Word: epas
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...letter obtained by TIME, Bush's Environmental Protection Agency moved to block a $220 million Army Corps of Engineers flood-control project in the Mississippi Delta, laying the groundwork for the first EPA veto of an Army Corps project since 1990. And the project is arguably the most ecologically destructive Army Corps boondoggle on the books today, which is saying something. It would build the world's largest hydraulic pump to protect a sparsely populated area dominated by soybean fields from Yazoo River flooding, and it would drain or degrade enough wetlands to cover all five boroughs of New York...
...pump, designed to move as much as 6 million gallons of water per minute, "would impact aquatic ecosystems on a massive scale," the EPA's Lawrence Starfield wrote in the letter. The Army Corps acknowledges that it would damage 67,000 acres of wetlands; the twelve Corps projects the EPA has vetoed in its history would have damaged a total of less than 8,000 acres. And scientists say the pump's actual devastation would be more like 200,000 acres, which is why 541 of them signed a letter calling for a veto. The Clinton Administration dismissed what then...
...also no coincidence that Bush's former number-two budget official, Marcus Peacock, is now Bush's number-two EPA official. The Corps claimed in its analysis that the pump will ultimately benefit the environment, because the agency will mitigate the damage after it's built. But as Peacock knows all too well, a slew of independent investigations have exposed Corps analyses as shams designed to justify big projects that keep the agency's employees busy and its congressional patrons happy. The investigations have also documented how the Corps rarely follows up on its mitigation promises. And this pump would...
...EPA's limit is the acceptable limit of safety, which includes a 10-fold safety factor. That's not a risk level. That's the accepted safety level [0.1 mcg of mercury per kg of body weight per day]. That's 10 times lower than where the EPA determined that risk was occurring - which is a prudent safety limit to be certain that there is no risk. So, for example, if six pieces of tuna sushi a week would put you at the limit, that means you would have to eat 60 pieces to get to the level where...
Also, it's important to note that the EPA set its safety limit based on the potential risks to infants and newborns, not based on the effects in adults...