Name:   MartiniMan - Subject:   You are deluded Date:   4/20/2018 8:58:04 AM (updated 4/20/2018 9:00:46 AM)

Casey, please do not go the way of Archie and Copper by posting stupid polemics.  You seem much more reasonable and less ideological than them and are willing to deal in the realm of facts and reason.  The post above is a step in the wrong direction.  Especially since much of the improvement from the pictures you posted was the reduction of steel production in Birmingham and other places like Pittsburgh where I grew up, although no doubt the technologies on current plants help significantly.

I have been in the environmental business for over 30 years and I know of what I speak.  No one, not Trump, nor Pruitt nor any Republican has suggested we roll back the Clean Air Act.  As a point in fact the last improvement to the Clean Air Act was under GHW Bush in 1991 to strengthen the original legislation passed under President Nixon.  What was rolled back by EPA under Pruitt, and rightly so, was the Clean Power Plan.  This was a policy instituted by Obama through EPA without going through the legislative process and was intended to target CO2 emissions from power plants, not pollutants like particulates, SO2, etc. This would have dramatically increased energy costs for zero benefit and would harm the poor and lower income working class most of all.  It was over reach and was intended to kill the coal industry as both Obama and Hillary promised to do.  

The Clean Air Act remains in force and is being fully and aggressively implemented by EPA and state regulatory agencies (mostly by states as they have adopted the Federal rules and have their own programs).  In our business we have actually seen an uptick in enforcement at both the state and Federal level and best of all, our clients now have more available resources to pay for rectifying these issues due to the tax cuts.  When our business is busy it means problems are being solved and I can tell you they are.  So drop the silliness and get back to being the most reasonable liberal on the Forum.  You are better than this last post.

And lest you misunderstand, I and most other conservatives are all for alternative sources of energy, but not for the reasons you might think and certainly not in the way the left wants to do it.