Bush Orders EPA To Destroy All Their Research And Libraries

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Global warming can kill most plankton. Plastic ground up by ocean waves now pollutes the sand all over the planet. Lame Duck Bush wants to drop all monitoring of lead poison in the air and water and the EPA orders all libraries, research and scientific papers to be destroyed and all equipment sold for pennies in order to bring maximum chaos to that agency and prevent scientists from working with previous studies or data banks. Arrest Bush and send him and his gang to Mars where NASA has found water for them to pollute.

&hearts All major extinctions began at the lowest level first.

By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer

WASHINGTON - In a "sneak peak" revealing a grim side effect of future warmer seas, new NASA satellite data find that the vital base of the ocean food web shrinks when the world's seas get hotter.

And that discovery has scientists worried about how much food marine life will have as global warming progresses.

The data show a significant link between warmer water — either from the El Nino weather phenomenon or global warming — and reduced production of phytoplankton of the world's oceans, according to a study in Thursday's journal Nature.

Just as in all parts of the biosystem: if the base gets messed up, all other parts die, too. This is why we must be careful, how we interface with nature. WE are at the very apex of the pyramid of living things and if we wreck the base whether it is the microlife forms in the soil or microsopic creatures in the waters, all other things depend on this abundant base. This is why acid rain is bad and why CO2 excess is bad. Mucking up the sea beds and the waterways, lakes and streams, messing up the soil and the air is fatal.

&hearts I noticed during my long life how the junk we chuck is growing ever greater even as we 'clean' the water.

By Maggie Ayre

Microscopic particles of plastic could be poisoning the oceans, according to a British team of researchers.

They report that small plastic pellets called "mermaids' tears", which are the result of industry and domestic waste, have spread across the world's seas.

The scientists had previously found the debris on UK beaches and in European waters; now they have replicated the finding on four continents.

Scientists are worried that these fragments can get into the food chain.

Plastic is everywhere. I remember when plastic rings were invented for carrying drinks in six packs. It immediately ended up on all the beaches, everywhere. Diving seabirds would get caught in these things and drown, fishes, dolphins, everything was trapped or ate and died thanks to these stupid things. Laws had to be passed changing the way they were made and now they don't trap animals but are still all over the place and they are part of this mess. Plastic bottles: ditto. They just didn't exist when I was a child.

The litter from glass bottles didn't harm wildlife. The ocean would artfully shape the broken bottles or they would be carried intact, around the world. I still remember picking up green glass Japanese netting balls in the fifties. They bobbed all the way to California, to our delight. Now, it is all plastic, all the time. No beautiful glass at all! I made stained glass windows out of the glass combed from beaches. Now, it is really quite ugly.

Glass is made of sand, silica, just like much of the beaches, so it is 'organic' to nature. Plastic isn't. As either oil or refined to plastic, it is a toxin no matter how big or small.

&hearts Bush and his criminal gang, far from stopping their rapine of this earth, are picking up speed, trying to get as many nasty things done as fast as possible.

by John Heilprin

The Bush administration is considering doing away with health standards that cut lead from gasoline, widely regarded as one of the nation's biggest clean-air accomplishments.

Battery makers, lead smelters, refiners all have lobbied the administration to do away with the Clean Air Act limits.

A preliminary staff review released by the Environmental Protection Agency this week acknowledged the possibility of dropping the health standards for lead air pollution. The agency says revoking those standards might be justified "given the significantly changed circumstances since lead was listed in 1976" as an air pollutant.

The EPA says concentrations of lead in the air have dropped more than 90 percent in the past 2 1/2 decades.

But Rep. Henry Waxman (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., the incoming chairman of the House Committee on Government Reform, called on the agency to "renounce this dangerous proposal immediately," because lead, a highly toxic element, can cause severe nerve damage, especially in children.

"This deregulatory effort cannot be defended," Waxman wrote EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson.

Lead is invisible but the damage it causes is very visible. And in water, it permeates the ecosystem and moves up the food chain so the animals like tuna or dolphins, that eat smaller animals that eat smaller animals, end up with really nasty concentrations of this stuff and it slowly kills them, deforms their babies and we, the top predators, get this in spades and Bush wants to make it easier to pollute?

Good barking grief. Arrest him.

&hearts And quickly, for his new EPA chief is destroying all the past hard work of all EPA researchers for the last half century!

Truth Out, Friday 08 December 2006

Washington, DC - In defiance of Congressional requests to immediately halt closures of library collections, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is purging records from its library websites, making them unavailable to both agency scientists and outside researchers, according to documents released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). At the same time, EPA is taking steps to prevent the re-opening of its shuttered libraries, including the hurried auctioning off of expensive bookcases, cabinets, microfiche readers and other equipment for less than a penny on the dollar.

In a letter dated November 30, 2006, four incoming House Democratic committee chairs demanded that EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson assure them "that the destruction or disposition of all library holdings immediately ceased upon the Agency's receipt of this letter and that all records of library holdings and dispersed materials are being maintained." On the very next day, December 1st, EPA de-linked thousands of documents from the website for the Office of Prevention, Pollution and Toxic Substances (OPPTS) Library, in EPA's Washington D.C. Headquarters.

Last month without notice to its scientists or the public, EPA abruptly closed the OPPTS Library, the agency's only specialized research repository on health effects and properties of toxic chemicals and pesticides. The web purge follows reports that library staffers were ordered to destroy its holdings by throwing collections into recycling bins.

ARRRGH. I wanted Al Gore for President so badly. Unlike Kerry, he is real, he really believes in this earth, loves it and wants to protect it! Imagine him doing this crime! Sigh. I wish we could simply replace Bush who is like those fairy tales of the real baby being snatched from the cradle and replaced with a demon. This demon, this usurper: send him to Mars!

&hearts The water there is probably toxic, perfect for these guys.

By Bruce Lieberman
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
12:02 p.m. December 6, 2006

Associated Press
In this photo provided by NASA, a suite of mid-latitude gullies on a crater wall are seen as captured by the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC). These gullies, which may have formed in relatively recent martian history by erosion caused by flowing, liquid water, are located in a crater on the east rim of Newton Crater.

The startling discovery was made by comparing photographs of the same places on Mars between April 1999 and February 2004. The findings, led by researchers Mike Malin and Ken Edgett at Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego, were announced at a NASA press conference Wednesday in Washington D.C.

All those Mars Colonization people: take your leader, Bush, and go. Please. The sooner, the better.

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Comments

[JSmith]

"Glass is made of sand, silica, just like much of the beaches, so it is 'organic' to nature. Plastic isn't. As either oil or refined to plastic, it is a toxin no matter how big or small."

Just saw this today. Setting the record straight...

Sand, being silica, is inorganic. Plastic, being carbon-based, is organic. (That's the definition of "organic": carbon-based.)

Stuff can be organic and toxic all at the same time.