Contact: Joshua Davis, 612-659-9124 (office)
At the event: Ginny Yingling, 651-343-2890 (cell)
Minnesotans March Backwards
to Tell Bush Administration:
"You're Headed in the Wrong Direction"
Minneapolis — Citizens marched backwards through Minnehaha Park on Saturday, June 5, to draw attention to the Bush administration's reversal of 30 years of environmental progress and public health protection.
"The Bush administration is the real threat to public health, and is bringing America back to an era of dirtier air and water," said Ginny Yingling, chair of the Sierra Club North Star Chapter's political committee. "We want to send a clear message to this administration: stop putting polluters before the public."
The backwards marchers were joined by Minneapolis Mayor R. T. Rybak, who spoke out about the need to protect communities from toxic pollution and think about the environment when talking about public health. "We all need to get out and exercise regularly," said Mayor Rybak, "but it will do more harm than good if the air's polluted and the food we eat is poisoned by mercury."
Mercury causes serious developmental disorders and is a poisonous by-product of coal-fired power plants, where it rains down into rivers and lakes, is consumed by fish, and then by the people who eat those fish. Clean Air Act rules adopted in 1990 would reduce mercury pollution 90% by 2007. But the Bush administration's Clear Skies Act (now in Congress, H.999) would subsidize more dirty coal plants, and reduce pollution by less than 70% by 2018. Next week, the US House of Representatives will vote on the Bush-supported Energy Bill and Arctic oil drilling.
"As a public school nurse, I saw first hand the damage done to our kids by air pollution," said retired Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan district school nurse, Kay Alberg. "Asthma is the number one cause of absenteeism in our schools, and air pollution has been shown to directly increase the number and severity of asthma attacks among kids. When our children are sick, they cannot learn, and we all lose."
Air pollution in the form of particulate matter from coal plants, automobile exhaust, and other sources is another problem in the Twin Cities, where we had 13 air quality alerts in 2003. The American Lung Association gives Hennepin County a "C" grade and Ramsey a "D" for particle pollution, and criticizes the Bush administration for "sentenc[ing] another generation of Americans to breathing dirty air by delaying the needed pollution reductions for decades."
Participants carried signs about other administration policies that undo existing environmental protections. Signs pointed out that the Bush administration has opened up over 230 million acres of public lands to destructive oil and gas drilling, an area larger than Texas and Oklahoma combined. It has also reduced cleanup of our toxic waste dumps.
We're healthy because of the environmental protections we've adopted since the 1960s," said Joshua Davis, a Sierra Club organizer. "We know that our existing environmental protections work — we just need to enforce them. But George Bush is heading us back to dirty air and water."
Other sources on public health threats under the Bush administration:
American Lung Association gives Hennepin County a "C" grade and Ramsey County a "D" for particle pollution, which contributes to asthma and other respiratory diseases.
"Despite this alarming situation, legislation has been introduced in Congress that will weaken and delay enforcement of the Clean Air Act. H.R. 999/S.485, the Administration's Clear Skies Act, will repeal key Clean Air Act enforcement programs, limit the ability of states to protect their citizens from air pollution and sentence another generation of Americans to breathing dirty air by delaying the needed pollution reductions for decades. Simply enforcing the current Clean Air Act will provide greater pollution reductions sooner than the Administration's plan."
http://lungaction.org/campaign/stateoftheair2004
The American Heart Association's Scientific Statement on
"Air Pollution and Cardiovascular Disease" is just out:
http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/reprint/109/21/2655
The statement supports stringent NAAQS for PM2.5. Among its findings:
"... In light of these data, there is a clear potential to improve the national public health and to substantially reduce cardiovascular morbidity and mortality by reducing PM levels to current EPA standards...the existing body of evidence is adequately consistent, coherent, and plausible enough to draw several conclusions. At the very least, short-term exposure to elevated PM significantly contributes to increased acute cardiovascular mortality, particularly in certain-at-risk subsets of the population. Hospital admissions for several cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases acutely increase in response to higher ambient PM concentrations. The evidence further implicates prolonged exposure to elevated levels of PM in reducing overall life expectancy on the order of a few years."
"On the basis of these conclusions and the potential to improve the public health, the AHA writing group supports the promulgation and implementation of regulations to expedite the attainment of the existing National Ambient Air Quality Standards. Moreover, because a number of studies have demonstrated associations between particulate air pollution and adverse cardiovascular effects even when levels of ambient PM2.5 were within current standards, even more stringent standards for PM2.5 should be strongly considered by the EPA."
The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that today, through the consumption of mercury-contaminated fish, one in six women of childbearing age has enough mercury in her blood to put her baby at risk. More than 600,000 children born each year are exposed to dangerous levels of this nerve toxin that could impair the development of their central nervous systems and put them at risk of long-term mental and behavioral disorders.
Old, dirty coal plants still provide most of America's energy supply and are the largest source of mercury contamination. The Clean Air Act requires electric utilities to reduce mercury emissions from all coal plants by 90 percent in 2007. The new Bush administration proposals would push that deadline back a full decade to 2018, and would weaken the reductions to 70 percent. That means Americans will not only be exposed to over 300 tons more mercury pollution than the Clean Air Act allows, but we may not see any mercury reductions for at least 15 years.