Word: epa
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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These GOP legislators are fighting to ensure that the middle class has access to dirty water, filthy air, cancer-causing substances and dangerous workplaces. For too long, regulatory bodies such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have barred the middle class from enjoying pollution and various health hazards...
...Fire ants are taking over the entire South," says DeLay, who until last year was the owner of Albo Pest Control in Houston. DeLay studied biology in college and went to work at a pesticide-formulation company in the early 1970s. There he learned that the EPA was banning Mirex, a pesticide that kills fire ants, aggressive interlopers from South America with a painful bite. DeLay, who believes Mirex is harmless, says this was his first exposure to the EPA's blundering ways. He claims that the delicensing of Mirex and another pesticide, chlordane, severely affected his extermination business, costing...
While fire ants have spread northward, the EPA doesn't think the problem is serious enough to outweigh the potential dangers of the pesticides to humans. According to the EPA, studies done in the 1970s indicated that Mirex was present in human mothers' milk all over the South. The agency says Mirex and chlordane are both dangerous to human health. "We call Mirex a possible human carcinogen. Mr. DeLay might disagree with that, but we believe the studies," says Sylvia Lowrance, an EPA spokeswoman. Other nonpartisan groups, including the Inter national Agency for Research on Cancer, agree . Both pesticides...
Ballenger, chairman of a House subcommittee on workplace protections, fumes over the amount of money the EPA has cost him as the owner of a plastic-packaging company based in Hickory, North Carolina. The EPA regulates his factory because one of its by-products is methyl alcohol, which can contribute to ozone pollution. To control methyl alcohol releases, Ballenger had to build a catalytic converter for $600,000 and spend $500,000 to make airtight the room where he prints labels on the packaging. Running the pollution-control devices cost him $180,000 a year. After all that, he says...
Keith Overcash, the North Carolina EPA regional director in charge of regulating Ballenger's plant, says the plant managers and EPA were in constant contact over the past 10 years and relations were always cooperative. According to Overcash, Ballenger himself never attended the meetings. Overcash says the EPA never told Ballenger to shut down his new press, and speculated that the company may be splitting up its operation simply to get below pollution limits and turn off the pollution-control devices. Ballenger concedes that he hopes to be able to shut down the costly devices. Meanwhile, he has voted with...