Bush Needs Brain, Lobotomizes EPA

NPR's Science Friday did a piece [mp3] with Jeff Ruch of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) on the closure of the Environmental Protection Agency's library system that went into effect this afternoon. Here's the gist from the PEER website:

These libraries and their staff provide essential services to EPA staff and to the general public, such as finding the most current information on health risks of chemical substances, providing documentation in enforcement cases against corporate polluters, and helping to prepare scientific support for new regulations.

Shuttering the EPA libraries means that:
• Tens of thousands of unique holdings will be boxed up and inaccessible for an unknown period;
• Public access to EPA holdings will cease; and
• EPA scientists, enforcement agents and other specialists will have a much harder time doing their jobs. See EPA scientists’ letter of protest to Congress.

While cloaked as a budgetary measure, the actual motives appear to be rooted more in controlling access by both EPA staff and the public to information. (An internal EPA study estimated that the library network saved approximately $7.5 million annually in professional staff time, an amount far larger than the agency library budget of $2.5 million.)

I want to highlight that this is irreversible. It is not a matter of cracking open the sealed archives and digitizing them. The library in Chicago has already started to find new homes for many of their documents. Also, FOIA requests will not be effective since these records have not been catalogued. If you can't name the document, you can't request it.

Also, this is NOT about balancing the budget and finding a responsible way for paying for our dabblings in offensive warfare. It is not even an effective way to achieve a "small government." The library program IS small ($2.5 million isn't even a rounding error compared to the proposed $350 billion non-military discretionary spending) and it is not "government waste." It's what keeps the Agency running. In fact, removing the program will likely cause the $7.3 billion spent annually by the Agency to get tied up in paperwork and data mining. And THAT is wasteful.

I've stopped seeing stars when I stand up to fast. Must be election season. Call your Congressman.

End of the Line

Foreign Policy Magazine has a stunning photo essay about the shipbreaking industry in Bangladesh. About half of the worlds super tankers are disassembled there, the others mostly go to China or India. The methods and work conditions are almost medieval. From the essay:

When the tide is high, vessels are driven at full speed toward the shore. Once the water recedes and the ships rest along the muddy beach, the salvage crews move in, emptying the vessels of everything on board.

The OSHA factsheet [PDF] on shipbreaking includes a who's who of toxic chemicals including PCBs, lead and other heavy metals, asbestos and CFCs. Not to mention all the sharp metal, broken glass and fire-prone liquids aplenty. The US has workplace standards to protect its citizens from these hazards. The laws of economics see to it they are protected from doing the work at all. Bangladesh has few or no standards, which is why you see 200,000 people in bare feet and no protective equipment. Bangladesh also has lax environmental regulations, so when the tide comes in, all those chemicals get washed right into the Bay of Bengal.




The magazine isn't the first to cover this story. Will Englund and Gary Cohn were awarded a Pulitzer Prize for their 1998 piece in the Baltimore Sun on Alang shipyard [google satellite image] in India, and Greenpeace (yes, they're still around) has declared it one of their priorities. So I'm a little surprised I hadn't heard more about it.

Hold me

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