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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (24709)	5/25/2009 7:56:18 PM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36917

That's true and in a good capitalist country, you would have to pay per view. Trials are a significant profit opportunity going to waste. If you want the entertainment value, you are going to have to pay me. I'm not going to save you from yourself for no payment. Al Gore made heaps from his CO2 frenzy and scored a Nobel Prize too [which is a great joke and makes their awards look ridiculous - as if they weren't already ridiculous, giving a "Peace Prize" to Yasser Arafat]. Mqurice

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (24709)	5/26/2009 3:29:01 PM
From: average joe	1 Recommendation Respond to of 36917

The trouble with trials is you sometimes lose... "Sotomayor: Obama’s Supreme Court Pick and the Cost of Environmental Protection By Keith Johnson Now that Sonia Sotomayor has gone from presumptive front-runner to official nominee for the Supreme Court, what’s that mean for environmental issues? Much of the fireworks surrounding Ms. Sotomayor’s work on the Second Court of Appeals centers on the controversial affirmative-action ruling in Connecticut. But she also wrote the opinion in one big environmental case—one the Supreme Court just overturned. In 2007, Ms. Sotomayor sided with the fishes and against power companies and the Environmental Protection Agency. That is, in Riverkeeper vs. EPA, she argued that the EPA can’t weigh costs and benefits in deciding what the “best technology” is for protecting fish that get sucked into power plants. In a nutshell, there’s no point in tallying up the marginal costs of extra environmental protections when Congress has already decided they’re worth it. From her 2007 decision: The Agency is therefore precluded from undertaking such cost-benefit analysis because the [best technology available] standard represents Congress’s conclusion that the costs imposed on industry in adopting the best cooling water intake structure technology available (i.e., the best-performing technology that can be reasonably borne by the industry) are worth the benefits in reducing adverse environmental impacts. In April, the Supreme Court overturned that decision in a 6-3 ruling; justice David Souter, who Ms. Sotomayor would replace, was one of the dissenters. The Supremes ruled that the EPA could in fact tally up the costs of environmental protections. “Best technology” means the technology that most effectively ensures environmental protections, not that would provide environmental protections at any cost. It’s an important point, and is likely to become even more important as Congress, the White House, and the EPA grapple with much wider environmental regulations, in the shape of climate-change policies. When industries first start cleaning up, there’s plenty of low-hanging fruit—big advances that can be made cheaply. Complications arise the more industries clean up: Getting the last few tons of carbon emissions out of a smokestack, for instance, might be prohibitively expensive compared with cleaning up the first 90%. So there is likely to be plenty more wrangling in the future over just how stringent environmental protections have to be—and at what cost they will come. Judge Sotomayor, if she is confirmed, has already hinted where she stands on that issue." blogs.wsj.com