8 ms·

What is happening to the EPA in the US is really unbelievable. How low will the bar get for the polluters in this country, one wonders?

by rapnie 8y ago

mc32 8y ago
This is the result of a 2016 amendment. Not the curreent admin. And read what the article says, the headline is clickbait. It will be a case-by-case review of any new application. Old, legacy bans will remain.
- smt88 8y ago
  It is absolutely the decision of the current administration. From Snopes: > The problem, according to critics, is twofold. The first, more generally, is that the EPA could have used the currently unfolding overhaul of the TSCA — which began at the end of the Obama administration and has continued along a very different path under Trump — to ban any new uses of asbestos, something that had been the case at the end of the last administration. Instead, they are explicitly allowing new uses, but with the caveat that the EPA first evaluate possible potential new uses based on “risk evaluation, select studies, and use the best available science.”
gameswithgo 8y ago
It is not unbelievable, it is the stated stance of the GOP to reduce environmental and health regulations, and they are doing it. It is exactly what we voted for.
- smt88 8y ago
  The majority of us did not vote for this. Without gerrymandering or the electoral college, Congress and the White House would be overwhelmingly controlled by Democrats.
  - shawn 8y ago
    At least the system is working as designed.
  - diminoten 8y ago
    You trace it back though; we voted for the people who did the gerrymandering, and we voted for the electoral college (our ancestors did, anyway).
    - koolba 8y ago
      I say it's a feature, not a bug. Reducing everything to a popular vote is just a feel good way of describing mob rule. The electoral college and equal Senate representation acts as a tempering force on said mob.
      - smt88 8y ago
        Aren't limited powers of the Presidency also a tempering force? So are checks and balances. Yes, direct representation encourages mob voting, but there are hundreds of distinct mobs that can check one another.
      - oblio 8y ago
        In most places you prevent tyranny of the majority through the constitution. Then in the bounds of the constitution, yes, the majority does get to decide. That's not the same as mob rule.
      - leesalminen 8y ago
        Agreed completely. Folks should be careful what they wish for...
      - NickM 8y ago
        The electoral college and equal Senate representation acts as a tempering force on said mob. So rather than tyranny of the majority, now we have tyranny of an arbitrary minority. I fail to see how that improves things. As others have pointed out, the constitution and the court system are the features that are supposed to counteract tyranny of the majority, not the EC or the Senate. The EC and the Senate aren't there because they make the system better or more democratic, they're there because they were part of the necessary compromises that were made hundreds of years ago to convince all the independent states to band together into the United States.
  - mhaymo 8y ago
    I think you're massively overstating the effects of gerrymandering. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379416303201 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026137941... > while Republican and Democratic gerrymandering affects the partisan outcomes of Congressional elections in some states, the net effect across the states is modest, creating no more than one new Republican seat in Congress
    - blanderman 8y ago
      It has a more dramatic effect on state governments: "In 2000, 21 state governments had governorships and state legislatures controlled by one party; 15 of those were Republican. But by 2010, 33 state governments were under one-party control, 22 of them Republican." https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/04/26/yes-gerrymandering-is-getting-worse-and-will-get-worse-still-this-explains-why/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/04/2...
    - Retric 8y ago
      > gerrymandering or the electoral college Look up just how many races had exactly one candidate and say that again. US politics has been adjusted based on it's ridiculous rules, different rules would have vastly more competitive races. IMO #1 change would be nationwide proportional representation for at least one side of congress which mean every single vote counts and 3rd parties are viable.
    - cimmanom 8y ago
      the issue is more that the country is self-gerrymandered such that despite the majority of total votes going to democrats, the distribution of house and senate seats across the states heavily favors rural areas that tend to vote overwhelmingly republican.
    - bbeonx 8y ago
      IMO, even if gerrymandering doesn't have a huge effect on seating in Congress (perhaps it has more effect on state level politics? I didn't read the other commenter's link so I won't make any claims) it makes a lot of districts non-competitive. The effects of this are hard to quantify and so we don't hear as much about it, but I argue that they are at least as profound as the numerical differences in congress on our national dialogue.
  - barry-cotter 8y ago
    The Democrats’ problem is that their supporters are better at sorting themselves into geographically distinct clusters, i.e. cities. You don’t get more Democratic representation for a 90% win than a 52% one. And gerrymandering is a bipartisan endeavour, whichever party is in power during redistricting gerrymanders, that’s just American politics. As far as the electoral college goes no one is making any effort at reform because no one cares unless it’s their ox that’s been gored. US presidential elections go by electoral college vote so that’s how candidates campaign. If it was by popular vote a lot more Republicans would bother voting in California and a lot more Democrats in Utah. There’s no actual constituency for reform, just the whining of losers. When the Democrats next take the White House there will be no talk of reforming the Electoral College.
    - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
      The problem is that the loss of our manufacturing base eliminated Democrat leaning organized labor outside the cities.
  - at-fates-hands 8y ago
    Actually this is the result of a two party system, not some nefarious political conspiracy. The electoral college is the way we elect presidents for a reason. If we went by population, a huge chunk of the country's vote wouldn't matter and the Democrats would win every election. I'm pretty sure that's exactly the opposite of what the founders of the country envisioned. If you're not happy about what's going on, get your act together and take back the house and then proceed to do what the Republicans did to Obama after they took back the senate and effectively blocked everything he wanted to do, including a SCOTUS nomination. You want REAL change? Allow more political parties so that the pendulum doesn't just swing back and forth. There was a time when any president would work with a divided congress and compromise to get stuff done. It would seem those days are long gone and the only way to truly fix the system is to get more than two parties just handing off power back and forth.
    - WhompingWindows 8y ago
      A huge chunk of the population's vote already doesn't matter. Any state with a wide margin of victory for either party effectively neutralizes the power of an individuals' vote. For presidential elections specifically, I live in a very blue state. No matter what my vote, it will not change the outcome even if we ground-hog-day repeated the election 1 million times. Whereas, in a state like Ohio or Pennsylvania or Michigan, where thousands of votes separate the winner, each individual's vote is much much more important, as well as the network effects of their political activism/thought patterns onto those around them. It's disingenuous to say that the two party system is the only problem here. Votes already don't matter for many people, except as a symbolic gesture of rights/freedom.
      - at-fates-hands 8y ago
        > Any state with a wide margin of victory for either party effectively neutralizes the power of an individuals' vote. For presidential elections specifically, I live in a very blue state. No matter what my vote. The presidential election is less important than your local elections. I live in a very blue state as well and nearly every year, our state supports the Democratic candidate. However, the majority of the local and state governments have had equal representation over the years, including electing several independent candidates. THOSE elections have far more impact on my day-to-day life then who's president for a few years. If you want to make a difference you can. If you feel like your vote doesn't count, then I would refer you to the time when Jesse Ventura ran as an independent candidate in Minnesota. The Republican candidate in one of the debates said, "If you vote for Jesse Ventura, then you're wasting your vote" You know who won the Governor's race that year? The guy who was told if you voted for him, your vote didn't matter.
  - sidlls 8y ago
    Just a couple of points, here. First, gerrymandering's effectiveness is a symptom of the problematic way we elect politicians in this country (first-past-the-post). Implement multimember districts and proportional representation and things might change (then again they might not). Second, so what if the Democrats controlled everything: Richard fucking Nixon gave us the EPA and relations with China. Meanwhile Carter gave us Regan, Clinton gave us welfare reform/destruction and finance deregulation, Obama gave us a giveaway for private health insurers and put social security on the table ("chained CPI"). Obama and Clinton both accelerated the militarization of our police. This notion that everything would be better (from a progressive/liberal perspective) if only Democrats had power is just out of sync with reality. Better than republicans? Maybe, on some issues. Generally not though.
    - res0nat0r 8y ago
      The GOP of Nixon days and their stance on the environment then is in no way comparable to the state of the GOP in 2018.
- crankylinuxuser 8y ago
  So, what exactly happened? The EPA was founded by a republican (Nixon). Yet environmental efforts are now attributed to democrats. And combined with that, is that republicans was to destroy the very org they made? What am I missing out of this? Why did the parties completely change their face?
  - mywittyname 8y ago
    The Reagan administration sold the GOP that all government agencies are incompetent.
    - close04 8y ago
      Whatever the reason, the solution is pretty straight forward: make extensive use of asbestos in every single room of the White House. :)
      - leesalminen 8y ago
        I had to search around for the flag button as I so rarely use it. I don’t think these kinds of comments are welcome on HN. Save it for reddit.
    - i_am_nomad 8y ago
      Not exactly. Reagan was a surprisingly nuanced political thinker, whether or not you agree with him. He believed - and in fact observed - that government has an inherent motivation to constantly increase legislation. This, according to Reagan, is partly because legislators who vote for more regulations on a given industry will then benefit from that industry’s lobbying and campaigning efforts. It’s akin to a somewhat benevolent protection racket - play ball, or you might find it even more expensive to do business. Of course, Reagan flipped that script and made wanton deregulation a “selling point” of the GOP. And now Trump has taken that to the extreme.
  - jccalhoun 8y ago
    The political parties did largely switch sides on many issues. As Republicans love to remind people, Lincoln was a Republican and he freed the slaves. Additionally the politicians who opposed civil rights legislation were largely Democrats. http://factmyth.com/factoids/democrats-and-republicans-switched-platforms/ http://factmyth.com/factoids/democrats-and-republicans-switc...
- spoiledtechie 8y ago
  a "stated stance"? Show me where? I call BS.
  - curtis3389 8y ago
    From their 2016 platform: We firmly believe environmental problems are best solved by giving incentives for human ingenuity and the development of new technologies, not through top-down, command-and-control regulations that stifle economic growth and cost thousands of jobs.
  - ptyyy 8y ago
    https://prod-cdn-static.gop.com/static/home/data/platform.pdf https://prod-cdn-static.gop.com/static/home/data/platform.pd... ctrl+f EPA ctrl+f Regulation: The Quiet Tyranny It's really not that difficult.
  - pwenzel 8y ago
    Trump, in his infinite wisdom, said that if asbestos had not been banned, the World Trade Center would never have burned down. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/258655569458651136 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/25865556945865113...
    - jakeinthehills9 8y ago
      The towers were brought down ("pull=it!") precisely because they were filled with asbestos and because of that it would have been prohibitively expensive to demolish them while staying in the regulations of the time, so they were rigged with explosives and dropped, under the guise of militarizing the oil fields of Iraq. The other thing everyone seems to be missing in this discussion is the fact that asbestos is a stone, a rock, made up of very sharp crystals ("fibers") that don't dissolve in the human body. Ever. Chlorine is broken down and disposed of by the human body, asbestos can not be removed from the lungs. Ever. Once the are there the fibers continually stab and irritate the surrounding cells. Even uranium has a half-life, but asbestos does not. It needs to be eliminated completely from the environment. It is not safe at any level.
- DougWebb 8y ago
  "We" didn't vote for this. A bit less than 25% of us voted for it, a bit more than 25% voted against it, and nearly 50% of us didn't bother to vote at all. (3rd parties got a small number of votes in the middle there too.) Neither of the major parties has a majority, or anything like a "mandate" about what the American people want. The majority wants "none of the above". If anyone figures out how to get that majority motivated to vote for them, they'll sweep the election.
  - wvenable 8y ago
    The 50% of people who didn't vote basically have said, we don't care to choose. So they got exactly what they voted for.
    - prolikewh0a 8y ago
      Or they didn't see a viable candidate that represented their interests and decided to abstain. This is a legal right.
      - chipotle_coyote 8y ago
        Your interests are going to be represented by one of the two major party candidates, whether you like it or not. And even if you're firmly on the side of "do not like," one of those candidates is almost certainly going to be less worse than the other. Maybe you think both of them have authoritarian tendencies, but only one of them openly talks about the press as the enemy of the people and tacitly encourages their followers to demonize and harass their opponents. Maybe you want universal health care and neither of the candidates support it, but one of them talks about shoring up and expanding the Affordable Care Act and the other one talks about repealing it. Maybe you think both of them are too beholden to Wall Street, but only one of them literally lives in a gold-plated penthouse a couple blocks away. So, sure, it's your legal right not to vote. But it's my legal right to point out that by doing so, you are not nobly opting out of the system -- you're supporting the winner.
        8y ago
leereeves 8y ago
Why are we unquestioningly swallowing this headline from an unknown source as if it were the truth? The EPA has not approved any new uses of asbestos. Quite the contrary: > In the absence of this proposed rule, the importing or processing of asbestos (including as part of an article) for the significant new uses proposed in this rule may begin at any time, without prior notice to EPA. https://www.epa.gov/asbestos/federal-register-notice-proposed-snur-asbestos https://www.epa.gov/asbestos/federal-register-notice-propose... This new rule is required for the EPA to comply with the Lautenberg Act's "Mandatory duty on EPA to evaluate existing chemicals with clear and enforceable deadlines" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_R._Lautenberg_Chemical_Safety_for_the_21st_Century_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_R._Lautenberg_Chemical_S... Politically, it's an unfortunate name. But it's not approving Significant New Uses, it's regulating Significant New Uses.
- makomk 8y ago
  Also, this isn't really about new uses of asbestos, despite the name of the rule. It's about making sure that old uses of asbestos which have fallen out of use don't reappear. Actual new applications for it are still unconditionally banned.

What is happening to the EPA in the US is really unbelievable. How low will the bar get for the polluters in this country, one wonders?

by rapnie 8y ago

What is happening to the EPA in the US is really unbelievable. How low will the bar get for the polluters in this country, one wonders?

mc32 8y ago

This is the result of a 2016 amendment. Not the curreent admin. And read what the article says, the headline is clickbait. It will be a case-by-case review of any new application. Old, legacy bans will remain.

smt88 8y ago
It is absolutely the decision of the current administration. From Snopes: > The problem, according to critics, is twofold. The first, more generally, is that the EPA could have used the currently unfolding overhaul of the TSCA — which began at the end of the Obama administration and has continued along a very different path under Trump — to ban any new uses of asbestos, something that had been the case at the end of the last administration. Instead, they are explicitly allowing new uses, but with the caveat that the EPA first evaluate possible potential new uses based on “risk evaluation, select studies, and use the best available science.”

gameswithgo 8y ago

It is not unbelievable, it is the stated stance of the GOP to reduce environmental and health regulations, and they are doing it. It is exactly what we voted for.

smt88 8y ago
The majority of us did not vote for this. Without gerrymandering or the electoral college, Congress and the White House would be overwhelmingly controlled by Democrats.
- shawn 8y ago
  At least the system is working as designed.
- diminoten 8y ago
  You trace it back though; we voted for the people who did the gerrymandering, and we voted for the electoral college (our ancestors did, anyway).
  - koolba 8y ago
    I say it's a feature, not a bug. Reducing everything to a popular vote is just a feel good way of describing mob rule. The electoral college and equal Senate representation acts as a tempering force on said mob.
    - smt88 8y ago
      Aren't limited powers of the Presidency also a tempering force? So are checks and balances. Yes, direct representation encourages mob voting, but there are hundreds of distinct mobs that can check one another.
    - oblio 8y ago
      In most places you prevent tyranny of the majority through the constitution. Then in the bounds of the constitution, yes, the majority does get to decide. That's not the same as mob rule.
    - leesalminen 8y ago
      Agreed completely. Folks should be careful what they wish for...
    - NickM 8y ago
      The electoral college and equal Senate representation acts as a tempering force on said mob. So rather than tyranny of the majority, now we have tyranny of an arbitrary minority. I fail to see how that improves things. As others have pointed out, the constitution and the court system are the features that are supposed to counteract tyranny of the majority, not the EC or the Senate. The EC and the Senate aren't there because they make the system better or more democratic, they're there because they were part of the necessary compromises that were made hundreds of years ago to convince all the independent states to band together into the United States.
- mhaymo 8y ago
  I think you're massively overstating the effects of gerrymandering. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0261379416303201 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026137941... > while Republican and Democratic gerrymandering affects the partisan outcomes of Congressional elections in some states, the net effect across the states is modest, creating no more than one new Republican seat in Congress
  - blanderman 8y ago
    It has a more dramatic effect on state governments: "In 2000, 21 state governments had governorships and state legislatures controlled by one party; 15 of those were Republican. But by 2010, 33 state governments were under one-party control, 22 of them Republican." https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/04/26/yes-gerrymandering-is-getting-worse-and-will-get-worse-still-this-explains-why/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2018/04/2...
  - Retric 8y ago
    > gerrymandering or the electoral college Look up just how many races had exactly one candidate and say that again. US politics has been adjusted based on it's ridiculous rules, different rules would have vastly more competitive races. IMO #1 change would be nationwide proportional representation for at least one side of congress which mean every single vote counts and 3rd parties are viable.
  - cimmanom 8y ago
    the issue is more that the country is self-gerrymandered such that despite the majority of total votes going to democrats, the distribution of house and senate seats across the states heavily favors rural areas that tend to vote overwhelmingly republican.
  - bbeonx 8y ago
    IMO, even if gerrymandering doesn't have a huge effect on seating in Congress (perhaps it has more effect on state level politics? I didn't read the other commenter's link so I won't make any claims) it makes a lot of districts non-competitive. The effects of this are hard to quantify and so we don't hear as much about it, but I argue that they are at least as profound as the numerical differences in congress on our national dialogue.
- barry-cotter 8y ago
  The Democrats’ problem is that their supporters are better at sorting themselves into geographically distinct clusters, i.e. cities. You don’t get more Democratic representation for a 90% win than a 52% one. And gerrymandering is a bipartisan endeavour, whichever party is in power during redistricting gerrymanders, that’s just American politics. As far as the electoral college goes no one is making any effort at reform because no one cares unless it’s their ox that’s been gored. US presidential elections go by electoral college vote so that’s how candidates campaign. If it was by popular vote a lot more Republicans would bother voting in California and a lot more Democrats in Utah. There’s no actual constituency for reform, just the whining of losers. When the Democrats next take the White House there will be no talk of reforming the Electoral College.
  - kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
    The problem is that the loss of our manufacturing base eliminated Democrat leaning organized labor outside the cities.
- at-fates-hands 8y ago
  Actually this is the result of a two party system, not some nefarious political conspiracy. The electoral college is the way we elect presidents for a reason. If we went by population, a huge chunk of the country's vote wouldn't matter and the Democrats would win every election. I'm pretty sure that's exactly the opposite of what the founders of the country envisioned. If you're not happy about what's going on, get your act together and take back the house and then proceed to do what the Republicans did to Obama after they took back the senate and effectively blocked everything he wanted to do, including a SCOTUS nomination. You want REAL change? Allow more political parties so that the pendulum doesn't just swing back and forth. There was a time when any president would work with a divided congress and compromise to get stuff done. It would seem those days are long gone and the only way to truly fix the system is to get more than two parties just handing off power back and forth.
  - WhompingWindows 8y ago
    A huge chunk of the population's vote already doesn't matter. Any state with a wide margin of victory for either party effectively neutralizes the power of an individuals' vote. For presidential elections specifically, I live in a very blue state. No matter what my vote, it will not change the outcome even if we ground-hog-day repeated the election 1 million times. Whereas, in a state like Ohio or Pennsylvania or Michigan, where thousands of votes separate the winner, each individual's vote is much much more important, as well as the network effects of their political activism/thought patterns onto those around them. It's disingenuous to say that the two party system is the only problem here. Votes already don't matter for many people, except as a symbolic gesture of rights/freedom.
    - at-fates-hands 8y ago
      > Any state with a wide margin of victory for either party effectively neutralizes the power of an individuals' vote. For presidential elections specifically, I live in a very blue state. No matter what my vote. The presidential election is less important than your local elections. I live in a very blue state as well and nearly every year, our state supports the Democratic candidate. However, the majority of the local and state governments have had equal representation over the years, including electing several independent candidates. THOSE elections have far more impact on my day-to-day life then who's president for a few years. If you want to make a difference you can. If you feel like your vote doesn't count, then I would refer you to the time when Jesse Ventura ran as an independent candidate in Minnesota. The Republican candidate in one of the debates said, "If you vote for Jesse Ventura, then you're wasting your vote" You know who won the Governor's race that year? The guy who was told if you voted for him, your vote didn't matter.
- sidlls 8y ago
  Just a couple of points, here. First, gerrymandering's effectiveness is a symptom of the problematic way we elect politicians in this country (first-past-the-post). Implement multimember districts and proportional representation and things might change (then again they might not). Second, so what if the Democrats controlled everything: Richard fucking Nixon gave us the EPA and relations with China. Meanwhile Carter gave us Regan, Clinton gave us welfare reform/destruction and finance deregulation, Obama gave us a giveaway for private health insurers and put social security on the table ("chained CPI"). Obama and Clinton both accelerated the militarization of our police. This notion that everything would be better (from a progressive/liberal perspective) if only Democrats had power is just out of sync with reality. Better than republicans? Maybe, on some issues. Generally not though.
  - res0nat0r 8y ago
    The GOP of Nixon days and their stance on the environment then is in no way comparable to the state of the GOP in 2018.
crankylinuxuser 8y ago
So, what exactly happened? The EPA was founded by a republican (Nixon). Yet environmental efforts are now attributed to democrats. And combined with that, is that republicans was to destroy the very org they made? What am I missing out of this? Why did the parties completely change their face?
- mywittyname 8y ago
  The Reagan administration sold the GOP that all government agencies are incompetent.
  - close04 8y ago
    Whatever the reason, the solution is pretty straight forward: make extensive use of asbestos in every single room of the White House. :)
    - leesalminen 8y ago
      I had to search around for the flag button as I so rarely use it. I don’t think these kinds of comments are welcome on HN. Save it for reddit.
  - i_am_nomad 8y ago
    Not exactly. Reagan was a surprisingly nuanced political thinker, whether or not you agree with him. He believed - and in fact observed - that government has an inherent motivation to constantly increase legislation. This, according to Reagan, is partly because legislators who vote for more regulations on a given industry will then benefit from that industry’s lobbying and campaigning efforts. It’s akin to a somewhat benevolent protection racket - play ball, or you might find it even more expensive to do business. Of course, Reagan flipped that script and made wanton deregulation a “selling point” of the GOP. And now Trump has taken that to the extreme.
- jccalhoun 8y ago
  The political parties did largely switch sides on many issues. As Republicans love to remind people, Lincoln was a Republican and he freed the slaves. Additionally the politicians who opposed civil rights legislation were largely Democrats. http://factmyth.com/factoids/democrats-and-republicans-switched-platforms/ http://factmyth.com/factoids/democrats-and-republicans-switc...
spoiledtechie 8y ago
a "stated stance"? Show me where? I call BS.
- curtis3389 8y ago
  From their 2016 platform: We firmly believe environmental problems are best solved by giving incentives for human ingenuity and the development of new technologies, not through top-down, command-and-control regulations that stifle economic growth and cost thousands of jobs.
- ptyyy 8y ago
  https://prod-cdn-static.gop.com/static/home/data/platform.pdf https://prod-cdn-static.gop.com/static/home/data/platform.pd... ctrl+f EPA ctrl+f Regulation: The Quiet Tyranny It's really not that difficult.
- pwenzel 8y ago
  Trump, in his infinite wisdom, said that if asbestos had not been banned, the World Trade Center would never have burned down. https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/258655569458651136 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/25865556945865113...
  - jakeinthehills9 8y ago
    The towers were brought down ("pull=it!") precisely because they were filled with asbestos and because of that it would have been prohibitively expensive to demolish them while staying in the regulations of the time, so they were rigged with explosives and dropped, under the guise of militarizing the oil fields of Iraq. The other thing everyone seems to be missing in this discussion is the fact that asbestos is a stone, a rock, made up of very sharp crystals ("fibers") that don't dissolve in the human body. Ever. Chlorine is broken down and disposed of by the human body, asbestos can not be removed from the lungs. Ever. Once the are there the fibers continually stab and irritate the surrounding cells. Even uranium has a half-life, but asbestos does not. It needs to be eliminated completely from the environment. It is not safe at any level.
DougWebb 8y ago
"We" didn't vote for this. A bit less than 25% of us voted for it, a bit more than 25% voted against it, and nearly 50% of us didn't bother to vote at all. (3rd parties got a small number of votes in the middle there too.) Neither of the major parties has a majority, or anything like a "mandate" about what the American people want. The majority wants "none of the above". If anyone figures out how to get that majority motivated to vote for them, they'll sweep the election.
- wvenable 8y ago
  The 50% of people who didn't vote basically have said, we don't care to choose. So they got exactly what they voted for.
  - prolikewh0a 8y ago
    Or they didn't see a viable candidate that represented their interests and decided to abstain. This is a legal right.
    - chipotle_coyote 8y ago
      Your interests are going to be represented by one of the two major party candidates, whether you like it or not. And even if you're firmly on the side of "do not like," one of those candidates is almost certainly going to be less worse than the other. Maybe you think both of them have authoritarian tendencies, but only one of them openly talks about the press as the enemy of the people and tacitly encourages their followers to demonize and harass their opponents. Maybe you want universal health care and neither of the candidates support it, but one of them talks about shoring up and expanding the Affordable Care Act and the other one talks about repealing it. Maybe you think both of them are too beholden to Wall Street, but only one of them literally lives in a gold-plated penthouse a couple blocks away. So, sure, it's your legal right not to vote. But it's my legal right to point out that by doing so, you are not nobly opting out of the system -- you're supporting the winner.
      - 8y ago

leereeves 8y ago

Why are we unquestioningly swallowing this headline from an unknown source as if it were the truth? The EPA has not approved any new uses of asbestos. Quite the contrary: > In the absence of this proposed rule, the importing or processing of asbestos (including as part of an article) for the significant new uses proposed in this rule may begin at any time, without prior notice to EPA. https://www.epa.gov/asbestos/federal-register-notice-proposed-snur-asbestos https://www.epa.gov/asbestos/federal-register-notice-propose... This new rule is required for the EPA to comply with the Lautenberg Act's "Mandatory duty on EPA to evaluate existing chemicals with clear and enforceable deadlines" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_R._Lautenberg_Chemical_Safety_for_the_21st_Century_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_R._Lautenberg_Chemical_S... Politically, it's an unfortunate name. But it's not approving Significant New Uses, it's regulating Significant New Uses.

makomk 8y ago
Also, this isn't really about new uses of asbestos, despite the name of the rule. It's about making sure that old uses of asbestos which have fallen out of use don't reappear. Actual new applications for it are still unconditionally banned.