Steve Milloy of JunkScience.com last week
reported in the Washington Times
about a deceptive pair of ads by Environmental Defense Fund.
The ads, which criticized Ohio-based utility American Electric
Power, portrayed children and the pre-born as threatened by AEP’s
attempt to block “new clean air rules.”
One
of the ads shows a hospitalized child wearing a
nebulizer facemask and automatic chest compressor. As Milloy
explained, “The ad is a total put-on. Moreover, asthma attacks
aren’t treated with chest-compression devices, which are instead
more typically used for cardiopulmonary resuscitation.”
The second
ad, which also attacks AEP, shows an ultrasound
image of a child in-utero as a narrator explains how “the
developing fetus and young children are thought to be
disproportionately affected by mercury exposure…” And the point is?
Is the mother gulping down 12 cans of tuna fish a day?
The manufactured problems highlighted by EDF (total net
assets at the end of Fiscal Year 2009: $132 million) at AEP’s
expense are undoubtedly part of a partnership with EPA to leave the
regulatory agency financially unscathed. The bill that EDF so
strenuously objects to
reduces EPA funding by 18 percent, and its
funding for climate change programs by 22 percent. This not only
cuts into EPA’s police power, but also has the potential to harm an
EDF cash flow that it enjoys by recovering its attorney fees after
suing EPA. As former Bush EPA official Jeffrey Holmstead
explained to Investor’s Business Daily
recently, “The EPA isn’t harmed by these suits.
Often the suits involve things the EPA wants to do anyway. By
inviting a lawsuit and then signing a consent decree, the agency
gets legal cover from political heat.”
This not only threatens the friendly deals that EDF and
other eco-litigators (like Sierra Club and Natural Resources
Defense Council) perpetrate, but it could threaten the healthy
revenue flow of their top executives (EDF President Fredd Krupp’s
2009 compensation: $423,359). So now you get Krupp
challenging AEP publicly with unverifiable
and grossly misleading statistics such as, “How many lives are you
willing to sacrifice? Because in the first two years alone,
according to EPA, your bill would cost 34,000 lives and lead to
220,000 asthma attacks.”
As Milloy
wrote:
There is no evidence that
ambient levels of mercury or mercury emissions from U.S. power
plants have harmed anyone. In any event, nature is responsible for
the vast majority of mercury emissions (70 percent), while U.S.
power plants are responsible for less than 1 percent of global
emissions.
The EPA says
air pollution kills tens of thousands of people annually. This is
on a par with traffic accident fatalities. While we can identify
traffic accident victims, air pollution victims are unknown,
unidentified and (as far as anyone can tell) figments
of EPA’s
statistical imagination.
What is certain is that it is unreasonable to
allow EPA to continue with its unaccountable reduction of
acceptable particulate levels well below what is needed to protect
human health and the environment, or to consider EPA’s proposed
limits on carbon dioxide emissions — which have not been
identified by scientists as showing inordinate harm to the
environment.
Even more certain is that the effect of EPA’s excessive
regulations — in the context of the Obama Administration’s overall
policy initiative to create a “new energy economy” with loads of
new “Green” jobs — are failures. In fact, EPA has
ignored the president’s executive order from
earlier this year that
required all agencies to calculate the affects of proposed
regulations on job creation.
Worse, EPA and its partners in environoia
at EDF focus on artificial fatality numbers that it cannot
prove, while ignoring the real harms caused by excessive regulatory
costs as explained in academic risk journals. Believe it or not,
EPA’s own literature from the Clinton era
states:
People’s wealth and health status, as measured by
mortality, morbidity, and other metrics, are positively correlated.
Hence, those who bear a regulation’s compliance costs may also
suffer a decline in their health status, and if the costs are large
enough, these increased risks might be greater than the direct
risk-reduction benefits of the regulation.
For example, a
study by my colleagues at American Tradition
Institute ties economic costs from a potential national clean
energy standard (proposed by President Obama in his State of the
Union speech this year) to premature deaths due to losses in
employment and income. The higher the costs of the regulation
(which in this case, would mandate higher electric bills and
therefore less disposable income for health needs) were, the
greater the number of premature deaths and health risks.
Even President Obama’s regulatory czar Cass Sunstein, in
his book Laws of Fear, wrote that “an
expensive regulation can have adverse effects on life and
health.”
Unfortunately, those kinds of facts get lost when
sweetheart deals between environmental extremists and government
regulators are at stake.
