What if there were a terrorist group that killed 3.3 million people around the world every year, including 55,000 in the United States?
Well, if the terrorists were foreigners, Congress probably be falling all over itself to declare war. But because those deaths were caused by air pollution, Republicans are instead on the side of the killers.
In fact, they just passed a bill that would allow coal plants to continue blanketing the surrounding countryside with toxic clouds.
Yesterday the House passed a bill that would stop the EPA from reducing airborne carcinogenic emissions from power plants — emissions that cause heart attacks, and lung cancer, and strokes, and give children chronic asthma for the rest of their lives.
Obama will veto the bill, of course. It’s just a symbolic gesture, but the symbol is largely what you want to make of it: to dirty-power industries like coal, it’s a symbol of how successfully they’ve bought the Republican party. To Republican voters, it’s a symbol of how reliably Republicans will block anything Obama proposes. And to Democratic voters, it’s a symbol of just how toxic Republicans can be, that they’re literally willing to support the wide-scale poisoning of their own constituents.
Let’s just be clear about what the Republicans are supporting here: at the hands of the coal industry alone, 13,000 people die simply from breathing, 20,000 suffer heart attacks, there are over 100,000 asthma attacks, and 1.6 million lost workdays. And the limited regulations that we have on dirty power plants have been a success, reducing those coal-breathing deaths from 24,000 just a decade ago.
(Still, it could be worse: toxic air from coal plants kill 4,400 people every day in China. Every day!)
To his credit, Obama’s pushing back, with a proposal for international standards of reducing the amount to which Americans are provided with poisonous gasses to breathe. Sounds like the kind of thing everyone could get behind, doesn’t it? Fewer poisonous substances in the air? Who could object to that?
Congress, that’s who. Because it’s international, the agreement would be considered a pact, which means that Congress will have to approve it, starting with Senate Environment and Public Works Chairman Jim Inhofe and House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith.
Inhofe was the beneficiary of a $467,700 payout last year by the oil and gas industry, and he now says that climate disaster is all part of God’s plan. (Remember, he’s the guy who carried a snowball into Congress to prove that global warming doesn’t exist.)
Smith’s seat in Congress was purchased for $112,050 from the oil and gas industry, and he loyally uses it to defund climate research.
Been nice knowing you all.