Imagine, Dear Reader, the following business proposition:
A faceless corporation will pay you a sum of money. The exact amount will be negotiated, but it will be an amount that you regard as more than fair and acceptable.
In exchange for this money, you will allow the corporation to place special masks on the faces of each of your children that will blow polluted air into their lungs twenty-four hours a day. You will also allow the corporation to introduce measurable amounts of neurotoxic substances, such as mercury, into your childrens’ air, water, and food.
As a result of this bargain, you will have more money, and the corporation will have an easier time operating its business and will be able to sell its products at a somewhat lower cost.
However, your children will also experience an increased risk of being hospitalized for serious breathing-related diseases, including infections, asthma, and COPD. The increased risk of hospitalization is between 11% and 17% greater as compared to children whose parents refuse the deal. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...
Your children also will be at increased risk for developmental problems, learning disabilities, lowered intelligence, and medical complications affecting various other body systems. www.who.int/...
So — to the bottom line — how much money will it take for you to sign off on this deal?
For the sake of your children, their children, and the future of your soul, I pray that your answer is “no amount of money would be enough for me to sign off on this deal.”
This horrible proposal, seemingly a deal with the Devil, is sadly not a mere parable. Instead, this tale points to the essence of a Faustian bargain supported by East Tennessee’s current First District congressman, Phil Roe.
In a newsletter to constituents released today, Roe explains why he favors H.R. 1119, a coal-industry backed bill that would reduce environmental protection measures applicable to older power plants that burn low-quality “waste” coal. Roe complains that environmental protections cost money, and he boasts that he is protecting his constituents’ wallets from “overzealous Washington bureaucrats creating unnecessary red-tape and costly regulations for job creators.”
The environmental protections that Roe opposes are known as the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards. These standards are designed to protect each of us, and our children, and unborn future generations, from scientifically well-known poisonous effects of the large-scale burning of coal. Poisons released by coal burning harm not only human health, but also have an adverse impact on the well-being of animals and plants in our environment.
Future generations are affected because certain poisons released from coal burning, such as mercury, are classified as “persistent bioaccumulative toxins.” In other words, mercury hangs around for a long long time — vastly longer than the electricity produced from burning the coal that releases the mercury in the first place. nadp.slh.wisc.edu/… The nervous systems of babies in utero are especially sensitive to the poisonous effects of mercury, and the damage can be permanent. Roe’s willingness to roll back protections against environmental mercury may contradict his position on other moral issues involving threats to the unborn. By his actions, he seems to be saying that protecting the unborn is not as important as protecting a coal corporation’s money.
Roe message shows us that he thinks money is the most important value. Indeed, he opens his energy message to constituents with this value-revealing statement: “Americans are some of the smartest shoppers in the world. We will drive across five lanes of traffic just to save two cents a gallon on gas.”
Really? It is “smart” to cross five lanes of traffic to save a couple of cents? Maybe that kind of “smart” helps to explain why Tennessee’s road accident fatality rate is well above the national average. www.iihs.org/…
Phil Roe insults the traditional family values of East Tennessee by assuming that we value money more than we value the health of our children and ourselves and future generations. He also insults our intelligence by assuming that we can’t see beyond his oversimplified corporation-friendly rationalizations.
Our government has better things to do than promote a world in which we trade environmental safety for lucre, a world in which he who lives by the dollar, dies by the dollar. My health and that of my children is not for sale to any coal company or other corporation. Shame on you, Phil Roe.