Regulation Is The New Green
by Deb Steele
Keeping up with environmental issues can feel like information overload at times. A main underlying theme used by the fossil fuel industry in various ways is that of regulation being a bad thing. While anti-regulation has always been a keystone of polluters’ political platforms, recent announcements by the EPA has spurred their lobbyists into action again with that old message. Within a matter of days the U.S. Senate will vote if the EPA should have the power to regulate greenhouse gasses under the Clean Air Act. Also on the EPA’s to-do list is figuring out if coal ash should be labeled as a toxic substance. As our government toils over how to deal with these long overdue environmental issues we better be sure they are hearing from citizens. If you want a cleaner safer climate you should be not only for regulation, but a politically active person as well.
It has been more than a year from when over a billion gallons of coal fly ash slurry spewed from a broken containment area near the coal fired Kingston Fossil Plant in Eastern Tennessee overcoming a nearby river. The amount of coal ash released was 50 times larger than the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989. With a new head of the EPA last year, Lisa Jackson announced action from her agency around the issue of coal ash by the end of 2009. A decision from the EPA has yet to be announced despite the fact that OSHA already considers coal fly ash a hazardous chemical. There are abundant levels of mercury, cadmium, and other heavy metals present in coal ash.
It does not take a horrible accident like the spill or living near containment areas of coal waste, to be vulnerable to serious health risks of coal ash. This material unregulated is already all around us in various forms. In 2000 the Clinton Administration missed an opportunity to correctly label coal ash as toxic, as a result it is considered a product fit for industrial recycling into products such as concrete. In the U.S. about 30 million tons of fly ash material was “recycled” for other uses during 2008 alone.
Review meetings of EPA’s proposed coal ash regulation have received an historic amount of industry attention, even more so than the regulation of greenhouse gasses at the White House. Industry stakeholders have attended 22 meetings while environmental stakeholders have been present at just four. Who is to insure the government is representing the interests of the people with a ratio of five to one? It could be argued more progress can be made in talking to culprits, but unfortunately there is a long running history of those most responsible for creating the mess influencing what does or does not happen in D.C.
That influence is bad for all of us. If we learned anything for the mortgage crisis, we learned how important oversight is. Whereas we could allow our elected officials to continue business as usual, and as a result avoid changing the underlining problems in the system; we could keep burning coal that destroys mountains in the process of obtaining it and everyone’s health in the process of burning it; and we could just continue to simply assume if we get the right person elected to office our work is done as citizens in a democracy; but at a certain point we cannot afford to fail our environment. As a society these issues demand our attention from the top down and the bottom up simultaneously and with conviction. As we stand on the eve of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, we should remind ourselves what a social movement looks like. We must demand our government protects our health and the environment from the interests from corporate polluters. We each must be personally involved.
