Friday, February 23, 2018

WI on air pollution: see, say, know and do nothing

Wisconsin has a hide-and-seek policy towards air pollution:

Hide the facts, seek no facts and make a dirtied-up state even dirtier.

So it's fitting that the State of Wisconsin's new official approach to Lake Michigan shoreline golf course development and air pollution data collection
Smoke stacks from a factory.
is to stop that pesky data collection
The state Assembly has passed a bill that asks the federal Environmental Protection Agency to exclude a monitoring site in a Sheboygan County state park from a statewide air-monitoring plan.
The bill passed on a party-line vote Thursday. It now heads to the desk of Gov. Scott Walker, having passed the state Senate Tuesday.
It's part of Walker's bigger plan to get federal environmental enforcement transferred back to the states, where Walker and his allies can make sure nothing happens.

Like Walker did for years when evading his obligation to enforce the Clean Water Act for Wisconsin residents. 

This mixture of do-nothingism and denial is right in line with GOP Attorney General and corporate tool Brad Schimel's battles against federal clean air and water initiatives, and his 2017 do-nothing approach when pollution facts and permit violations were staring him in the face:
...right-wing WI GOP Attorney General and corporate tool Brad Schimel had let the 3M corporation off without any financial penalty for air pollution violations during 2014 and 2015 at its Wausau manufacturing facilities.
And it's in sync with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources' know-nothing scrubbing of know, published climate change data
Not content with having already stripped content and links from an agency webpage about climate change - - deletions I documented some years ago and which I have frequently referenced - - the ideologues intent on scrubbing science off these pages and sowing doubt and confusion about the consensus view of experts worldwide about climate change have edited, deleted and otherwise compressed to whitewash long-standing concepts and facts off a climate change page about the Great Lakes.

No comments: