Accurate? HOW do you know what IS accurate? Are YOU a climatologist, a scientist or a doctor? The truth is SO much of the environmental action being called for by the 'left' and 'environmentalists' parallels action called for to abate pollution. We KNOW that carcinogens and heavy metals like mercury and lead have tremendous ADVERSE effects on humans, fish, fowl and all mammals that breath, drink water are touch the soil.
I urge you to read Robert F. Kennedy's speech. You are welcome to disagree with his politics, but I challenge you to disprove his environmental claims or his indictment of the Bush administration's criminal environmental policies.
I will ask you the same question I asked DUD...You said: 'every piece of legislation that is passed to "regulate" the "industry" was promulgated by the very corporations that are being regulated'
HOW do you accept THAT as truth, yet you deny those SAME corporations are spending millions of dollars, lobbying and applying political pressure to distort, misinform and obfuscate the climate debate and try to discredit, dismiss and derail the REAL scientists?
Bush's sorry environmental record
by Former EPA Administrator Russell Train and former New Hampshire State Senator Rick Russman, both REP members
published September 23, 2004 in the Concord (NH) Monitor
Except in a few instances, the environmental policies of the Bush administration are a disgrace.
As lifelong Republicans who have worked for decades to protect and restore clean air and clean water, we find the turning back of the environmental clock by this administration profoundly disturbing. And New Hampshire suffers from these backward policies.
Republican President Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency. In his 1970 State of the Union message, he called the environmental cause "as fundamental as life itself." With bipartisan leadership in Congress, Nixon initiated many of the environmental protections we enjoy today.
Republican President George H.W. Bush signed the Clean Air Act of 1990, one of the most protective environmental statutes.
Unfortunately, President George W. Bush's administration is reversing course from 30 years of bipartisan leadership to protect our health and environment.
The administration's policies to promote energy, mining and timber interests with little regard for the interests of common citizens represent a throwback to an era of exploitation. The administration's assault on the environment has increased pollution and health threats in New Hampshire, according to a report by Environment2004.
The administration weakened the Clean Air Act to allow aging power plants to continue spewing sulfur, mercury and other contaminants into the skies. These end up in New Hampshire's air and waters. This pollution from Midwestern power plants and other sources forms smog that threatens the 65,000 New Hampshire residents who suffer from asthma. It falls as acid rain that damages New Hampshire's forests and waters.
Mercury pollution has forced New Hampshire to establish a fish consumption advisory that covers all its lakes and rivers. Infants, children, pregnant women and women of child-bearing age are particularly vulnerable to mercury. Mercury affects a child's ability to learn, most notably impairing memory, attention and fine motor function.
New Hampshire's drinking water is threatened by the Bush administration. Fifteen percent of New Hampshire's public water supplies and thousands of its private wells are contaminated by the fuel additive MtBE. Recent studies show that MtBE may cause cancer, and it makes drinking water smell and taste foul even at low levels, yet the administration has not banned its use.
To pay for the cleanup of this contamination, New Hampshire sued 22 oil companies responsible for MtBE contamination. Nonetheless, the Bush administration's energy bill would block these suits and force New Hampshire taxpayers to foot the bill for cleaning up the state's contaminated drinking water. The industry contributed $338,000 to the Bush presidential campaign and Republican congressional candidates in 1999 and 2000.
Republican Sens. Judd Gregg and John Sununu fervently oppose this policy.
The administration has adopted these and other policies based on the advice of its industry allies instead of the EPA's scientists and experts. Its proposed mercury policy would delay significant mercury reduction until 2018. This was lifted from the utility industry's recommendations while the administration ignored the EPA's children's health protection experts.
This is but one example of the administration disregarding scientific guidance - a radical change from previous Republican and Democratic administrations.
The scientific community is alarmed by the Bush administration's widespread rejection of sound science. The Union of Concerned Scientists, a nationwide organization of eminent scientists declared: "When scientific knowledge has been found to be in conflict with its political goals, the administration has often manipulated the process through which science enters into its decisions."More recently, 48 Nobel Prize-winning scientists wrote in an open letter to the American people that the administration "has ignored unbiased scientific advice in the policy-making that is so important to our collective welfare."
There was no mandate in the 2000 election to weaken and undo our environmental and public health protections. In this year's election, environmental policy needs a full public debate.
Whole article...
Yes I am a scientist, I am a geologist by trade. I started as a big believer in AGW till I did some actual research on the subject. Then because I DO have a scientific background it became very obvious very quickly that what was being said was wrong. I did not know that it had devolved to the level of actual fraud till about two years ago. Then it was confirmed by CLIMATEGATE. So I can say with a very high degree of certainty what is correct and what is not correct.
old fraud loves to say I lie about geology every time I post on it but to date after challenging him to provide us with an example he of course can't produce because, well he is a fraud.
And you complain about the millions of dollars that are being spent by the lobbyists and ignorethe BILLIONS that have allready been squandered. Last time I checked a billion was bigger than a million. But maybe not on your planet.
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You didn't answer my
question.
We only have ONE planet to inhabit. You can call yourself anything you wish, but there are scientific TRUTHS that undeniable, unless you are an apothecary that prescribed calomel and bloodletting to cure George Washington, we know about certain geological sustances that harm human beings.
If you are a geologist, then this segment of RFK Jr's speech should be crystal clear for you to understand and digest. And if you are a geologist, you know the dangers of dumping rock, debris and rubble into a waterways. It should make you very angry...because the 'scientists' and the policies they promote are the SAME 'scientist's you support. It is and will kill human beings!!!
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We know a lot about mercury we didnt 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 levels tested recently, and Waterkeeper will test your levels, you can send them a hair sample. Mine are 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, we have 630,000 children who are born in America every year who have been exposed to dangerous levels of mercury in their mothers 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 billions of dollars for that industry, and thats the industry that gave $100 million to this president, and 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 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.
Were living in a science fiction nightmare today in the United States of America, where my children and the children of millions of Americans who have asthmatic kids are bringing children into a world where the air is too poisonous for them to breathe. Where my children and the children of most Americans can now no longer safely engage in the seminal primal activity of American youth, which is to go fishing with their father and mother and to come home and eat the fish because somebody gave money to a politician.
I live three hours south of the Adirondack Mountains, the oldest protected wilderness on the face of the earth. Its 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 Davey Crockett roamed are the source of our values and our culture, and were cutting them down with these giant machines called drag lines. Theyre 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 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, and theyre 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 isnt. 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, and then they take these giant machines and they scrape the rubble and debris into the adjacent river valley. Well, its 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, he said, Its all illegal, all of it, and he enjoined all mountaintop mining.
Two days from when we got that decision, Peabody Coal and Massey Coal, who 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. The definition of the word fill that changed 30 years of statutory interpretation to make it legal today as it is in every state in the United States to dump rock, debris, rubble, construction debris, garbage, any kind of solid waste into any waterway in this country 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 were 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, 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, were not protecting the environment for the sake of the fishes and the birds and the trees. Were protecting it for our own sake, because its the infrastructure of our communities and because it enriches us.