Republicans value life 0.5 as much as compared to Democrats

[Anguirel]

Last Two Lines:

The EPA went a step further: Under its old cost-benefit formula, the agency valued each human life saved from toxic pollution at $6.1 million. But thanks to a new rule, the cost of polluting people to death has plummeted: Under Bush, your life has officially been devalued by $2.4 million.

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Ok, Moo. Marius. Whomever is still around and thinks Bush and his Administration and the Republican-Majority Congress is a good thing for America... defend the policies in a way that doesn't point to Eugenics and killing anyone who can't afford bottled water and air filters.

PS. Hey, you, in the NRA - You want those rifles so you can hunt? Great! Maybe you should think about saving your hunting grounds...

[Marius]

Wait, you want me to defend the administration's policies as presented in an article titled "A Polluter's Feast," and subtitled with, "Bush has reversed more environmental progress in the past eight months than Reagan did in a full eight years"? I'll try to read through this thing and respond on some of this guy's terms, but I can't guarantee I'll get all the way through before I have to stop from the sheer nonsense of it. No one can possibly think this article is going to be a clear factual or fair presentation of what's going on.

[Marius]

Yeah, no, I'm sorry. If you want to have a discussion about the Bush administration and its environmental policies, I'm into that idea. I'm not doing it based on this article. I almost made it through the hyperboles and pejoratives of the first few paragraphs and into a section where maybe there was some chance this guy was going to try to present facts and be convincing, and then I hit the nonsensical scaremongering about the evil plan to research using "atomic radiation" (yeah, he put it in italics to emphasize how scary) to refine oil.

So if you want a comment on the adminsitration based on this article here's all you get: This article contains nonsense, lies, spurious accusations, slanderous fictions, and not even the smallest measure of accuracy or moderation. Ask me instead to comment on the Bush administration's abortion policies based on the fact that they're running out of Iraqi babies to eat, and they don't want prices to rise too much on their favorite food.

[Crazy Elf]

Ah huh. So are you saying, Marius, that the Bush administration is completely innocent of all the things that the article states it's guilty of because you don't like his tone?

[Marius]

Yes, that is what I'm saying. The article doesn't talk about any actual policies. It talks about ridiculous caricatures of policies. Because the article speaks only in terms of hyperbole and overreaching nonsense accusations, it doesn't talk about things the administration has actually done.

[Anguirel]

Yes, that is what I'm saying. The article doesn't talk about any actual policies.

From the Article, after the useless intro:

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The Clinton administration, declaring <mercury> pollution a "threat to public health," ordered coal plants to slash their mercury emissions by ninety percent by 2008. But in March, the EPA implemented a new rule -- entire sections of which were drafted by industry lobbyists -- that allows three times the emission of the Clinton rule and delays implementation of the cleanup until 2030.

The administration is approving so many new permits for oil and gas drilling -- more than 6,000 last year alone -- that it can hardly keep pace with the paperwork. In February, the Bureau of Land Management brought aboard five "volunteer" consultants -- whose salaries are paid in full by industry -- to help with the rubber stamping. The energy bill goes even further, allowing federal authorities to open public lands to drilling without even considering alternative uses such as hunting and ecotourism. "You are supposed to find the best use of the land," says Kevin Curtis, vice president of the National Environmental Trust. "But the energy bill basically says, by statute, that oil and gas drilling is the best use of that land."

Even as oil and gas interests get permission to drill on wild lands, the energy bill exempts most of the industry's 30,000 annual projects from the Clean Water Act -- allowing petrochemical runoff from well pads to bleed into creeks, rivers and aquifers. The bill also exempts one of Halliburton's most profitable practices from the Safe Drinking Water Act. Called hydraulic fracturing, the technique boosts the yield of oil and natural gas by injecting a toxic stew of benzene, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, sodium hydroxide and MTBE into the ground. "Fracing" earns Halliburton $1.5 billion a year -- twenty percent of its total energy revenues -- but also contaminates groundwater.

By May, it had scrapped the Clinton-era regulation known as the "roadless rule," which placed nearly a third of all national forests off-limits to industry. The Forest Service has already mapped roads into 34 million acres. The logging won't come cheap: Last year alone, taxpayers spent nearly $49 million to carve roads into the Tongass National Forest in Alaska, the world's largest intact temperate rain forest. In return, the federal treasury collected less than $800,000 in royalties from industry.

The energy bill cleared the Senate only after the administration dropped its most controversial provision: opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling. But even before Bush had signed the measure, Sen. Pete Domenici, chair of the Senate Energy Committee, vowed to resurrect the drilling plan in September by tacking it onto the budget bill, which is immune to filibuster.

In August, the Forest Service quietly adjusted the numbers it uses to weigh the benefits of logging vs. tourism, slashing the "recreational value" of the forests by $100 billion.

Public outrage has forced the administration to give up a few of its wildest schemes: "blending" raw sewage into drinking water, for example, or exempting 20 million acres of wetlands from the Clean Water Act.

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All of those are actual policies, most implemented, the last one attempted. I skipped the nuclear part and the fish part because those are easily defensible if you aren't a total enviro-nut. 25 years between surveys is decent (though improved methods might be good if they exist), I don't know enough about fish farms to talk about their effects, and nuclear power is a good alternative, especially compared to fossil fuel plants.

Also noted is that several key officials who were appointed by this administartion are former lobbyists from the industry, who now have the power to regulate the industry they formerly lobbied for. Not necessarily a bad thing, but they seem to be looking to green-light as much as they can get away with for their former respective industries, damn the effects on either the future or the current impact on the environment.

[WillyGilligan]

Good to know we're ending this in Bulldrek style. :

*Grabs Bulldrek's last post and runs away with it*

Mine! It's all mine!!!

No, this is bulldrek style.

PAGE-JACK!!!!