Thank a Liberal today.
Thanks Obama!
What is the red blip on the map in NW New Mexico? Google maps makes it look like there aren’t even any cities there? Any ideas?
Actually, thank Richard Nixon, who created the EPA. Though I guess he’s liberal by today’s standards. You could probably swap him for Obama and not see much policy change.
Farmington’s biggest industries are oil and coal mining. According to wikipedia all their power comes from coal.
It’s not a huge city, but at 45,000 it’s not nothing either.
It’s hard to believe Farmington’s coal-using power plants create a pollution zone bigger than Vegas. Could it be we’ve found the real Area 51?
Four Corners has always been legendary for pollution:
http://summitcountyvoice.com/2010/10/12/finally-air-pollution-controls-in-the-four-corners-region/
Does that chart document a decline in air pollution due to controls, or only a side effect of the final decline of manufacturing in the US? Or possibly both?
I find interesting the little blip of yellow that appears and disappears about halfway through, just off the south side of the Salmon River in Idaho. Seems way too far away from the Boise area and doesn’t coincide with that city’s diminishing yellow spot. Forest fire? But I don’t see other forest fires showing up.
I’d like to find out if there’s a correlation between those drops and factory work being sent elsewhere in the world. It’d very interesting to see a similar graph for China.
Does it seem like the pollution increases everywhere just a bit at the very end?
Ten years ago George Bush was still in his first term. Not sure this is a liberal phenomenon.
Frankly, I’m pretty unconvinced there’s any quantifiable difference in our nation’s trajectory whether liberals or conservatives are in charge. They all go where the money is once they get in power. I’m amazed that pollution has decreased. I don’t think the decline of industry explains it.
lol now lets see china or asia or even russia… usa means little in world of pollution . but hey makes the eco-turds feel good about themselfs
Like others have noted, I wonder how much of this can be attributed to the Great Recession and the hollowing out of the blue-collar middle-class.
If it is due to the Great Recession, it’s probably the only benefit Wall Street has bestowed on our country since the Reagan Revolution (when all the economic growth started going to the top 1%.)
Ten years ago George Bush was still in his first term.
Frankly, I’m pretty unconvinced there’s any quantifiable difference in our nation’s trajectory whether liberals or conservatives are in charge.
Please say you’re kidding. Bush wasn’t the same. Bush is one of the reasons there’s so much mercury and dioxin in our food today. You’re embracing false equivalence and throwing history out of the window.
Ex-EPA Chiefs Blame Bush in Global Warming
EPA says Bush flunks mercury safety
http://www.apnewsarchive.com/2005/EPA-Says-White-House-Flunks-Mercury-Safety/id-6da064baf1932be8ead1720d23a40c87
States, Cities Sue EPA Over New Air Rules
Lawsuits filed Monday by 13 states and more than 20 cities, which seeks to block changes to the Clean Air Act, contend new rules from the Bush administration would weaken protections for the environment and public health.
Air pollution improved over time despite setbacks from conservatives like Bush because the rest of the country (a.k.a. progressives and liberals) fought against these idiots to improve wherever they could on state and city levels, etc.
We’d be extremely better off environmentally today if Gore had run things. I mean really, are you kidding? You think Bush and Gore are the same on the environment?
I call Gore a lesser evil than GW Bush. Gore’s track record is shitty, but it’s ridiculous to compare him to GW Bush:
• Gore’s track record consists of support of renditions (in a memoir from Richard Clarke) in certain cases. While Gore’s stance on renditions was shitty, it certainly wasn’t a greater evil than Reagan and most Republicans by a long shot and Bush/Cheney took torture to an entirely different level by mainstreaming torture by U.S. soldiers. Not the same thing unless we, once again, delve into false equivalence.
• Al Gore was known to engage with and listen to Richard Clarke who warned of inevitable hijacking attempts before the Trade Center/Pentagon attacks, but was blatantly ignored by the GW Bush admin who was known to be absolutely obtuse towards Clarke and other Clinton Intelligence officials. It’s incredibly likely that Gore would have taken pre-emptive security actions based upon solid intelligence to thwart hijackings in general. Bush was obtuse, sat on his fucking hands and literally went on vacation instead.
• If you go way back on gay rights, Gore sucked. But then you’d have to ignore that while in office he later supported the 1998 executive order banning sexual-orientation discrimination in federal civilian jobs, etc. and other things that set him far apart from the greater evil Republicans including Bush unless, once again, you want to embrace yet another false equivalence.
• On the drug war Gore was much less evil than Republicans and even broke with Clinton during office on Medical Marijuana. To compare Gore to Bush who ramped up the war on drugs to ridiculous extremes is yet another ridiculous false equivalence on your part.
• Gore’s vote on the Gulf War just plain sucked, but was still a lot less hawkish, lesser evil than Republicans if one is seated in reality.
• The clipper chip was a shit idea, but one that at least required a warrant which is a much lesser evil than warrantless wiretapping, but I guess you could go with another false equivalence if you’d like. Gore listened to reason and dropped it. Bush and Cheney doubled and tripled down.
• Gore’s support of technology. While Gore was busy helping to fund and promote our technology center and spreading access, the GW Bush administration spent much of its time protecting consolidated monopolies that hurt innovation while blustering and spreading the lie that Gore said he “invented” the Internet.
• Music lyrics labeling. Yep, Gore supported that, but you really think that was worse than when GW Bush decided to very actively outright CENSOR climate science and political activists?
• Enviromment … you REALLY want to compare his track record there to Bush?? Or Obama? That’s a joke.
The lesser evil that Gore has done doesn’t cancel out his other policies of greater good on the environment, support for single payer at a time when the public was too ignorant to support him on it and the FACT that he was still a lesser evil than the Republicans were on many, many issues.
What EVIDENCE do you have that Gore in 2000 would be just like two far right-wing presidential administrations with a mostly conservative, rubber stamp congress in tow during the bulk of the time?
And, there’s this:
When many others were jumping for joy when Obama was elected, there were others that knew he was a lesser evil and nothing more than that. Even before Obama was elected, some of us said this:
http://boingboing.net/2008/06/24/obamas-support-for-t.html#comment-229153987?
(scroll up to 06/24/2008 04:29 PM if Discus craps out on the link)
You see, just like Gore, I never had any allusions about Obama in the first place. I admit that I had cautiously hoped that he’d be a second term trojan (in some regards) for various reasons, but he’s blown that miserably except in a few circumstances with tepid support for gay rights, health care and such. Still, much better than anything McCain/Palin or Romney/Ryan would have done, to say the least.
But, once again, I never had any illusions in the first place because I knew that the American public had already screwed themselves by allowing our country to go so far backwards by voting in two disastrous GW Bush terms with a disastrous rubber stamp, conservative congress to back his disastrous agenda. It’s a fucking disaster. You don’t go from a literal disaster to utopia in 5 years, sorry.
Your baseless supposition that two Gore administrations would have been very much the same as the two GW Bush administrations isn’t seated in reality and only serves to keep us all down.
It’s going to take decades to clean up this mess and that’s ONLY if the American public finally pulls its head out of its ass and finally stops falling for false equivalence ignorance and spin.
How about complaining about consistently voting in lesser evils over time once we’ve actually tried it? Obama after two disastrous GW Bush terms with many conservatives voted into Congress, etc. doesn’t cut it by a long shot.
The false equivalency mentality hasn’t worked at all and these guys absolutely LOVE it when we fall for it. It’s why they actively support false equivalence and half-truths with their power in the media and with their “think tanks”. We need to stop falling for it hook, line and sinker.
DISCLAIMER: Before anyone attacks the sources without looking at the content, please note most of the content contains more sources and there are many more sources on this as well if anyone bothers to look.
Yep, they don’t just farm it, they burn it.
Farmington is the location of the Four Corners Generating Station.
I don’t want you think I like Bush, or that I’m defending him. My simple point is that you can’t assign this trend to liberals, as 40% of the trend took place during an arch-conservative presidency. That has nothing to do with whether Bush was simply a bad president or an astonishingly bad president.
I think there’s probably an apolitical explanation for the decline in air pollution. The corresponding decline of American industry may be it.
You’ve put a lot of effort into your post, and I appreciate that.
Actually you can and should assign the trend to progressives. As I mentioned and showed with sources, progressives in the states and cities resisted (and even sued the Bush admin) to help stem some of the conservative’s march to trash our environment in the name of corporate profits.
Air pollution improved over time despite setbacks from conservatives like Bush because the rest of the country (a.k.a. progressives and liberals) fought against these idiots to improve wherever they could on state and city levels, etc.
We’d be extremely better off environmentally today if conservatives weren’t bumps in the roads for progress.
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