Forum Index > Public Lands Stewardship > HR 861 - To terminate the Environmental Protection Agency
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mike
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PostSun Mar 05, 2017 6:34 pm 
The Animas mess was left to taxpayers by mining companies. Why is the EPA responsible? If the EPA had more authority at the front end we wouldn't be left paying for cleaning up their messes. Getting rid of the EPA is bad economics (except for polluters)

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Dave Workman
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PostMon Mar 06, 2017 5:38 am 
mike wrote:
The Animas mess was left to taxpayers by mining companies. Why is the EPA responsible? If the EPA had more authority at the front end we wouldn't be left paying for cleaning up their messes. Getting rid of the EPA is bad economics (except for polluters)
Mike, IIRC the EPA admitted responsibility for that foul-up. I found this online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Gold_King_Mine_waste_water_spill and it provides a nutshell explanation. I don't know that Congress will get rid of the EPA, but it might get reined in.

"The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted." - D.H. Lawrence
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drm
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PostMon Mar 06, 2017 9:32 am 
As the agency with overall responsibility, EPA has to take responsibility. But it's hard for me to consider this to be EPA's fault. Here is a quote from the link you provided:
Quote:
They caused the accident while attempting to drain ponded water near the entrance of the mine on August 5.[3] The maintenance by the EPA was necessary because local jurisdictions had previously refused Superfund money to fully remediate the regions' derelict mines, due to a fear of lost tourism.[4] After the spill, the Silverton Board of Trustees and the San Juan County Commission approved a joint resolution seeking Superfund money.[5] Contractors accidentally destroyed the plug holding water trapped inside the mine, which caused an overflow of the pond, spilling three million US gallons (11 ML) of mine waste water and tailings, including heavy metals such as cadmium and lead, and other toxic elements, such as arsenic,[6] beryllium,[6] zinc,[6] iron[6] and copper[6] into Cement Creek, a tributary of the Animas River in Colorado.[7] The EPA was criticized for not warning Colorado and New Mexico about the operation until the day after the waste water spilled, despite the fact the EPA employee "in charge of Gold King Mine knew of blowout risk."[8]
So local authorities tried to sweep the problem under the rug. EPA, thus denied adequate resources, hired a contractor who goofed and caused the spill. If I was to try to apportion fault among the various players in this disaster, EPA would not be anywhere near the top.

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PostMon Mar 06, 2017 9:49 am 
Dave Workman wrote:
Mike, IIRC the EPA admitted responsibility for that foul-up. I found this online: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Gold_King_Mine_waste_water_spill and it provides a nutshell explanation.
I am not sure what your point is with that article, regarding using it to justify doing away with the EPA. Assume there was no EPA in the first place. What would the situation have been? It seems as though the company would have walked away from the mine without doing anything, the locals would have ignored the situation, and the mine would have been more slowly leaching out the same toxins into the water supply ever since the mine shut, and it would just continue to spew toxins in the future. Was this one situation handled well by the EPA's choice of a low bidder for the job....No. Would overall pollution been a lot worse without EPA intervention...likely. And this is just one case where they screwed up. Are you assuming all their other cases were equally screwed up? That seems like a leap?

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fairweather friend
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PostMon Mar 06, 2017 3:33 pm 
The Animas is a tributary of the San Juan River, which flows into the Colorado (or actually, Lake Powell, thanks to Glen Canyon Dam.) In April, 2016, I solo kayaked 83 miles of the San Juan and one of the groups I encountered along the way was a science group (hired by the state of Utah) who told me that the levels of heavy metals they were finding in the feeder creeks of the San Juan actually contained higher levels of heavy metals than the main river. The toxic dam release was on August 5, 2015, so my encounter with these scientists was a full eight months after the spill. IIRC, the reason they had been hired to do this study is because the state of Utah wanted to seek recompense from the EPA for the spill, haha. As far as the EPA is concerned... are you kidding me??? The EPA protects and has helped restore watersheds and bodies of water from Puget Sound to the Great Lakes and countless river systems and estuaries. To obliterate their funding is beyond insanity. I simply do not understand those who desire to foul the earth as quickly as possible just so a handful of rich corporations can become even richer. How could that possibly benefit you or future generations of Americans?

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Pyrites
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PostMon Mar 06, 2017 6:33 pm 
Backpacker Joe wrote:
Lets get real. The agency is going NOWHERE! But, and I applaud this, it IS going to get its budget slashed which is very good. ALL agencies need to get their budgets slashed. up.gif Quote Selected Text Quote Entire Post
When there's been fire on the mountain at Cle Elum have you argued for all agencies' budgets to be cut?

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Tom
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PostMon Mar 06, 2017 6:37 pm 
I don't think our lawmakers foul the earth to enrich others. They have something at stake so the motivation is to enrich themselves, directly or indirectly. I don't think the public necessarily desires to foul the earth. They are just ignorant and easily misled.

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Malachai Constant
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PostMon Mar 06, 2017 6:54 pm 
The people who foul the earth simply do not care either out of ignorance or greed or both. The politicians who enable them are paid in contributions or in other ways to accomidate the ignorance and greed. The contributions buy media and support for the politicians. Propagandists who support the politicians for this or more likely other issues aid and abet the destruction. There is little support for destroying the enviornment but lots of support for resources extraction, religion, bigotry, and the tool that cannot be mentioned. One issue zealots will support politicians who support their one issue no matter what else they do.

"You do not laugh when you look at the mountains, or when you look at the sea." Lafcadio Hearn
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Ulysses
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PostTue Mar 07, 2017 10:24 am 
EPA reined in? Is this a joke? Reined in from what? Reagan essentially gutted the EPA and it hasn't been the same since. Do you not care about clean air and clear water? Educate yourselves. Thanks to legislation like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act along with the creation of the EPA there has actually been progress in the last forty years. There could and should be much more.

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fairweather friend
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PostTue Mar 07, 2017 9:00 pm 
Here is another story of the rampant pollution in the US that led to the formation of the EPA. It's in Popular Science I think it's really a shame people don't understand how much the EPA has accomplished in the past 40 years and what a benefit a clean environment is for everyone. Back in the early 70's when I was a kid, I can remember running around a boggy wetlands area littered with rusting oil drums filled with God knows what. We'd roll the drums down an embankment and into the water and then throw rocks at them as they oozed out their contents. This was back East somewhere. Probably became a Superfund site, for all I know. Gee, just think of all the wonderful "playgrounds" kids will have again once the EPA is gone! I'm getting all nostalgic just thinking about it.

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drm
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PostWed Mar 08, 2017 9:13 am 
For all this defense of the EPA and the things it protects us from, which I wholeheartedly agree with, I will grant one thing to those with a complaint: the cost of these programs does not always go where it should, on the polluters (which sometimes is the consumer). Sometimes it gets forced onto those who are weakest politically, the ones who can't make the big political contributions. If we could fix this (and that requires fixing campaign finance, which basically the Supreme Court as currently constituted will not allow), then I think at least some of the complaints would go away.

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fairweather friend
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PostWed Mar 08, 2017 11:49 am 
I'm not sure I could find a single state or federal agency that spends tax dollars the way "I" think they should be spent, but I can almost guarantee that no one else would see things exactly the same way I do. Which is to say, certain criticisms of the EPA's actions may be warranted, but to advocate defunding the agency to the point that it ceases to exist (i.e., throwing the baby out with the bathwater) pretty much gives away what those who support this bill want, which is absolutely NO regulation on industry of any kind. And I can't get with that. If there are specific complaints about specific regulations or budgeting decisions, then that could easily be addressed by the EPA's new chief, Scott Pruitt. But improving the agency's efficiency or tweaking the regs is not the goal, it's annihilation of the agency in total. You know what the real problem is? Then EPA, like most federal agencies, never spent money to toot their own horn and show the American people what has been accomplished. Here's another good article (from 2015... practically ancient history given the way America is changing right now) that explains a few of the agency's accomplishments: 4 big pollution problems the EPA has mostly fixed

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trestle
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PostWed Mar 08, 2017 4:06 pm 
Backpacker Joe wrote:
ALL agencies need to get their budgets slashed.
And yet we're increasing the budget of the largest agency. shakehead.gif

"Life favors the prepared." - Edna Mode
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Backpacker Joe
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PostThu Mar 09, 2017 9:39 am 
trestle wrote:
Backpacker Joe wrote:
ALL agencies need to get their budgets slashed.
And yet we're increasing the budget of the largest agency. shakehead.gif
You can shakehead.gif all you want. Government needs to be SMALLER in every aspect and on every level! up.gif

"If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide." — Abraham Lincoln
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treeswarper
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PostThu Mar 09, 2017 11:33 am 
Backpacker Joe wrote:
Government needs to be SMALLER in every aspect and on every level! up.gif
Why and how? Do we get rid of the socialist snowplows? Gonna cut the Forest Service even more so no fire prevention work gets done and no crews can be hired to fight fire? Who ya gonna call when ALL agencies are cut and you need help? It's a popular saying to cut the gubmint. The problem is when the pro cut folks are asked what to cut and how needed and wanted services are still to be delivered. It's much easier and requires no thinking to either post a meme or make a blanket statement. Reality is that we all like our roads, woods, and even services--like trail maintenance. By the way, the Forest Service has been cut and hacked massively since the timber harvest shrank. I'm not sure they can take much more. The folks at the top will survive, but the worker bees will not be hired.

What's especially fun about sock puppets is that you can make each one unique and individual, so that they each have special characters. And they don't have to be human––animals and aliens are great possibilities
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