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It's all about pissing off liberals, and nothing more. Don't try to over analyze what's going on.
Between the modifications and the fuel, it seems like a lot of money spent just to needle people.
Yea, protecting our environment is really stupid.
"We didn't inherit this land from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children."
Lakota Sioux Proverb
The way liberals do it, it is really stupid.
Here is a REALLY smart liberal. I am sure he is saying things your right wing mind is incapable of understanding.
Environmental injury is deficit spending. It's a way of loading the cost of our generation's prosperity onto the backs of our children.
The free market is the most efficient and democratic way to distribute the goods of the land, and that the best thing that could happen to the environment is if we had true free-market capitalism in this country, because the free market promotes efficiency, and efficiency means the elimination of waste, and pollution of course is waste. The free market also would encourage us to properly value our natural resources, and it's the undervaluation of those resources that causes us to use them wastefully. But in a true free-market economy, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community.
But what polluters do is they make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering the quality of life for everybody else, and they do that by evading the discipline of the free market. You show me a polluter; I'll show you a subsidy. I'll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and to force the public to pay his production costs. That's what all pollution is. It's always a subsidy. It's always a guy trying to cheat the free market.
Corporations are externalizing machines. They're constantly figuring out ways to get somebody else to pay their costs of production. That's their nature. One of the best ways to do that, and the most common way for a polluter, is through pollution. When those coal-burning power plants put mercury into the atmosphere that comes down from the Ohio Valley to my state of New York, I buy a fishing license for $30 every year, but I can't go fishing and eat the fish anymore because they stole the fish from me. They liquidated a public asset, my asset.
The rule is the commons are owned by all of us. They're not owned by the governor or the legislator or the coal companies and the utility. Everybody has a right to use them. Nobody has a right to abuse them. Nobody has a right to use them in a way that will diminish or injure their use and enjoyment by others. But they've stolen that entire resource from the people of New York State. When they put the acid rain in the air, it destroys our forest, and it destroys the lakes that we use for recreation or outfitting or tourism or wealth generation. When they put the mercury in the air, the mercury poisons our children's brains, and that imposes a cost on us. The ozone in particular has caused a million asthma attacks a year, kills 18,000 people, causes hundreds of thousands of lost work days. All of those impacts impose costs on the rest of us that in a true free-market economy should be reflected in the price of that company's product when it makes it to the marketplace.
What those companies and all polluters do is use political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and to force the public to pay their costs. All of the federal environmental laws, every one of the 28 major environmental laws, were designed to restore free-market capitalism in America by forcing actors in the marketplace to pay the true cost of bringing their product to market.
The OP is wrong. Its not "conservatives" who are doing this. Think about it - this action is pretty much the opposite of "conservative". As I said in the other thread about this -
"Coal Rollers" - Page 3 - US Message Board - Political Discussion Forum
This is like the teenagers who want their cars to be loud or think that rebellion is not cleaning your plate or picking up your room.
I doubt that many people would actually do this though. Most people grow up, get a job, take care of their family and shake their heads at the kids with loud cars and smoke billowing out of their ass. And most adults don't do things like this that actually harm their own children.
Those who do this don't want to admit it but its just jealousy. They can't afford a nice car so they pimp out their ratty truck.
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I started a thread on this 18 hours before you did, yet this thread has more posts?
Da fuck going on here?
In order to make a vehicle do this they must run the vehicle "rich" meaning the air fuel mixture is more saturated with fuel thus burning through fuel faster. This appears to simply be a toll on the stupid. I am no environmentalist but a $3.65 a gallon I don't see any value in blowing it out of the tail pipe at the expense of your vehicle to...serenade people who otherwise don't care. But than again I am not an ignorant five year old manchild with a pickup truck and a chip on my shoulder.
Which explains why it is only crazy people that are doing it. Kinda like it is only crazy people that chain themselves to trees.
To piss libs off
Conservatives Are Purposely Making Their Cars Spew Black Smoke To Protest Obama And Environmentalists
https://autos.yahoo.com/news/conser...-cars-spew-black-smoke-protest-190500408.htmlPickup trucks customized to spew black smoke into the air are quickly becoming the newest weapon in the culture wars.
"Coal Rollers" are diesel trucks modified with chimneys and equipment that can force extra fuel into the engine causing dark black smoke to pour out of the chimney stacks. These modifications are not new, but as Slate's Dave Weigel pointed out on Thursday, "rolling coal" has begun to take on a political dimension with pickup drivers increasingly viewing their smokestacks as a form of protest against environmentalists and Obama administration emissions regulations.
Last month, Vocativ noted many coal rollers focus their fumes on "nature nuffies," or people who drive hybrids, and "rice burners," or Japanese-made cars.
"The feeling around here is that everyone who drives a small car is a liberal," a roller named Ryan told Vocativ. "I rolled coal on a Prius once just because they were tailing me."
Weigel spoke to a seller of coal rolling customization equipment who described why some drivers see spewing smoke as a political protest.
"I run into a lot of people that really dont like Obama at all," the salesperson said. "If hes into the environment, if hes into this or that, were not. I hear a lot of that. To get a single stack on my truckthats my way of giving them the finger. You want clean air and a tiny carbon footprint? Well, screw you."
As coal rollers have become a form of conservative protest, their popularity seems to be exploding. Vocativ found Facebook pages dedicated to the phenomenon have about 16,000 followers and over 100,000 rolling coal posts have appeared on Instagram and Tumblr. According to Google Trends, there were virtually no internet searches for "rolling coal" prior to February 2011. Since then, search volume for the term has increased over 700%.
With this explosion in online attention, the battles between coal rollers and their environmentalist enemies are playing out in social media pages, Youtube videos and internet comment sections. Many of the rolling coal Facebook pages feature memes (like the one pictured on the right) that mock hybrid drivers and liberals. Coal rollers have also posted videos showing their trucks blasting more environmentally-efficient cars with smoke.
Opponents of the practice have also taken to the internet. Weigel noted "a mid-June surge of comments" from progressives attacking coal rolling social media pages in the wake of the Vocativ article. In 2012, one outraged Youtuber posted a video entitled "Victim Of Coal Rolling" that showed a pickup shooting fumes at his car.
"Blow your smoke at me you son of a bitch," the driver says in the video.
Though the clip seemed designed as a criticism of coal rollers, it attracted a slew of comments from people who were clearly on the side of the pickup driver.
"What a loser you are, ain't nothing wrong with rolling some confederate coal," one person replied.
"Stupid ricers. what were you gonna do you bitch?" another said.
Check out some videos of coal rollers hitting the road and blasting other motorists below.
The way liberals do it, it is really stupid.
Here is a REALLY smart liberal. I am sure he is saying things your right wing mind is incapable of understanding.
Environmental injury is deficit spending. It's a way of loading the cost of our generation's prosperity onto the backs of our children.
The free market is the most efficient and democratic way to distribute the goods of the land, and that the best thing that could happen to the environment is if we had true free-market capitalism in this country, because the free market promotes efficiency, and efficiency means the elimination of waste, and pollution of course is waste. The free market also would encourage us to properly value our natural resources, and it's the undervaluation of those resources that causes us to use them wastefully. But in a true free-market economy, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community.
But what polluters do is they make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering the quality of life for everybody else, and they do that by evading the discipline of the free market. You show me a polluter; I'll show you a subsidy. I'll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and to force the public to pay his production costs. That's what all pollution is. It's always a subsidy. It's always a guy trying to cheat the free market.
Corporations are externalizing machines. They're constantly figuring out ways to get somebody else to pay their costs of production. That's their nature. One of the best ways to do that, and the most common way for a polluter, is through pollution. When those coal-burning power plants put mercury into the atmosphere that comes down from the Ohio Valley to my state of New York, I buy a fishing license for $30 every year, but I can't go fishing and eat the fish anymore because they stole the fish from me. They liquidated a public asset, my asset.
The rule is the commons are owned by all of us. They're not owned by the governor or the legislator or the coal companies and the utility. Everybody has a right to use them. Nobody has a right to abuse them. Nobody has a right to use them in a way that will diminish or injure their use and enjoyment by others. But they've stolen that entire resource from the people of New York State. When they put the acid rain in the air, it destroys our forest, and it destroys the lakes that we use for recreation or outfitting or tourism or wealth generation. When they put the mercury in the air, the mercury poisons our children's brains, and that imposes a cost on us. The ozone in particular has caused a million asthma attacks a year, kills 18,000 people, causes hundreds of thousands of lost work days. All of those impacts impose costs on the rest of us that in a true free-market economy should be reflected in the price of that company's product when it makes it to the marketplace.
What those companies and all polluters do is use political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and to force the public to pay their costs. All of the federal environmental laws, every one of the 28 major environmental laws, were designed to restore free-market capitalism in America by forcing actors in the marketplace to pay the true cost of bringing their product to market.
I would love him to provide actual examples of widespread disregard of the environment among corporations, but he can't. I guess he isn't as smart as you think he is.
Here is a REALLY smart liberal. I am sure he is saying things your right wing mind is incapable of understanding.
Environmental injury is deficit spending. It's a way of loading the cost of our generation's prosperity onto the backs of our children.
The free market is the most efficient and democratic way to distribute the goods of the land, and that the best thing that could happen to the environment is if we had true free-market capitalism in this country, because the free market promotes efficiency, and efficiency means the elimination of waste, and pollution of course is waste. The free market also would encourage us to properly value our natural resources, and it's the undervaluation of those resources that causes us to use them wastefully. But in a true free-market economy, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community.
But what polluters do is they make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering the quality of life for everybody else, and they do that by evading the discipline of the free market. You show me a polluter; I'll show you a subsidy. I'll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and to force the public to pay his production costs. That's what all pollution is. It's always a subsidy. It's always a guy trying to cheat the free market.
Corporations are externalizing machines. They're constantly figuring out ways to get somebody else to pay their costs of production. That's their nature. One of the best ways to do that, and the most common way for a polluter, is through pollution. When those coal-burning power plants put mercury into the atmosphere that comes down from the Ohio Valley to my state of New York, I buy a fishing license for $30 every year, but I can't go fishing and eat the fish anymore because they stole the fish from me. They liquidated a public asset, my asset.
The rule is the commons are owned by all of us. They're not owned by the governor or the legislator or the coal companies and the utility. Everybody has a right to use them. Nobody has a right to abuse them. Nobody has a right to use them in a way that will diminish or injure their use and enjoyment by others. But they've stolen that entire resource from the people of New York State. When they put the acid rain in the air, it destroys our forest, and it destroys the lakes that we use for recreation or outfitting or tourism or wealth generation. When they put the mercury in the air, the mercury poisons our children's brains, and that imposes a cost on us. The ozone in particular has caused a million asthma attacks a year, kills 18,000 people, causes hundreds of thousands of lost work days. All of those impacts impose costs on the rest of us that in a true free-market economy should be reflected in the price of that company's product when it makes it to the marketplace.
What those companies and all polluters do is use political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and to force the public to pay their costs. All of the federal environmental laws, every one of the 28 major environmental laws, were designed to restore free-market capitalism in America by forcing actors in the marketplace to pay the true cost of bringing their product to market.
I would love him to provide actual examples of widespread disregard of the environment among corporations, but he can't. I guess he isn't as smart as you think he is.
I'll give you an example. As I said, a gigantic diminution in quality of life has taken place in this country as a direct result of this President's (Bush) environmental policy that Americans mainly don't know about. I'm just going to focus on one industry, which is coal-burning power plants. I have three sons who have asthma. One out of every four black children in America's cities now has asthma. We know that asthma attacks are triggered primarily by bad air -- by ozone and particulates. We know that the principle source of those materials in our atmosphere is the 1,100 coal-burning power plants that are burning coal illegally. It's been illegal for 17 years. President Clinton's administration was prosecuting the worst 75 of those plants, but that's an industry that donated $48 million to this President during the 2000 election cycle and has given $58 million since.
One of the first things that Bush did when he came into office was to order the Justice Department and EPA to drop all those lawsuits. The top three enforcers at EPA, Sylvia Lowrance, Bruce Buckheit, and Eric Schaeffer, all resigned their jobs in protest. These weren't Democrats. These were people who had served through the Reagan and Bush administrations, the earlier Bush administration. A top Justice Department official said that this had never happened in American history before, where a Presidential candidate accepts money, contributions from criminals under indictment or targeted for indictment, and then orders those indictments and investigations dropped when he achieves office.
Immediately after dropping those lawsuits, the White House abolished the New Source Rule, which was the heart and soul, the central provision, of the Clean Air Act. That rule is the one that required those plants to clean up 17 years ago, and it's the fundamental compromise that allowed the passage of the Clean Air Act. If you go to EPA's website today, you will see that that decision alone, that single decision -- this is EPA's website -- kills 18,000 Americans every single year. Six times the number of people that were killed by the World Trade Center attack. This should be on the front page of every newspaper in this country every single day, and yet you're not reading about it in the American press.
A couple of months ago, EPA announced that in 19 states it is now unsafe to eat any freshwater fish in the state [because of] mercury contamination. We know where the mercury is coming from -- those same coal-burning power plants. In 48 states, at least some of the fish are unsafe to eat. In fact, the only two states where all of the fish are still safe to eat are Alaska and Wyoming, where Republican-controlled legislatures have refused to appropriate the money to test the fish. In all of the other states, at least some, most, or all of the fish are unsafe to eat.
We know a lot about mercury we didn't know a few years ago. We know for example, that one out of every six, now one out of every three, American women has so much mercury in her womb that her children are at risk for a grim inventory of diseases: autism, blindness, mental retardation, heart, liver, kidney disease.
I have so much mercury in my body -- I had my level tested recently, and Waterkeeper will test your level, you can send them a hair sample -- my level is about double what the EPA considers safe. I was told by Dr. David Carpenter, who is the national authority on mercury contamination, that a woman with my levels of mercury in her blood would have children with impairment. I said to him, "You mean she might have," and he said, "No, the science is very certain today. Her children would have some kind of permanent brain damage." He estimated an IQ loss in those kids of about five to seven points.
Well, 630,000 children are born in America every year who have been exposed to dangerous levels of mercury in their mother's wombs. President Clinton, recognizing the gravity of this national health epidemic, reclassified mercury as a hazardous pollutant under the Clean Air Act. That triggered the requirement that all of those companies remove 90 percent of the mercury within three and a half years. It would have cost less than one percent of plant revenue -- a great deal for the American people. We have the technology. It exists. We already require it in states like Massachusetts.
But it still meant spending billions of dollars for that industry, and that's the industry that gave $100 million to this President. About 12 weeks ago, the White House announced that it was abolishing the Clinton-era rules and substituting instead rules that were written by utility-industry lobbyists that will allow those companies to never have to clean up the mercury. The rules say on their face that they have to clean up only 70 percent within 15 years, which by itself is outrageous. But, in fact, the utility lawyers who wrote those rules wrote so many loopholes into them that the utilities will be able to challenge them, probably successfully and certainly forever, and they will never have to clean up any additional mercury.
We're living in a science-fiction nightmare today in the United States of America, where my children, and the children of millions of other Americans who have asthmatic kids, live in a world where the air is too poisonous for them to breathe. Where my children, and the children of most Americans, can no longer safely go fishing with their father and mother and come home and eat the fish -- because somebody gave money to a politician.
The way liberals do it, it is really stupid.
Here is a REALLY smart liberal. I am sure he is saying things your right wing mind is incapable of understanding.
Environmental injury is deficit spending. It's a way of loading the cost of our generation's prosperity onto the backs of our children.
The free market is the most efficient and democratic way to distribute the goods of the land, and that the best thing that could happen to the environment is if we had true free-market capitalism in this country, because the free market promotes efficiency, and efficiency means the elimination of waste, and pollution of course is waste. The free market also would encourage us to properly value our natural resources, and it's the undervaluation of those resources that causes us to use them wastefully. But in a true free-market economy, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community.
But what polluters do is they make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering the quality of life for everybody else, and they do that by evading the discipline of the free market. You show me a polluter; I'll show you a subsidy. I'll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and to force the public to pay his production costs. That's what all pollution is. It's always a subsidy. It's always a guy trying to cheat the free market.
Corporations are externalizing machines. They're constantly figuring out ways to get somebody else to pay their costs of production. That's their nature. One of the best ways to do that, and the most common way for a polluter, is through pollution. When those coal-burning power plants put mercury into the atmosphere that comes down from the Ohio Valley to my state of New York, I buy a fishing license for $30 every year, but I can't go fishing and eat the fish anymore because they stole the fish from me. They liquidated a public asset, my asset.
The rule is the commons are owned by all of us. They're not owned by the governor or the legislator or the coal companies and the utility. Everybody has a right to use them. Nobody has a right to abuse them. Nobody has a right to use them in a way that will diminish or injure their use and enjoyment by others. But they've stolen that entire resource from the people of New York State. When they put the acid rain in the air, it destroys our forest, and it destroys the lakes that we use for recreation or outfitting or tourism or wealth generation. When they put the mercury in the air, the mercury poisons our children's brains, and that imposes a cost on us. The ozone in particular has caused a million asthma attacks a year, kills 18,000 people, causes hundreds of thousands of lost work days. All of those impacts impose costs on the rest of us that in a true free-market economy should be reflected in the price of that company's product when it makes it to the marketplace.
What those companies and all polluters do is use political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and to force the public to pay their costs. All of the federal environmental laws, every one of the 28 major environmental laws, were designed to restore free-market capitalism in America by forcing actors in the marketplace to pay the true cost of bringing their product to market.
I would love him to provide actual examples of widespread disregard of the environment among corporations, but he can't. I guess he isn't as smart as you think he is.
It's all about pissing off liberals, and nothing more. Don't try to over analyze what's going on.
Here is a REALLY smart liberal. I am sure he is saying things your right wing mind is incapable of understanding.
Environmental injury is deficit spending. It's a way of loading the cost of our generation's prosperity onto the backs of our children.
The free market is the most efficient and democratic way to distribute the goods of the land, and that the best thing that could happen to the environment is if we had true free-market capitalism in this country, because the free market promotes efficiency, and efficiency means the elimination of waste, and pollution of course is waste. The free market also would encourage us to properly value our natural resources, and it's the undervaluation of those resources that causes us to use them wastefully. But in a true free-market economy, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community.
But what polluters do is they make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering the quality of life for everybody else, and they do that by evading the discipline of the free market. You show me a polluter; I'll show you a subsidy. I'll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and to force the public to pay his production costs. That's what all pollution is. It's always a subsidy. It's always a guy trying to cheat the free market.
Corporations are externalizing machines. They're constantly figuring out ways to get somebody else to pay their costs of production. That's their nature. One of the best ways to do that, and the most common way for a polluter, is through pollution. When those coal-burning power plants put mercury into the atmosphere that comes down from the Ohio Valley to my state of New York, I buy a fishing license for $30 every year, but I can't go fishing and eat the fish anymore because they stole the fish from me. They liquidated a public asset, my asset.
The rule is the commons are owned by all of us. They're not owned by the governor or the legislator or the coal companies and the utility. Everybody has a right to use them. Nobody has a right to abuse them. Nobody has a right to use them in a way that will diminish or injure their use and enjoyment by others. But they've stolen that entire resource from the people of New York State. When they put the acid rain in the air, it destroys our forest, and it destroys the lakes that we use for recreation or outfitting or tourism or wealth generation. When they put the mercury in the air, the mercury poisons our children's brains, and that imposes a cost on us. The ozone in particular has caused a million asthma attacks a year, kills 18,000 people, causes hundreds of thousands of lost work days. All of those impacts impose costs on the rest of us that in a true free-market economy should be reflected in the price of that company's product when it makes it to the marketplace.
What those companies and all polluters do is use political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and to force the public to pay their costs. All of the federal environmental laws, every one of the 28 major environmental laws, were designed to restore free-market capitalism in America by forcing actors in the marketplace to pay the true cost of bringing their product to market.
I would love him to provide actual examples of widespread disregard of the environment among corporations, but he can't. I guess he isn't as smart as you think he is.
I live three hours south of the Adirondack Mountains, the oldest protected wilderness on the face of the earth. It's been protected since 1888. We had a right, the American people, to believe that we would be able to enjoy those pristine landscapes, the forests, the beautiful lakes for generations unspoiled. But today, one fifth of the lakes in the Adirondacks are now sterilized from acid rain, which has also destroyed the forest cover on the high peaks of the Appalachians from Georgia all the way up into Northern Quebec, and this President has put the brakes on the statutory requirements that those companies, those coal-burning power plants, clean up the acid rain. As a direct result of that decision, this year for the first time since the passage of the Clean Air Act, sulfur dioxide levels went up in our country an astronomical four percent in a single year.
The person who gave me this t-shirt talked about mountaintop mining a few minutes ago. A year ago in May, I flew over the coal fields of Kentucky and West Virginia, and I saw where the coal is coming from. If the American people could see what I saw, there would be a revolution in this country, because we are cutting down the Appalachian Mountains. These historic landscapes, where Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett roamed, are the source of our values and our culture, and we're cutting them down with these giant machines called drag lines. They're 22 stories high, they cost half a billion dollars, and they practically dispense with the need for human labor. And that, of course, is the point.
I remember, when my father was fighting strip mining back in the 60s, a conversation I had with him at the dinner table where he said that they are not only destroying the environment, but they are permanently impoverishing these communities because there is no way that you can generate an economy from the moonscapes that they leave behind. He said they're doing it so that they can break the unions, and he was right. In 1968, when he told me that, there were 114,000 unionized mine workers taking coal out of tunnels in West Virginia.
Today there are only 11,000 miners left in the state, and almost none of them are unionized because the strip industry isn't. Using these giant machines and 25 tons of dynamite that they explode in West Virginia every day -- a Hiroshima bomb every week -- They are blowing the tops off the mountains. They then take these giant machines and scrape the rubble and debris into the adjacent river valley. Well, it's all illegal. You cannot dump rock and debris and rubble into a waterway in the United States of America without a Clean Water Act permit. So Joe Lovitz sued them, and he won in front of a great crusty old West Virginia judge, Judge Charles Hayden, who recently died. Charles Hayden said the same thing I said: "It's all illegal, all of it," and he enjoined all mountaintop mining.
Two days after we got that decision, Peabody Coal and Massey Coal, which had given millions of dollars to this White House, met in the White House, and the White House rewrote one word of the Clean Water Act. Their new definition of the word fill changed 30 years of statutory interpretation to make it legal today in every state in the United States to dump rock, debris, rubble, construction, garbage, any kind of solid waste into any waterway without a Clean Water Act permit. All you need is a rubber-stamp permit from the Corps of Engineers that, in many cases, you can get through the mail. It has none of the safeguards that the Clean Water Act provides. And this is what we're fighting today. This is not just a battle to save the environment. This is the subversion of our democracy.
The industry and the great big polluters and their indentured servants and our political process have done a great job. And their PR firms and their faulty "biostitutes," and all these think tanks on Capitol Hill, have done a great job over the past couple of decades of marginalizing the environmental movement, of marginalizing us as radicals, as tree huggers or, as I heard the other day, pagans who worship trees and sacrifice people. But there is nothing radical about the idea of clean air and clean water for our children. As I said before, we're not protecting the environment for the sake of the fishes and the birds and the trees. We're protecting it for our own sake, because it's the infrastructure of our communities, and because it enriches us.
If you talk to these people on Capitol Hill who are promoting these kind of changes and ask them, "Why are you doing this?" What they invariably say is, "Well, the time has come in our nation's history where we have to choose between economic prosperity on the one hand and environmental protection on the other." And that is a false choice. In 100 percent of the situations, good environmental policy is identical to good economic policy. [applause] Especially if we measure our economy, and this is how we ought to be measuring it, based upon its jobs and the dignity of jobs over the generations, over the long term and on how it preserves the value of the assets of our communities.
If ,on the other hand, we want to do what they've been urging us to do on Capitol Hill, which is to treat the planet as if were a business in liquidation, to convert our natural resource to cash as quickly as possible, to have a few years of pollution-based prosperity, then we can generate an instantaneous cash flow and the illusion of a prosperous economy. But our children are going to pay for our joyride. They're going to pay for it with muted landscapes, poor health, and huge cleanup costs that are going to amplify over time, and that they will never, ever be able to pay off. Environmental injury is deficit spending. It's a way of loading the cost of our generation's prosperity onto the backs of our children. [applause]
One of the things I've done over the past seven, eight years, since 1994, since this whole movement, the anti-environmental movement got a foothold, a beachhead in Congress, is to constantly go around and confront this argument that an investment in our environment is a diminishment of our nation's wealth. It doesn't diminish our wealth. It's an investment in infrastructure, the same as investing in telecommunications and road construction. It's an investment we have to make if we're going to ensure the economic vitality of our generation and the next generation.
I would love him to provide actual examples of widespread disregard of the environment among corporations, but he can't. I guess he isn't as smart as you think he is.
I'll give you an example. As I said, a gigantic diminution in quality of life has taken place in this country as a direct result of this President's (Bush) environmental policy that Americans mainly don't know about. I'm just going to focus on one industry, which is coal-burning power plants. I have three sons who have asthma. One out of every four black children in America's cities now has asthma. We know that asthma attacks are triggered primarily by bad air -- by ozone and particulates. We know that the principle source of those materials in our atmosphere is the 1,100 coal-burning power plants that are burning coal illegally. It's been illegal for 17 years. President Clinton's administration was prosecuting the worst 75 of those plants, but that's an industry that donated $48 million to this President during the 2000 election cycle and has given $58 million since.
One of the first things that Bush did when he came into office was to order the Justice Department and EPA to drop all those lawsuits. The top three enforcers at EPA, Sylvia Lowrance, Bruce Buckheit, and Eric Schaeffer, all resigned their jobs in protest. These weren't Democrats. These were people who had served through the Reagan and Bush administrations, the earlier Bush administration. A top Justice Department official said that this had never happened in American history before, where a Presidential candidate accepts money, contributions from criminals under indictment or targeted for indictment, and then orders those indictments and investigations dropped when he achieves office.
Immediately after dropping those lawsuits, the White House abolished the New Source Rule, which was the heart and soul, the central provision, of the Clean Air Act. That rule is the one that required those plants to clean up 17 years ago, and it's the fundamental compromise that allowed the passage of the Clean Air Act. If you go to EPA's website today, you will see that that decision alone, that single decision -- this is EPA's website -- kills 18,000 Americans every single year. Six times the number of people that were killed by the World Trade Center attack. This should be on the front page of every newspaper in this country every single day, and yet you're not reading about it in the American press.
A couple of months ago, EPA announced that in 19 states it is now unsafe to eat any freshwater fish in the state [because of] mercury contamination. We know where the mercury is coming from -- those same coal-burning power plants. In 48 states, at least some of the fish are unsafe to eat. In fact, the only two states where all of the fish are still safe to eat are Alaska and Wyoming, where Republican-controlled legislatures have refused to appropriate the money to test the fish. In all of the other states, at least some, most, or all of the fish are unsafe to eat.
We know a lot about mercury we didn't know a few years ago. We know for example, that one out of every six, now one out of every three, American women has so much mercury in her womb that her children are at risk for a grim inventory of diseases: autism, blindness, mental retardation, heart, liver, kidney disease.
I have so much mercury in my body -- I had my level tested recently, and Waterkeeper will test your level, you can send them a hair sample -- my level is about double what the EPA considers safe. I was told by Dr. David Carpenter, who is the national authority on mercury contamination, that a woman with my levels of mercury in her blood would have children with impairment. I said to him, "You mean she might have," and he said, "No, the science is very certain today. Her children would have some kind of permanent brain damage." He estimated an IQ loss in those kids of about five to seven points.
Well, 630,000 children are born in America every year who have been exposed to dangerous levels of mercury in their mother's wombs. President Clinton, recognizing the gravity of this national health epidemic, reclassified mercury as a hazardous pollutant under the Clean Air Act. That triggered the requirement that all of those companies remove 90 percent of the mercury within three and a half years. It would have cost less than one percent of plant revenue -- a great deal for the American people. We have the technology. It exists. We already require it in states like Massachusetts.
But it still meant spending billions of dollars for that industry, and that's the industry that gave $100 million to this President. About 12 weeks ago, the White House announced that it was abolishing the Clinton-era rules and substituting instead rules that were written by utility-industry lobbyists that will allow those companies to never have to clean up the mercury. The rules say on their face that they have to clean up only 70 percent within 15 years, which by itself is outrageous. But, in fact, the utility lawyers who wrote those rules wrote so many loopholes into them that the utilities will be able to challenge them, probably successfully and certainly forever, and they will never have to clean up any additional mercury.
We're living in a science-fiction nightmare today in the United States of America, where my children, and the children of millions of other Americans who have asthmatic kids, live in a world where the air is too poisonous for them to breathe. Where my children, and the children of most Americans, can no longer safely go fishing with their father and mother and come home and eat the fish -- because somebody gave money to a politician.
That is a fine example of a conspiracy theory without any facts, or even actual fake facts, to back it up.
Quantum Windbag said:That is a fine example of a conspiracy theory without any facts, or even actual fake facts, to back it up.
This is the first I've heard of this so I can't say whether or not its true. I pride myself on being an anti enviro and pay attention to things like this. I do everything I can to poke a stick at the fools whenever I can.
Yea, protecting our environment is really stupid.
"We didn't inherit this land from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children."
Lakota Sioux Proverb
This is the first I've heard of this so I can't say whether or not its true. I pride myself on being an anti enviro and pay attention to things like this. I do everything I can to poke a stick at the fools whenever I can.
Yea, protecting our environment is really stupid.
"We didn't inherit this land from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children."
Lakota Sioux Proverb
I wish liberals thought this way about money. Obama has outspent all presidents combined.
Yea, protecting our environment is really stupid.
"We didn't inherit this land from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children."
Lakota Sioux Proverb
I wish liberals thought this way about money. Obama has outspent all presidents combined.
Oh horse shit. You really believe that any POTUS controls the purse strings. Really? And that ONLY Democrats spend spend spend. Grow the fuck up.
Yeah...what Sampson said. Why should we be good when others are bad? The GOP should make that their slogan!
Did I say that anyone should be good?
I said that you are amusing.......thanks for playing....
It is fun to watch monkeys dance
I wish liberals thought this way about money. Obama has outspent all presidents combined.
Oh horse shit. You really believe that any POTUS controls the purse strings. Really? And that ONLY Democrats spend spend spend. Grow the fuck up.
Obama had total control during his first two years, and yes he has outspent all presidents combined. Facts seem to make you mad. Lol
