Friday, May 15, 2009

Undoing Bush

Here's some good news. The Hudson river is now being dredged to remove PCBs and other nasty stuff dumped there by GE. A quick background. When Bush got in one of the things he did was to no longer fund Superfund. That was a fund set up to help clean up our nations toxic waste dumps. What these fools ( and I'm referring to the pro business republicans)did was to cut funding for the EPA and let Superfund run out of money. What they don't seem to realize is that anything toxic you dump into the environment will come back to haunt you. It may not be today or tomorrow but eventually you'll be drinking poison. Even Nixon realized that. He was the one who set up the EPA and Superfund after the Love Canal.

Dredging the mess

I'm also glad that one of the first things Obama did when he took office was to undo the rules on arsenic levels in water that Bush had loosened.

9 comments:

Utah Savage said...

Everything the Bush Administration did is going to take decades to undo. They filled every department with political appointees with a political agenda that is antithetical to the departments they work in. So they are the monkey wrench working to make the government not work.

But it's nice to know that now small steps are starting to be made to right some of the terrible and long lasting wrongs that were started under that malignant administration. How could we have let him have a second term?

Lockwood said...

Didn't mandated business funding of the EPA superfund get discontinued under Clinton? I should go check this out. My recollection is that Bush was criticized not for defunding it, but when it became clear that the superfund was no longer solvent, trying to simply try to discontinue its activities.

@Utah- That last sentence hits home...His first term was a miscarriage of justice, but his second term was a choice! I have never been so ashamed.

BBC said...

Mile-long freight trains running every several days will carry the dried mud to a hazardous-waste landfill in Texas...

So we are going to fill Texas with hazardous waste and pretend that it isn't in this country anymore??

Um, okay, been to Texas and much of it is a wasteland anyway so I guess that works for me.

I spent a lot of my youth in Northern Idaho near the Bunkerhill mine in Kellogg, the rivers there ran gray and had no life in them.

It become part of the superfund thing, I haven't been back over there since moving here in 98 but the rivers were looking much better then.

Demeur said...

Utah - Obama undid some 200 executive orders of Bush in his first week in office. Gadfrey he must have had writers cramp. That last part you mention that was easy he stole two elections it's a Bush family trait.

Lockwood - They still had Superfund under Clinton. I worked on a couple of those sites around here.
Bush's second term was Diebold's choice.

Billy - I guess they did clean up Bunkerhill. One of my recert instructors worked on it and that was a long time ago. Idaho and Montana has a lot of nasty places because of the mines and those are republican states that didn't give a damn about dumping. Profits before people you know.

BBC said...

Actually, back then it was just a way to make a living, and ignorance about the environment.

S.W. anderson said...

BBC wrote: "So we are going to fill Texas with hazardous waste and pretend that it isn't in this country anymore?"
No, we're going to name the dump site The Rick Perry Texas Republic Park and make it a going away present! :)

S.W. Anderson said...

Utah Savage has an excellent handle on the situtation. It's probably going to be like trying to get rid of roaches in a century-old flophouse.

That project on the upper Hudson River will extend about five miles, with GE paying most or all the cost. That's a start, which is good. But from what I understand, a second phase will be needed and the company hasn't committed to funding it.

Tom Harper said...

If Texas wants to secede, then dumping our hazardous wastes in Texas means we're getting them out of the country :)

Actually, I like parts of Texas -- the eastern and western ends of the state, and San Antonio. (To visit, not to live there.)

How could we have let Dumbya have a second term? This is something we'll all be atoning for for generations. It'll always be one of the darkest chapters in our history.

Snave said...

Tom beat me to it re. the comment about Texas wanting to secede. Heh!

Utah is right, it will take a long time to undo all the Bush=Cheney damage. I am hoping the Dems will stay in control for the next 7 1/2 years so that some measures can be put in place to keep the reversals of Bush policy from being rescinded.

Good post, Demeur. Every little step in this process helps. Obama is taking some good first steps in a number of areas.