Thursday, December 28, 2017

Team Trump serves lead paint makers. Walker got there first.

As we have seen on several environmental matters, Walker is Trump with less bluster, more guile, similar outcomes.

So people in Wisconsin who remember that Walker and the GOP legislature were discovered to have taken big money from a major lead paint maker as they cut back lead paint regulation - - 

GOP eases lead paint laws after $750,000 in donations

- - will not be surprised that Trump's intentionally-demolished EPA has been slammed today for a willfully go-slow approach again to federal lead paint regulation.
A federal appeals court is ordering the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to take action within 90 days to revise standards meant to protect children from lead-based paint.
The San Francisco-based Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruledWednesday that the EPA has taken too long to act on a 2009 petition from health and environmental groups who want the agency to further restrict lead paint limitations.
The judges issued a “writ of mandamus,” a rare edict from a federal court that requires a litigant to take action.
The EPA told the court that it would take another six years to develop a lead paint rule, which the judges did not accept.



1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The toxic legacy lives on and often times comes up in the strangest ways. Many folks today are unaware, sometimes by design, that some of the chemical waste of Wisconsin is buried in old ravines and dumps along the bluffs overlooking Lake Michigan. As the metro area developed the still undeveloped areas were used as a dumping ground. Ravines that had eroded over time to large size along the bluffs were the receptacle for a great deal of the chemicals and products that industry discarded. Sometimes they recycled chemical drums right along the lake and dumped the contents into huge pools and if it ran into the lake it certainly didn't bother the heads of those companies. The DNR used to have an effort to catalogue these old "dumps". Developers found clean-ups inconvenient for their profit margins and so we "look forward" with industry as "our partners" and we do not call it enforcement but rather "helping our customers to achieve their goals". You can be certain that the people who thought up these phrases and put them into action never rushed their child to the hospital due to a chemical exposure from these dumps. Those things don't happen in River Hills and worrying about the health of average children and future generations was never a topic of conversation when the powerful got together at the Athletic Club.