Saturday 11 February 2012

NYS Dept. of Environmental Conservation Proposes to Reduce Monitoring Toxic Emissions in Tonawanda NY

January 28, 2012
Charley Bowman, Interim Executive Director

The NYS Department of Environmental Conservation is swearing on a stack of Bibles (aka the Biblically long 1537 page rdSGEIS Report, Sept 7, 2011) that they will assiduously monitor the waste water containing 500+ unhealthy chemicals, including cancer promoting benzene, formaldyhyde and radioactive compounds that will be generated by hydrofracking central upstate NY. Nary a malicious molecule will escape our regulatory attention -- they say -- because we will work our DEC inspectors - presently numbering about 4 -- harder than those poor folks in China continually standing on their feet working 72 hours a week assembling iPADs and iPhones bound for the Galleria Mall in Cheektowaga NY. And if they complain, we will show them a sign identical to the Applelarian sign continuously shown to those Chinese workers: " Work hard on the job today or work hard looking for a job tomorrow" (NY Times, Jan 25, 2012). We at the NYSDEC are great motivators, buy an iPAD.

In the the face of NYSDEC's enthusiasm to closely monitor the upcoming voluminous toxic hydrofracking waste water, it comes as an immense surprise to the WNY Peace Center that the NYSDEC proposes to cease operations at 2 of its 4 air monitoring sites that keep a close eye on benzene wafting into the atmosphere from a source located in an area that includes -- among other man-made structures -- the Tonawanda Coke Corporation's towering sky-high, periodically belching smoke stacks in Tonawanda NY (and please note I did see one leafless tree in that general area yesterday).

Why?

Because New York State refuses to fairly tax the wealthy and/or collect the tax from the transfer of stock, every NYS agency is looking for pennies to save. It's foreclosed, asthmatic, benzene-harboring citizens don't understand that just those two types of taxation would reverse the entire effects of the 2007 stock market crash -- and then some. In this horrifically unfair taxation setting, the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation is looking under every cushion of every chair for savings. What better way to save money than to stop monitoring the industrial environmental polluters in Western NY? Gosh -- the DEC officials reason -- NYS citizens will not have a very important source of information with which to sue our industrially-based campaign-contributing corporations and NYS could not levy punitive fines against our possible future industrial employers.

Our bosses -- elected officials -- will grow their campaign coffers abundantly (http://www.cacwny.org/press/JDCrane.pdf), reward us with upscale political appointments and we can retire from the state working as consultants to the industrial industries we formerly regulated collecting our NYS pensions simultaneously! Go forth, stop monitoring the air and let toxic benzene and carbon tetrachloride pore out of profitable smoke stacks into the atmosphere overlying Western NY. Thank God, New York State doesn't require us to live near the industries we regulate...

Folks, please sign the petition to stop this nonsense: http://tinyurl.com/75uj25g

More info at the Clean Air Coalition of WNY: http://www.cacwny.org/