What do we do when Lake Michigan, the largest fresh water lake in the US (5th largest in the world) is too polluted to drink, too dangerous to swim in its waters and too toxic for any fish to survive in?
Already a UN report said:
More than half of humanity will be living with water shortages, depleted fisheries and polluted coastlines within 50 years because of a worldwide water crisis.......
Yet, British Petroleum or BP, considered one of the worst polluters in the world, got a thumb's up to dump and pollute with the EPA's blessing! And it is all legal!
The 1,400 acre BP refinery will now be able to dump 1,584 pounds of ammonia and 4,924 pounds of sludge into Lake Michagan every day.
Why, you may ask? For 80 more jobs! Yes, jobs are important, but so is water. Instead of BP dumping toxins into fresh water (Ma'am, would you like your water with a shot of ammonia?), they could have created "green collar" jobs. Instead of polluting, 80 jobs could have been created to enhance renewable energy, for example. John Edwards, a Democratic Party candidate for President brilliantly proposed this:
.......investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency technology, he said, would create over one million jobs around the nation. Those plans include training and placing 150,000 green collar workers, and creating 50,000 government-subsidized jobs to help hard-to-hire workers learn new skills related to the energy sector.
The regulators in Indiana decided to exempt BP from their own state environmental laws! They claimed it was for the desperately needed jobs. And BP said they didn't have room on their massive 1,400 acre site to build a water refinery anyway. After all, the Feds certainly don't mind watering down the Clean Air Act either. They start that since Bush took office.:
The request to dump more chemicals into the lake ran counter to a provision of the Clean Water Act that prohibits any downgrade in water quality near a pollution source even if discharge limits are met. To get around that rule, state regulators are allowing BP to install equipment that mixes its toxic waste with clean lake water about 200 feet offshore.
Actively diluting pollution this way by creating what is known as a mixing zone is banned in Lake Michigan under Indiana law. Regulators granted BP the first-ever exemption.
For the Bush Administration's friends and co-conspirators, laws are not only made to be broken. Laws are made to be twisted, reinterpreted, misread, ignored and sullied. Thirsty days are ahead.