"It's why I do what I do," says Kath Schomaker, outreach director for Gray Is Green, as she sets off on a trip this week and next to several midwestern states to meet and talk with seniors about the Clean Air Promise Campaign. "I may be nearing retirement, but now more than ever I feel the need to be active on the matter of our environment and our shared responsibility as stewards to leave the places we love and the clean air and water we need for good health intact for future generations."
"It was my generation, after all," Kath reminds me, that some 40 or so years ago, bearing witness to mounting instances of environmental degradation and driven by a nonpartisan will to preserve our planet, "launched the modern environmental movement, passing our nations' first bedrock laws to regulate pollution and protect our rights to a healthy environment."
Thanks to these foundational achievements, Kath notes with pride, "the air we breathe is cleaner and the water we drink is safer. We pulled together as a nation to make that happen."
Recently, however, a misguided political movement, driven and funded by polluter interests unrestricted in their political spending, has launched a full-on assault on America’s environmental and public health safeguards. And it's got clean air protections square in its crosshairs.
Lobbyists for the polluters have been paid huge sums to push through Congress several bills that would limit the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) ability to enforce clean air standards that protect us from air pollution.
At the same time, polluters have been leaning hard on the agency to delay its plans to set tougher standards for mercury and other air pollutants, including ozone and soot. It is estimated that the new standards would save as many as 17,000 lives every year by 2016 and prevent up to 110,000 cases of childhood asthma symptoms. The new safeguards also would avoid more than 12,000 emergency room and hospital visits and prevent 830,000 lost work days every year.
As you might expect, seniors are particularly vulnerable to the harmful effects of air pollution. In fact, medical researchers have found that seniors who are exposed to higher levels of nitrogen dioxide and fine particulate matter were more than twice as likely to be hospitalized for pneumonia, a leading cause of illness and death in order adults. In addition, exposure to carbon monoxide increased the likelihood that seniors with heart problems would be hospitalized.
Other vulnerable subpopulations include children and pregnant women. Nearly 37 million children live in areas with unhealthy air due to ozone smog or soot pollution. According to the American Lung Association (ALA), children often have greater exposure than adults to airborne pollutants, because they are active outdoors more frequently, increasing their exposure to any pollutants in the air. In addition, children are often more susceptible to the health effects of air pollution because their immune systems and developing organs are still immature.
Watch, or better yet, listen, to this disturbing video produced by the ALA if you want to understand why our children need strong health and environmental protections.
Facts like these get Kath thinking about our legacy, and what sort of environment we are leaving for our children. "Clean air is our right and our responsibility," she says. "No one should be able to pollute our air, to take it away from us, particularly not from our children."
"How can anyone be against clean air?" an 80-something retirement community resident in Pennsylvania asks Kath.
That's why she is out informing seniors around the country about the Clean Air Promise. "People are looking for ways to show they care. They know it matters that we have strong environmental safeguards in place and that they not be dismantled." And they know we have no time left to act. "It's about time!" says a 60-plus entrepreneur Kath met in Vermont.
Making the Clean Air Promise is one of the simplest, most straightforward ways all of us can show we care. All one needs to do is go to CleanAirPromise.org and make this promise:
“I promise to protect America’s children and families from dangerous air pollution. I will support clean air policies and other protections that scientists and public health experts have recommended to the EPA to safeguard our air quality.”
Fact sheets about the campaign are available on the Gray Is Green website. Print them out and share them with your friends and neighbors. Schedule a meeting with your Congressional representatives while they're in the district, and bring the factsheets along. Get them to make the Clean Air Promise. If they hesitate, ask them, "How can anyone be against clean air?"
If we have no money to be heard it means these criminals are creating a revolution in America by their weakness their selling to rich interest their hypocrisy self serving BS
Let's look at one aspect of the health care bill - Asthma. As our air and ozone I might add improved from 1980 till 2007 asthma cases continued to increase! You go on the data and it seems bad air was better. Now I know this is incorrect but my point is there are other more powerful influences causing asthma cases to rise. This also points to the fact that all the health cost claims are then unrealistic!
The new Ozone limits is an End Run to reduce the number of coal fired generations plants in this country. I'm not opposed to the idea just don't say it will improve our health's because the true factual data does not support these claims! You look at a couple of high emission states like Texas and Louisiana both below the nation average in the numbers of asthma with Louisiana being on of the lowest averages in the country.
A CEO takes a$500,000 cut off his $30 Million Dollars salary SO WHAT !
No one is worth $30,000,000 a year !
Stop doing it, and we'll stop accusing you of it.
Bigger stronger lungs to breath with in order to supply
enough oxygen to the blood.
Adaptation of the brain to being dizzy giving us a better
sense of balance.
A state of euphoria may stimulate the imagination, actually
causing belief in things that we cannot immagine yet.
We have to try this journey into new human engeneering.
After talking to people, I find three types. First, authoritarians who seem to base their life and beliefs on the idea that the higher someone is on the social (and/or economic) scale, the more they should be honored and their needs filled. These are people who believe in the devine right of kings and the rich. Second, haters. By this I mean there are people who simply hate "do-good" ideals. I hate those people. (That's a joke, folks!) And third, people who put beliefs above facts and common sense. These are people that follow their belief agendas: facts, common sense, and the welfare of the rest of us be damned. Many Fox News watchers are in this group. Fox whips them up with false cliches and off they go, happy as ignorant clams.
"Bottom line: polluters and other corporate interests are using the [fake debt limit debacle and other artificially stimulated political] chaos as a smokescreen to decimate environmental protections."
The current ozone regulation is 75 parts per billion, and that standard was set only 2 years ago. Most folks will be able to meet that standard pretty soon, so I have to wonder why the push to lower the standard to 60 parts per billion. Is there some new research in the past 2 years that shows that the extra 15 parts per billion is killing folks? I'd like to see a link to it before jamming another regulation that will cost tens of billions of dollars in compliance costs into the economy since a review of the national emissions inventory wouldn't seem to justify it.
I could go on, but I will just add that your "tens of billions" in costs is hugely questionable. Corporations, in a show of short-term self-interest, overstate the costs of compliance. That's been found the few times legitimate audits have been performed. There is loss of industry to non-regulated countries but that's another - sick - issue and to which carbon tax is a corrupt answer, but is sold to us anyhow.
I have seen the estimates from industry as well and they are much higher than that, along with an estimate of 7 million jobs loss in the manufacturing sector by 2020. Yes, the industry estimates of compliance costs and job losses are higher and are probably inflated as you say.
Even so, if I take the EPA's own estimate of $90 Billion (which if we go by their track record is probably understated, but assume it is accurate) - that is a hell of a lot of money to force people to spend on 15 parts per billion of Ozone absent some kind of serious scientific evidence that it is warranted. There is no doubt that it will cost some number of jobs - even if we assume industry overstated the losses 7x, would it be worth the loss of a million jobs?
What normal person would choose dirty air instead of clean, breathable air? What normal, thinking person would opt for a bad ticker and cancer when we outlawed filthy air for years? There must be something in the air for folks to even consider heart killing and cancer causing air! Reminds me of ole horror flicks made in the 50's while everyone but a few lost their minds and became mind-dead drones!
Corporations. I mean, they are people after all. ;)