Many Americans left behind in the quest for cleaner air

[drokhole]

Many Americans left behind in the quest for cleaner air
source: Huffington Post

For all of her 62 years, Lois Dorsey has lived five blocks from a mass of petrochemical plants in Baton Rouge. She worries about the health of people in her life: A 15-year-old granddaughter, recovering from bone cancer. A 59-year-old sister, a nonsmoker, felled by lung cancer. Neighbors with asthma and cancer.

She's complained to the government about powerful odors and occasional, window-rattling explosions -- to no avail, she says. Pollution from the plants -- including benzene and nickel, both human carcinogens, and hydrochloric acid, a lung irritant -- continues.

"If anything," said Dorsey, herself a uterine cancer survivor, "it's gotten worse."

Americans might expect the government to protect them from unsafe air. That hasn't happened. Insidious forms of toxic air pollution -- deemed so harmful to human health that a Democratic Congress and a Republican president sought to bring emissions under control more than two decades ago -- persist in hundreds of communities across the United States, an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity's iWatch News and NPR shows...

(more at link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/the-center-for-public-integrity/many-americans-left-behin_b_1079251.html)

This alone is reason enough to Occupy. Just try not to breathe the air.

[libinnyandia]

1. But according to th GOP

those regulations are job killers. The governor of my state wants Iowa to be the healthiest state in America but also wants to do away with anti pollution regualtions. Oh yes he's' a Republican.