Republicans say they want to restore America. But restore it to what? They don’t want to cut carbon emissions or limit Big Oil and Big Coal’s continued dirty and dangerous drilling and mining practices. No, they want to expand them.
We will fight to increase access to domestic energy sources and oppose attempts to impose a national “cap-and-trade” energy tax.
Republicans don’t even want the EPA to require companies to make their industrial boilers release less toxic emissions of dioxin, mercury, carbon monoxide and other known health risks into our air by updating to the latest technology. The excuse they offer for allowing the continuous release of these poisons into our atmosphere reveals a massive display of arrogance and hypocrisy:
In June, the EPA issued a proposal that would force industrial, commercial and institutional boilers and heaters to use “maximum achievable control technology” to reduce harmful emissions that erode air quality and pose a public health risk. […]
The agency … has argued that implementing the rule would prevent 1,900 to 4,800 premature deaths in 2013 by reducing pollutants like dioxin, mercury and carbon monoxide, which are known or suspected to cause cancer and other serious health and environmental effects.
The EPA also lists a series of other benefits, including a reduction in asthma, bronchitis, heart attacks, hospital visits and lost work days. The agency says the value of the benefits ranges from $17 billion to $41 billion in 2013 alone — outweighing the costs of implementing the new rule by at least $14 billion.
But the Inhofe report — written by the Senate Environment and Public Works minority staff titled and titled “EPA’s Anti-Industrial Policy: Threatening Jobs and America’s Manufacturing Base,” — found that the proposed rule, known as “Boiler MACT,” could put nearly 800,000 jobs at risk over requirements on commercial and industrial boilers, cement plans and ozone standards. […]
A spokesman for the EPA told FoxNews.com that the agency had not seen the report yet.
“But the doomsday predictions we hear now are the same sort we have heard every time EPA has taken any step to implement the laws that Congress wrote to protect Americans from pollution in the air we breathe and the water we drink,” EPA spokesman Brendan Gilfillan said in a written statement. “Experience has consistently proved those doomsday predictions wrong for the past 40 years.”
Yes, these are the same Republicans who voted against eliminating the tax cuts for companies that send jobs overseas because to do so would “eliminate jobs in America.” So let me see if I can get state the GOP position correctly.
Cleaner air? Republicans say you can’t can’t do it. Would hurt US jobs.
Eliminating tax loopholes that benefit US companies that outsource jobs to foreign countries? Republicans say you can’t can’t do it. Would hurt US jobs.
Reduce carbon emissions to reduce the damage and cost of climate change and encourage investment and subsidize green energy alternatives such as wind and solar power to reduce dependence on fossil fuels? Can’t do it. Would hurt US jobs.
Drill more offshore oil and gas wells despite the risks inherent in that outdated technology as demonstrated by the BP Deep Water Horizon disaster? Must do it!
Remove more mountaintops to get at the coal deposits there despite a long record of environmental degradation, property damage and and ruined lives? Must do it!
Employ hydrofracking technology to drill for natural gas despite the fact that it poisons groundwater with chemicals and methane and makes homes and farms unlivable? Must do it!
Ignore all evidence of Climate Change and the costs to our world, both from an economic standpoint and the environmental devastation that is occurring as we speak? Must call it a lie and unproven and a hoax.
Reopen hearings on Climategate despite all the prior hearings by the British government and by a number of reputable scientific panels which cleared the climate scientists whose private emails were stolen and excerpts reported out of context to smear them and their work? Must do it!
In short, doing anything to clean our air, clean our water and eliminate carbon emissions in order to limit the effects of climate change is anathema to the Republicans in office or running for office. Unfortunately, doing nothing to stop more use of fossil fuels is literally suicidal for our nation: economically, socially, environmentally, ecologically and from the standpoint of public safety and human health.
(cont.)
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I have a cold this morning because I was out and about in the rain here in Western NY (home of the ever lovable Carl Paladino) yesterday all day long. But despite my misery, and the soggy weather, things weren’t as bad for me as for the folks in Allentown, PA where they had over 8 inches of rain fall since Thursday.
In fact it has been raining all up and down the Eastern Seaboard, with flooding in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and especially in the Carolinas, where Jacksonville, NC had 12 inches of rain (isn’t that like Monsoon type weather?) in 6 hours yesterday. This massive outpouring of precipitation follows a relatively dry summer for the Northeast, which is why the National Weather Service was giving out flash flood warnings yesterday and today like candy on Halloween.
More rain is expected today as the remnants of Tropical Storm Nichole dump sheets of rain on the East Coast as far North as Maine.
Another day of flood-producing rain was expected along the Eastern Seaboard Friday as a weakening tropical depression worked its way into the Northeast.
Flood warnings and advisories were in place from the Carolinas north through Maine. […]
Wilmington, North Carolina, has received 22.54 inches of rain since Sunday, the National Weather Service said. It’s the highest five-day total in almost 140 years of weather records and Wilmington’s wettest September on record, the weather service said.
In many ways all this is eerily reminiscent of the massive snow storms the East Coast faced last winter (though not where I lived thank god). For example, Dulles International Airport in Washington, DC recorded 72.8 inches of snow last winter when the average year in DC has only 17 inches. At the time, Senator Inhofe, he of the “Global Warming is a Big Fat Hoax” made the record snow fall into a joke by having his grandchildren build an Igloo and call it “Al Gore’s New Home.”
Well Senator Inhofe, who’s laughing now? We’ve had record heat around the globe this year, and also record extreme weather events such as the floods in Pakistan that inundated much of the country killing thousands and making millions homeless. We’ve also witnessed heat wave related droughts in Russia which led to massive wildfires that killed hundreds of Muscovites from all the smoke and destroyed much of Russia’s wheat harvest.
In the United States we had the rare occurrence of 100 degree temperatures in New York City and Boston (among many, many other US cities), and Los Angeles just recently broke the all time highest temperature recorded there with a reading of 113 degrees on Monday, September 27th. We previously had late Spring floods in Mississippi Kentucky, Arkansas and Tennessee, the most devastating of which occurred in Nashville.
Add to the list the third lowest Arctic sea ice extent (i.e. amount of ice coverage) on record, as well as the quite possibly the least sea ice by volume (i.e. the actual amount of ice lying atop the Arctic Ocean) on record:
Arctic experts at the University of Washington use temperature, satellite, and weather data in a computer model to estimate the total volume of ice in the area. According to their model, the total ice volume in the Arctic is now at an all-time low, nearly 10,000 cubic kilometers less than the average of the past 30 years.
Then there is the little matter of our world’s coral reefs dying off due to increased temperatures in the oceans:
The biggest immediate effect of warmer ocean temperatures in the tropics has been the extraordinary death of corals, as Science laid out 3 weeks ago:
Reefs on both sides of the Thai Peninsula were hit, with up to 100% of some coral species bleached, says James True, a coral biologist at Prince of Songkla University in Hat Yai, Thailand. He expects at least 80% of the most sensitive species to die. “A few inshore reefs got so badly damaged, they probably won’t ever come back to the way they were,” he says. Among surviving corals, “disease is rampant,” True says, with two to three times the usual incidence of necrotic lesions and growth anomalies. Similar reports of “quite extensive bleaching” have come from Vietnam and through the heart of the Coral Triangle in Indonesia and the Philippines.
All these extreme events were predicted by climate change models and the most recent assessment report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (though they didn’t predict that these changes would occur as rapidly as they are).
WASHINGTON, Sep 24, 2009 (IPS) – Less than three months before a key global negotiation on curbing greenhouse gases, a new study released here Thursday by the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) warns that climate change is taking place faster than anticipated.
The 68-page study, “Climate Change Science Compendium 2009”, suggests that many of the more dire predictions made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – a group that includes hundreds of the world’s leading climate and atmospheric scientists – two years ago are increasingly likely to become reality.
The new report is based on some 400 major peer-reviewed scientific studies and research institutions over the last three years, and will be continuously updated as new studies are published. It warns that Earth may rapidly be approaching certain thresholds or “tipping points” that can permanently disrupt entire ecosystems that currently support the lives of millions of people.
Nonetheless, the Republicans continue to be the party that rejects the now well documented science of climate change and demands that our energy policy rely exclusively on the burning of fossil fuels: coal, oil and natural gas. Electing more of them to Congress will be dangerous to your health, your job and possibly your life.