Opinion in Brief
Great news! The Environmental Protection Agency wants to allow more contamination in our drinking water. Considering recent agency efforts and the fact that it’s serving under the Bush administration, this should come as no surprise to anybody.
The current limit on arsenic (a known carcinogen) is 10 parts per billion – a standard that President Bush tried to suspend when he first took office.
Great news! The Environmental Protection Agency wants to allow more contamination in our drinking water. Considering recent agency efforts and the fact that it’s serving under the Bush administration, this should come as no surprise to anybody.
The current limit on arsenic (a known carcinogen) is 10 parts per billion – a standard that President Bush tried to suspend when he first took office. The EPA proposed a new limit of 30 parts per billion for water systems that serve fewer than 10,000 people. The new standard would greatly affect our own state, which has had difficulty meeting the 10-parts-per-billion arsenic limit, according to an article in The Washington Post.
The EPA also tried recently to relax the clean-air regulations for older power plants, refineries and factories. The measure, which was squashed last month by the U.S. Court of Appeals, would have allowed those facilities to avoid installing advanced pollution controls.
One motive drives both recent attempts by the EPA to weaken existing regulations: cost. Cleaning water and factory emissions requires a bit of money. But surely non-deadly water and breathable air are worth something to people.
