WASHINGTON, April 1, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — A proposed Senate resolution citing enormous public health and economic benefits from the Clean Air Act was denounced as “a work of fiction” today by JunkScience.com.
Introduced yesterday by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and 33 other members of the Democratic caucus, the resolution parrots U.S. Environmental Protection Agency claims that the Clean Air Act saves millions of lives and adds trillions of dollars to the economy.
“The resolution’s claims of public health and economic benefits from the Clean Air Act are exaggerated to the point of fantasy,” observed JunkScience.com publisher Steve Milloy. “It’s a work of fiction,” Milloy said.
To expose the fictitious benefits of the Clean Air Act, JunkScience.com recently published a report entitled “EPA’s Clean Air Act: Pretending air pollution is worse than it is.”
“EPA’s Clean Air Act” principally found that:
- America’s air is already safe to breathe and it is much better than the EPA would have the public believe; and that
- The EPA relies on health studies that exaggerate harm and economic studies that understate regulatory costs in order to maintain the fiction that its ever-more stringent regulations are providing meaningful public health benefits.
“While air quality improvements made during the 1970s and 1980s were worthwhile, the Clean Air Act has produced no discernible public health or economic benefits since at least 1990,” Milloy says.
Ironically, as air quality has steadily improved over the last 40 years, the EPA has claimed more and more death and illness from air pollution is occurring. As a result of the EPA’s over-regulation of air quality, Americans are spending hundreds of billions of real dollars in exchange for imaginary health benefits. The EPA claims that the Clean Air Act provides economic benefits on the order of 10 percent of the national GDP — i.e., about $1.3 trillion annually.
“If that claim was true then the EPA could simply regulate America’s way out of our ongoing economic doldrums,” says Milloy.
The Senate resolution is further misleading in that its aim is to help defeat bipartisan efforts in Congress to block EPA regulation of greenhouse gases.
“By conflating and confusing conventional air pollutants with greenhouse gases, Senate Democrats are trying to fool the public into believing that blocking the EPA’s controversial and dubious greenhouse gases rules amounts to a rollback of existing Clean Air Act provisions on conventional air pollutants,” says Milloy.
The JunkScience.com report “EPA’s Clean Air Act: Pretending air pollution is worse than it is” is available online at https://junkscience.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/epa_s-clean-air-act-final.pdf.
@Kozlowski April 1, 2011 at 10:28 pm: “If CO2 is a pollutant and endangers health at 350ppm, then what about greenhouse workers where CO2 is often more than double!”
The concentration of CO2 in most office spaces is 800 to 2,500 ppm, and ~900 ppm is the goal value recommended by heating and A/C trade groups. Most of the CO2 in offices comes from human office workers. EPA has published numerous studies on this issue.
Why is EPA not regulating the CO2 in office buildings at the same level as the air. i.e. 350 ppm?
Liberals will come up with the darnedest reasons for spending money they don’t have. Promoting the ‘Clean Air Act’ as a necessity for saving the planet and funding the non-existent needs of a department of the government that has outlived it’s usefulness by twenty years and countless billions of dollars is typical behavior for these clowns. It’s not enough that they’ve sold this country down the drain to any foreign power that will buy our debt…no, they to continue to lie to us like the snakes they really are. I’m for impeaching the lot of them! Or maybe just hauling them out to a makeshift gallows and hanging the bastards. I’m so sick of these jackals!
@chuck in st paul This is a Senate resolution . . . “It’s time to give this anachronism the coup de gras.”???
The Senate should again realize that it’s their little actions have great consequences . . . and never forget it.
If CO2 is a pollutant and endangers health at 350ppm, then what about greenhouse workers where CO2 is often more than double!
Are they dropping dead? Are they coming down with illnesses right and left? Have they filed a class action lawsuit? Will the proposed EPA rules enable massive class action suits against the purported negative health effects? Are they going to ban this type of ‘pollution’ entirely? Or just regulate it so it doesn’t damage humans?
“They’re particularly dangerous when wounded.”
The EPA, like many organizations of the 60’s and 70’s has outlived its usefulness. It grabs at anything to stay afloat. Now it does what all cornered animals do, it strikes out visciously in fear for it’s life.
It’s time to give this anachronism the coup de gras.
Up next . . . . public health and economic benefits from the 100% Sterile/Germ Free Environment Act – followed by the clean earth inspection teams . . . Who’s that guy who says “wait for it”!