aka: BushCo’s™ assault on the environment.
it’s been just over a week since BushCo™ announced that federal agencies would be barred from assessing the emissions from projects that contribute to global warming and its effect on species and habitats that are required under the Endangered Species Act, so l guess it’s not unexpected that they’d eviscerate the environmental policies some more before they leave…more below the fold
let’s start here: Anti- Regulation Environment Aide to Cheney Is Up for Energy Post
A senior aide to Vice President Cheney is the leading contender to become a top official at the Energy Department, according to several current and former administration officials, a promotion that would put one of the administration’s most ardent opponents of environmental regulation in charge of forming department policies on climate change.
F. Chase Hutto III has played a prominent behind-the-scenes role in shaping the administration’s environmental policies for several years, the officials said, helping to rewrite rules affecting the air that Americans breathe and the waters that oil tankers traverse. In every instance, according to both his allies and opponents, he has challenged proposals that would place additional regulations on industry.
chase has an interesting history with the RATpug’s as well as BushCo™, having been a key player in the 2000 florida coup debacle:
Hutto, 39, a Michigan native and a veteran of several successful GOP campaigns, has spent almost his entire career working for Republicans in Washington. He started out as an opposition researcher working on Spencer Abraham’s 1994 upset Senate victory and conducted similar research for two other Senate bids before serving on the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign as a vote-recount team leader in Duval County, Fla.
some of his more notable achievements in the BushCo™ quest for profit over planet include:
In recent months, Hutto has helped scale back a rule proposed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to protect North Atlantic right whales — one of the most endangered animals on the planet — from lethal ship strikes. The rule NOAA submitted 1 1/2 years ago originally would have required ships within 30 nautical miles of several East Coast ports to slow to 10 knots or less during parts of the year when the whales are migrating…
opposed tightening federal rules for smog-forming ozone — which is linked to thousands of premature deaths each year…
and in 2005 he questioned why the EPA needed to limit mercury emissions from power plants, because the agency had just issued a rule that would have the incidental effect of somewhat reducing the toxic pollutant. In both instances, the EPA strengthened the protections over these objections.
as a spokesman for the Union of Concerned Scientists said:
…if Hutto takes the helm of the Energy Department’s climate policy office, the impact could last well beyond Bush’s term in office.
“It’s not surprising that the Bush administration is considering a candidate who has a track record of putting politics ahead of science. Over and over again, appointments like this one have damaged the government’s ability to protect the environment and public health,” Grifo said, adding that in the coming months, Hutto could make policy decisions that the next administration would find difficult to reverse quickly.
sources: wapo
think progress
and speaking of ships:
Pollution from ships causing thousands of deaths
Sulphur particles from ships may be responsible for as many as 60,000 deaths a year, say US scientists
…scientists from the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) found that ships contributed far more of the sulphate in the atmosphere than was previously realised. Their analysis separated primary sulphate from ship smoke and other sources, such as vehicle exhaust emissions.
Air samples showed that 44% of the sulphate polluting coastal California could be traced to ships. On some days ship sulphate accounted for almost a half of the fine particles in the air. Ships burning high sulphur fuel in the ports of Los Angeles, Long Beach and San Diego were largely to blame, the scientists discovered.
Primary sulphate is produced when ships burn a cheap sulphur-rich fuel called “bunker oil”. The particles are believed to be especially harmful to human health because of their small size.
and oceans:
Suffocating dead zones spread across world’s oceans
Critically low oxygen levels now pose as great a threat to l
ife in the world’s oceans as overfishing and habitat loss, say expertsMan-made pollution is spreading a growing number of suffocating dead zones across the world’s seas with disastrous consequences for marine life, scientists have warned.
The experts say the hundreds of regions of critically low oxygen now affect a combined area the size of New Zealand, and that they pose as great a threat to life in the world’s oceans as overfishing and habitat loss.
The number of such seabed zones – caused when massive algal blooms feeding off pollutants such as fertiliser die and decay – has boomed in the last decade. There were some 405 recorded in coastal waters worldwide in 2007, up from 305 in 1995 and 162 in the 1980s.
Robert Diaz, an oceans expert at the US Virginia Institute of Marine Science, College of William and Mary, at Gloucester Point, said: “Dead zones were once rare. Now they’re commonplace. There are more of them in more places.”
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Writing in the journal Science, the researchers say the dead zones must be viewed as one of the “major global environmental problems”. They say: “There is no other variable of such ecological importance to coastal marine ecosystems that has changed so drastically over such a short time.”
and as chimpy and “dick” and their sycophants try to assure you there’s nothing to worry about, the ecologists at the University of Alaska aren’t convinced:
Warming climate threatens Alaska’s vast forests
Records indicate that Alaska has already experienced the largest regional warming of any U.S. state — an average 5 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius) since the 1960s and about 8 degrees Fahrenheit (4.5 degrees Celsius) in the interior of the state during winter months.
“We’ve got mounds of evidence that an extremely powerful and unprecedented climate-driven change is underway,” said Glenn Juday, a forest ecologist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks.
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Further north near the Arctic Circle, receding sea ice has major implications for polar bears, seals and dozens of species, as well as native humans who depend on the land to sustain them.
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…more than 3 million acres (1.21 million hectares) of spruce have been killed in south-central Alaska since 1992…
but drilling in coastal waters [and ANWR] is still on the agenda, and it looks like the demoRATs are going to capitulate again, if madame speaker pelosi’s latest statement [in the demoRAT weekly radio address last saturday] accurately reflects the direction they’re going:
…Pelosi said opening portions of the Outer Continental Shelf for drilling would be a part of energy legislation that House Democrats intend to put forward in the coming weeks to address oil dependence and high gasoline prices.
anti-science, anti-environment, pro profit…the zen mantra of BushCo™
