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Pollution
Suffocation!
By:
Matthew Preira
As the economy steadily plummets,
the Bush Administration has already begun working on a new way to
make the lives of the American public even more awful. Yes, yes…it's
true…there's still something left for Bush II and all his father's
old friends to screw up.
It's called the Clear Skies
Initiative. With a name like the Clear Skies Initiative,
you would never have any idea of the damage to both the health of
the American people and the environment the Bush Administration is
proposing in the name of big business. The Clear Skies Initiative
was proposed to amend the Clean Air Act, the primary federal
law governing air quality. According to the Natural Resources Defense
Council, the Clear Skies Initiative would reset the restrictions
of toxic air pollutants, allowing three times more toxic mercury emissions,
50 percent more sulfur emissions, and hundreds of thousands more tons
of smog-forming nitrogen oxides. Relaxing environmental restrictions
placed on modernizing power plants, refineries, and factories has
been the first step taken to cut the costs of industries while significantly
polluting our air.
At the end of August, The Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) ruled that plants updating their equipment
are exempt from taking the measures to install antipollution controls.
The new law is a major step backwards from the pro-public interest
"Clean Air Act," when put in place will set strict rules
and regulations regarding harmful emissions (one of which requiring
factories to install antipollution technology whenever going through
a period of upgrade).
Under the "special-interest
friendly" (READ: for the benefit of wealthy corporations who
want to blacken your lungs) "Clear Skies" Initiative, environmental
restrictions will be slashed left and right.
Mercury is a highly harmful element,
which can cause neurological problems and retardation for young children
and fetuses of pregnant mothers. In 2002, the EPA listed two million
acres of lakes and the entire Florida coastline under mercury
fish consumption advisories. The advisories warned residents to limit
the fish they eat if they are caught locally. What does the Bush
Administration want to do about this? Increase the amount of
Mercury emitted into our air times five!
The Bush Administration's Clear
Skies Initiative will more than double soot-forming sulfur emissions
from power plants, regardless of studies showing these types of emissions
take years off lives by weakening the hearts and lungs of those who
breathe them in.
If the Bush Administration gets
what they want, emissions of smog-forming nitrogen, which cause an
estimated 400,000 asthma attacks and send more than 12,000 Floridians
a year to the emergency room, will stay as high as 2.1 million
tons per year through 2018.
On second glance, the Clear
Skies Initiative does very little to "clear" anything
other than a few digits off a factory's monthly bill that is.
Use the websites listed below
to contact your state representative and tell them you won't stand
to suffer so polluters can save money. The people "in charge"
of the Initiative are actually state representatives in the
House and the Senate who will be voting on it. Those are the best
people to contact. Place a call, write an email, have all of your
family members do the same, and hopefully the members of Congress
would represent the interests of individuals they were elected by
(YOU! THE PERSON NEXT TO YOU! YOUR FAMILY!), rather than those of
Big Industries.
To find your state representatives
in the House of Representatives go to:
http://www.house.gov/writerep/
To find your state representatives
in the senate go to:
http://www.senate.gov/
Information used in the article
regarding the Bush Administration's specific rollbacks was taken from
FloridaPIRG
official web fact sheet at:
http://floridapirg.org/
Visit the Natural Resources Defense
Council's webpage at:
http://www.nrdc.org/default.asp
For information about the mercury
advisories visit the Marine Resources Council's Website at:
http://www.mrcirl.org/
To read about the mercury advisories,
click here:
http://www.staugustine.com/
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