An excellent article by Harvey Wasserman for Chernobyl Day.
http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/7/2010/1825 Chernobyl demands a REAL climate bill
April 26, 2010
This week 24 years ago, untold quantities of lethal radiation began pouring into the atmosphere from the catastrophic explosion at Chernobyl Unit 4. Nearly a million people have died because of it.
And on this horrific anniversary we have now seen the stumble of a very bad climate bill. The events are directly related.
Chernobyl's death toll has been bitterly debated.
But after nearly a quarter-century of industry denial, the New York Academy of Sciences has published, Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment, the definitive catalog and analysis. Drawing on some 5,000 studies, three Russian scientists have placed the ultimate death toll at 985,000.
<snip to discussion of the climate bill>
Widespread reports of what it contained were to be clarified with its planned introduction on Chernobyl Day. But co-sponsor Lindsay Graham (R-SC) abruptly withdrew, apparently amidst partisan wrangling over immigration.
By all accounts this bill included a fossil industry wish-list, with big money for "clean coal," off-shore drilling, a disembowelment of the EPA and much more. With oil fires raging at sea and miners being buried in the coal fields, how this bill would actually solve the climate crisis remains unclear.
What WAS clear were subsidies that John Kerry (D-MA) said would put taxpayers on the hook for at least a dozen new reactors, and possibly far more.
The details are temporarily moot, but the portent is not.
<snip>
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