In its latest move to benefit corporate bottom lines, the Bush Administration is proposing gutting the nation's enviornmental right-to-know law.
The rule would mean thousands of companies nationwide would no longer have to provide the public with details of toxic chemicals they release into the environment. Under existing rules, facilities that release
500 or more pounds of toxic substances each year must reveal how much of each chemical is emitted into the air, discharged into waterways and taken to landfills or other disposal sites.
Under the EPA proposal, that threshold would be raised to 5,000 pounds.Under the administraton's proposal, 922 communities would lose all information from the the national Toxics Release Inventory detailing emissions. The Environmental Protection Agency will make a final decision on the proposal next year, after a public comment period that ends Jan. 13.
Savings to corporate America: $650 million.
Is it worth it?
Only to corporate America."In individual neighborhoods, the difference between 500 pounds and 5,000 pounds is significant," Idell Hansen, Washington state's director of hazardous waste and toxics reduction,
told the
Los Angeles Times.
"If the proposed changes are adopted, EPA will be issuing a permit to poison,"
added Jan Pendlebury, director of the New Hampshire chapter of the National Environmental Trust, in an interview with the
Concord (N.H.) Monitor. Eighty-one local and national environmental groups appealed to Congress in a letter to urge the EPA to leave the inventory unchanged.
***
Kim Nelson, an assistant administrator at the EPA, said the companies that would benefit from the proposal are "tiny, tiny businesses, mom-and-pop shops operating on Main Street, that, in an aggregate, amount to less than 1% of the emissions in this country."
But like so many things the Bush Administration says about the enviornment, Nelson's words are
empty conservative spin.
The agency's electronic inventory shows that many of the affected companies are not "mom-and-pop shops operating on Main Street," but instead the likes of American Gasket & Rubber, Clorox Products, Foamex, Illinois Oil Products, Langley Air Force Base, Pepsi Bottling Group, Raytheon and U.S. Gypsum Co.
Worse, many of the affected companies have facilities near residential areas.***
Congress established the Toxics Release Inventory in 1986, after a leak from a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, in 1984 killed thousands of nearby residents who were unaware that potentially deadly chemicals were used at the facility. The 21st anniversary of that disaster is today.
Under the program, approximately 26,000 industrial facilities report information about any of the 650 chemicals in the program.
Environmentalists credit the program with a 60 percent reduction of the disposals or releases of 299 chemicals nationally.***
This item first appeared at
Journalists Against Bush's B.S.