[url]http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/printer-friendly.asp?ARTICLE_ID=22616[/url]
Defusing green booby-traps
By Gordon Prather
The polls say that Americans, by a margin of about two to one, think George II is doing a really good job as president. The media elite -- having told us that he isn't -- don’t understand why so many of us think that he is.
Well, for one thing, we don’t see him much on television, rushing off every day in Air Force One to the scene of every seven-car pileup or creek flooding its banks to feel our pain. No, the president and his bomb-squad have been busy in the nation’s capitol, searching for -- and sometimes defusing -- various booby-traps left there by the Gore-Greenies.
After only a few days in office, President Bush announced that he had no intention of complying with Al Gore’s Kyoto Global Warming Protocols. He had to do that to defuse one of the Kyoto booby-traps left by the Gore-Greenies at the EPA -- the Gore-Greenies had got Christy Whitman to propose regulating carbon dioxide as a "pollutant."
Power-generation facilities burning fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) do produce carbon dioxide and water vapor -- both of which are Gore-Greenie "greenhouse gases" -- but neither of them are "pollutants" as defined by the Clean Air Act. The Gore-Greenie plan was to use the Clean Air Act as a regulatory hammer to force compliance with the Kyoto Protocols, which would require us -- by 2012 -- to cut back our carbon dioxide emissions to the levels of 20 years before. If the Gore-Greenies had prevailed, not only would we not be able to build any more coal- or natural gas-fired plants, but we would have had to shut down all the plants built during the 1990s.
But the president’s bomb squad can’t relax just yet. Having lost that Kyoto battle, the Gore-Greenies at EPA are at it again. They want to drastically reduce the arsenic levels allowed in drinking water, from 50 parts per billion to 5 ppb. Actually, they have had to settle for reducing it to 10 ppb, but they wanted to reduce it to 5 ppb.
What do arsenic levels in our water have to do with Kyoto?
Well, a 1,000 megawatt coal-fired plant, producing enough electricity for a city of about 300,000 people, burns about three million tons of coal a year, and releases -- among other heavy metals (such as mercury and uranium) -- 450 pounds of arsenic!
So when you find a lump of coal in your Christmas stocking, don’t suck on it.
Now, coal-fired plant emissions are already suspected by the EPA of being responsible for the heavy metal "contamination" of lakes and rivers in northern states. According to the EPA, in Wisconsin alone, more than 200 lakes and rivers are contaminated with mercury. The amount of mercury in coal is much, much less than the amount of arsenic. If the EPA already suspects coal-fired plants of contaminating rivers and lakes with mercury, how much longer will it be before coal-fired plant operators are hauled off to jail for contaminating America’s lakes and rivers with arsenic?
So, perhaps the Gore-Greenie objective in setting the 10 ppb arsenic level in drinking water is not to drive cities and municipalities into bankruptcy, after all. It’s to force the shut-down of all remaining coal-fired plants, ala Kyoto.
But if we do that, the only remaining option is nuclear power!
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