Actually, you already know the answer if you read this site. It’s the REPUBLICANS. And I bet you can already guess why they think stricter clean air standards to help prevent (or at least lessen the impact of) childhood asthma. It starts with a B and ends with an S and yes, it is a BS reason for why we should put up with dirtier air and why kids or adults should suffer life altering consequences as a result:
Summer air pollution could trigger more asthma attacks for children who live in industrial cities, and the Environmental Protection Agency would like stricter rules to cut smog.
“Asthma is the most common chronic disease of childhood and is responsible for a large amount of health care expenditures and lost school days,” testified James Ginda, a respiratory therapist from Rhode Island.
Patty Resnik, the corporate director at Christiana Care Health System in Delaware, said the economic costs of asthma ranged from $12.7 billion to $19.7 billion a year. She said studies showed that this comprised medical costs as well as missed days of work for parents of asthmatic children. […]
Republican senators agreed [with economist Margo Thorning of the pro-business “think tank” American Council for Capital Formation] that the costs of reducing air pollution further would be too high. […]
Sen. David Vitter, R-La., said he had “absolutely no confidence in the science coming out of the EPA.”
Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., said there was no question that everyone supported the well-being of children, but President Barack Obama’s administration had encouraged an “aggressive regulatory regime,” he said.
“It’s designed to make the energy we use more expensive,” he said.
Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/06/08/115486/pollution-worsens-kids-asthma.html#ixzz1OyzVWugv
Yes, James Inhofe, the man who claims climate change is the greatest hoax ever in the history of the world, and the recipient of over $600,000 in campaign contributions from the oil and gas industry between 2000 and 2008, supports the well-being of your kids. He just happens to support the well being of Big Oil a whole lot more. The same can be said for David “God has forgiven me for my sex scandal” David Vitter, who received over $538,000 from Big Oil between 2005 and 2010. If I were the Senators owned by Big Oil I’d probably say what they said as well.
As for Margo Thorning of the American Council for Capital Formation, she has long been a critic of cutting carbon emissions. In 1999 she testified before Congress that the Kyoto Protocol, which called for reductions in carbon emissions by signatories to the treaty, would be too costly to the US economy.
In 2003, she was a presented her paper “”Kyoto and Beyond: Economic Impact on Developed Economies” at the American Enterprise Institute, Reexamining Climate Change Science, Economics, and Policy. From the AEI description of the event:
The 1992 Rio Earth Summit produced an important, common sense consensus in favor of avoiding “dangerous interference” with the global climate. Rio, however, led to the Kyoto Protocol, which abandoned the focus on reliable science and effective policy in favor of arbitrary, unrealistic targets and timetables. Kyoto, for all practical purposes, is now dead: the United States and Russia will not participate in the agreement, the European Union is not meeting its commitments to the protocol, and the developing world was never included. Six years after Kyoto, a new approach is needed.
This AEI conference seeks to restart the climate-change dialogue by returning to the spirit and purpose of the Rio consensus in the weeks leading up to the opening of the 9th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Milan, Italy, on December 1, 2003. Panelists will discuss the science of climate change, which has grown more uncertain and more susceptible to political influence in recent years, and public policy issues such as how to spend research money and spur innovation. A return to Rio will offer the opportunity to reexamine how dangerous warming is likely to be, what steps should be taken to address it, and what can be done to reestablish the common sense consensus that led to the Framework Convention.
In 2004, she organized a press conference with Putin’s Economic adviser, Andrei Illarionov, to speak out about the economic harm that implementing the Kyoto protocol would cause.
In June of this year this article, “Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990 Slow U.S. Economic Growth” was posted at the American Council for Capital Formation (of which Thorning is a Senor Vice President and its Chief Economist), describing Thorning’s testimony regarding the damage done to our economy as a result of the Clean Air Act.
Suffice it to say, Thorning has never met a a clean air initiative that she couldn’t find damaging to business. By the way, Sourcewatch describes the organization that pays her salary, American Council for Capital Formation (ACCF), as follows:
American Council for Capital Formation (ACCF) is a think tank that prides itself on “economic growth through sound tax, regulatory, and environmental policies.” ACCF is a very influential in Washington D.C. with ACCF’s President Mark Bloomfield as being, “one of the most influential figures operating behind the scenes in the Congress,” Robert Novak, 1997.
ACCF has a conservative perspective of economic policy and favors policies that favor big business. ACCF’s Officers and Board of Directors included former high-ranking politicians (predominantly Republican) in the U.S. government along with representatives of industry associations, including individuals from the American Petroleum Institute, Principal Financial Group, American Chemistry Council, American Farm Bureau Federation, American Business Conference, American Forest & Paper Association, Edison Electric Institute, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association and other pro-industry trade associations and corporations. Individuals from the American Enterprise Institute, and the Hoover Institution are members of ACCF’s Board of Scholars.
In short, Thorning is shill for big business. Like Inhofe and Vitter, she knows who butters her bread, and delivers economic analyses to meet the needs of large corporations, regardless of the devastating effect on the health and lives of our children and every one else who suffers from inadequate regulation of polluters who dump their toxic wastes into our air and our water.
It should come as no surprise then that her analysis of the costs to our economy from implementing the Clean Air Act relies on a net cost-benefits methodology that is inherently rife with assumptions and estimates that exude uncertainty and do not take into account intangible benefits that are difficult to measure and thus impossible to monetize.
After numerous assumptions, uncertainties and estimates are boiled own to one monetized benefits figure and one monetized costs figure, the difference is calculated in order to determine “net benefits.” This one-number approach obscures uncertainty and masks the value of those benefits that agencies cannot translate into dollars and cents. Such a simple presentation of such a complex composition paints a dramatically distorted picture of the potential effects of a regulation. […]
Cost-benefit analysis is particularly troubling for health, environment, civil rights, and safety rule makings because of the magnitude of intangible and invaluable benefits. In order to inject some accuracy into the estimation of these kinds of benefits, agencies often present ranges of estimates. However, the sizes of these ranges make it impossible for policy makers to draw meaningful conclusions. […]
Cost-benefit analysis should be an especially minor tool in the consideration of public health rule makings. Monetizing certain benefits of regulation, such as lives saved, is both economically flawed and morally suspect. In such cases, the results of a cost-benefit analysis are useless for policy makers.
Let’s be blunt. The corporations people like Inhofe, Vitter and Thorning represent don’t care if your or your aging parents suffer from potentially life threatening and life altering respiratory ailments as a result of their pollution. All they care about is profits. The less regulation, the greater their profits, profits that are already at an all-time high. Profits that do not translate into more jobs, only job cuts, as I demonstrated in part in my diary yesterday, and which others here have also shown, despite the claims of industry apologists to the contrary.
Excessive profits only benefit the few at the cost of the many. The immorality of using the profit motive to attack public health regulations was never more on display that at the Senate hearings on June 8th. That so many Republicans support policies that are harmful to the majority of Americans is not surprising, I know. But it should still shock your conscience that these immoral puppets are so willing play the role of marionettes exposing for all who wish to see the strings that run from their lips to the hands of their corporate puppet masters.
After all, as the Union of Concerned Scientists pointed out:
The Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental advocacy group, warned last week that bad air days from ground-level ozone pollution will get worse in much of the U.S. as a result of climate change unless pollution is reduced.
Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2011/06/08/115486/pollution-worsens-kids-asthma.html#ixzz1OzJZ7HAm
Actually lots of things will get worse if we don’t start moving away form fossil fuels to more sustainable, renewable sources of energy. Extreme storms, drought, wildfires, disease, refugees, wars over scarce resources — all these will worsen. The only things that won’t be impacted by regulating greenhouse gas emissions? The profits of industries dependent on our continued use of fossil fuels, and the moral consciences of those who lie and deceive on behalf of greed.
