WASHINGTON, Jan. 26, 2009
President Barack Obama is expected to announce plans to change course on U.S. energy policy.
(CBS/AP) President Barack Obama is expected continue the trend of reversing Bush administration policy Monday as he plunges into the nation’s energy policy.
Mr. Obama will announce plans to give states a freer hand in curbing emissions from cars, and to get his government moving on fuel-efficiency standards that could remake the auto industry, according to officials familiar with the details who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid pre-empting the president.
The attention on energy comes as Mr. Obama heads into his first full week as president, with an agenda dominated by economic woes and a push to get a huge stimulus plan through Congress.
In one key move, Mr. Obama is aiming toward letting California and other states set their own tailpipe emission standards, a tool for reducing the gases that contribute to global warming.
The perception here from the right is that tougher emission standards hurt business. Never mind the fact that business hurts citizens when standards are low and they are allowed to produce and dispose of dangerous pollutants in any manner they choose. Corporations are killing us slowly, like tobacco.
According to a study from Cornell University published in 2007, 40% of deaths worldwide are cause by pollution.
Air pollution from smoke and various chemicals kills 3 million people a year, according to a new Cornell study.
ScienceDaily (Aug. 14, 2007) — About 40 percent of deaths worldwide are caused by water, air and soil pollution, concludes a Cornell researcher. Such environmental degradation, coupled with the growth in world population, are major causes behind the rapid increase in human diseases, which the World Health Organization has recently reported. Both factors contribute to the malnourishment and disease susceptibility of 3.7 billion people, he says.
David Pimentel, Cornell professor of ecology and agricultural sciences, and a team of Cornell graduate students examined data from more than 120 published papers on the effects of population growth, malnutrition and various kinds of environmental degradation on human diseases. Their report is published in the online version of the journal Human Ecology and will be published in the December print issue.
“We have serious environmental resource problems of water, land and energy, and these are now coming to bear on food production, malnutrition and the incidence of diseases,” said Pimentel.
Four out of every ten deaths in the world are somehow related to pollution. Bush and his flunkies wanted this to continue by doing things like loosening restrictions on carbon emissions and allowing illegal dumping of coal slag into our streams. This is how Republicans perform as caretakers of our water and food; this is how they care for the citizens of the United States.
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