Another interesting piece writen by a friend of mine. As always, good stuff. [hr style="width: 100%; height: 2px;"]It does not seem to me very long ago that our current Presidet was claiming to be an environmental president. He may pretend to champion many good causes, but his administration is doing great harm.
This month, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will be cutting $2 million dollars from its budget as a cost-cutting measure. This may seem like a trifle - after all the Office of Management and Budget probably spends that much each year on paper clips. But it is what they will be cutting, not so much how much the cut will be. What this cut will do away with are the regional research libraries maintained by the EPA to assist researchers in conducting studies on a wide range of environmental issues.
For example, let us say that company D is using some XYZNT chemical as some part of their manufacturing process. What does exposure to that chemical do to people, and at what dose does it become harmful? To find these things out now, you can go through all the scholarly documents and findings on tap at the EPA libraries. Unfortunately, information source on the Internet are neither reliable nor authoritative. For the EPA to replace their regional libraries with an authoritative Internet site would be far more expensive than to just keep the libraries as they are. There are alternative private sources, but there are typically very expensive. For EPA researchers to use these alternative sources would again increase the cost of doing their jobs far more than to keep the existing libraries as they are.
So why get rid of the libraries? To save a paltry $2 million off a Federal agency's budget? Nonsense. The reason is to keep the studies from being done.
But, you complain, we have the researchers who cannot conduct necessary research, what are we to do? The most likely solution for the Bush administration would be to lay-off the researchers and contract out this research to various industry groups. In this new plan for our collective wellbeing, the American Chemical Society would tell us what chemicals were safe and the American Petroleum Association will tell us how safe oil exploration is in our national parks.
Talk about giving the hen-house over to the foxes.
Some people may not like everything that the EPA does, but I know very few people think that industry overseeing itself will provide a higher standard of public health and safety. When the health and safety of the public suffers, nobody is foolish enough to say that it will be easy and inexpensive to fix the problem. Come to think of it, this whole affair is part and parcel with the whole agenda of the current administration, which seems bent on postponing as many hige and horrible problems on future generations as possible.
People who don't want to recognize that we have serious problems and that they're getting worse every week seem content to lie back, soothed by sweet sounding distortions and prevarications into a happy daze. I pity them, but much more, I pity their children.
