Ten, Please read this so you'll know what's going on!
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=655&ncid=655&e=2&u=/oneworld/20030808/wl_oneworld/4536651701060343364
Funding Woes Plague Superfund Clean Up
The federal government is failing to fully fund the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (news - web sites)'s (EPA) Superfund program and 42 percent of Superfund clean up efforts could be slowed down or stopped as a result, environmentalists say......
A new report released today by the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG) blames the Bush administration for cuts to the Superfund budget and Congress for shifting the burden of clean up from polluters to the American taxpayer......
"Not only has the pace of cleanups slowed down dramatically in the past three years, but regular taxpayers are footing more and more of the bill for toxic cleanups," said Julie Wolk, the report's lead author and an environmental health advocate for PIRG......
The slowdown in clean up leaves "millions of Americans remain at risk of chemical exposure and disease," Wolk said.....
Seventy million people, including some 10 million children, live within four miles of the nation's more than 1,230 Superfund sites. Children are most vulnerable to the arsenic, DDT and brain-damaging toxins like lead and mercury that are found in the water and soil at these locations......EPA Acting Administrator Marianne Horinko announced 20 new Superfund sites last month but acknowledged that only 11 would be funded in the coming fiscal year. She says any sites not receiving funding do not pose immediate risks to human health and will be considered for funding next year......
Horinko gave no additional information about funding for the hundreds of sites around the nation with ongoing clean up, but Ryan says "all ongoing clean up projects are going to get some funding."...
This does not sit will with environmentalists.....
The administration is "keeping the public in the dark," says Lois Gibbs, executive director of the Center for Health, Environment and Justice....
A 2001 study by the non profit research group Resources for the Future determined that the Superfund program needs annual funding of between $1.4 billion to $1.7 billion. Using these figures, PIRG's report says that the Bush administration has under funded the Superfund program by some $1.2 billion to $1.8 billion from 2001 through 2004....
The report blasts the administration and the U.S. Congress for opposing the collection of polluter pays fees, a policy that has increased the share of the program's costs carried by the federal government from 18 percent in 1995 to a proposed 79 percent or more in 2004....This is not the way the Superfund program was designed to work, but the program has been wrought with problems for much of its life....
Started in 1980 as a relatively short term project to clean up abandoned hazardous waste sites, the program has expanded as tens of thousands of waste sites have been discovered...
Many of these sites are owned by the federal government, and cleaning them up has proved to be far more complicated and costly than anticipated. But the sites that are not owned by the federal government are to either be cleaned up by the private parties responsible for contamination or by the EPA, which is then tasked with seeking reimbursement from those responsible...
Congress created a trust fund to pay for cleanups of non government sites and devised "polluter pays fees" to fund it. These fees consisted of a corporate tax that applies to profits of large corporations in excess of $2 million, a fee on the purchase of harmful chemicals and a fee on the purchase of crude oil by refineries....
But the polluter pays provision expired in 1995....
The Bush administration opposes reinstating the fees unless reforms of cleanup standards and polluters' liabilities are enacted, a position environmentalists say mirrors industry.
"The polluter pays is a guiding principle of the Superfund program--every President up until now has collected or supported those fees," Wolk said.
Wolk takes issue with the administration's position that the program's budget has not fallen under the Bush presidency. When the figures are adjusted for inflation, Wolk says, funding for the program averaged $1.3 billion from 2001 to 2003 compared to $1.7 billion from 1992 through 2000.
There is little evidence the Superfund program will get the funding boost environmentalists say it needs.
