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Trump's EPA says limits on mercury emissions from coal plants not necessary

JacksinPA

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https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...-from-coal-plants-not-necessary-idUSKCN1OR1BU

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Trump administration on Friday said limits on mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants were not necessary as their costs outweighed the benefits, sparking an outcry among environmentalists who say the move favors the coal industry at the expense of public health.

Under the Mercury and Air Toxic Standards, or MATS, enacted under former President Barack Obama, coal-burning power plants have been forced to install expensive equipment to cut output of mercury, which can harm pregnant women and put infants and children at risk of developmental problems.
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Another Obama-era environmental protection regulation bights the dust, this time to benefit the coal industry. Mercury is a potent neurotoxin found both in coal ash waste & in plant stack emissions. It is a very serious environmental threat.
 
A lot of companies spent a lot of money to ensure people in Trumps base hate the EPA and environmental regulations in order for them to pollute and save a quick buck.

Money well spent and they’ll never realize they’ve been had.
 
****ing Christ. Minimizing the amount of mercury that coal power plants release should not be a partisan issue. Pretty sad commentary that it is. :doh
 
I'm not aware of the specifics of the regulation (output with and without), but mercury almost wiped out the alligators of the Everglades. It basically did end the Florida Panther. We had to import cougars to save the population. Mercury biomagnifies.
 
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...-from-coal-plants-not-necessary-idUSKCN1OR1BU

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Trump administration on Friday said limits on mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants were not necessary as their costs outweighed the benefits, sparking an outcry among environmentalists who say the move favors the coal industry at the expense of public health.

Under the Mercury and Air Toxic Standards, or MATS, enacted under former President Barack Obama, coal-burning power plants have been forced to install expensive equipment to cut output of mercury, which can harm pregnant women and put infants and children at risk of developmental problems.
==============================================
Another Obama-era environmental protection regulation bights the dust, this time to benefit the coal industry. Mercury is a potent neurotoxin found both in coal ash waste & in plant stack emissions. It is a very serious environmental threat.

Well, finally all those out-of-work coal miners can stop learning a new trade and get back to work on their black-lung and ground-water pollution.
 
Well, finally all those out-of-work coal miners can stop learning a new trade and get back to work on their black-lung and ground-water pollution.

Watched Chapter 11 of Anthony Bourdain's CNN series, set in W Virginia, on Netflix. It was said that a skilled mine worker could made $94K/year. But who wants to drive 100 miles to get to the nearest Walmart?
 
Mercury is a potent neurotoxin found both in coal ash waste & in plant stack emissions.

Trump: Finding new ways to enlarge the base!
 
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To put mercury into its proper context, back in the 17th & 18th centuries when every man wore a beaver hat, the furriers that prepared the hides used mercury salts in the process. This, of course, got into their systems. Hence the expression 'Mad as a hatter.' That's what this neurotoxin does. It is also good at killing bacteria. Growing up in the late 40s & early 50s, there was always a bottle of mercurichrome in the medicine chest for treating the minor cuts & scrapes that come with childhood. See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merbromin. No longer sold in the U.S. & overseas.
 
****ing Christ. Minimizing the amount of mercury that coal power plants release should not be a partisan issue. Pretty sad commentary that it is. :doh

The type of people who vote for Trump are the people who say "wasteful regulations!" at everything.

If finally cornered and challenged on that point, and if they don't jump thread, many will grudgingly say "oh well I'm not saying all regulations are bad. But this one is!" Of course, they do not have the training or experience in the relevant scientific field and/or in the relevant mathematics to judge whether or not a cost-benefit analysis came out the right way. They don't have a clue. You need to go beyond calculus (or at least, the first half of a decent college-level calculus course) and learn a bunch of economics to have a shot of analyzing one on the math side. Etc.




And then they're burying their spouse or their parent who died early from some preventable cancer because of some toxic spill or whatever, back in a time before the regulation they are raging at was implemented......

...and without knowing it, they support stripping those things away willy-nilly, knowing that they don't know whether what they say is true.




It's as infuriating as it is depressing. 15-20ish years after more seriously looking at politics and its results, I'm more than a little bitter.
 
The type of people who vote for Trump are the people who say "wasteful regulations!" at everything.

If finally cornered and challenged on that point, and if they don't jump thread, many will grudgingly say "oh well I'm not saying all regulations are bad. But this one is!" Of course, they do not have the training or experience in the relevant scientific field and/or in the relevant mathematics to judge whether or not a cost-benefit analysis came out the right way. They don't have a clue. You need to go beyond calculus (or at least, the first half of a decent college-level calculus course) and learn a bunch of economics to have a shot of analyzing one on the math side. Etc.

And then they're burying their spouse or their parent who died early from some preventable cancer because of some toxic spill or whatever, back in a time before the regulation they are raging at was implemented......

...and without knowing it, they support stripping those things away willy-nilly, knowing that they don't know whether what they say is true.

It's as infuriating as it is depressing. 15-20ish years after more seriously looking at politics and its results, I'm more than a little bitter.

This. All of this.
 
I'm not aware of the specifics of the regulation (output with and without), but mercury almost wiped out the alligators of the Everglades. It basically did end the Florida Panther. We had to import cougars to save the population. Mercury biomagnifies.

Swordfish is a good example of mercury being magnified by living things. Growing up in a Catholic household, I ate my share of this fish on Fridays. The joke used to be that if you ate enough you could have made a mercury thermometer.
 
Swordfish is a good example of mercury being magnified by living things. Growing up in a Catholic household, I ate my share of this fish on Fridays. The joke used to be that if you ate enough you could have made a mercury thermometer.

Top predators.

Had my share of Mahi, King and such from the Stream, and Snapper, Shark, even Grouper in the 70s from Biscayne Bay. Not many Bass from the Glades, thankfully.
 
The type of people who vote for Trump are the people who say "wasteful regulations!" at everything.

If finally cornered and challenged on that point, and if they don't jump thread, many will grudgingly say "oh well I'm not saying all regulations are bad. But this one is!" Of course, they do not have the training or experience in the relevant scientific field and/or in the relevant mathematics to judge whether or not a cost-benefit analysis came out the right way. They don't have a clue. You need to go beyond calculus (or at least, the first half of a decent college-level calculus course) and learn a bunch of economics to have a shot of analyzing one on the math side. Etc.




And then they're burying their spouse or their parent who died early from some preventable cancer because of some toxic spill or whatever, back in a time before the regulation they are raging at was implemented......

...and without knowing it, they support stripping those things away willy-nilly, knowing that they don't know whether what they say is true.




It's as infuriating as it is depressing. 15-20ish years after more seriously looking at politics and its results, I'm more than a little bitter.

A lot of EPA superfund sites were created during & after WWII when it was balls to the wall & the only thing that mattered was production.
 
A lot of EPA superfund sites were created during & after WWII when it was balls to the wall & the only thing that mattered was production.

Indeed.

And stripping away regulations now without having the basic capacity to understand the cost-benefit analysis that was kicked around in the agency before they kicked around the potential regulation, before it was refined, before the APA process, and before it was put into the Federal Register simply because "regulations are bad mmmmkay" is liable to have the same effect. Except this time, there isn't even the venire of a need to justify doing it.

Bear in mind, it was Nixon who signed the EPA's enabling statute. Long-houred and unprotected child labor in factories would've been in the memories of those alive in the WWII era; hell, many would remember that just 35-40 years earlier you could buy heroin for a cough in a pharmacy. We weren't exactly all that up on environmental science then or much in the way of related fields, either.

Hell, DDT went on sale after the war ended, by some months. We didn't check this stuff out before hand. We didn't even really know to do it. Silent Spring and beginning to care about what we might be doing to our surroundings started after. Before it was more "damn, I wish soot didn't cover everything in cities" rather than "maybe breathing this will kill me in ten years".



Now, we know better. Or we should, but many are intent on replicating an action that Ostriches don't actually take....
 
Watched Chapter 11 of Anthony Bourdain's CNN series, set in W Virginia, on Netflix. It was said that a skilled mine worker could made $94K/year. But who wants to drive 100 miles to get to the nearest Walmart?

Used to be, hereabouts, that big bucks were made in mining on the bonus system. You got paid on top of your wage rate for foot drilled or ton mucked or whatever and this made men ignore safety measures. It was the same in the bush where fallers and buckers made big bonuses and also made this jurisdiction one of the most dangerous in North America in terms of lives lost and man-hours lost to industrial accidents.
I don't know if that bonus scheme is still in place in W. Virginia or not but if so it definitely is responsible for much harm.
 
Top predators.

Had my share of Mahi, King and such from the Stream, and Snapper, Shark, even Grouper in the 70s from Biscayne Bay. Not many Bass from the Glades, thankfully.

Love red snapper but can't find it here in NE. Last had it near you on Islamorada, in the Keys, late 50s. Fishermen would bring their boats in on the Gulf side of Rte 1 & bring their fresh catch to the restaurant on the Ocean side to barter for drinks & meals. What a life! What very fresh fish!
 
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The kind of people who vote Democrat never saw a regulation they didn't like, unless it limited someone's ability to murder babies, of course.

Anything that places more government control over the private sector is fine by them, especially if it affects the fossil fuel industry. Fossil fuel industries are the primary obstacle to forcing everyone to use "green" energy. Force everyone onto "green" energy and excercise even more control. It's all a part of the communist agenda; Cortez let that cat out of the bag a few weeks ago.

Furthering the communist agenda is the reason they never ask "does this regulation do more harm than good?". Reason being, they want it to harm private industry and don't really give a rat's ass about the environment.
 
Why should our health, planet and environment be jeopardized by 19th century technology? For what? Donors, 100,000 votes?
 
Even Republican politicians are on a local level are starting to see the benefits of renewable energy.

“Republicans from Texas to Iowa regularly extoll the virtues of renewables like wind and solar power, and for good reason. Rural Republican districts are often the locations with the best solar and wind resources, and when those resources are harnessed they bring good jobs to places where new sources of employment are often otherwise scarce. In fact, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ #1 and #2 fastest growing jobs in the U.S. are solar panel installers and wind turbine technicians. These jobs are good, solid middle class jobs with annual salaries pushing close to six-figures. Beyond construction, the plants (particularly wind farms, with their many moving parts) offer good jobs in the long term.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joshua...n-leaders-love-renewable-energy/#631e530f3da7

While two thirds of Americans give priority to developing renewables over fossil fuel. It was also two thirds of Americans that wanted US to stay in the Paris accord.

Most in US say alternative energy takes priority over fossil fuels

https://www.theatlantic.com/science...upport-staying-in-the-paris-agreement/528663/
 
Why should our health, planet and environment be jeopardized by 19th century technology? For what? Donors, 100,000 votes?

The coal and oil industries have a huge influence on the Trump administration.

“The memo was written by Robert E. Murray, a longtime Trump supporter who donated $300,000 to the president’s inauguration. In it, Mr. Murray, the head of Murray Energy, presented Mr. Trump with a wish list of environmental rollbacks just weeks after the inauguration.

Nearly a year later, the White House and federal agencies have completed or are on track to fulfill most of the 16 detailed requests, even with Monday’s decision by federal regulators to reject a proposal by Energy Secretary Rick Perry to subsidize struggling coal and nuclear plants.

The March 1 memo, which was obtained by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and shared with The New York Times, is addressed to Vice President Mike Pence. The sweeping wish list of regulatory overhauls includes ending regulations on greenhouse gas emissions and ozone and mine safety, as well as cutting the staff of the Environmental Protection Agency “at least in half” and overhauling the Labor Department’s office of mine safety.”


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/09/climate/coal-murray-trump-memo.html

“When the Trump administration laid out a plan this year that would eventually allow cars to emit more pollution, automakers, the obvious winners from the proposal, balked. The changes, they said, went too far even for them.
But it turns out that there was a hidden beneficiary of the plan that was pushing for the changes all along: the nation’s oil industry.

In Congress, on Facebook and in statehouses nationwide, Marathon Petroleum, the country’s largest refiner, worked with powerful oil-industry groups and a conservative policy network financed by the billionaire industrialist Charles G. Koch to run a stealth campaign to roll back car emissions standards,a New York Times investigation has found”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/climate/cafe-emissions-rollback-oil-industry.html
 
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