If the Bush administration has its way, some factories won’t have to report all the pollution spewed from their smokestacks, making it harder for government scientists to calculate the health risks of the air Americans breathe.
The Environmental Protection Agency, responding to an AP analysis that found broad inequities in the racial and economic status of those who breathe the nation’s most unhealthy air, says total annual emissions of 188 regulated air toxins have declined 36 percent in the past 15 years.
But the EPA wants to ease some of the Clean Air Act regulations that have contributed to those results and proposes to exempt some companies from having to tell the government about what it considers to be small releases of toxic pollutants. The EPA also plans to ask Congress for permission to require the accounting every other year instead of annually.
The agency said in September it wants to reduce its “regulatory burden” on companies by allowing some to use a “short form” when they report their pollution to the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory.
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In the Ohio River Valley along the Ohio-West Virginia border, factories annually send into the air hundreds of thousands of pounds of manganese dust, a heavy metal that can harm the brain and nervous system.
Biologist Dick Wittberg, who heads the mid-Ohio Valley Health Department, has been pressing for years for a full-blown government study to determine if those releases are harming the children in his hometown of Marietta, Ohio.
Several years ago, Wittberg took part in a study that compared Marietta children with those in a similar-sized Ohio town on academic and physical tests. The Marietta kids fared significantly worse.
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The settlement involves EPA action taken against Dupont for allegedly withholding information about the potential health and environmental risks posed by perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, under provisions of both the Toxic Substances Control Act and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act.
The EPA alleged that DuPont withheld information for more than 20 years about the health effects of PFOA, also known as C-8, and about the pollution of water supplies near the company’s Washington Works plant near Parkersburg, W.Va.
Among other things, the EPA said that DuPont withheld test results indicating that the chemical had been found in at least one pregnant worker from the Washington Works plant and had been passed on to her fetus.
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WOW!!! A WaPo writer that is actually willing to be a little critical of his employer!
Reporting that President Bush steered clear of the White House’s own Conference on Aging yesterday — making him the first president ever to do so — fell to the regional newspapers and NPR, not the big guys.
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From what I can tell, there’s not a word about Bush’s no-show — or anything about the conference at all — in The Washington Post[my emphasis], the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, or even on the Associated Press or Reuters wires.
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Since I earlier wrote rather disparaging about the writing qualities of WaPo writers, I figure that I ought to give praise when praise is due. So read and enjoy.
The new “King Kong” answers many important questions:
Can a girl outrun a dinosaur? (Yes.)
Can a tommy gun kill a prehistoric spider? (Yes.)
Can a blonde and a monkey find true, if chaste, love at the top of the Empire State Building? (Yes.)
Can three hours feel like 90 minutes? (Yes.)
Can Jack Black act? (No.)
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Conservative Christians Say Fighting Cuts in Poverty Programs Is Not a Priority
This just goes to show you just how hypocritical they are…
That is a great relief to Republican leaders, who have dismissed the burgeoning protests as the work of liberals. But it raises the question: Why in recent years have conservative Christians asserted their influence on efforts to relieve Third World debt, AIDS in Africa, strife in Sudan and international sex trafficking — but remained on the sidelines while liberal Christians protest domestic spending cuts?
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The only reason that Nancy Floreen opposes it is because her backers in the development industry don’t consider it a threat…
In a unanimous vote, council members said closing the stations could increase traffic in Montgomery’s northern tier at a time when the population is increasing. If the two stations are closed, riders would have to board the train at the nearby Barnesville and Germantown stops.
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The Republican dominated Ohio House has passed an election reform bill that, in the words of Peg Rosenfield, election specialist with the League of Women Voters of Ohio, is “a voter suppression bill.” According to Rosenfield; “This bill has so many bad things in it that I don’t know where to start.”
HB3’s most publicized provision will require positive identification before casting a vote. But it also opens voter registration activists to partisan prosecution, exempts electronic voting machines from public scrutiny, quintuples the cost of citizen-requested statewide recounts and makes it illegal to challenge a presidential vote count or, indeed, any federal election result in Ohio. In addition, the recently passed HB1 allows campaign financing to be dominated by the wealthy and by corporations.
In the 2005 election, virtually all remaining Ohio counties were switched to Diebold touch screen machines. The results of that election showed discrepancies that made 2004 look tame.
Despite polls showing overwhelming voter approval, two electoral reform issues went down improbable defeat. Issue Two, meant to make voting easier, and Issue Three, on campaign finance reform, were shown by highly reliable Columbus Dispatch polls to be passing handily.
The Dispatch was within 0.5% on Issue One, a bond issue, and has rarely been significantly wrong in its many decades of Ohio polling. Even opponents of Issues Two and Three conceded that they were highly likely to pass.
On the Sunday before the Tuesday 2005 election, the Dispatch predicted Issue Two would pass by a vote of 59% to 33%, with about 8% undecided. But Tuesday’s official vote count showed Issue Two failing with just 36.5% in favor and 63.5% opposed. For that to have happened, the Dispatch had to have been wrong on Issue Two’s support by more than 20 points. Nearly half those who said they would support Issue Two would have had to vote against it, along with all the undecideds.
The numbers on Issue Three are equally startling. The Dispatch showed it winning with 61%, to just 25% opposed and some 14% undecided. Instead just 33% of the votes were counted in its favor, with 67% opposed, an almost inconceivable weekend turnaround.
No other numbers were comparable on November 8, 2005, or elsewhere in the recent history of Dispatch polling. The startling outcome has thus raised even more suspicion and doubt about the use of electronic voting and tabulating machines in Ohio, which account for virtually 100% of the state’s vote count.
Democracy may be over in the state of Ohio.
Richard Rainwater has made more than $2 billion by looking for economic “blowups” then investing at the bottom of the market. In the mid-90s, when there was panic selling in Houston real estate, Rainwater bought up 15 million square feet and tripled his investment when the market recovered.
Lately, Rainwater has been reading everything he can get his hands on about peak oil. While he sees another enormous moneymaking opportunity coming, this one “is the first scenerio I’ve seen where I question the survivability of mankind.” He doesn’t necessarily believe the gloomiest of the prophets but he can’t discount them either.
We’ve got a lot of things going on simultaneously. The world as we know it is unwinding with respect to Social Security, pensions, Medicare. We’re going to have dramatically increased taxes in the U.S. I believe we’re going into a world where there’s going to be more hostility. More people are going to be asking, ‘Why did God do this to us?’ Whatever God they worship. Alfred Sloan said it a long time ago at General Motors, that we’re giving these things during good times. What happens in bad times? We’re going to have to take them back, and then everybody will riot.’ And he’s right.
Rainwater says he is going to open a “for profit survivability center,” and no one around him knows if he’s joking or not. “I just want people to look out,” says Rainwater, “‘Cause it could be bad.”