The
Washington Times
www.washtimes.com
Michelle Malkin
CREATORS SYNDICATE
Published 8/6/01
When the Bush administration
lands on the same side of an issue as the New York Times
editorial board, Sen. Hillary Clinton, New York Democrat, and the
Sierra Club, it's time to clear out the cockpit. The
administration's latest junk science decision should cause Bush
supporters to wonder: Is Al Gore secretly manning the EPA?
This week, President Bush's
Environmental Protection Agency ordered General Electric Co. to
fork over nearly half a billion dollars to dredge up long-buried
chemicals from New York's Hudson River. That's exactly what the
Clinton-Gore administration proposed in an 11th-hour decree last
year -- despite heated opposition from local residents, flimsy
evidence of harm from the chemicals, probable injury to the
natural habitat, and certain damage to the economy.
This massive, federally mandated
cleanup will ruin the landscape and cost precious jobs in
blue-collar communities along the river, but it will keep Beltway
bureaucrats, lawyers and eco-whiners employed for decades.
"This is a tremendous environmental victory," crowed
Chris Ballantyne of the Sierra Club. A Times editorial called EPA
chief Christie Todd Whitman's decision "admirable."
Sen. Clinton declared dredging "the right position, based on
the science, to take."
The pro-dredgers claim that PCBs
(polychlorinated biphenyls) embedded in the river bottom pose a
grave cancer risk and must be completely eliminated. GE produced
the chemicals in the manufacturing of electrical transformers.
The company legally disposed of its PCB-contaminated waste into
the Hudson from the 1940s until 1977, when the chemical was
banned.
Since that time, the tainted
sediment has been buried by layers and layers of mud. Commerce
and tourism on the banks are healthy; locals swim freely and
safely in the river; and at least one town along the targeted
area taps the river for drinking water. A review of the current
scientific literature shows there is no credible evidence of
increased human cancer risk from exposure to trace levels of
PCBs. Studies of workers exposed to high PCB levels and studies
of people who ate PCB-contaminated fish showed no increased
cancer risk when compared to non-exposed populations.
Now, it's true that PCBs can cause
cancerous tumors in animals -- but only after you inject enormous
doses of the chemical into lab mice over prolonged periods.
"But what about the fish?" the enviros wail. What about
them? Thanks to sensible, minimally disruptive remediation
efforts over the past three decades, fish populations are
thriving. That might not be the case if the
Clinton-Gore-Bush-Whitman plan goes through.
The proposed "cleanup"
would involve dredging some 2.65 million cubic yards of
contaminated sediment from the Hudson -- 19 hours a day, six days
a week, six and a half months a year for an estimated five years.
At least two new hazardous waste plants would be built on the
river or its banks to process the PCBs, and an estimated 45,000
tons of waste a day would be hauled out to nonexistent landfills
(sure to be opposed by the same NIMBY enviros that created this
mess).
According to the grass-roots
activist group CEASE (Citizen Environmentalists Against Sludge
Encapsulation), which has opposed dredging for nearly a
quarter-century, the EPA project would also destroy 97 acres of
prime aquatic habitat, killing or displacing all the creatures
that live there, and destabilize or destroy 17 miles of Hudson
River shoreline.
Tim Havens, a small businessman who
heads CEASE, told me this week he was "overwhelmingly
disappointed" in the Bush administration's decision to carry
out the Clinton-Gore plan. Mr. Havens blasted the EPA's arrogant
secrecy and shoddy science. Mrs. Whitman has never visited the
affected counties and didn't even pay residents the courtesy of
informing them of the decision before telling the press.
"We're staunch Republicans in
these communities working-class citizens, small businesspeople,
farmers, homeowners and housewives," Mr. Havens told me.
"We're the backbone of the American economy, and we thought
Bush and his people would be a lot friendlier. They decided to
take the easy way out." Mr. Havens warns: "We'll
remember in November" when Bush ally and dredging proponent
Republican New York Gov. George Pataki is up for re-election.
On the science, economics and
politics of this dredging debacle, one thing is crystal clear:
The Bush administration has mucked up big time.
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