We have top scientists telling us that the amount of carbon dioxide in the air is the highest it's been in two-thirds of a million years! Let's be clear on that. The scientists are telling us that the carbon dioxide is higher than it's been in longer than the biblical scholars believe that the earth has existed!
I'm thinking that this tells us that God doesn't want the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to be this high. Somebody else might have other ideas what this means, but they just make the baby Jesus cry.
Anyway, since the President is now willing to admit that global warming... oh, sorry, "climate change" exists, his chief advisors are suddenly willing to tell the truth.
The human role in climate change is no longer debatable, U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said today...Yeah, but meanwhile, despite the fact that it's not debatable, apparently the debate rages on.
"Human activity is contributing to changes in the Earth's climate," Bodman said at a press conference in Washington. "That issue is no longer up for debate."
Despite a strongly worded global warming report from the world's top climate scientists, the Bush administration expressed continued opposition today to mandatory reductions in heat-trapping "greenhouse" gases.I'd say that the record profits posted by the gas companies might have something to do with this non-policy change, but that would be rude, wouldn't it?
I mean, let's consider the spectacular record that Bush has on the environment. I mean, after all, he...
No, really, he...
OK, so he kind of sucks on environmental issues. Consider mercury poisoning.
In March of 2005, the agency set limits on the amounts of mercury that could be emitted by power plants. At the time, the EPA said that they couldn't make the limits more "aggressive" because the cost to the industry was already more than the public health benefit.
Which would have been true, if they weren't ignoring a study by Harvard University that said that slightly greater limits would have health benefits worth more than five billion dollars per year, but would cost the industry three quarters of a billion dollars.
This was a study that the EPA had paid for, that was co-authored by an EPA scientist, and that was peer-reviewed by two other EPA scientists. In common language, the EPA wasted our tax dollars to ignore a study that might have made Americans healthier.
At first, the EPA claimed that the study results didn't get to them in time for their deadline. When interviews and documents proved that to be a lie, they switched their stories, and claimed that the Harvard study was using "flawed" data about the heart problems caused by mercury contamination. They did manage to stick by their original claim that the health benefits would only be around fifty million dollars, though.
The government's action lends an interesting light to the fact that the EPA dismantled a previous working group on mercury, just as they were about to require much more stringent regulations from all coal-burning power plants in America.
With their new ruling, the EPA completely ignored previous studies that showed that mercury contamination in seafood caused irreversible damage not only to the hearts of adults, but to brain functions in infants.
Let's repeat the most important word there: "irreversible." As in "can't be fixed."
The EPA had accepted those studies at the time, and as a result, had already suggested that pregnant women limit their intake of seafood to no more than twelve ounces per week.
Of course, that was then. This is now. The Bush administration now seems to be quite happy with the idea of a brain-damaged electorate. I wonder why that is?
They'll probably be telling us to eat more seafood next.
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