Friday, April 22, 2005

Happy Earth Day

I'm not a gardener, but even I appreciate the daffodils coming up, the spring weather, and the opportunity to enjoy our brief interlude outdoors before the black flies hit. So happy Earth Day, everyone!

This is a good time to mention the American Progress Action Fund. They maintain a set of talking points on lots of hot-button issues: Iraq, Social Security, the budget, energy, media manipulation, and so on. Each piece is pretty short – usually just three bullets – but provides a good intro to the topic, with links to more info. It’s a handy reference to know about. Here’s a snip of today’s entry:
Earth (to Bush) Day
Today is Earth Day and President Bush plans to visit the Great Smoky Mountain National Park to tout his clean air policies. True to its name, Great Smoky has the worst air pollution of any national park in America. Despite a 2000 campaign promise to improve air quality in our parks, President Bush's policies have actively undermined air quality in national parks and their surrounding communities.
  • The president's "Clear Skies" initiative means more hazy parks. The administration's Clear Skies Act eliminates a key provision of the Clean Air Act program that requires old, polluting power plants to install modern emissions controls. ...
  • Rather than eliminating air pollution, the White House wants to shift it around from state to state. The Clear Skies Act effectively eliminates the possibility of states situated downwind of pollution sources from implementing any remedy until 2015. …
  • Expect the nation's parks to get more polluted in the upcoming years. According to EPA's own estimates, even after full implementation of CAIR's sulfur dioxide reductions, only one of Tennessee's six counties that now fail to meet clean air standards for sulfur-dioxide related "fine particle pollution" will be brought into compliance. ...
Read the full piece here.

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