Saturday, March 08, 2003
Under the radar
While the entire world concentrates on the coming war in Iraq—most with dread and sorrow, a few (including Dubya and his crew, Tony, and of course Osama) with slavering relish— the Bush government continues its unrelenting behind-the-scenes course of undermining American values, economic well-being, environmental conditions, and so on and so forth. Buried on page A4 of Saturday’s Seattle Times was a compendium called Capital Watch, which included three well-hidden items.
One of those items—the Congressional Budget Office’s fast-rising estimate of the deleterious effects of GWB’s economic “stimulus” insanity—has been discussed in a number of places in the blogosphere, and even appeared in the mainline media, so I won’t talk about it here. See, for example, Daily Kos and this Reuters story.
Nor will I say much about the third item—postponement of arguments before the Supreme Court in an appeal of a lawsuit concerning accommodations under the Americans With Disabilities Act—because I don’t know enough about the law or the legal process to really understand what it means.
Here’s the important information in what I do want to talk about:
Runoff rule delayed for oil products
WASHINGTON � The Bush administration has decided to give the oil and gas industry two years to comply with a storm-water regulation that goes into effect Monday, and will consider a permanent exemption.
The administration said it needs additional time to determine the impact the rule would have on the industry and whether it should be applied to such companies.
In the second phase of implementation of regulations about stormwater runoff on construction sites (rules originally promulgated in December 1999), projects covering 1-5 acres would need to obtain state and/or federal permits before commencing. Extension of this regulation to projects of this extent (larger ones are already required to obtain such permits) is scheduled to go into effect on March 10, 2003. At the last minute, Bush’s EPA has decided to extend the deadline by two years, and will consider making a permanent exemption, for one (and only one) class of construction project.
No one who reads this blog will be surprised to hear which industry gets this special treatment—oil drillers, of course! The so-called “reasoning” behind this action is rather humorous, in the omigod, look what those bastards are pulling off this time genre.
** The Bush EPA was shocked, shocked to find that as many as 30,000 oil drilling projects per year fall under the purview of this regulation. They had been led to believe that oil drilling sites were smaller than that. (ed. note: and therefore figured that Dubya’s ole bidness buddies could get away with spilling their runoff with impunity)
** The industry argues that drilling sites don’t create large runoff problems, and that complying with the regulation would be too expensive.
Let me restate that last one: Drilling sites don’t produce much runoff and it’s expensive to reduce their runoff. This is, of course, patently absurd. Why, just imagine how expensive it would be if they created a lot of runoff!
This low-profile, but undoubtedly high-profit, action is fully described in this obfuscatory release from Christie Whitman and the EPA office.
↑ Close ...
Posted by N in Seattle on 03/08 at 01:50 PM
(1)
Comments •
(0)
Trackbacks •
Permalink
Page 1 of 1 pages
