Great news! Asbestos is back, baby!

Great news! Asbestos is back, baby!

Fuck you and that “love sweet love” crap, Burt Bacharach. What the world really needs now is  asbestos, sweet asbestos.

Once again I have to point out that this is not from The Onion. This is real. Scott Pruitt may be gone, but he has left a legacy at the EPA.

As ol’ Deep Throat said “follow the money.” How long will it be before we find the government official who either bought an asbestos plant for a penny on the dollar, or took a bribe from someone who did?

On a less specific, but  even more terrifying note:

The EPA recently released a report “detailing its new framework for evaluating the risk of its top prioritized substances. The report states that the agency will no longer consider the effect or presence of substances in the air, ground, or water in its risk assessments.

I wonder what it will consider?

6 thoughts on “Great news! Asbestos is back, baby!

  1. I’m not overly concerned about this. No matter what the E.P.A. does, companies have a vital self interest in staying in business. To the best of my knowledge every company directly involved in the manufacture of asbestos prior to the 1970’s was sued out of business. Asbestos litigation continues today either seeking money from the compensation fund created when these companies were liquidated or against companies more tangentially connected to asbestos.

    I don’t think asbestos will ever again be used as building insulation, but there may be some uses (such as apparently the manufacture of chlorine) where with precautions, it can be used safely. Even if the E.P.A. fails to adequately oversee the use of asbestos, attorneys specializing in product liability will take up the slack. Or more accurately fear of those attorneys will motivate the companies to make sure whatever products they create are safe. Now if the E.P.A. were to issue a rule that somehow gave companies immunity from litigation THAT would be a serious problem.

    1. Companies have a vital interest in MAKING MONEY. That is far different from interest in staying in business. Think about it

    2. The really scary part of this is not the fact that asbestos is back, but rather the other paragraph I cited, the one that states, in essence, that the environmental protection agency will no longer protect the environment.

  2. When Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton, he got them involved in three financial disasters. One I can’t remember, one involved offshore drilling down around South America, and one was buying a big company that turned out to have billions in asbestos liabilities. I doubt he has much pull with Trump, but keeping corporate America happy is now the only thing the Republican Party really exists for (IMO). Anything else is lip service and rabble rousing.

  3. And I thought Sonny Bush was bad with his “let’s arsenic up these kids’ drinking water” initiative…

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