Big Coal Fights Off Crackdown on Toxic Ash

Source: Rolling Stone
By Jeff Goodell

Yesterday was a good day for Big Coal.

At a meeting yesterday with activists in Washington an EPA official announced that although the agency is working “very hard” on new rules - already about 30 years overdue - for toxic coal ash disposal, those rules won't be completed until 2012, or even 2013, according to Lisa Evans of the environmental group Earthjustice. Evans was among a group of activists from 50 states who met with EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson and others on Capital Hill to push for tougher clean air regulations.

No surprise there: Big Coal has lobbied hard against the toxic ash rules — since they threaten to cut into its profits — and the industry knows how to get its way in Washington.

The EPA says the reason for the delay is that it's still digesting public comments from the hearings it held around the country in the aftermath of the coal ash spill in Tennessee in December 2008, when an earthen dam burst and sent a billion gallons of toxic sludge into the Emory River. It was one of the largest industrial disasters in American history, a flood of waste 100 times larger than Exxon Valdez spill in 1989.

More at: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/big-coal-fights-off-crackdown-on-toxic-ash-20110504

Like you, I am not surprised that coal gets a pass on its toxic pollution. Even after the ash spill in 2008 the TVA told residents that the water just needed to be boiled to be safe to drink! Water that contains radioactive material, toxic metals like Mercury, Lead, Arsenic, and over a dozen others that are toxic in high doses. Boiling does not a damn thing to reduce those -- in fact it may *increase* them in the remaining water as some of the pure water boils off as steam.

Coal is deadly and yet our impotent politicians cannot muster the backbone to even talk about regulating it. Sickening.