Blind and Naked Ignorance

[babylonsister]

Blind and Naked Ignorance
by Christopher Brauchli

Blind and naked Ignorance
Delivers brawling judgments, unashamed,
On all things all day along.
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Merlin and Vivien



If there were only one agency (and there’s probably not) that has consistently enjoyed the benefits lavished on it by an ignorant president who continuously diminishes its standing in the world of science, it would be the Environmental Protection Agency. No other agency has so thoroughly given in to the importunings of a president who lives in constant fear of what science might offer if left to its own devices, it being a branch of knowledge that cannot be controlled by him or Dick Cheney.

A hint of things to come started with Mr. Bush’s refusal to sign the Kyoto Treaty on global warming. That was an issue he preferred not to address since it addressed something that to Mr. Bush’s way of thinking had no address since it wasn’t the problem others thought it was and, more especially, was a problem he was prepared to address quite differently from the rest of the world.

Then came Christie Whitman’s 2003 departure from the E.P.A. that she headed from the beginning of the Bush administration. Her tenure was marked by criticism from administration critics who thought she did too little to advance regulatory remedies to extant environmental issues, and administration insiders who thought she was doing too much. Irrespective of who was right, her departure marked the beginning of a change at the EPA that continued throughout the rest of the Bush years.

In October 2003 the Agency announced a new set of rules permitting power plants, oil companies and other industries to avoid requirements of the Clean Air Act of 1970 that says, among other things, that industrial plants that upgrade facilities must install modern pollution controls. The 2003 rules provided that so long as the upgrade did not cost more than 20% of the total cost of replacing the entire facility, it would be considered “routine maintenance” rather than an upgrade. In December of that year the EPA announced that mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants should not be regulated the same as other toxic air pollutants. According to the New York Times the proposal would place legally mandated mercury regulation “under a less stringent section of the Clean Air Act that governs pollutants that cause smog and acid rain, which are not toxic to humans.”

In December 2006 we learned of another of the administration’s encounters with science that involved eliminating some of the libraries maintained by the EPA, as effective a way of silencing critics as there is. (Anticipating the departure of George Bush, presumably, on June 17, 2008 the EPA told Congress that the libraries that had been closed were being reopened and books returned whence they’d gone during the Bush sponsored knowledge blackout.)

more...

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/06/29/9968/

[opihimoimoi]

1. Who knows what good could of come from a GORE Adminstration....

Mucho Goodness