Skip to main content

Save money...forget about and damn good health!

It is hard to believe that this has happened in 2011 - in the one of the richest countries in the world.

Environment News Service reports in "U.S. House Slashes Funding for Public Health, Clean Air, Clean Water":

"Early this morning, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a funding bill that environmentalists say amounts to the biggest attack on clean air and clean water in recent history.

H.R. 1, the continuing resolution offered by House Republicans to keep the government funded for the rest of the fiscal year, passed by a vote of 235-189. Only three Republicans joined all the Democrats in voting no.

American Lung Association President and CEO Charles Connor called the bill "a severe assault on the health of all Americans."

"The U.S. House of Representatives failed to protect the public health of all Americans by passing H.R. 1," said Connor. "This bill ignores public health and will have dire consequences for all Americans, especially people with lung diseases, including lung cancer, asthma and emphysema."


Bruce Mansfield coal-fired power plant on the Ohio River near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania emits greenhouse gases and other pollutants. (Photo by Kiyo Komoda)

"The American Lung Association calls on the Senate to recognize that, as passed by the House, H.R. 1 is toxic to public health," said Connor. "The Senate must start from scratch and recognize that tough fiscal choices can be made without jeopardizing public health."

H.R. 1 slashes the budget of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency by one-third and prevents the agency from acting to reduce carbon dioxide and other global warming pollutants from coal-fired power plants and oil refineries, a regulatory program that began January 2.

The bill also blocks EPA from restoring Clean Water Act protections for many of the nation's most vulnerable waterways, including those that feed into drinking water supplies for more than 117 million Americans."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Pentagon's eye-popping spending....and waste!

Only a gigantic bureaucracy could get away with spending of such dimensions - and the amazing waste involved in part of that ginormous spend.   Think US Pentagon..... "From spending $150 million on private villas for a handful of personnel in Afghanistan to blowing $2.7 billion on an air surveillance balloon that doesn’t work, the latest revelations of waste at the Pentagon are just the most recent howlers in a long line of similar stories stretching back at least five decades.  Other hot-off-the-presses examples would include the Army’s purchase of helicopter gears worth $500 each for $8,000 each and the accumulation of billions of dollars' worth of weapons components that will never be used. And then there’s the one that would have to be everyone’s favorite Pentagon waste story: the spending of $50,000 to investigate the bomb-detecting capabilities of African elephants. (And here’s a shock: they didn’t turn out to be that great!) The elephant research, of course, represe...
Post a Comment
Read more

Video: Israel demolishing a Bedouin village

From Mondoweiss - Israel's supposed "most moral army in the world", the IDF, engaged in immoral, and according to international law, illegal action.... "Israeli forces have demolished every home in the Bedouin village of Khirbet Taha in the northern West Bank district of Nablus during three separate demolitions since the start of the year. Unlike most Bedouin villages, the residents in Khirbet Taha own their own land. However that land falls in Area C, territory in the occupied West Bank under full Israeli control. The village’s only school was also destroyed, leaving children to study in a dilapidated 100-year-old mosque — the only structure left standing in the village. According the United Nations, Israel has demolished half as many Palestinian buildings in the first few months of 2016, as they had in all of 2015. In February alone, the UN found that more Palestinians homes were destroyed than any other month since 2009, when the organization began its docum...
Post a Comment
Read more

What does a no-fly zone actually mean?

As some countries consider imposing a no-fly zone in relation to Libya, the pertinent question must be what does that mean and entail? FP provides the answers: "It depends on the circumstances. There are two primary types of no-fly zones imposed by air forces. The first is imposed by one military over another, while the two sides are at war. In practice, this type of no-fly zone amounts to a warning from one side that it will engage the other's aircraft if they are spotted in a given territory. The second type, more applicable to the situation in Libya, is when an outside power possessing overwhelming air superiority restricts flights over a given country in order to discourage an internal conflict or humanitarian crisis. This is a relatively recent tactic, which was used most famously in Bosnia and Iraq during the 1990s. No-fly zones are often a compromise in situations where the international community is demanding a response to ongoing violence, but full military interven...
6 comments
Read more