Sometimes, in the rush of current events, important stories, stories significant to each and everyone of us in our daily lives, are ignored. The war, GOP corruption and sex scandals, death by Blackwater, Moveon’s “General Betrayus” v. Limbaugh’s “phony soldiers,” “Did Hillary cackle?”, Bush’s mangled English, which Washington DC pundit is most out of touch, Britney losing her kids, ad nauseam, dominate our current news cycle. Yet, often other, just as important events, the ones most relevant to the vast majority of Americans, go little noticed or reported upon by the media.
Case in point: Last year, about this time, the EPA announced it was going to tighten air quality standards. A good thing, yes? Did Bush finally did something right? Well, not exactly:
The Environmental Protection Agency’s new rule lowers the limit on how much fine particulate matter Americans may be exposed to over a 24-hour period, cutting the existing standard of 65 micrograms per cubic meter of air to 35. However, it leaves unchanged the annual limit for “fine particulate matter,” or soot, in the air. That standard remains an average of 15 micrograms per cubic meter per day over the course of a year. […]
The EPA’s scientific advisory panel voted overwhelmingly last year to recommend cutting the annual amount of soot Americans breathe, from a daily average of 15 micrograms per cubic meter to 13 or 14 micrograms. But William L. Wehrum, the EPA’s acting assistant administrator for air and radiation, said officials concluded that the current annual standard “is in fact adequate to protect public health with an adequate margin of safety, and there isn’t sufficient evidence to justify a tightening of that standard.”
Let me simplify that for you. EPA’s scientists told EPA to reduce the annual amount of soot (“fine particulates” if you prefer) that Americans breath in each year, but an EPA political appointee, William L. Wehrum (now working as a partner for the Washington law firm Hunton & Williams as an environmental air quality compliance lawyer decided that the scientists didn’t know what they were talking about, and refused to follow their “recommendations” because there wasn’t “sufficient evidence” to justify cleaning up the air we breathe.
Which, was, and is, a flat out lie:
Jan. 31, 2007 — Air pollution is a much bigger factor in death from heart disease or stroke than has previously been recognized, according to findings from one of the largest studies ever to examine the issue.
Researchers followed close to 66,000 women — aged 50-79 — living in 36 cities. All the women were enrolled in the ongoing health study, the Women’s Health Initiative.
After adjusting for other risk factors for heart disease and stroke, they found that air quality was a strong predictor of heart disease and stroke risks — and an even stronger predictor of death from heart disease or stroke.
Fine particulate air pollution — caused primarily by vehicle exhausts, coal-fired power plants, and other industrial sources — was the sole type of air pollution associated with increased risk.
When all other risk factors were equal, the researchers found that women living in the most polluted cities had the highest heart disease and stroke risks, while women living in the cleanest cities had the lowest.
Shorter version: dirty air’s a killer. And with the increase in the number of warmer days caused by global warming it’s only going to get worse:
(cont.)
New Study: Smog Poses Greater Health Risk Because of Global Warming
More Bad Air Days for Southern, Eastern U.S. Cities
WASHINGTON, DC (September 13, 2007) — People living in ten mid-sized metropolitan areas are expected to experience significantly more ‘red alert’ air pollution days in coming years due to increasing lung-damaging smog caused by higher temperatures from global warming.
The analysis[1] was prepared by researchers at Yale, Johns Hopkins and Columbia universities, in collaboration with researchers at State University of New York at Albany, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison and released today by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
The study uses data from the 2007 journal Climatic Change, which looks at climate change, ambient ozone, and public health in U.S. cities. It was released today by NRDC and some of the nation’s top medical experts.
“The air in many of our nation’s cities is already unhealthy. Hotter weather means more bad air days for millions of Americans,” said NRDC Climate Center’s Science Director Dan Lashof. “People with asthma are especially at risk, but everyone is adversely harmed by breathing unhealthy air. This research provides another compelling reason to establish enforceable limits on pollution.”
And yet, during the last six and a half years the Bush administration has done everything in its power to allow the sources of this killer pollution to escape responsibility (and liability) for their actions. You already know about the whole sordid story of how the Bush administration has sought to deny global warming, downplay its effects, censor and intimidate government scientists, and stall effective measures to combat it. But that’s only half the story.
Enforcement of the existing environmental laws against major polluters is down significantly under Bush.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s pursuit of criminal cases against polluters has dropped off sharply during the Bush administration, with the number of prosecutions, new investigations and total convictions all down by more than a third, according to Justice Department and EPA data.
The number of civil lawsuits filed against defendants who refuse to settle environmental cases was down nearly 70 percent between fiscal years 2002 and 2006, compared with a four-year period in the late 1990s, according to those same statistics.
The Bush administration has also cut EPA’s funding and staff for enforcement of our environmetal laws:
The slower pace of enforcement mirrors a decline in resources for pursuing environmental wrongdoing. The EPA now employs 172 investigators in its Criminal Investigation Division, below the minimum of 200 agents required by the 1990 Pollution Prosecution Act, signed by President George H.W. Bush.
The actual number of investigators available at any time is even smaller, agents said, because they sometimes are diverted to other duties, such as service on EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson’s eight-person security detail.
And they have instituted bureaucratic “reforms” which effectively delay bringing new enforcement actions:
A new policy distributed May 25 requires agents to seek prior approval from the head of their division and establishes new paperwork procedures. This has slowed agents’ ability to make referrals, congressional investigators said.
Even worse, the Bush administration has lied about the air quality of our cities and towns, and deliberately stalled efforts to make the biggest producers of soot, power plants which rely on burning coal or other fossil fuels to generate electricity modernize and clean up their emissions. The EPA’s own Inspector General, Nikki Tinsley, exposed the Bush administration’s malfeasance, in testimony she gave to Congress back in 2004:
In a rebuke of the Bush administration, the inspector general of the Environmental Protection Agency said on Thursday that legal actions against major polluters had stalled because of the agency’s decision to revise rules governing emissions at older coal-fired power plants.
The inspector general, Nikki L. Tinsley, took direct aim at the administration’s revision of the New Source Review rule, one of the administration’s most prominent – and vilified – environmental initiatives, saying that it makes it easier for power-plant operators to postpone or avoid adding technologies that reduce polluting emissions.
The revised rule, made final last year, has not been put in effect yet because of legal challenges. But the report concludes that just by issuing the rule, which scuttled the enforcement approach of the Clinton administration, the agency has “seriously hampered” its ability to settle cases and pursue new ones.
Ms. Tinsley also called into question the Bush EPA’s new rules to allow more mercury emissions by power plant polluters. Reports issued by her office also exposed the lie by Bush officials that America’s air quality was the “cleanest most of us had ever breathed:”
The same day, even as EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt was on the campaign trail for President Bush, touting the nation’s air as “the cleanest most Americans have ever breathed,” another IG report found that smog levels in major metropolitan areas had remained the same or gotten worse, making the air unhealthful.
Not surprisingly, Ms. Tinsley, for daring to cross the Bush agenda to ease restrictions on polluters, was forced to resign as EPA’s Inspector General in 2005. Also, not surprisingly, air quality standards across the country have worsened on Bush’s watch, and more people have died and more people have sickened (from conditions such as asthma which are aggravated by dirty air) as a result of Bush’s war against our right to breathe.
It isn’t as sexy a story as Iraq. There are no IED’s blowing up under-armored Humvees. It isn’t as much fun as a Republican hypocrite “toe tapping” away in a Minnesota public restroom (leading to a comedic bonanza for Leno and Letterman). And it sure isn’t as compelling as the latest snit fit about who really hates the troops the most, Moveon or Limbaugh. And Lord knows it can’t compete with the sheer entertainment value of the latest antics of Paris Hilton or Britney Spears.
But it may just be the most important story of our lives. Certainly, its the one most likely to increase the risk that we or those whom we love may die or suffer debilitating illnesses so that power companies can continue to spew toxic waste and other dangerous contaminants into the air. Conversely, the cleaner the air becomes, the healthier we all will be.
And for that reason alone, don’t you think our media ought to cover it to the same degree they cover these other stories?