President Barack Hussein Obama, on January 10, 2012, made a speech to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) personnel praising their efforts. Obama said that EPA regulations are good for the economy and create jobs and that the agency “touches” the lives of every American every day. He actually said that! Obama told EPA employees, “We can make sure that we are doing right by our environment and, in fact, putting people back to work all across America.”
Really? Well, here are some (but certainly not all) EPA regulations and what the EPA is doing:
- Biofuels – the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) was enacted in 2007 with the goal of reducing America’s dependence on foreign oil. Fuel companies, by 2011, were to be blending in 6.6 million gallons of cellulosic biofuel into domestic gasoline and diesel. But there is one small problem with EISA: biofuel technology has not caught up to EPA requirements. Cellulosic biofuels only exist in small amounts as various research companies desperately try to come up with a way to produce the biofuel which doesn’t require massive government subsidies. But did that one little problem stop the EPA? To quote the late John Belushi, “Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.” With no economically viable supply of cellulosic biofuel to be had, the fuel companies were unable to comply with EISA requirements. The EPA is planing to impose fines on the fuel companies for failing to meet EISA guidelines.
- Energy Production – EPA administrator Lisa Jackson said, ” “We have no data right now that lead us to believe one way or the other that there needs to be specific federal regulation of the fracking process.” [emphasis mine] But did that little fact stop the EPA from pursuing its agenda? Noooooooooooooooooooooooo. While charging fracking drillers with contaminating groundwater, the EPA suppressed information about the fact that well water in Pavillion, WY, had been “contaminated” with polluting chemical never used in fracking. The EPA issued a draft report in early December, 2011, alleging that fracking may have been responsible for drinking-water pollution in Pavillion, WY, thus causing a “chilling” effect on the development on a source of domestic energy. This practice of issuing draft reports before scientific analysis has been completed is a violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, and a corporation is a citizen. Once a company’s reputation has been damaged as a result of false or incomplete reports receiving extensive national media coverage, that company and its investors have suffered irreparable harm.
- Mercury Elimination – While the EPA recently issued new regulations to reduce mercury emitted be electric power plants (that will increase electricity prices), it chooses to ignore three inconvenient facts:
- EPA studies indicate that power plants emit an estimated 41-48 tons of mercury per year. Yet volcanoes, subsea vents, geysers, and other sources emit 9,000-10,000 tons per year! US power plants account for less than 0.5 percent of all the mercury in the air Americans breathe. The EPA demands that utility companies spend billions every year retrofitting coal-fired power plants that produce half of all US electricity.
- The EPA based its “safe for humans” mercury criteria on a study of Faroe Islands inhabitants, whose diet is quite different from our own. They eat few fruits and vegetables, but do eat pilot whale meat and blubber that is laced with mercury. Their diet is very low in selenium, a natural defense against mercury.
- the EPA is actively downplaying mercury’s health risks when it comes from broken compact fluorescent lights (CFLs) inside homes. In a pamphlet extolling the virtues of CFLs, the EPA says it’s a “myth” that the mercury used in compact fluorescent lights is “dangerous in your home.”
To be “fair and balanced,” I have to cite the ONE regulation that Obama overruled: he directed the EPA to withdraw the proposed regulation to reduce concentrations of ground-level ozone.
So Obama praises the efforts of the EPA. Can we then safely assume that he favors EPA regulations and we will see more of them? After all, for the most part, the EPA has been his lap dog and does his bidding.
But that’s just my opinion.
That ozone pullback was a direct effect of having Bill Daley on Obama’s staff.
(Not worded well. Reminded me how Obama misses Reggie Love.)
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But Obama actually said this:
Yeah, right.
Zombie, over at PJMedia goes on to note:
Yup.
Obama has added a new category of job to America’s tradtional two.
There was the “productive job,” involving the creation of new things: manufacturing, inventing, designing, building, extracting raw materials, and so on.
There was the “supportive job,” involving preserving a pleasant and safe civilizational environment: policing, service jobs, cleaning, health care, and so forth.
And now, there is Obama’s addition: the “destructive job,” involving a monumental waste of effort that only results in a redistributive move of wealth from the taxpaying to the non-taxpaying.
The final step will be when algore is made czar of all things earth.
there is no doubt that the EPA under agenda driven bureaucrats with ultimate power to do as they want, with no check or balance are the most dangerous things for the destruction of America’s way of life. While most federal agency’s should be shut down and their power given back to the states, the EPA needs to be run by a congressional comittee coupled with the added strength of every state AG becoming a voting member of such comittee and veto power of things which affect their states.
Just a word with regard to mercury. Comparison between power plants and volcanoes are odious. We aren’t talking about mercury diluted by the entire atmosphere, over the entire planet, we are talking about people living in close proximity to power plants, being exposed to harmful levels. I would imagine that there are not a few conservatives who live immediately downwind of power plants who are not opposed to the EPA’s efforts.
I also think that most Americans would not respond positively to assurances that they don’t need to worry so much about mercury poisoning, because we have higher selenium in our diets to offer some protection. I rather think that most Americans would much rather see mercury emissions minimized as opposed to worrying about whether or not they are having the right balance of selenium (a toxin in its own right, above certain levels) to mercury in their bodies.
It would be interesting to see the GOP make closing the EPA part of their platform. Vote for the Grand Old Party — the Party of Pollution. Let’s see how well that plays.
– Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach CA
That’s a simple statement of fact.
Human beings are actually paid to design equipment and processes that deal effectively with the many detrimental by-products of large scale industrial and agricultural activities. They’re also paid to manufacture, install, and maintain such equipment, to perform the ongoing work required by those processes, and to monitor the results in order to protect the environment and the public.
This isn’t just beneficial, it’s essential. Nor can you trust people who are totally fixated on their profit margins to take care of it. Unless, of course, you’re totally out of touch with reality.
Creating jobs? Ask the farmers and (former) farm workers in devastated central California about that.
@openid.aol.com/runnswim: Where is the data, Larry? What is the extent of the real problem? How much extra mercury do people actually ingest as a function of proximity to power plants? Without a study, for all you know the relationship could be inverse, or there might no significant correlation at all. And you are also dismissing the selenium issue out of hand.
@Greg: The key here, Greg, is this phrase in your quote: “common-sense rules to reduce air pollution.” The entire pushback against this is based on the considered opinion that there is a lack of common sense on display. The EPA has been notably slipshod and dishonest in creating scientific reports that form the supposed basis for their opinions.
If mercury levels in humans are not significantly affected by power plant emissions, then there is no argument in favor of the stringent new rules. And in fact, people die when electric power is less available and less reliable.
Note that officially, the EPA pooh-poohs the issue of mercury in the compact fluorescent bulbs they are pushing and this is pure politics. A broken fluorescent lamp will put a lot more mercury into your personal local environment than a power plant up the road will.
The regulatory scientific establishment rejects the idea of a threshold below which a toxin is not a problem. A “linear model” that assumes no safe dose is generally used, and it is in fact probably wrong.
http://het.sagepub.com/content/27/2/163.short
This error dates back to the work of Nobel Prize winner, who as it turns out, may have engaged in a little scientific fraud. Besides – people like linear models – they are easy to use, even if they give the wrong answer.
http://junkscience.com/2011/09/20/shocker-nobel-prize-winner-lied-about-radiation-danger-data-suppression-abetted-rise-of-linear-no-threshold-model/
The original work was done on radiation, but the same model has been widely extended to modeling of toxins such as mercury and DDT.
http://spectator.org/archives/2005/02/25/ddt-fraud-and-tragedy
@Wm T Sherman:, #8:
That’s a big if. The problem, I think, is that mercury is easily absorbed into the body via the respiratory system. Coal-fired power plants emit mercury directly into the atmosphere, and are responsible for around 1/2 of the mercury entering the atmosphere yearly. (The other 1/2 being natural from natural sources: primarily, volcanic activity.) Mercury is far more dangerous to infants and children than to adults. Neurotoxicity exists at very low levels. It might not kill them, or produce dramatic symptom, but it can retard neurological and intellectual development.
Mercury is present at levels considered to be unsafe in the fish found in 15% of all U.S. lakes, streams, and rivers.
When we’re dealing with a demonstrably dangerous neurotoxin, I think the burden of proving some level entirely safe for infants and children should be on those who wish to lessen controls over it. At one time such a position might have been described as a conservative one.
@Greg: Coal-fired power plants are not responsible for half of all mercury emissions. All human emissions combined, into land air and water, are 40% of total mercury emissions. Coal-fired powerplants are a fraction of that, and U.S. coal-fired powerplants are a fraction of all coal-fired powerplants.
Safe levels of mercury in fish are not settled and the very low EPA limits are a fraction of those recommended by other government agencies such as the FDA.
This “proof of zero risk” idea is a variation on the “precuationary principle” used to justify radical reductions in carbon dioxide output. It is a logical absurdity — everything is a tradeoff between risk and benefit. Discouraging women from eating fish during pregnancy is potentially harmful to fetal brain development. If a radically low mercury exposure level is sought it may do actually do more harm than good.
The draconian new mercury rules appear to be another example of poiliticized science in the mold of the carbon dioxide controls — bad science to justify an expansion of government power.
Recall that this stinker came to everybody’s attention initially when the EPA gave the state of Texas an impossible 6 months to retrofit power plants, meaning either shutting down six major plants or defying the government. It appeared to single out Texas for a punitive action. Looked political, in other words.
Only straw men argue that people who oppose closing many coal-powered electric plants are for getting rid of the EPA’s standards completely.
The EPA wants to replace incandescents with compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs).
They are a poor replacemnt for many reasons:
They brighten slowly,
function poorly with dimmer knobs,
and emit light that many find unappealing.
Even worse, according to EnergyStar.gov, each CFL contains 4 milligrams of toxic mercury.
Given the Environmental Protection Agency’s “maximum contaminant level” of 0.002 milligrams per liter, an average CFL contains enough mercury to pollute 528 gallons of water — more than sufficient to fill ten typical 50-gallon residential water heaters.
As the EPA warns, “High exposures to inorganic mercury may result in damage to the gastrointestinal tract, the nervous system, and the kidneys.”
Breaking a CFL triggers a significant health hazard that requires a ten-step clean-up.
http://www.epa.gov/cfl/cflcleanup-detailed.html
Among other things, the EPA recommends “opening a window or door to the outdoor environment.” No problem . . . unless you occupy an apartment, hotel room, or office with sealed windows.
Most modern skyscrapers lack operable windows.
The same is true for many Capitol Hill offices.
Some buildings have windows that open but 3 months of the year it is WINTER.
Myron Ebell, director of Freedom Action, a pro-market grassroots organization:
“They [environmentalists] do object to minute amounts of mercury in airborne emissions from coal-fired power plants.
The minute amounts of mercury in the air have trouble getting into anyone’s vital organs.
[Which is why the EPA recommends opening your windows if you break a CFL.]
However, the mercury from breaking a CFL bulb inside your home could end up inside you.
I think the environmentalists are being very inconsistent.”
The new EPA logo:
http://i979.photobucket.com/albums/ae277/RAPH6969/OBUMMER/07-1.jpg
THEY want every thing to stop because it upset their EPA rules, so no jobs possible for any one, and the busyness are on stop mode until election, hope he is defeated quickly, so thing can start to move. everything is in a lethargic mode also, people are so down they don’t want to move, all depress, that’s what they want, it make it easier to control,, the crowd, look at airport screening, people are bent on it now, don’t want to fight anything, that is playing in the BIG BROTHER RULES,
WHAT IF OBAMA DECIDE NEXT TO STAY IN POWER FOREVER, CANCEL THE ELECTION BY
EXECUTIVE ORDER, WHAT IS ANYBODY CAN DO BESIDE TALKING ABOUT IT?, HE ALREADY decide to move orders without CONGRESS, WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN NOW,
ARREST HIM? AND WHO WILL. FBI OR MILITARY POWER TAKING OVER, THE WHITE HOUSE AND PUT ALL ON ARREST CHARGES, ELIMINATE THE POWER OF THE PRESIDENT,
IS THAT POSSIBLE TO HAPPEN?
SOME ONE BETTER PREPARE THE POSSIBLE SCENARIO, BECAUSE OBAMA IS ON A RAMPAGE,
@Greg:
Yeah, so let’s put mercury in out light bulbs and ban the light bulbs that have no mercury. “Common sense solutions,” to be sure.
@openid.aol.com/runnswim:
All the good the EPA could do is lost by extreme left wing rhetoric and scare tactics. It has been proven over and over here and on other blogs that conservatives are much more environmentally friendly that liberals. Look at the before and after shots of any conservative rally and then look at the same for a liberal rally, (I don’t think we need to even mention the OWS camps).
“We need to have cleaner air and water, but you are not allowed to build a new, cleaner refinery or power plant.” Barney Frank stopped the building of an LNG plant in Mass. LNG is the cleanest form of efficient energy production outside of nuclear.
But it may not matter any longer anyway. As I posted in another thread, the answer may be just a few years away.
http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/sensors/PhySen/docs/LENR_at_GRC_2011.pdf
http://coldfusion3.com/blog/nasa-publicly-reveals-lenr-research
@Aqua, #15:
There’s a much ignored trade off involved that actually makes very good sense. The greater efficiency of compact fluorescent lights result in much less coal being burned to produce electricity, with a corresponding reduction in atmospheric mercury emissions–not to mention CO2, soot, and acid rain pollutants. The cost of those benefits is a small amount of mercury that’s confined within a glass container that most often remains unbroken–an amount per unit that’s considerably less than what is commonly present in the large fluorescent tubes we’ve been using for decades.
A person can take reasonable precautions to avoid mercury exposure if a CFL is accidentally broken. It’s hard to take similar precautions with the air you routinely breathe.
Talk about trade offs, Greg, there is little reason to a pathetic mandate on lightbulbs, that add mercury when they came up with boiler modifications back in 2005 that cut the mercury emitted by 70%. Considering that the Bush EPA mandated reductions of 23 percent by 2010 and 69 percent by 2018, I’d say that the modifications, and the new design clean coal plants pretty much eliminate this CFL nonsense and *no* mercury needs to be expensively recycled (that takes energy too, ya know), and none in the landfill.
This is plain BS, and Congress needs to be reined in on this nanny nonsense. Obama needs to allow natural gas fields to be exploited, and clean coal to go ahead. Screw the light bulbs… heh
@Greg: Oh, now you want to talk about tradeoffs and risk vs. benefit all of a sudden. Now you want to talk about whether the exposure is significant, rather than insist on zero.
By the way – the amount of mercury per bulb is smaller with CFLs compared to tubes, but the amount per lumen is about the same. Same amount of light = same amount of mercury.
In general, I have minimal confidence that any large corporate industry will base its decisions on anything other than its own profit margins. Given the way that CEO compensation is determined, I have little confidence that even those decisions will be based on long-term considerations. That being the case, in general, I don’t trust them to pay adequate attention to the environment or to the best interests of the public. One of any modern government’s necessary functions is to regulate their activities in the public interest. There’s no other entity big enough or powerful enough to do it.
I guess some people don’t realize the in-you-home, in-your-bedroom, in-your-bathroom, in-your kitchen, in-your-backyard aspects of the EPA.
Several members of the Supreme Court criticized the Environmental Protection Agency on Monday for heavy-handed enforcement of rules affecting homeowners after the government told an Idaho couple they can’t challenge an order declaring their future home site a “protected wetlands.”
Justice Antonin Scalia assailed the “high-handedness” of the environmental agency when dealing with private property, and Justice Samuel Alito described some of the EPA’s actions as “outrageous,” arguing that most people would say “this kind of thing can’t happen in the United States.”
The couple, who attended the Supreme Court arguments, said they had no reason to suspect there were wetlands on their property.
Three EPA officials showed up, said they believed the land was wetlands.
Major business groups, homebuilders, road builders and agricultural interests all have joined the Sacketts in urging the court to make it easier to contest EPA compliance orders issued under several environmental laws.
Alito leveled some of the strongest criticism against the EPA, noting that the Sacketts had to wait until the EPA sued them to even challenge the idea that there were wetlands on their property.
“You think maybe there is a little drainage problem in part of your lot, so you start to build the house and then you get an order from the EPA which says: ‘You have filled in wetlands, so you can’t build your house; remove the fill, put in all kinds of plants; and now you have to let us on your premises whenever we want to,’” Alito said. “You have to turn over to us all sorts of documents, and for every day that you don’t do all this you are accumulating a fine of $37,000 a day. And by the way, there is no way you can go to court to challenge our determination that this is a wetlands until such time as we choose to sue you.”
Chief Justice John Roberts said that because of the potential fines, few people are going to challenge the EPA’s determinations. Roberts said. “All EPA has to do is make whatever finding it wants, and realize that in 99 percent of the cases, it’s never going to be put to the test.”
Various wetlands experts disagree as to whether the land is or is not a wetlands.
Nan G
hi,
this is outrageous indeed, they are suppose to be there to help AMERICANS, and instead they are threatening them, like the JUDGE MENTIONED , AND INCREDIBLE BEING DONE IN AMERICA,
THEY SHOULD BE ABOLISH COMPLETELY, how many did they terrorize and abuse which did not find a way to fight them,
the EPA use the power of GOVERNMENT IN POWER TO ACT LIKE THE BULLY OF THIS AMERICA, THAT IS COMING FROM OBAMA HIMSELF FOR SURE, BECAUSE NO OTHER PRESIDENT WOULD ALLOW THAT AGENCY TO EXIST AS IT IS,
RICK PERRY FOR PRESIDENT WILL TAKE CARE OF THEM.
BYE
@Greg: You don’t automatically trust in the good intentions of corporations. Good. That’s why we have laws.
And yet you have confidence in the good intentions of a far larger, more powerful, and protected organization, the government. You want to dispose of all those pesky inefficient Constitutional checks and balances just like your owner Obama does.