Cancers from Environment 'Grossly Underestimated'
Daily Exposures Cause Far More Cancers Than Once Thought, a Presidential Panel Says
Environmental carcinogens are responsible for a far greater number of cancers than previously believed -- a fact that suggests eradicating these environmental threats should be a priority for President Obama -- according to the report of a presidential advisory panel.
"The Panel was particularly concerned to find that the true burden of environmentally induced cancer has been grossly underestimated," wrote the authors of the report, "Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now."
ENVIRONMENT: EPA Moves to Regulate Toxic Coal Waste Spotlighted in Center Investigation
Today the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced much-anticipated proposals to regulate the disposal of coal ash — an environmental hazard that was the subject of an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity last year.
The Center’s probe revealed the havoc that coal ash has wreaked on the environment and on human health near ponds, landfills, and pits where it gets dumped, while debate over federal regulation [has] dragged on for decades. That debate has flared again since the disastrous December 2008 coal-ash spill in eastern Tennessee, a spill which led EPA to pledge to finally regulate the waste — a toxic byproduct of burning coal to produce electricity.
...This latest development in the decades-old battle over federal regulation of coal ash seems remarkably reminiscent of a draft plan backing the Subtitle C approach draft determination put forward by the EPA in 2000, when the agency appeared on the verge of proposing stricter federal controls under the hazardous label.
Of course, we never would have expected this:
Ultimately, after fierce industry lobbying and political pressure, the agency backed away from that option and instead pledged to issue the non-hazardous guidelines. Throughout the Bush administration, however, the EPA failed to implement those standards.
No Guarantees at the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation
Pension Protection Agency Cited for Audit Failure, Misleading Congress
Last November, the federal corporation charged with protecting Americans’ retirement funds issued an ominous public warning: the amount of pensions at risk inside failing companies had more than tripled during the recession.
The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation’s announcement signaled it might need tens of billions of new dollars to rescue traditional pensions paid by U.S. firms whose economic collapse left them unable to meet their retirement obligations to workers.
...On Nov. 12, 2009, PBGC’s outside audit firm and the corporation’s own internal watchdog jointly informed the federal body it was being cited for a “material weakness” in its internal financial controls, the accounting equivalent of an F grade.
Do lobbyists, polluters, Wall Street bankers, and corrupt, incompetent government officials imagine life as some sort of game?
If not, then what psychological mechanism prevents them from understanding that their policies and actions harm, and in many cases, cause the deaths of many <span style="font-style:italic;">actual human beings?</span>
Which part of "Love thy neighbor as thyself" do they not understand? Or are they just being very literal-minded?
Do we need to build a network of museums or zoos or something, so these folks can get an up close look at the lives destroyed by their greed, ambition and desperate need for power?
The Museum of Shattered Lives. Died of Cancer Park. The Museum of Death and Disfigurement. Lost Life-Savings Gallery.
Will we have to bus corporate executives, politicians, hedge fund managers, and other clueless leaders of our budding plutocracy to these sites, like schoolchildren going on a field trip, so they can learn first hand what it's like to die from cancer, lose one's life savings, live with chronic, debilitating illness, or be killed by a lunatic with a handgun just because of where you happened to be born, or the color of your skin or because you work a low-wage job - or because an ambitious politician feels your life is expendable as long as pleases an industry lobbyist?
"Wowww," they'll say. "I didn't know these kinds of things really happened to people."
Or maybe we could create for them a sort of reverse "It's a Wonderful Life" experience, during which they will learn how much better the world would look if they had not been around to fuck it up so completely.
I am originally from Philadelphia. I have often wished that every elected official in Washington would be required to spend an entire day in the ghettos of North Philly. They would be thunder-struck. The same, I'm sure, would be true if they were sent to areas of rural poverty, or better yet, forced to submerge themselves in one our thousands of polluted waterways.
We could do that right here in Minnesota. In Minnesota, Land of Lakes, 40% of the waters no longer "meet standards for public use." Minnesota Pollution Control Agency Assistant Commissioner Lisa Thorvig says:
"Right now where we assess our waters, about 40 percent are impaired and about 60 percent are meeting water quality standards... If we just extrapolate that out to all of our waters, we expect we will reach about 10,000 water impairments being listed once we've fully assessed our waters."
... There are dozens of water bodies with so much bacteria they're dangerous to swim in. In other cases, pollution makes it dangerous to eat more than one fish a month taken from the water.
Whatever the reason, impairment means those waters don't meet standards for public use under the federal Clean Water Act. That limits recreational uses like swimming or fishing.
The kicker, as if you hadn't already guessed:
Thorvig says a <span style="font-weight:bold;">lack of funding</span> continues to limit the agency's work on polluted waters...At the present rate, it could take decades just to assess the pollution in Minnesota lakes and rivers.
Minnesota is falling apart under Republican governor Tim Pawlenty. As with most Republican ideologues, he would rather see poor, sick people die for lack of access to health care, students become less well-educated, and the waters in this water-blessed state go to shit rather than consider raising a single type of revenue to help stop the slide into hell.
Mr. Pawlenty claims to be an Evangelical, so one would think he might be familiar with these words:
"My brothers, what use is it for a man to say he has faith when he does nothing to show it? Can that faith save him? Suppose a brother or a sister is in rags with not enough food for the day, and one of you says, 'Good luck to you, keep yourselves warm, and have plenty to eat', but does nothing to supply their bodily needs, what is the good of that? So with faith; if it does not lead to action, it is in itself a lifeless thing."
But Tim Pawlenty wants to be president. It's not called "blind ambition" for nothing.
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