EPA headquarters in Washington, DC |
Barely a
week goes by these days without hearing of some new demand by the Environmental
Protection Agency that borders on the insane.
Increasingly,
EPA regulations are being challenged and now reach the Supreme Court for a
final judgment. This marks the failure of Congress to exercise any real
oversight and control of an agency that everyone agrees is now totally out of
control.
Recently
the EPA ruled that New York City had to replace 1,300 fire hydrants because of
their lead content. The ruling was based on the Drinking Water Act passed by
Congress in 2011. As Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY) pointed out while
lambasting the agency, “I don’t know a single New Yorker who goes out to their
fire hydrants every morning, turns it on, and brushes their teeth using the
water from these hydrants. It makes no sense whatsoever.” Reportedly, the
Senate is poised to consider legislation exempting fire hydrants if the EPA
does not revise its ruling.
The EPA is
not about making sense. It is about over-interpreting laws passed by Congress
in ways that now continually lead to cases before the Supreme Court. The Court is composed of
lawyers, not scientists. In an earlier case, they ruled that carbon dioxide
(CO2) is a “pollutant” when it is the one gas that all vegetation requires.
Without it, nothing grows and all life on Earth dies.
A federal
appeals court recently heard a case about the EPA’s interpretation of the 2012
Mercury and Air Toxics Rule, yet another effort in the “war on coal” that would
shut down more coal-fired plants that provide the bulk of the electricity the
nation requires.
The EPA is
asserting that the rule would annually prevent 11,000 premature deaths, nearly
5,000 heart attacks, and 130,000 asthma attacks. Moreover it asserts that it
would help avoid more than 540,000 missed work days, and protect babies and
children. These statistics are plucked from various studies published in journals and are typical of
the way the EPA operates to justify its rulings. Their accuracy is dubious.
What makes
this case, brought by EarthJustice--formerly the Sierra Club Legal Defense
Fund--of interest is the way the NAACP, along with 17 other organizations, came
to the defense of the ruling. Are you surprised that the NAACP has a director
of Environmental and Climate Justice?
Apparently civil rights for
Afro-Americans now embraces the absurd claims about climate change, formerly
known as global warming. “Civil rights are about equal access to protections
afforded by law,” said Jacqui Patterson, the NAACP director. “These standards
provide essential safeguards for communities who are now suffering from decades
of toxic exposure.” If these essential safeguards are in place, on what basis
does she make such a claim?
The
EarthJustice attorney, Jim Pew, claims the case is about protecting “hundreds
of thousands of babies each year from development disorders, and spare
communities of 130,000 asthma attacks each year. If, in a lawsuit, you find
yourself arguing against the lives of babies, children with asthma, and people
suffering from your toxic dumping, then you are on the wrong side of both the
lawsuit and history..”
Here,
again, the claims about health-related harm are absurd. Who believes that
asthma or development disorders are related to mercury? Who believes that
communities served by coal-fired power plants are subject to major health
hazards?
The claims
about mercury are baseless, in a 2011 commentary published in The Wall Street Journal, Dr. Willie Soon, a geoscientist at Harvard and expert on mercury and
public health issues was joined by Paul Driesson, a senior policy advisor for
the Committee For a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), rebuts the claims about
mercury that have been part of the environmental lies put forth for years.
“There is
no factual basis for these assertions. To build its case against mercury, the
EPA systematically ignored evidence and clinical studies that contradict its
regulatory agenda, which is the punish hydrocarbon use.”
“Mercury
has always existed naturally in the Earth’s environment…Mercury is found in air,
water, rocks, soil and tries, which absorb it from the environment. This is why
our bodies evolved with proteins and antioxidants that help protect us from
this and other potential contaminants.”
Dr. Soon and
Driessen do not deny that coal-burning power plants emit an estimated 41-to-48
tons of mercury per year, “but U.S. forest fires emit at least 44 tons per
year; cremation of human remains discharges 26 tons, Chinese power plants eject
400 tons; and volcanoes, subsea vents, geysers, and other sources spew out
9,000-10,000 additional tons per year.”
“Since our
power plants account for less than 0.5% of all the mercury in the air we
breathe, eliminating every milligram of it will do nothing about the other
99.5% in our atmosphere.”
Such FACTS
mean nothing to the EPA. The air and the water of the United States is
remarkably clean, but to justify its existence and expand its power, the EPA
continues to impose idiotic and unscientific rules about fire hydrants and
power plants.
The threat
is the EPA, not mercury.
© Alan
Caruba, 2013
1 comment:
I recall a post on WUWT that correlated plants that emitted mercury and downwind and local contamination. There was no connection. It was called ....
Found it: http://wattsupwiththat.com/author/weschenbach/page/9/ "Mercury, the Trickster God.
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