post
“I was not surprised how many of the Republican Congressmen were attacking the EPA and its attempts to control and eliminate air pollution.”
Please try and stay on topic and not derail the thread to something you would like to talk about. As a guest poster why don’t you make it one of your topics instead. Hold your head up instead of looking down.
Worth repeating
China is predicted to build 2,200 new coal-fired electric plants by 2030.
Atmospheric CO2 is just over 390ppm. Expert James Hansen says that 350ppm is the safe zone. Safe from what I don’t know. It’s not hurricanes, tornado’s, droughts, flood’s, earthquakes. tsunamis and what ever else they claim that bad CO2 causes because all of the above was worse when it was below 350ppm.
The point is atmospheric CO2 will continue to rise unabated and will soon be above 400ppm. Well above the so called safe zone that James, the expert climate scientist, who also says he’s trying to protect his grand kids Hansen says is the safe zone. What a crock and you people buy that shit.
Raff I appreciate the love and care that only a grandpa can give. I hope that when they become parents they don’t have to show pictures of you in the dark. All that clean air you want from them will be heading their way via China.
China, on the other hand, has emerged as a leader in developing clean, renewable energy, but its demand for coal is still staggering, and growing, and China is predicted to build 2,200 new coal-fired electric plants by 2030.
Coal companies, already boosting exports through Vancouver, British Columbia, are increasingly viewing China and other overseas markets as an answer to cooling domestic demand. While coal exports are still relatively small””about 41 million tons in 2009″”they are climbing fast according to data compiled by the Energy Information Administration. Through the first nine months of 2010, the United States exported nearly 61 million tons. Exports to Asia during the first three quarters of 2010 were three and a half times total 2009 exports; China’s imports from the United States rose by more than 10 and a half times in the same period.
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/04/14/207890/export-coal-china/?mobile=nc
Should we really be encouraging the export of American coal to China?
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/04/14/207890/export-coal-china/?mobile=nc
On a visit to Wyoming on March 22, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced that his department will sell four large coal leases to Antelope Coal LLC; Caballo Coal Company, an affiliate of Peabody Energy; and Alpha Coal West. It is expected that those leases would over 15 years provide the companies with 758 million tons of coal from the Powder River Basin. Interior will also decide this year on whether to advance proposed leases on another 1.6 billion tons of coal.
Why increase mining and production at the same time domestic coal demand is expected to slow? For export, of course. “We’re opening the door to a new era of U.S. exports from the nation’s largest and most productive coal region to the world’s best market for coal,” noted Peabody Energy Chairman and Chief Executive Gregory Boyce in a February statement. How much of that coal may eventually be exported is anybody’s guess. But the simple reality is that coal is on the decline in the United States amid an accelerating transition to natural gas and the prospect of full carbon dioxide emissions regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Or maybe . . . they changed the name of the same phenomena so chowderheads wouldn’t run around saying “Well it’s not warmer here now!” or “It’s not colder here now!” as if that was actual evidence of the effect of the increased heat load in the entire atmosphere. Unstable weather of increasing frequency and severity before a radical climate shift has always been the danger if you actually understood the problem of AGW in the first place. Since you haven’t, well, that’s kind of a moot point, but as a matter of precision the term “climate disruption” is considerably more precise than “global warming” in conveying the essence of the problem to the layman and those who are scientifically ignorant by choice.
D.S.
“I’d like to refer you to China, which is a centrally planned economy, yet a huge polluter, so which is it you endorse? Buy products from China which rampantly pollutes, so you don’t have to have it here. Which completely stifles the real economy here so you can have a nice place to live. So central planning or free market? You can’t have both.”
NICE !!!!!!
The United States has one of the Worlds cleanest air standards. This is all a ploy by the communist now in charge of the country to do all it can to help communist China. Think about it. They open new coal fired energy plants every week and we shut ours down. No need for coal in the U.S. so ship it to China. XL Pipeline, we don’t need no oil from Canada. We will just ask the Saudi’s and Brazil to increase production. Send that oil to China.
Remember these people are experts.
In a book Holdren co-authored in 1977, the man now firmly in control of science policy in this country wrote that:
• Women could be forced to abort their pregnancies, whether they wanted to or not;
• The population at large could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into the nation’s drinking water or in food;
• Single mothers and teen mothers should have their babies seized from them against their will and given away to other couples to raise;
• People who “contribute to social deterioration” (i.e. undesirables) “can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility” — in other words, be compelled to have abortions or be sterilized.
• A transnational “Planetary Regime” should assume control of the global economy and also dictate the most intimate details of Americans’ lives — using an armed international police force.
http://zombietime.com/john_holdren/
As reminder Obama’s Science Czar and expert John Holdren warned us about global cooling in the 70’s. He and Paul Ehrlich wrote a book. I know O.S. is familliar with his work because he asked me have I ever read his book. These loonie tunes suggested some really radical ideas. Even though they don’t believe in god they want to act as a god by controlling the population.
Overpopulation was an early concern and interest. In a 1969 article, Holdren and co-author Paul R. Ehrlich argued, “if the population control measures are not initiated immediately, and effectively, all the technology man can bring to bear will not fend off the misery to come.”[21] In 1973, Holdren encouraged a decline in fertility to well below replacement in the United States, because “210 million now is too many and 280 million in 2040 is likely to be much too many.”[22] In 1977, Paul R. Ehrlich, Anne H. Ehrlich, and Holdren co-authored the textbook Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment; they discussed the possible role of a wide variety of solutions to overpopulation, from voluntary family planning to enforced population controls, including forced sterilization for women after they gave birth to a designated number of children, and discussed “the use of milder methods of influencing family size preferences” such as access to birth control and abortion.[12][23] [24]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Holdren
The climate has always changed. No one disputes that. And the reason they stopped calling it global warming was because there wasn’t any that could be proven linked to mankind or unnatural, so they couldn’t sell their deceptions with the old scare tactic moniker “global warming”.
It has changed yet again, it’s call Climate Disruption
President Obama’s Science Czar John Holdren is worried about global warming. Having noticed that there hasn’t actually been any global warming since 1998, he feels it ought to be called “global climate disruption” instead. That way whether it gets warmer or colder, wetter or drier, less climatically eventful or more climatically eventful, the result will be the same: it can all be put down to “global climate disruption.”
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100054012/global-warming-is-dead-long-live-er-global-climate-disruption/
Farming communities facing crisis over nitrate pollution, study says
“The agricultural industry, however, has maintained that it is not solely responsible because nitrates come from many sources. While the report focused on California, nitrates in groundwater is a problem that plagues farming communities around the U.S.
But, according to the UC Davis report, 96 percent of nitrate contamination comes from agriculture, while only 4 percent can be traced to water treatment plants, septic systems, food processing, landscaping and other sources.”
Yeah. The market has jumped right on denying, er, fixing that problem.
oh and thank you Lawrence for a thought provoking post.
I think Al Gores presentation was flawed and counterproductive in many ways. That said Global Warming and pollution scares me more than a nuclear Iran. I read somewhere that a huge referendum was passed on global pollution control. Anyone remember what it was? It made me very happy.
DS,
You may not like the fact that Greenspan was a Randian devotee, but you can’t make up your own reality. Or maybe you can.
That Greenspan was a dishonest political huckster does not change the fact that he was an avowed Objectivist and proponent of laissez-faire capitalism.
“What do you call what we have now?”
Formerly regulated capitalism being perverted into political corporatism and eventually fascism.
And what raff said. If you can’t even get recent history right, why should I take your reading suggestions seriously? Not that I take anything Hayek says anymore seriously than I take what von Mises said seriously – which is to say not at all. Also, I wouldn’t suggest that I read anything by Rothbard either. As to “who I subscribe to”, I’m not much of a follower. I do agree with Krugman on a fair bit, but not everything, although certainly more than I agree with Friedman who begat Bernake. Bernake who I think should probably be working at Pottery Barn instead of given any position of influence or in prison for his role in bailing out AIG which as an act of straight out fascism. Bernake may talk like a Friedman monetarist but he walks like a fascist. The principles of Keynes work fine as long as they are not distorted by corporatism interfering with the regulatory function of government. We had 40 plus years practicing Keynesian economics. The day Keynes failed is the day campaign contribution limits were stripped from FECA and the day he died was the day the SCOTUS handed down Citizens United. But that prosperity you so praise from our past is a direct result of Keynesian economics just as much as the current debacle that is our economy is a direct result of the Austrian School practices as implemented by people like Greenspan as aided and abetted by a sold out Congress bought by corporate graft disguised as “campaign contributions”. Keynes is even regaining popularity in the wake of the current disaster. But the Austrian School is coming under more and more critical scrutiny for their role in the global economic crisis. One proven waxes while one proven wanes. An intelligent person might ask themselves why that is and a smart person would look into it, but a true believer will simply double down when his beliefs are challenged by reality. Especially when those beliefs weren’t based in reality to start with. Unless that reality is simply to feed the greedy and the sociopaths. Because in reality, that’s all the Austrian School does – encourage unfettered greed and sociopathic behavior, neither of which are beneficial to society.