The EPA’s Justifications for Its Power Plant Regulations
If there is one thing that people of all political persuasions can agree upon, it’s that “opinion” and “news” are two different things, and that editorials should not be presented as if they were fact. This is why I cringed at the very of idea of this piece in Global Energy World, an online publication normally recognized for the same style of news that we found in “The Daily Planet.” This article, however, was written by rabidly anti-government and global warming denying Institute for Energy Research, a group dedicated to preventing the public sector from placing limits on emissions. The group’s founder, Robert Bradley, argues that carbon dioxide “is not a pollutant but a building block of a living and vibrant biosphere.”
I suppose the use of the word “absurd” in the headline, EPA’s Absurd Justifications for Its Power Plant Regulations, should have tipped me off that perhaps I was looking at someone’s slant on the subject. Want to talk about “absurd?” Skip the subject of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and climate change, and confine the discussion to health care and short-term environmental damage. According to the Harvard Medical School, the annual and uncaptured cost of burning coal in the U.S. alone is $345 billion. Any conversation on the subject that ignores this is absurd in the extreme.
Another uncaptured cost: death. Go ask the families of the 13,000 Americans who died over the last 12 months as a direct result of breathing the aromatics from coal-fired power plants if they think regulating the emissions from power plants is “absurd” – but heed my advice: wear a helmet and steel jockstrap if you’re seriously going to pose that question; you may not be invited in for tea and cookies.
Perhaps the ultimate absurdity is that, in the face of garbage reporting like this, our society is powerless to change its approach to energy, to protect itself from the obscene level of damages inflicted upon it every year by the fossil fuel industries.
