Pl-eeaze!
It's remarkable that I've never forgotten the major, decade-long $540 million study conducted at the behest of the late NY Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan that found the acid rain problem was NOT the problem the media was portraying. Less than five percent of lakes and rivers had acidity. And most of that was from leeching from the ground where the water was standing on.
But when Congress approved the [1990 Clean Air Act], it ignored the results of its own $540 million study, commissioned a decade earlier and completed in 1990.In one of the most thorough analyses of an enviromental problem ever conducted [emphasis mine], researchers checked acidity levels in more than 4,000 lakes and thousands of miles of streams. Their tests showed that acid rain, while a problem, was certainly not a crisis for this country. While a few hundred lakes and streams were shown to have high levels of acids, the study also said that thousands of others had not been affected.
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the New York Democrat who voted for the clean-air law, said the Congressional study was ignored because it would have upset the delicate regional political alliances that had been formed to push through the acid-rain protections.
"That's the way it happened," Mr. Moynihan said in an interview. "It was not a pretty way to make policy." (LINK)
There's a reason a convicted felon still serving in a Texas prison won 41% over Obama in a recent election in West Virginia, a state that is almost certainly going to go against President Obama in the next election. Haven't seen that for decades.
Environmentalism: green on the outside, red on the inside.
From the NYT in 1993:
The 1990 Government study on acid rain found high acidity in 4.2 percent of 1,181 lakes that were assessed and in about 3 percent of the nearly 4,000 miles of streams. Most of the problem, it said, was confined to Upper Michigan, the Adirondack region of New York, the Green Mountains in Vermont, the Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia and parts of Florida. The study also found that in those lakes that were affected, even those in Canada, acidity levels were already dropping as a result of requirements of the 1970 Clean Air Act.
In short, the study undermined the conventional wisdom that acid rain affected thousands of lakes and tens of thousands of miles of streams in every region east of the Mississippi River.
According to several Congressional staff members, Congress ignored this data because the members were intent on establishing an acid-rain rule that could be uniformly applied. They wanted to be sure that states with clean air could not gain a competitive edge over others, where expensive controls would have to be installed, and thus attract industry by offering less expensive power.
Now that the DC Appeals Court has given the EPA carte blanche power to enforce its bureaucratic fascism under the guise of saving the planet, expect more jobs to be lost and the EPA's role to become more of a public issue. The country's carbon-based output is now at 1964 levels, according to Patrick Michaels at the Cato Institute! And the levels continue to fall.
These EPA lawyers are, however, to those who look at it who aren't on the Sierra Club payroll like a recently disgraced EPA official, out of control.
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