Environmental Defense - Haze Growing Worse At Western National Parks

[hatrack]

The sweeping vistas at national parks and monuments throughout the West are more frequently becoming obscured by haze, according to a report released Tuesday by Environmental Defense.

The report by the national nonprofit group says air quality across the region is declining, with increasing ozone and haze. It also says several new coal-fired power plants and increased oil and gas development could have an adverse impact on air quality.

"It's a classic good news-bad news story," said Dr. Jana Milford, a Boulder-based senior scientist with Environmental Defense. "The bad news is that we're seeing some disturbing trends." The good news, she said, is that new rules curbing industrial emissions may reduce haze.

Under a court-ordered deadline, the result of an Environmental Defense lawsuit, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is expected today to issue cleanup guidelines for power plants, refineries and other older industrial sources. The new rules - called "Best Available Retrofit Technology" - require those facilities to make upgrades and could affect about 16 plants in Colorado. Among them: the Cemex cement plant in Lyons, the Valero refinery in Denver and several Xcel power plants throughout the state."

EDIT

http://www.denverpost.com/news/ci_2802604

[phantom power]

1. The young republicans know how to fix this.

Privatizing the parks! It will fix everything.... somehow.

While the prestige of Heritage is part of the appeal, so is the work, which rarely involves making coffee or copies. Joel Peyton, who just graduated from Western Kentucky University, is helping to write a paper on privatized services in national parks. That is a task for which he may be especially well suited: after spending three summers working in a Kentucky state park, he published a paper this year denouncing "the inefficiencies of a government-run park system."

When Mr. Peyton's application reached the desk of Ronald D. Utt, a Heritage senior fellow, Mr. Utt said, "Get this guy." An expert in privatization, Mr. Utt had been wanting to make the same arguments about the National Park Service, which he called "the world's largest lawn care and janitorial service."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/14/politics/14heritage.html?pagewanted=print

[thegreatwildebeest]

2. The Parks service...

The Parks service is damn near incompetent. It's a good argument for better oversight and removal of large swaths of the bureacracy. But farming it out to private companies? That gurantees nothing, and would actually raise the issue of private companies regulating other private companies on what is public land.

[phantom power]

3. That is what I hate about privatization arguments.

If a government bureaucracy is inefficient, then why not just fucking fix it? Replacing it with a private bureaucracy is the worst possible solution. Now you've just got another bureacracy, and one you don't have any control over. And one that's motivated by maximizing profit over and above anything else, including doing whatever job it's supposed to be doing.

This myth of free-market efficiencies needs to have a stake driven through it's heart.

[thegreatwildebeest]

4. Lack of oversight...

The lack of oversight over what most privitized service companies do is hilarious when you hear most repulicans and libertarians exclaim that the government is a bureacratic mess with no oversight (have these people actually ever worked in a corporation? have they tried getting office supplies? Dilbert wasn't written in a void). Not mind you that I'm a big friend of the state (I would personally like to see both the state AND corporations abolished) but the argument by right wingers is demonstrably false and misleading.

[phantom power]

5. Yeah. It should be easy to win this argument. Just remind everybody

what it's like to deal with an HMO, or file a home insurance claim, etc. Heck, even the USPS is officially a "private" company.