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It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice-there are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.
- Frank Zappa, The Real Frank Zappa Book
The administration has done something that on the surface appears to be anti-environmental when in reality all it is doing is implementing the Paperwork Reduction Act.
The Paperwork Reduction Act that is referenced in many forms the citizen encounters says one of its purposes is to "minimize the paperwork burden for individuals, small businesses . . . Federal contractors . . . and other persons resulting from the collection of information by or for the Federal Government." Any attempt to describe in fewer than dozens of thousands of words any legislation enacted by Congress falls far short and the foregoing is no exception since the Act itself has 20 sections and the foregoing is but a snippet of the first section. George Bush takes great pleasure in finding any congressional Act with which he can cheerfully comply and his administration's compliance with this law has earned it unjustified criticism. The criticism pertains to lessening the paperwork burden imposed on certain companies by weakening requirements pertaining to the release of toxic chemicals.
The 1986 Emergency Planning & Community Right to Know Act was passed following the 1984 Union Carbide chemical disaster in Bhopal, India. Signed by President Reagan, the Act imposed reporting requirements on companies that dealt with toxic materials. Affected companies are required to produce a Toxic Release Inventory Report (TRI) disclosing, among other things, the release into the air, ground and water of toxic chemicals. Under the Act the Environmental Protection Agency is required to publish a list of extremely hazardous substances and publish a final regulation "establishing a threshold planning quantity for each substance on the list." Facilities dealing with those substances were subject to the requirements of the regulation "if one of the substances on the list is present at the facility in excess of the threshold planning quantity established for such substance."
Until the end of 2006, the threshold planning quantity was 500 pounds. Facilities with more than 500 pounds were required to make annual reports using a detailed form prepared by the EPA. The requirements became known as the "community right to know rules" since they gave communities detailed information about toxic releases into their environments that would otherwise have gone unreported. Although the rules were good, they had one consequence that the Bush administration disliked. They created a lot of paper work for the affected facilities since they were required to complete a form known as Form R instead of a simpler form known as Form A. Aware of the burden the rule placed on industry, the EPA has issued a new rule that is going to make life easier for facilities by reducing their paperwork and will reduce concern in communities around the country about the release of toxic materials into the environment since they will not learn of them and, thus, have no cause for alarm.
Under the new rules that this writer has tried in vain to put into comprehensible English, the use of form A has been expanded "by raising the eligibility limit on total waste management of non-persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic chemicals . . . from 500 pounds to 5,000 pounds, with a cap on releases and other disposal of 2,000 pounds." The number of communities that will sleep better at night as a result of being in the dark is, according to the General Accounting Office that understands the new rule, staggering.
According to the GAO summary, under the new rules the "EPA would allow more than 3,500 facilities to no longer report detailed information about their toxic chemical releases and waste management practices. As a result, more than 22,000 of the nearly 90,000 TRI reports could no longer be available to hundreds of communities in states throughout the country." The summary goes on to state that 12 state attorneys general and the EPA's own Science Advisory Board stated the changes "will significantly reduce the amount of useful TRI information." That wasn't all the GAO concluded.
It found that the EPA did not "follow key steps in agency guidelines designed to ensure that it conducts appropriate scientific, economic, and policy analyses" and went on to say that was because the Office of Management & Budget pressured the EPA to provide burden reduction by the end of 2006.
The GAO recommends that Congress overturn the rule by legislation and has supporters in Congress. Senator Frank R. Lautenberg who authored the 1986 legislation said: "Unfortunately, this report makes clear the Bush Administration is putting politics ahead of science and letting facilities hide critical data about toxic chemicals." Senator Barbara Boxer said: "The public has a right to know about toxic pollution in local communities." They may be right. However, reducing paperwork, as all who have ever dealt with paperwork would agree, is far more important than alarming communities by telling them about releases of toxic materials when there is not much they can do about a release that's already happened.
Christopher Brauchli - brauchli.56@post.harvard.edu
For political commentary see http://humanraceandothersports.com
9 Comments so far
Show AllWe persevere
Along the lines of "Leave it to Beaver," we have "leave it to Bush" to simply erase all evidence, and then without anything so pesky in the path of his profit-mongering colleagues, go on to rape, plunder and pillage as "business as usual."
Dr. Seuss, Shaman that he was, sought to teach children the basic "101" of ecology in his masterful, THE LORAX. He cut right into the chief carrot the capitalist ethos utilizes, creating false desires. Seuss called them THNEEDS.
From the false programs, to paid PR to make Iraq look like "progress is happening," to the mishandling of Katrina relief, to EVERYTHING, this administration is JUST about the money, and uses PR and false prophets to endorse its every wrong, wasteful and immoral program. Ugliness has risen. In the I ching the Sage observers of patterns that recur recognized there are times when "inferior powers rise" and the people, like the willow, must bend with the flood waters, but not break. Stamina! This, too, shall pass.
Quote: " maxpayne December 22nd, 2007 7:12 pm
... Hemp can be used to make better quality paper than trees plus it takes less time to grow and is perfectly recyclable."
And can be productively and constructively use for still other purposes. The seeds are good for making excellent oil, and are very good for human health; the plants, much like buckwheat, are a great way of making depleted soils rich or productive again; the fibers can be used for making excellently clothing material, much better than cotton, from what I've previously read; that sort of material can be used for making other things too, surely coverings for chairs, sofas, futon mattresses, ..., and surely strong bags, as well as rope, and maybe thread, for sewing, footwear, etc.; that oil can be produced from the plant may, I think does, mean that the plant could be used for making biofuels, although I don't know about how much or little energy waste vs benefit and pollution the process involves; and ... etc. And it can be surely great for helping to seriously reduce destruction of forests. I would not be surprised if several other uses can be added to this list, but these are some of the things I have read about.
Oh, I also saw or viewed a home construction documentary on tv not long ago; the house having been made almost entirely from or out of hemp, with various transformations, to fill the various needs in the construction. Am not sure, but insulation may have been one of those uses of the hemp.
I was pleasantly surprised when coming across that documentary, which I had not been expecting; was just changing channels to see what each was airing.
The only negative I have heard about in terms of cultivating hemp is that once a location's crop becomes infected with a virus that is harmful to the plant, then it's purportedly ... like impossible to prevent the virus from recurring again, season after season. It's what I heard; not something I can attest to the truth or lack of truth of.
To PJD: it comes as no surprise to me that there is not more response from CD readers on this topic. It seems that we have SO MANY things going insanely wrong with our world today (especially USA) that it's seems futile to address even a fair portion of them. In the martial arts, there is a philosophy: pick your battles carefully, since we all only have a limited amount of resources/support.
However, this particular battle has been waged since early in the 20th century, and as usual, for racist and corporate motives.
When I discuss drugs and consciousness in my General Psychology class, I warn students (especially high-schoolers) that I'm going to be saying some very un-politically correct things. Such as the fact that hemp (NOT marijuana)is one of the most useful plants on the planet and that absolutely NO ONE has ever been killed directly through use of marijuana, either. It's one of the oldest, safest and most useful drugs on the planet, too, with countless benefits from fuel to food to medicine. My most ignorant, closed-minded students tend to be the high school students, not my older, more knowledgeable college students. I have several times been reported as encouraging my high school students to actually USE marijuana. Finally, my department chair has gotten tired of that game and no longer calls me on the carpet for doing something terribly subversive--telling the truth.
Just a few days ago, I was actually able to catch the great educational classic on the subject, "Reefer Madness". Absolutely hilarious on one hand and terribly frightening on the other, since so many uninformd folks seem to actually take the horrible acting seriously. Watch it if you dare. It is so absolutely absurd that it is both one of the worst "acting" jobs in history and that it is still considered "factual" on the other.
Our totally insane and unworkable "War on Drugs" (which I call in class "Prohibition II")has made 'criminals' of countless Americans and led to us imprisoning more of our population than any nation on earth (including the so-called "repressive regimes").
Does our Psychology text book mention a class of drugs, perfectly legal, which kills over 100,000 Americans every year? Absolutely not! That, of course, is prescription drugs USED AS PRESCRIBED by your doctor. When you add in the millions of citizens whose physical and mental abilities are sometimes permanently impaired through the proper use of such "approved" drugs, you wonder how they could still be permitted to be prescribed so rampantly.
I, too, have almost been killed twice and am stil recovering from the "side effects" of medications prescribed by my doctor and used AS INSTRUCTED. To their credit, I have also been SAVED by this same medical system that sometimes seems to have as many failures as successes.
As long as the pharmaceutical companies continue to "test" their own concoctions and actually WRITE the actual legislation and GIVE THEM to "our legislators" for unchallenged passage, the American public is generally helpless.
There is some hope on the horizon, however, as more and more states and municipalities are rebelling against the Federal thugs and passing local laws and injunctions for their own police forces to basically ignore laws considering marijuana (especilly the medical use thereof) to NOT be enforced.
Let's accept and acknowlege that pot is the safest drug ever and that hemp the most useful plant, and get on with their mass production.
Someday, probably not in my lifetime, perhaps reason, fairness and logic will rule our decisions, rather than the rabid dogs of profit. B.
Haha! Gotta give it to'em - even Orwell didn't have this kind of imagination! Clean Air! Healthy Forests! Less paperwork! How do they keep doing that and getting away with it? Impeachment is in the air, has been for a couple of years now - what the blinkety-blank is taking so long??
Well, as long as your Chinese toys are clean, I guess it doesn't matter that your water, soil and air are polluted. How does one live in a society where one is constantly tricked, deceived, lied to, ripped off...and NOT go on a rampage?
Here's a solution. SHUT DOWN THE DRUG WAR and LEGALIZE HEMP. Hemp can be used to make better quality paper than trees plus it takes less time to grow and is perfectly recyclable.
http://forestry.about.com/cs/alternativeforest/a/hemp_vs_wood_2.htm
Thanks to our EPA the U.S. can legally be a dumping ground for food and other goods that are far too toxic to sell in Europe.
I agree with PJD and if you eat food served in a lead crystal dish after awhile this change will seem ok.
Huh? No comments yet? Did this talk of "Form A" and "Form R" make some peoples eyes glaze over?
Well, here's a simpler explanation.
While the rest of the civilized world is aggressively attacking the manufacture and release of toxic substances through the precautionary principle, here in the US, the the EPA, without public input or comment, now allows industry to dump huge amounts of some very toxic substances in the air, ground and water, with impunity.
So, any of you living in those cancer clusters, I recommend that you form a committee, and find a way to get the information from the plant's employees. If that fails, form an armed posse and pay a visit the plant's offices.