Our guest blogger is Pete Altman, in an NRDC Switchboard repost.
Let’s get straight to the point. When members of Congress choose to support bills that would prevent the EPA from updating Clean Air Act standards, they are making a choice to support polluters over the health of children and adults in America. Some of these bills will increase the amount of mercury, smog-forming, soot, toxic and carbon dioxide pollution that industrial plants will emit compared to if the EPA is allowed to do its job. Some will simply make it a law that we must allow industrial polluters to dump unlimited amounts of carbon dioxide into the air.
That’s why NRDC and Health Care Without Harm are teaming up today to make sure that the constituents of the members of Congress that have co-sponsored one or more Bad Air Bill know that their representatives are putting their health at risk:
How serious is the threat to health? Here’s what Brenda Afzel MS, RN, Health Care Without Harm’s Climate Policy Coordinator and member of the Executive Board of the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments has to say about it:
“Putting the EPA in a political stranglehold will sentence tens of thousands of people to debilitating, respiratory illnesses such as asthma, adding to the burden of chronic disease in the nation and increasing the financial burden to the health care system. Let’s be clear: If these lawmakers are successful in blocking the EPA from doing its job to cut life-threatening pollution, more asthma sufferers, particularly children, will wind up gasping for breath.”
There are over 7 million kids and over 17 million adults with asthma in the lower 48 states. Since those who suffer from asthma are so vulnerable to air pollution, we thought it would be helpful to show how many kids and adults with asthma live in the counties that are represented by members of Congress who want to block the EPA. Here’s a table of the Bad Air Bill cosponsors with details on asthma rates in their districts.
Behind the push to stop EPA from updating the Clean Air Act are polluters from the oil, coal and utility industries that don’t think protecting public health is worth the money to invest in cleaning up. So, the table includes polluter campaign contributions to the Bad Air Bill co-sponsors here. Many of these polluting contributors have prioritized blocking the EPA.
Here are the basics on the Bad Air Bills being pushed by members of Congress:
- Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., introduced a bill (H.R. 97) that would permanently block EPA from limiting carbon pollution.
- Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W. Va., introduced a bill (H.R. 199) that would block EPA from taking any action under the Clean Air Act to limit carbon or methane pollution, for two years.
- Rep. Ted Poe, R-Texas, introduced a bill (H.R. 153) that would prohibit EPA from developing or enforcing standards to limit carbon pollution.
- Rep. John Carter, R-Texas, has a introduced a resolution (H.J. RES. 9) that would permanently block the EPA from reducing the soot, mercury, cancer-causing toxic and smog-forming pollution that cement plants dump into the air.
What’s the link between carbon pollution and asthma? In 2009, EPA scientists determined carbon pollution is a public health risk, including its role in worsening the smog pollution to which asthmatics are particularly vulnerable. Regarding the effects on air quality, agency experts said “The evidence concerning adverse air quality impacts provides strong and clear support for an endangerment finding. Increases in ambient ozone are expected to occur over broad areas of the country, and they are expected to increase serious adverse health effects in large population areas that are and may continue to be in nonattainment. The evaluation of the potential risks associated with increases in ozone in attainment areas also supports such a finding.”
NRDC has also explored the links. My colleague Kim Knowlton has written extensively about the ties between carbon, global warming and health.
In 2004, a multi-disciplinary team of experts showed that warming temperatures will cause more days with unsafe ozone levels. The findings were published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Climatic Change, from which NRDC produced the report “Heat Advisory” that can be viewed here: http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/heatadvisory/heatadvisory.pdf.
The 2007 update to the report can be found here: http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/heatadvisory/heatadvisory07.pdf.
– Pete Altman, in a Switchboard repost.
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
It’s a moral issue…
http://moralground.com/mission/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/ClimateFlightAction/165484890164497?v=info
Joe, there’s a formatting issue with the inset between “members of Congress” and “What’s the link…” I get unreadable thin black text over an odd red background (in my Firefox browser). No issue in the source post.
Thanks for this post. And let’s also use clear language:
They have sabotaged a healthy future for us and our children.
This is not just a sell-out – this is a crime. When an elected representative deliberately fails – they are suborning plunder.
These representatives of toxic corruption endanger our future.
The corruption of our politics is without limit, all of us be damned. Leaded fuel long banned in cars is still being used in most propeller driven planes. The fuel is known as ‘highly leaded’. One gallon has enough lead to measurable reduce the IQ of many thousands of children. This is well know and thoroughly studied
Same problem as Marc A but using Internet Explorer.
Amazing really. We look back in scorn on those Dickensian types sending kids into coalmines or up chimneys and releasing foul smells and noxious wastes of all kinds into the surroundings. They just built their own homes upwind and out of sight of the horrors.
These people sincerely believed that poor people and their children were inferior beings, unworthy of any consideration, let alone “better” things – like sewage systems. They were ignorant of many things, and morally certain about others.
Despite them being totally reprehensible, we understand how their minds worked. Now we have people who claim to be interested in the well-being of all their constituents and of their vulnerable children. But they propose exactly the same kinds of things as the Victorian industrialists of 150 years ago.
These people are not ignorant of the issues of 100+ years ago. So how do their minds work?
Just really existing market capitalism at work. If 99% of capitalists grew a conscience and refused to pollute for profit, the other 1% of ‘entrepreneurs’ would be that much richer. Was it not true that lead was replaced as an anti-knocking additive, in many cases, by manganese, an even more potent neuro-toxin? Children’s lungs are a classic ‘externality’, well, actually, asthma treatment is rather lucrative (for the medical industrial complex which prefers treatment to prevention, every time), because chronic, so what you have here is the market capitalist version of a ‘win-win situation’.
adelady #6, I take it that your’s is a ‘rhetorical question’. We know precisely how the mind of a capitalist works. It has been explicated by psychologists, moralists and philosophers over centuries. It is all about gigantic egomania, perhaps as a pathological over-reaction to feelings of impotence in the face of death, hatred of others, manifest in the ideology that life is ‘a war of all against all’, and thus other people are enemies, or, at best ‘competition’ and lack of human empathy. Add in a Brobdingnagian capacity for mendacity, hypocrisy, unscrupulousness in search of advantage over others, and you get the type in question. I dare say that ‘psychopath’ is a useful short-hand.
I have had asthma for 64 years. I have had asthma since the day I was born at a navy base where they were testing all sorts of chemicals in the air. That was just after WW2. Nobody else in my family has the allergies to anything airborne that I do. Women wearing make-up or perfume stay away.
Asthma is torture, like a mild form of waterboarding that continues all day. Torture is a felony. Why aren’t there any prosecutions?
I don’t know what it was that the navy was doing to the air, but it really did a number on me. I am an isolated case because those chemicals were rare in those days and so were allergies and asthma. Allergies and asthma are modern diseases. They didn’t happen before industry happened.
Childhood obesity and type 2 diabetes: Also were rare before industrialization. Food companies put addictive or hunger causing substances into food to increase sales. That practice should be a felony.
Coal contains: URANIUM, ARSENIC, LEAD, MERCURY, Antimony, Cobalt, Nickel, Copper, Selenium, Barium, Fluorine, Silver, Beryllium, Iron, Sulfur, Boron, Titanium, Cadmium, Magnesium, Thorium, Calcium, Manganese, Vanadium, Chlorine, Aluminum, Chromium, Molybdenum and Zinc. There is so much of these elements in coal that cinders and coal smoke are actually valuable ores. We should be able to get all the uranium and thorium we need to fuel nuclear power plants for centuries by using cinders and smoke as ore. Unburned Coal also contains BENZENE, THE CANCER CAUSER. We could get all of our uranium and thorium from coal ashes and cinders. The carbon content of coal ranges from 96% down to 25%, the remainder being rock of various kinds.
If you are an underground coal miner, you may be in violation of the rules for radiation workers. The uranium decay chain includes the radioactive gas RADON, which you are breathing. Radon decays in about a day into polonium, the super-poison.
Chinese industrial grade coal is sometimes stolen by peasants for cooking. The result is that the whole family dies of arsenic poisoning in days, not years because Chinese industrial grade coal contains large amounts of arsenic.
Yes, that ARSENIC is getting into the air you breathe, the water you drink and the soil your food grows in. So are all of those other heavy metal poisons. Your health would be a lot better without coal. Benzene is also found in petroleum. If you have cancer, check for benzene in your past.
See: http://www.ornl.gov/ORNLReview/rev26-34/text/coalmain.html
for most of the above.
‘Fracking’ Releases Uranium When Drilling Marcellus Shale For Natural Gas, According To New Research
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/26/fracking-releases-uranium_n_774114.html
China: Inorganic Arsenic in Rice – An Underestimated Health Threat ?
(19.05.2010)
Inorganic arsenic was found to be the predominant arsenic form in rice from China. Due to the high consumption of rice, arsenic intake for the Chinese population through rice is higher than from drinking water.
Inorganic arsenic is a confirmed human carcinogen causing skin and bladder cancer. The most common route of exposure is via ingestion of contaminated drinking water or food such as rice. The UK Committee on Toxicity of Chemicals in Food, Consumer Products and the Environment (COT) (an independent scientific committee that provides advice to the Food Standards Agency) has concluded that people should consume as little of this form of arsenic as reasonably. Worldwide concerns over inorganic arsenic in potable water have prompted much research and policy development focusing on removing this chronic human carcinogen. However, recent studies have indicated that elevated inorganic arsenic in rice may additionally contribute significantly to dietary intake. Rice is generally grown under flooded conditions and accumulates As from the soil and water where As mobility is high. The transfer rate of As from soil to grain is an order of magnitude greater in rice than that in wheat or barley, leading to baseline levels of As in rice that are approximately 10-fold higher than those in other cereal grains.
http://www.speciation.net/News/China-Inorganic-Arsenic-in-Rice–An-Underestimated-Health-Threat–;~/2010/05/19/5027.html
“URANIUM, ARSENIC, LEAD, MERCURY, Antimony, Cobalt, Nickel, Copper, Selenium, Barium, Fluorine, Silver, Beryllium, Iron, Sulfur, Boron, Titanium, Cadmium, Magnesium, Thorium, Calcium, Manganese, Vanadium, Chlorine, Aluminum, Chromium, Molybdenum and Zinc.”
Yesterday my solar panels produced 21 kWh without emitting any of those elements. So we have cleaner alternatives to coal. We should not have to put up with this pollution. Defeat the bad air politicians.
Perhaps you have seen the “Drive carefully – Baby on board” caution sign in car windows or on the bumper.
I would like to have a bumper sticker that says “No babies on board. Drive any way you like.”
The concern for the health of children exhibited by some, with adult health as a minor afterthought is sometimes annoying. I am an adult. Children are not the only ones we should be concerned about.
[JR: True, but they are much more sensitive to pollution and will suffer the consequences of catastrophic climate change.]
Thank you for running this story about the essential link between air pollution and asthma. Toxins in the atmosphere are also a well-established, if generally ignored, cause of cancer, emphysema, heart disease, deaths in heat waves, and has recently been linked in studies about diabetes and autism, also epidemics.
And in case any readers don’t know, vegetation is even more sensitive to ozone than humans. Trees, including nut and fruit orchards, are dying off – and annual crop yields are significantly stunted.
Ozone is an existential threat.
I’m still out in Rancho Mirage following yesterdays demonstration against the Kochs – but tomorrow or the day after I hope to have a post up about the iconic Joshua trees in the National Park – which rangers say will be gone within 50 years thanks to climate change and air pollution. Based on observations so far, I give them more like 5 – 10 at best. Meanwhile links to research are here: http://witsendnj.blogspot.com/p/basic-premise.html
Thanks NRDC, for a gutsy, non-nonsense article – unlike much of the mealy mouth “maybe this, maybe that” being written on air pollution these days.
Just posted – a good TED talk by Naomi Klein:
http://www.ted.com/talks/naomi_klein_addicted_to_risk.html