Jake Johnson at CommonDreams reports on Tuesday’s hearing in West Virginia. He writes—EPA Ripped for Holding Lone Public Hearing on Clean Power Plan Repeal in Coal Country:
"The EPA is having this hearing here because they think everyone in West Virginia opposes the Clean Power Plan," Bill Price, an organizer for the Sierra Club in West Virginia, told The New Republic. "We're going to show them differently."
Repealing the Clean Power Plan (CPP)—a program designed to slash emissions from coal-fired power plans—has long been on EPA chief Scott Pruitt's extensive pro-fossil fuel to-do list. In October, the EPA publicly unveiled its official proposal to roll back the CPP, a move green groups vowed to fight in court and in the streets.
On Tuesday, environmentalists took their fight straight to the EPA, arguing that contrary to Big Oil talking points, the CPP is vital for safeguarding public health and spurring job growth and innovation.
"We can have both" good jobs and a clean environment, David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council argued in his testimony. "We can—and we must—protect Americans' health and preserve the stability of our climate."
"It is not the job of the EPA to protect the coal industry," adds Dr. Jeremy Richardson, a senior energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists. "In fact, the EPA is bound by law to address air and water pollutants from producing and using coal. Many of these pollutants are hurting the health of communities right here in Appalachia, where acid mine drainage and coal ash contaminate our waterways, and are also causing harm around the country where people live downwind from coal-fired power plants."
Stanley Sturgill, a 72-year-old former coal worker suffering from black lung also weighed in with an "emotional plea" in support of the CPP.
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QUOTATION
“Women who accuse men, particularly powerful men, of harassment are often confronted with the reality of the men’s sense that they are more important than women, as a group.”
~Anita Hill, 1997
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
On this date at Daily Kos in 2009—Home Job a Good Gig, If You Can Find One:
I had a boss a decade ago who hated the idea of employees working from home. Hated it. Glared at me every time I suggested we let a few of our team work at home at least a couple of days a week. That team mostly comprised editors and, with an Internet hook-up, they could easily have accomplished their tasks in the basement in their jammies, with the Cheetos close at hand, if they so chose. In some cases, it would have saved them a two-hour round-trip commute. And cut down on their dry-cleaning bills.
It was all about control. He was the kind of boss who didn't believe his staff was working unless he could actually see them working. Didn't matter that their tasks had a required level of output whose quantity could be measured by how often deadlines were met or missed and whose quality was randomly scrutinized by us higher-ups, some of whom also could have worked from home. If Timbuktu had broadband, they could have edited from there. Even though my boss was a good deal younger than I, and should have been more with it, he stuck to this cramped, old-management style right up until the day he left the job. Just as he stuck to the view that people would never give up dead-tree newspapers for on-line coverage.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Nothing has ever succeeded in ridding the world of James O’Keefe, but maybe we have a special moment of opportunity here, in the Great Awakening on sexual assault. Because James O’Keefe is a sexual predator, and KITM can prove it to you. So we do.
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