The Green[e]house Effect: a Weblog

The Looting of America (cont'd)

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More accounts of routine business in the time of George Bush:

• Wall Street Journal :: "Chemical Manufacturers Elude Crackdown on Toxic Materials."

  For months after the terrorist attacks, the impassioned desire to protect Americans led even a Republican administration to crack down on important industries. Once those emotions subsided, Washington reverted to the traditional partisan debate over how deeply government should be involved in the market. Congress is once again weighing chemical security this year, but any law that passes will be much more business-friendly than first envisioned.

  It's not that the terrorist threat has disappeared. Tuesday, the Department of Homeland Security raised its color-coded assessment of the risk of an attack to orange, the second-highest level on the scale. But many policy makers now seem more comfortable with voluntary industry responses, such as the chemical industry's code urging companies to beef up security whenever the government raises the threat level.

  "Liberals wanted to use the tragedy of Sept. 11 as an excuse to regulate more," says Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe, the lead Republican legislator on chemical security.

• Independent Lens :: Mountaintop Removal Mining:

  Mountaintop removal mining is the practice of blasting off the tops of mountains so machines called draglines can mine coal deposits. Coal mining companies dump the mountaintops into nearby valleys and streams to create "valley fills," converting mountain landscapes covered in hardwood forests into fields of sparse grass. Coal companies are stripping off the tops of mountains in West Virginia, Kentucky and Virginia.

• Seattle Post-Intelligencer :: "SUV tax cut."

  Under current tax law, it's permissible to write off $25,000 from your taxes in the first year after the purchase of a 6,000-pound truck or SUV. (Then there's the gravy of 20 percent a year after that.)

  But the Senate bill increases the tax deduction to $100,000.

  Who did it? We don't even know, yet. There are no fingerprints on the amendment — legislation was going back and forth so fast Thursday night that this little gem slipped in quietly.

  Fortunately this bill is not law yet — but the House version has a similar proposal.

  But don't worry too much. Congress isn't finished yet. Lawmakers are also crafting a new energy bill — and one proposal calls for the elimination of a $2,000 tax deduction for fuel-efficient gas-electric hybrid vehicles.

• Wired News :: "A Spy Machine of DARPA's Dreams."

  The Pentagon is about to embark on a stunningly ambitious research project designed to gather every conceivable bit of information about a person's life, index all the information and make it searchable.

  What national security experts and civil libertarians want to know is, why would the Defense Department want to do such a thing?

  The embryonic LifeLog program would dump everything an individual does into a giant database: every e-mail sent or received, every picture taken, every Web page surfed, every phone call made, every TV show watched, every magazine read.

  All of this — and more — would combine with information gleaned from a variety of sources: a GPS transmitter to keep tabs on where that person went, audio-visual sensors to capture what he or she sees or says, and biomedical monitors to keep track of the individual's health.

• The Charlotte Observer :: "Hog Farm Waste May Hurt Health."

  PAULDING, Ohio - Robert Thornell says that five years ago an invisible swirling poison invaded his family farm and the house he had built with his own hands. It took his memory, his balance and his ability to work. It left him with mood swings, a stutter and fistfuls of pills.

  His 14th doctor said he knew the source of the maladies: cesspools the size of football fields belonging to the industrial hog farm a half-mile from the Thornell home.

  A growing number of scientists and public health officials around the country say they have traced a variety of health problems of neighbors of huge industrial farms to vast amounts of concentrated animal waste, which emit toxic gases while collecting in open-air cesspools or evaporating through sprays. The gases, hydrogen sulfide and ammonia, are poisonous.

  The waste is collected in pools because the concentration of hogs is so high that it must be treated before it can be used as fertilizer.

  Livestock trade officials and Bush administration regulators say more study is needed before any cause and effect can be proven. . . [but] in Iowa, one of the country's two biggest pork-producing states (North Carolina is the other), state environment officials started conducting air quality tests for hydrogen sulfide and ammonia at six neighborhood locations around hog farms last month. Brian Button, an air information specialist with the state, said preliminary data showed that 22 times in April, the gases exceeded the state's recommended air standards of 15 parts per billion of hydrogen sulfide and 150 parts per billion of ammonia, averaged over an hour.

  [Dr. Kaye] Kilburn [of the University of Southern California], who runs a business diagnosing neurological disorders, said that over the last three years he had seen about 50 patients, including Thornell and his wife, Diane, who had suffered neurological damage he judged to be a result of hydrogen sulfide poisoning from industrial farms. . . .

  Paul Isbell of Houston, Miss., started experiencing seizures after a hog farm moved in down the road. Julie Jansen's six children suffered flulike symptoms and diarrhea when industrial farms moved into their neighborhood in Renville, Minn. Kilburn found that one of Jansen's daughters has neurological damage; she has problems with balance and has lost some feeling in her fingers. . . .

  Bush administration officials are negotiating with lobbyists for the livestock farms to establish voluntary monitoring of air pollution, which will give farms amnesty for any Clean Air Act violations while generating data that will enable regulators to track the type and source of pollutants more accurately.

• The New York Times :: "ChevronTexaco to Stop Sponsoring Met's Broadcasts."

  ChevronTexaco announced yesterday that it would withdraw its support from the Metropolitan Opera's Saturday afternoon live radio broadcasts after the 2003-4 season, ending the longest continuous commercial sponsorship in broadcast history.

  Joseph Volpe, general manager of the Met, said that he was determined to continue the broadcasts without ChevronTexaco and that he would look for a new sponsor.

  Started on Christmas Day in 1931 with Humperdinck's "Hansel and Gretel," the Met matinee broadcasts have introduced opera to millions of people around the world.

  Mr. Volpe said the broadcasts had been "the single most powerful audience development program in introducing opera to families" and had inspired opera stars. "Many of the singers today first discovered opera on the radio broadcasts," he said.

  Patricia E. Yarrington, ChevronTexaco's vice president for public and government affairs, said in a statement, "As our business has evolved, we believe it is important to focus more of our resources directly with the countries and markets where we do business."

Posted by Greg Greene at May 21, 2003 07:20 PM