Imagine what big business and the free market would be trying to get away with if there was no EPA.
EPA may drop lead air pollution limits
By JOHN HEILPRIN, Associated Press Writer Wed Dec 6, 9:20 PM ET
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration is considering doing away with health standards that cut lead from gasoline, widely regarded as one of the nation's biggest clean-air accomplishments.
Battery makers, lead smelters, refiners all have lobbied the administration to do away with the Clean Air Act limits.
A preliminary staff review released by the
Environmental Protection Agency this week acknowledged the possibility of dropping the health standards for lead air pollution. The agency says revoking those standards might be justified "given the significantly changed circumstances since lead was listed in 1976" as an air pollutant.
The EPA says concentrations of lead in the air have dropped more than 90 percent in the past 2 1/2 decades.
But Rep. Henry Waxman (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., the incoming chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform, called on the agency to "renounce this dangerous proposal immediately," because lead, a highly toxic element, can cause severe nerve damage, especially in children.
"This deregulatory effort cannot be defended," Waxman wrote EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson.
Soon after lead was listed as an air pollutant 30 years ago, the Carter administration began removing lead from gasoline. Other big sources of lead in the atmosphere are from solid waste, coal, oil, iron and steel production, lead smelters and tobacco smoke.
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EPA may drop lead air pollution limits
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Doug
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Re: EPA may drop lead air pollution limits
Don't you know the free market will take care of us? Of course, maybe a few thousand people will have to die first...Darrel wrote:Imagine what big business and the free market would be trying to get away with if there was no EPA.
DOUGWASHINGTON - The Bush administration is considering doing away with health standards that cut lead from gasoline, widely regarded as one of the nation's biggest clean-air accomplishments.
Battery makers, lead smelters, refiners all have lobbied the administration to do away with the Clean Air Act limits.
Hogeye cheers. Big business, which puts profits over people's lives, cheers. People who think the world is overcrowded, cheer.
People who want a decent environment, moan.
"We could have done something important Max. We could have fought child abuse or Republicans!" --Oona Hart (played by Victoria Foyt), in the 1995 movie "Last Summer in the Hamptons."
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Barbara Fitzpatrick
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But it will make Poppy's friends, the one's who always bail W out when he screws up, happy.
Darrel - Better make that millions rather than thousands. With a national population of 300 million and a world population of 6 billion (and counting), a few thousand, or even several thousand, people dead isn't going to force market changes.
Of course, since this stuff most directly effects children and is largely neural and brain damage, by the time the market got around to moving we'd have a whole generation physically unable to care. Think we have problems now? Think about a whole generation mentally and neurologically damaged. Should they manage to have healthy children, a doubtful proposition in itself, those children will have to be raised by their more stable grandparents - or adoptive parents of their grandparents generation. I love market regulation, don't you? (NOT!)
Darrel - Better make that millions rather than thousands. With a national population of 300 million and a world population of 6 billion (and counting), a few thousand, or even several thousand, people dead isn't going to force market changes.
Of course, since this stuff most directly effects children and is largely neural and brain damage, by the time the market got around to moving we'd have a whole generation physically unable to care. Think we have problems now? Think about a whole generation mentally and neurologically damaged. Should they manage to have healthy children, a doubtful proposition in itself, those children will have to be raised by their more stable grandparents - or adoptive parents of their grandparents generation. I love market regulation, don't you? (NOT!)
Barbara Fitzpatrick
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Dardedar
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Industry, free-market, has no problem with poisoning the kiddies:
Revolt Over New Federal Mercury Law
By Mark Clayton
The Christian Science Monitor
Thursday 07 December 2006
The state-led push could weaken the EPA's emissions-trading system, which is popular with industry.
Facing a mandate to slash toxic mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants, 23 states are thumbing their noses at a federal cleanup plan and are instead developing their own far tougher plans to deal with mercury.
But doing so has caused many of them to miss a federal Nov. 17 deadline to submit their plans to the Environmental Protection Agency. Now, the EPA is ratcheting up the pressure. This week, the agency is expected to publish names of more than 20 states that could have the federal plan imposed on them if they don't submit tougher plans by next spring.
What it all adds up to is a major state-led rebellion over mercury emissions that dwarfs, for example, an 11-state push to create regional greenhouse-gas reduction programs without federal support. If successful, the revolt could weaken a key element of the federal mercury rules: an emissions-trading system popular with the utility industry and already in place for air pollutants like nitrogen oxides.
"What we're seeing is a critical mass of states restricting trading in such a way that it really imposes a significant impact on EPA's national trading program," says S. William Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, a Washington trade group representing state and local air-quality agencies. "States are sending a strong message that mercury emissions trading is not, and should not be, a centerpiece of any federal mercury- control program."
[snip]
"We just felt that we could and should do more than EPA was asking on mercury," says Dean Van Orden, chief of the air information division of Pennsylvania's air-quality bureau. "We think it's significant so many other states are doing the same thing, including coal-producing states."
Pennsylvania's plan would cut mercury emissions 80 percent by 2010 in a first phase and 90 percent by 2015. By contrast, CAMR cuts 21 percent of mercury nationwide by 2010 and 70 percent by 2018. With costs of mercury-control technology falling sharply, tougher regulations were the right thing to do, some state officials say.
Pennsylvania and others are also not participating in emissions trading. While "cap and trade" systems worked for sulfur dioxide and other pollutants, many states argue that mercury is different because it is a toxin rather than a mere pollutant. Already, more than 3,200 health advisories warning of mercury contamination in fish from streams and lakes have been issued in 48 states.
And because mercury particles can begin dropping out of the air just a few miles from where they're emitted, state officials worry the trading system might create new mercury "hot spots" within their borders.
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Revolt Over New Federal Mercury Law
By Mark Clayton
The Christian Science Monitor
Thursday 07 December 2006
The state-led push could weaken the EPA's emissions-trading system, which is popular with industry.
Facing a mandate to slash toxic mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants, 23 states are thumbing their noses at a federal cleanup plan and are instead developing their own far tougher plans to deal with mercury.
But doing so has caused many of them to miss a federal Nov. 17 deadline to submit their plans to the Environmental Protection Agency. Now, the EPA is ratcheting up the pressure. This week, the agency is expected to publish names of more than 20 states that could have the federal plan imposed on them if they don't submit tougher plans by next spring.
What it all adds up to is a major state-led rebellion over mercury emissions that dwarfs, for example, an 11-state push to create regional greenhouse-gas reduction programs without federal support. If successful, the revolt could weaken a key element of the federal mercury rules: an emissions-trading system popular with the utility industry and already in place for air pollutants like nitrogen oxides.
"What we're seeing is a critical mass of states restricting trading in such a way that it really imposes a significant impact on EPA's national trading program," says S. William Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, a Washington trade group representing state and local air-quality agencies. "States are sending a strong message that mercury emissions trading is not, and should not be, a centerpiece of any federal mercury- control program."
[snip]
"We just felt that we could and should do more than EPA was asking on mercury," says Dean Van Orden, chief of the air information division of Pennsylvania's air-quality bureau. "We think it's significant so many other states are doing the same thing, including coal-producing states."
Pennsylvania's plan would cut mercury emissions 80 percent by 2010 in a first phase and 90 percent by 2015. By contrast, CAMR cuts 21 percent of mercury nationwide by 2010 and 70 percent by 2018. With costs of mercury-control technology falling sharply, tougher regulations were the right thing to do, some state officials say.
Pennsylvania and others are also not participating in emissions trading. While "cap and trade" systems worked for sulfur dioxide and other pollutants, many states argue that mercury is different because it is a toxin rather than a mere pollutant. Already, more than 3,200 health advisories warning of mercury contamination in fish from streams and lakes have been issued in 48 states.
And because mercury particles can begin dropping out of the air just a few miles from where they're emitted, state officials worry the trading system might create new mercury "hot spots" within their borders.
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Barbara Fitzpatrick
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I'm all for the fed regs being the base - states can make them stronger, just not weaker - for just about everything. Actually, I've emailed the EPA (as part of one or more of them many enviro groups I'm a member of) about not doing cap & trade on mercury. Stuff too toxic - it's a neurotoxin and its worst effects are on fetuses and babies. Cap & trade is great for other things (incl CO2), especially if the cap is lowered incrementally over a course of years to the target. (Start with something do-able with minor changes and work into the stuff that will take capital improvements - allows a phase-in of upgrades.) But not for mercury (or any other neurotoxin).
Barbara Fitzpatrick