More Capitulation: Obama Halts EPA Regulation On Smog Standards (2 articles)

(Hey, Obama--capitulate much? All the time? That's right, you do...here's an idea: big corporations need to figure out how to expand business without making the air too hazardous to fucking BREATHE! See, breathing clean air is kind of important if you don't want to die a horrible death from lung cancer or asphyxiation. Asshole!--jef)

Smog is Fun for Everybody!!! Wheeeee!!!!
Huffington Post - Sept. 2, 2011
 
WASHINGTON — In a dramatic reversal, President Barack Obama on Friday scrubbed a clean-air regulation that aimed to reduce health-threatening smog, yielding to bitterly protesting businesses and congressional Republicans who complained the rule would kill jobs in America's ailing economy.

Withdrawal of the proposed regulation marked the latest in a string of retreats by the president in the face of GOP opposition, and it drew quick criticism from liberals. Environmentalists, a key Obama constituency, accused him of caving to corporate polluters, and the American Lung Association threatened to restart the legal action it had begun against rules proposed by President George W. Bush.

The White House has been under heavy pressure from GOP lawmakers and major industries, which have slammed the stricter standard as an unnecessary jobs killer. The Environmental Protection Agency, whose scientific advisers favored the tighter limits, had predicted the proposed change would cost up to $90 billion a year, making it one of the most expensive environmental regulations ever imposed in the U.S.

However, the Clean Air Act bars the EPA from considering the costs of complying when setting public health standards.

Obama said his decision was made in part to reduce regulatory burdens and uncertainty at a time of rampant questions about the strength of the U.S. economy.

Underscoring the economic concerns: a new report Friday that showed the economy essentially adding no jobs in August and the unemployment rate stubbornly stuck at 9.1 percent.

The regulation would have reduced concentrations of ground-level ozone, the main ingredient in smog, a powerful lung irritant that can cause asthma and other lung ailments. Smog is created when emissions from cars, power and chemical plants, refineries and other factories mix in sunlight and heat.

Republican lawmakers, already emboldened by Obama's concessions on extending Bush-era tax cuts and his agreement to more than $1 trillion in spending reductions as the price for raising the nation's debt ceiling, had pledged to try to block the stricter smog standards as well as other EPA regulations when they returned to Washington after Labor Day.

A spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, had muted praise for the White House Friday, saying that withdrawal of the smog regulation was a good first step toward removing obstacles that are blocking business growth.

"But it is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to stopping Washington Democrats' agenda of tax hikes, more government `stimulus' spending and increased regulations, which are all making it harder to create more American jobs," said Boehner spokesman Michael Steel.

Thomas Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said the move was "an enormous victory for America's job creators, the right decision by the president and one that will help reduce the uncertainty facing businesses."

White House officials said the president's decision was not the product of industry pressure, and they said the administration would continue to fight other efforts by Republicans to dismantle the EPA's authority.

But that was little consolation for many of the president's supporters. The group MoveOn.org issued a scathing statement, saying Obama's decision was one it would have expected from his Republican predecessor.

"Many MoveOn members are wondering today how they can ever work for President Obama's re-election, or make the case for him to their neighbors, when he does something like this, after extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich and giving in to tea party demands on the debt deal," said Justin Ruben, the group's executive director.

The American Lung Association, which had sued the EPA over Bush's smog standards, said it would resume its legal fight now that Obama was essentially endorsing the weaker limit. The group had suspended its lawsuit after the Obama administration pledged to change it.

Obama's decision, in fact, mirrors one made by Bush in 2008. After EPA scientists recommended a stricter standard to better protect public health, Bush personally intervened after hearing complaints from electric utilities and other affected industries. His EPA set a standard of 75 parts per billion, stricter than one adopted in 1997, but not as strong as federal scientists said was needed to protect public health.

In March, the EPA's independent panel of scientific advisers sent a letter to the agency's director, Lisa Jackson, saying it was its unanimous recommendation to make the smog standards stronger and that the evidence was "sufficiently certain" that the range proposed in January 2010 under Obama would benefit public health.

But the White House, which has pledged to base decisions on science, said Friday the science behind its initial decision needed to be updated, a process already under way at EPA. The smog standard now is to be revised until 2013.

Whether Obama still occupies the White House at that point depends on the outcome of next year's presidential election.

Cass Sunstein, the head of the White House regulatory office, said changing the smog regulation now, only to have it be reconsidered again in two years, would create unnecessary uncertainty for the private sector and local governments.

The stricter limits initially proposed by Obama would have doubled the number of counties in violation. Smoggy cities such as Los Angeles and Houston would have been joined by counties in California's Napa Valley and one in Kansas with a population of 3,000. They would have had up to 20 years to meet the new limits, once EPA settled on a final number, or would have faced federal penalties.

In his statement, the president said scrapping the stronger smog standards did not reflect a weakening of his commitment to protecting public health and the environment.

"I will continue to stand with the hardworking men and women at the EPA as they strive every day to hold polluters accountable and protect our families from harmful pollution," Obama said. (Bullshit!--jef)

Even before Friday's decision – announced as many Americans were paying more attention to their Labor Day weekend plans than the news – the White House has faced some criticism for its record on the environment. Obama abandoned a campaign pledge* to set the first-ever limits on the pollution blamed for global warming, and he announced an expansion of offshore drilling before the Gulf oil spill sidelined those plans.

The ground-level ozone standard is closely associated with public health – something the president said he wouldn't compromise in his regulatory review.

(* for those keeping count, we're close to 20 campaign promises he has broken.--jef) 

++++

Obama withdraws smog regulation, overruling EPA

By Kase Wickman
Friday, September 2nd, 2011

President Barack Obama Friday announced that he would overrule the Environmental Protection Agency's controversial anti-smog regulations. Business leaders and Republicans had voiced strong objections to the new smog standards, and they count Obama's decision as a victory.

Obama cited a desire to avoid costly regulations as his reason for telling EPA Director Lisa Jackson to withdraw the smog rule.

Depending on how strict the standards were, the new smog rules were estimated to cost between $19 billion and $90 billion, according to Forbes.

"I want to be clear: my commitment and the commitment of my administration to protecting public health and the environment is unwavering (except when my corporate contributors tell me otherwise, which is all the time--jef)," Obama said in a statement sent by the White House. "I will continue to stand with the hardworking men and women at the EPA as they strive every day to hold polluters accountable and protect our families from harmful pollution, (except that I'm not going to do that at all. I will keep serving the interests of the corporate contributors to my 2012 Presidential Campaign, and nothing comes before that.--jef)"

The rule will be reconsidered in 2013, Obama said, and it was pointless to pay for regulations that would be so soon up for redrafting.

Last week, Obama was chided by House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) for the number of governmental regulations under consideration as well as the amount of regulations with costs exceeding $1 billion.

"A search of this year’s information, posted online in recent days, reveals that the Obama Administration’s job-crushing regulatory barrage is not being scaled back, but rather expanded, appearing to contradict White House rhetoric this week about President Obama’s intent to reduce the regulatory burden on job creators," Boehner wrote in a blog post.

In his own response this week, Obama outlined "a number of steps" his administration had taken to relieve regulatory burdens and streamline the bureaucratic process.

Friday, the White House posted a blog post by Heather Zichal, deputy assistant to the president for energy and climate change, outlining the ways Obama has achieved "Cleaner Air and a Stronger Economy — A Record of Success," as the post is titled.

The announcement that Obama was ordering the EPA to withdraw their drafted proposal came on the heels of the monthly jobs report, which showed that no new jobs had been added in August.

"The Obama administration is caving to big polluters at the expense of protecting the air we breathe," Gene Karpinski, the president of the League of Conservation Voters, told Forbes.

"This is a huge win for corporate polluters and huge loss for public health."

EPA Plan to Raise Radiation Exposure Limits Sparks Internal Debate

Tuesday, April 5, 2011 by Facing South
by Sue Sturgis

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is considering dramatically increasing the allowable level of radioactive contamination in water, food and soil after radiological incidents such as spills or "dirty bomb" attacks.

The radioactive Iodine-131 detected in milk samples in California and Washington state were 5,000 times below levels of concern. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is considering dramatically increasing the allowable level of radioactive contamination in water, food and soil after radiological incidents such as spills or "dirty bomb" attacks. (AP) The move preceded the nuclear disaster now unfolding in Japan in the wake of last month's devastating earthquake and tsunami. Documents released today by the whistleblower group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility show the plan has sparked concerns within EPA.

The agency's Office of Radiation and Indoor Air (ORIA) has prepared an update of the 1992 "Protective Action Guides" for radiation exposure. Other EPA divisions have raised concerns about how much the new guidelines would raise allowable exposures.

As Charles Openchowski of EPA's Office of General Counsel wrote in a January 2009 e-mail to ORIA:

"[T]his guidance would allow cleanup levels that exceed MCLs [Maximum Contamination Limits under the Safe Drinking Water Act] by a factor of 100, 1000, and in two instances 7 million and there is nothing to prevent those levels from being the final cleanup achieved (i.e., it's not confined to immediate response of emergency phase)."

Other EPA officials have raised concerns that drinking water containing radioactive contamination at the proposed limits would result in acute health effects such as vomiting and fever. PEER obtained the internal EPA e-mails after filing a lawsuit last fall under the Freedom of Information Act. It is still waiting for the agency to turn over thousands more communications.

"This critical debate is taking place entirely behind closed doors because this plan is 'guidance' and does not require public notice as a regulation would," said PEER Counsel Christine Erickson.

PEER sent EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson a letter today calling for a more open and broader examination of the proposed radiation guidance.

A comprehensive 2005 report from the National Academy of Sciences found there is no safe dose of low-level radiation, with no threshold of exposure below which radiation can be shown to be harmless.

"The health risks -- particularly the development of solid cancers in organs -- rise proportionally with exposure," said epidemiologist Richard R. Monson, chair of the NAS committee that issued the report and professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. "At low doses of radiation, the risk of inducing solid cancers is very small. As the overall lifetime exposure increases, so does the risk."

Dangerous Disinformation About Radiation

Spewing From Meltdowns
By JOHN LaFORGE

Well-reported plumes of radiation have spread to California and beyond from the wrecked six-reactor complex at Fukushima, Japan. What's worse in terms of citizen awareness, clouds of disinformation are circling even faster.

The consequences of Japan's disaster cubed — earthquakes, a tsunami and spewing radiation — can hardly be exaggerated, with over 22,000 people reportedly killed or missing, widespread contamination by long-lasting isotopes like cesium, and an early estimate of $250 billion in damages.

Yet within the blizzard of radiation being dispersed uncontrollably, day after day, from Japan's wrecked reactors and their dry pools of burning-hot waste fuel, it's important to note the storm of reassuring but erroneous lullabies about "safe," "harmless" and "less than dangerous" exposures.

There is no level of radiation exposure, no matter how small, that is harmless. Every federal agency that regulates radioactive pollution agrees.

Any exposure raises cancer risk

The National Council on Radiation Protection says, "… every increment of radiation exposure produces an incremental increase in the risk of cancer."

The Environmental Protection Agency says, "… any exposure to radiation poses some risk, i.e. there is no level below which we can say an exposure poses no risk." The Department of Energy says about "low levels of radiation" that "… the major effect is a very slight increase in cancer risk."

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission says, "any amount of radiation may pose some risk for causing cancer ... any increase in dose, no matter how small, results in an incremental increase in risk." 

The National Academy of Sciences, in its "Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation VII," says, "... it is unlikely that a threshold exists for the induction of cancers ...."

Long story short, "One can no longer speak of a 'safe' dose level," as Dr. Ian Fairlie and Dr. Marvin Resnikoff said in their report "No dose too low," in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

But when representatives from government agencies, universities or industry say "the amount of radiation did not reach a dangerous level," the listener is led to believe in error that there's some level that is risk-free.

The hiding or obscuring of radiation's dispersal came from government and company officials early on who reported "venting of hydrogen gas," and claimed there was "no threat to health." Even when hydrogen gas explosions destroyed parts of four reactors, the promise of safety was repeated.

"In fact," writes environmental anthropologist Barbara Rose Johnston in the March 18 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, "the hydrogen released is tritium water vapor, a low-level [radiation] emitter that can be absorbed in a human body through simply breathing, or by drinking contaminated water."

Principle Japanese government spokesperson, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano, has been one of the worst violators. On March 21, Edano asked the public not to overreact to reports of radioactively contaminated food, saying, "Even if you eat contaminated vegetables several times, it will not harm your health at all," the BBC reported.

Spinach with radioactive iodine 27 times the government-established limit had been found in the city of Hitachi, more than 50 miles south of the failed reactors.

Outright lying, appalling laziness

On March 17, when radiation levels were reportedly 300 times normal just south of Fukushima, Associated Press writer Eric Talmadge reported without qualification that officials said, "It would take three years of constant exposure to these higher levels to raise a person's risk of cancer." This is outright lying by "officials" of course, but it also shows the appalling laziness of the AP, since information on low dose exposures is easily available from the websites of the agencies quoted above.

Dr. Chris Busby, a founder of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, and chief scientist at the Low-Level Radiation Campaign declared March 16, "Reassurances about radiation exposures issued by the Japanese government cannot be believed. They are based on an invalid risk model which the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) itself has admitted cannot be applied in accident situations."

This ICRP radiation risk model is the basis of and dominates all present radiation exposure legislation. Yet Dr. Busby reports, "The basic concept of radiation dose is generally recognized to be invalid for many types of internal exposure relevant to the present emergency."

Industry watchdogs are working to correct the errors. Mary Olson, of Nuclear Information and Resource Service writes, "Radiation carries a risk, not a certainty, of DNA damage at every level of exposure. An emission from a radionuclide that chanced to ride on your sandwich into your tummy — an exposure so tiny that it would never be measured — has the capacity to start what might become fatal cancer."

Governments have set up "permissible," "allowable" and "legal" radiation exposure limits because reactors can't operate without venting or dumping contaminated gases and liquids. Exposure to this radiation, during routine operations or from partial meltdowns — say in milk, tap water, or vegetables — is never safe. It is merely permitted under law.

Thad Allen 'satisfied' with dispersant use in Gulf oil disaster

NEW: BP says it complied with EPA guidelines
By the CNN Wire Staff

(CNN) -- Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, who is overseeing the federal response to the BP oil spill, said Sunday that he is "satisfied" with the amount of dispersants that have been used to clean up the disaster, saying crews have used them only when needed.

Allen's comments were in response to new documents released by a congressional subcommittee that indicate Coast Guard officials allowed BP to use excessive amounts of chemical dispersants in the Gulf of Mexico.

BP used the chemicals to break up oil after the April 20 Deepwater Horizon rig explosion sent millions of gallons of crude gushing into the Gulf.

Allen noted that the decision to use the dispersants does not rest with BP; rather, "it's a decision by the federal on-scene coordinator," he said in describing a "very disciplined process."

Despite a federal directive restricting the use of dispersants, the Coast Guard routinely granted exemptions, said Rep. Edward J. Markey, chairman of the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee.

In May, the Environmental Protection Agency, along with the Coast Guard, ordered the oil giant to stop surface application of the chemicals during the oil spill except in rare occasions, according to a House subcommittee on energy and environment.

In rare cases, exemptions had to be requested, documents show.

"BP carpet bombed the ocean with these chemicals, and the Coast Guard allowed them to do it," Markey said in a statement Saturday. "After we discovered how toxic these chemicals really are, they had no business being spread across the Gulf in this manner."

Allen dismissed Markey's allegations during a conference call with reporters Sunday.

"I'm satisfied that we only use them [dispersants] when they're needed," he said.

Allen said field commanders on a case-by-case basis have decided to use dispersants when oil has been spotted by surveillance aircraft and no other method of cleaning it up is available in the area.

"We're going to accept some impact on the water column" rather than having the oil reach the beach, he said.

The Coast Guard approved more than 74 exemptions in 48 days, Markey said. In one instance, Coast Guard officials allowed the oil giant to use a larger volume of dispersants than it had applied for, he said.

Dispersants are "a toxic stew of chemicals, oil and gas, with impacts that are not well understood," Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts, said in the letter to Allen.

BP issued a statement Sunday saying it has worked closely with the EPA and the Coast Guard over the use of dispersants "since the very beginning" of the disaster.

"Furthermore, we've complied with EPA requests regarding dispersants which are an EPA-approved and recognized tool in fighting oil spills," the statement said.

Doug Suttles, BP's chief operating officer, said Sunday that the oil company is funding research into the long-term effects of the spill, including the use of dispersants.

"Right now we haven't seen anything that shows us to be concerned, but we're going to keep looking," he said.

Markey said the findings are based on an analysis by the Energy and Environment Subcommittee.

"The use of dispersant is always a difficult decision, with environmental trade-offs that must be taken seriously into consideration," EPA spokesman Brendan Gilfillan said Sunday. "As a result, its use in response to the BP spill was subject to numerous strict conditions once it quickly became apparent that BP wanted to use it in unprecedented quantities and in novel ways."

BP's use of disperants peaked at 70,000 gallons on May 24, the EPA said. It was after that the EPA ordered the halt on its use, except for rare occasions. From the time that directive was issued, dispersant use dropped 72 percent, Gilfillan said.

Initially, the EPA was not involved in the day-to-day decisions about which exceptions were granted, but that changed in late June.

"While EPA may not have concurred with every individual waiver granted by the federal on-scene coordinator, the agency believes dispersant use has been an essential tool in mitigating this spill's impact, preventing millions of gallons of oil from doing even more damage to sensitive marshes, wetlands and beaches and the economy of the Gulf coast," Gilfillan said.

Allen said Sunday that he and EPA administrator Lisa Jackson talk daily about dispersant use, saying "we haven't ignored EPA's guidelines."

Markey said the subcommittee also found contradictions on how much chemical dispersant was being used. On other occasions, BP used more than the amount approved by the Coast Guard, Markey said in his letter.

The report brings into question the total amount of dispersants used in the Gulf. BP says it has used 1.8 million gallons to break up oil flowing from the Deepwater Horizon's ruptured well.

"The validity of those numbers are now in question," Markey said.

Meanwhile Sunday, Allen announced that the first of two efforts to seal the ruptured well once and for all could begin as early as Monday night.

The "static kill" -- when mud and cement are poured into the well from above -- had been previously delayed while debris that collected during Tropical Storm Bonnie can be cleared out.

Suttles said that the more likely start for the static kill will be Tuesday.

"I do have a lot of confidence we'll be successful," Suttles said.

That will be followed by a final "bottom kill" after a relief well intercepts the crippled well -- a step that Allen estimated Sunday to begin a minimum of five to seven days after the static kill is complete.