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EARTHblog » Nadia Steinzor
Regulations for life
In the world of dirty energy, things often go awry. In just the last few weeks, there s been ongoing news of the nuclear power plant disaster in Japan, yet another in a never-ending series of oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico, and natural gas-related fires in Pennsylvania and Minnesota.
And what do many policymakers choose to do about such problems? Attack the very regulatory systems designed to protect people and the environment, for example through anti-Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) bills and calls for less federal meddling in the gas industry.
Tagged with: epa, natural gas, regulation, dirty energy, fossil fuels
Equation for disaster
Risk is often defined as a product of two factors: probability and impact. Yet when it comes to the endless quest for fossil fuel energy, it s become all too easy to minimize the latter.
An oil spill on the scale of what happened last year in the Gulf of Mexico was considered so unlikely that BP s drilling operations in the region were exempted from full environmental review. But now there s enough concern about the lasting impacts of what happened that the National Institutes of Health recently launched a major new study to track how residents who assisted with the clean up are faring.
Building nuclear power plants along the coast in a seismically active part of the world may have seemed like a risk worth taking to satisfy Japan s energy needs. Now that the plants are nearing meltdown after a major earthquake and tsunami, this calculation is questionable perhaps particularly from the perspective of the 140,000 people ordered not to go outdoors because of radiation and the plant workers whose lives hang in the balance as they try to prevent further disaster.
Tagged with: natural gas, drilling, dirty energy, risk
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