Public Health Under Attack

One in three amendments in House budget affect environment.

treehugger.com

(WASHINGTON D.C.) - Ignoring the risk to the public, the House Republican majority and a few Democrats have mounted a broad ideological attack on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s rules to protect public health. These assaults on our public health protections could cause thousands of premature deaths every year, create billions of dollars in unnecessary health costs, and leave communities at risk of pollution-related cancers and other diseases. Children and seniors face the highest risks.

Nearly a third of the amendments in the budget plan approved by the U.S. House of Representatives are aimed at eliminating health and environmental protections. These provisions favor polluting industries at the expense of Americans.

Among one of the anti-environmental measures the House voted to kill are critical protections to control pollution coming out of cement plants – limits that would save 2,500 lives each year, reduce mercury and other toxic pollution by more than 90 percent, and yield up to $18 billion annually in health benefits. The House voted to block this rule by a vote of 250 to 177, largely along party lines. Notably, none of the representatives who voted for the bill denies that the cement plant pollution limits would save thousands of lives every year and that rolling back the requirements would lead to thousands of unnecessary deaths. These health protections are mandated by federal law, which required EPA to put them in place more than a decade ago.

There are an estimated 100 cement plants nationwide. Oregon has one cement plant, but it released 1,962 pounds of mercury – the most mercury emissions from any state with cement kilns – in 2009. To put these emissions in perspective, it takes only 1/70th of a teaspoon of mercury to contaminate a 25-acre lake and render the fish in that lake unsafe to eat. Studies have found that high levels of exposure to mercury damage the developing nervous system, and that hundreds of thousands of babies born each year in America are at risk of neurological damage because of the mercury levels already present in their mothers’ bodies. These children’s ability to learn, write, walk, talk and read may be impaired, and they are at risk for having permanently lowered IQs. Mercury is especially a hazard for poor and minority populations who rely on catching their own fish to feed their families.

Cement kilns also pump vast quantities of lead, arsenic, chromium, and dioxins into the air. These pollutants can cause cancer, birth defects and other catastrophic health impacts. These pollutants build up in fish and other food sources and threaten the health of everyone who breathes the air.

The cement kiln protections that the House voted down would control emissions of mercury and other toxic pollutants by requiring all plants to match the emission levels that the cleanest plants have already achieved. The technology needed to clean up emissions from cement plants has been available for many years, but many polluting facilities have simply delayed upgrades, unnecessarily threatening public health more and more each year.

To gin up opposition to these common-sense requirements, industry lobbyists and their allies in Congress are making false claims about job loss and industry collapse. Those claims are unsupported by any data, and are directly at odds with EPA’s own conclusion that its rule will not shut down plants. More damningly, their claims conflict with a report by the Portland Cement Association, the industry group that represents all cement companies operating in the U.S. In 2010, after EPA published the new pollution rule, the Portland Cement Association published a sunny economic forecast, predicting that American cement plants will increase production by 50 percent between now and 2015, while cement imports remain at low current levels.

Reports by the EPA and Ceres, a coalition of investors, environmental and public interest groups have confirmed that the health benefits of Clean Air Act protections outweigh their costs by billions of dollars. Last week, the EPA announced that health benefits from the Clean Air Act will reach about $2 trillion in 2020 and will outweigh their costs by approximately 30-to-1.

Oregon Representative Greg Walden (R-2) voted to kill the majority of these health protections and voted in favor of the overall budget. We applaud Representatives David Wu (D-1) and Earl Blumenauer (D-3) for voting against these anti-environmental measures and for voting against the overall budget. Now the ball is in the U.S. Senate’s court. Oregon Senators Jeff Merkley and Ron Wyden have a responsibility to restore these critical public health protections for Oregonians and for all Americans.

Breathing clean air is not a partisan issue, but a simple matter of life or death. We ask these senators to stand up for clean air, clean water and public health by voting to restore the EPA’s ability to enforce the Clean Air Act. __________________________________

Source: Earthjustice