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Environmental Defense Fund expects that there will be critics of the new rule. (Gosh! Do ya’ think!) “So, when you hear from the critics,” advises EDF, “you can tell them that not only can they afford it, but they can’t afford NOT to cut their pollution.”
The Environmental Protection Agency will announce a rule that will, for the first time, limit hazardous emissions from our nation’s power plants. These pollutants threaten the health of every American with annual emissions of more than 386,000 tons of dangerous air pollution like mercury, acid gases, heavy metals and even radioactive materials.
Unlike criteria air pollutants – like ozone and particulate matter – there are no current national ambient air quality standards for air toxics. This means that there’s no regulation on the amount of harmful air toxics that can collect in our air, water, or wildlife. Once in the environment, many of these toxic compounds are there forever.
While we have yet to learn all of the implications from harmful exposures to air toxics, we do know that some of the most serious health effects are most severe in infants and young children and include brain damage, learning disabilities, behavioral disorders, and impaired vision and hearing. We also know that reducing exposures can reduce risk, and that reducing risk is the best and most immediate way to protect human health.
Send Your Energy to Them to Stand Their Ground, even if means standing before the Gates of Koch.
Related articles
- Coal Power Plants Are Number One … Source of Toxic Air Pollutants in U.S. (desmogblog.com)
- American Lung Association: We must clean up coal-fired power plants and close the ‘Toxic Loophole’ (climateprogress.org)
- EPA’s new standards for boiler pollution reflect business concerns but still protect public health (climateprogress.org)
- EPA releases data for air toxics monitoring at Berks County school (newdayunderwriting.wordpress.com)
- Health Groups Gird for Fight Over EPA’s Power-Plant Toxics Rules (nytimes.com)
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And, while on the subject of toxic pollution and people’s health, “data collected by NASA, and it is just finally being released to scientists (like Dr. Leifer*), NGO’s (like the Gulf Coast Ecosystem Restoration Task Force) and the public (like all the sick Gulf coast residents),” writes reddit commentator alimardo.
Guanabara Bay fishers say abandon all hope, ye who fish where oil companies rule.
* Editor’s note: “The Chief Mission Coordinating Scientist on the NASA remote sensing mission to the BP oil spill in the Gulf Of Mexico was Ira Leifer, Ph.D from University of California Santa Barbara. Dr. Leifer has been working with natural oil spills and natural methane bubble flows for the last decade. He is in the process of releasing some of the government data collected during the spill; the vast majority of this data has been suppressed and is not available to scientists, the media, or the general public. The data was collected on boats at the sea surface, in airplanes over the Gulf, and by satellite.” HuffPoz Jerry Cope
Brad Johnson tells us that “the usual suspects are out en masse pounding the drums to demonize the EPA and at least implicitly deny the existence of global warming:”
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[...] might suspect that inspiration (Koch, Koch) came from the caroling coal [...]