Our World and Everything in It

 

According to an article on ENS, “The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee held a hearing today to review the Bush administration’s record on public health and environmental matters, but it was conducted in the absence of Ranking Member Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, a Republican and former chair of the committee.”

It figures. Remember Inhofe, the senator waiving his own list of scientists that don’t agree with global warming, many of which belong to the “The Friends of Science Society,” a Canadian group I’ve blogged about before that seem to have ulterior motives:

 

So Inhofe boycotted this meeting, urged two witnesses not to appear, and the rest of the Republicans on the committee didn’t show either. It’s only a matter of time hopefully that we find out just how much environmental damage the Bush administration did. It affects our health and the future of our children. This is why I cannot understand people’s grasping at straws to avoid admitting and dealing with a rapidly growing global warming problem.

According to the article, the GAO or Govt. Accountability Office has already uncovered the following:

·         EPA political officials worked with the White House and the Pentagon to undermine the process for evaluating toxic chemical risks.

·         EPA has severely weakened its Office of Children’s Health Protection and largely ignored its Children’s Health Advisory Committee.

·         Despite the president’s campaign promise to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, the White House reversed course and rejected actions to control global warming pollution.

·         In one of its first official acts, the Bush EPA announced that it was suspending the newly strengthened standard for arsenic in tap water.

·         The EPA story is the same for soot, smog, and lead standards – all weaker than its own scientists recommended.

·         Over the last seven years, the pace of Superfund cleanups has dropped by about 50 percent compared to the last seven years of the prior administration, from about 80 cleanups per year to 40 or less.

·         EPA has decided that it will not set a health standard for the toxic rocket fuel perchlorate in our drinking water, even though EPA data show that up to 16.6 million people are exposed to unsafe levels.

I don’t know about anyone else, but with or without Inhofe and the Republicans presence on the latest committee, there is enough evidence above to show that more than likely we’ve been lied to about plenty relative to the environment. And the animals that have taken a hit because of Bush’s tampering with the Endangered Species List goes beyond polar bears.

I still have a qualm that when the Bush administration is over we’re going to hear these words regarding the state of our world and everything it it, “It’s much, much worse than we thought.”

Read the article: http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/sep2008/2008-09-24-02.asp.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 7:45 pm and is filed under Bush Administration, EPA, Environmental Legislation, Environmentalism, Federal Government, Global Warming, Global Warming Policy, Legislators, Morality, Science, Superfund, The Denial Machine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.