Who Had 'EPA Brings Back Asbestos' In The 2018 Pool?
Yummy yummy safe asbestos!
In another great step toward dismantling the regulatory state, the Environmental Protection Agency is fixing to allow the sale of construction products containing asbestos again. Yes, that's even though, if you want to get all nitpicky about it, the science hasn't changed and asbestos still fucks up human lungs and causes cancer , even in kids whose dads worked with it and never even touched the stuff themselves. While existing prohibitions on asbestos will remain in place, this is nonetheless a huge win for Donald Trump, who has long believed science is just a myth liberals made up to hurt job creators and skyscraper developers.
New proposed rules the EPA set out in June will allow the sale of products containing asbestos, subject to case-by-case approval by the agency, which promises to be super careful and guided by science. But it won't be too nitpicky, either, since as part of a regulatory reform started under Barack Obama, then turned into regulatory clear-cutting by Trump and Scott Pruitt, the Agency said all new chemical approvals will only assess the health effects of direct contact with the substances, not the effects of substances in the air, water, or ground, and certainly not from their disposal, because god do you want to be bored to death or be able to buy new fireproof diapers? (Probably not those. But you can dream!)
As you may remember, back in the 1990s, Donald Trump argued in one of his dumb books that there's not a thing wrong with asbestos . Not only is it "100 percent safe, once applied," it simply "got a bad rap" from people who wanted to RUIN him. He knows exactly how it happened!
I believe that the movement against asbestos was led by the mob, because it was often mob-related companies that would do the asbestos removal. Great pressure was put on politicians, and as usual, the politicians relented. Millions of truckloads of this incredible fire-proofing material were taken to special "dump sites" and asbestos was replaced by materials that were supposedly safe but couldn't hold a candle to asbestos in limiting the ravages of fire.
More recently, in 2012, Science Expert Trump tweeted his expert opinion on how the World Trade Center would still be standing today, if only it had been stuffed full of good, noble asbestos:
If we didn't remove incredibly powerful fire retardant asbestos & replace it with junk that doesn't work, the World Trade Center would never have burned down.
Mind you, there's no paper trail showing the EPA's new openness to asbestos was directed by Trump, but it did make a nice little gift.
While some countries have banned it outright, the USA merely stopped its use in building construction and mandated it be removed (by the Mafia) during renovations. Asbestos is still used in the production of chlorine, for some plastic products. The USA imports about 480 tons of the shit annually, mostly from Brazil and, hey, Russia! The Russian company Uralasbest operates a gigantic mine where it digs the crap out of the earth, and even featured a -- presumably unlicensed -- image of Trump's face on pallets of asbestos on its Facebook page.
"Approved by Donald Trump, 45th President of the United States," the seal read, according to a translation supplied by the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit focused on human health and the environment that flagged the posting.
You can bet that if Trump Tower Moscow had ever been built, it would have been safe, even without a troublesome sprinkler system.
In conclusion, get your Wonkette-brand breathing filters at our online store.
[ The Architects Newspaper / NYT / WaPo / Snopes ]
I've read so much about asbestos, which is just my way of saying there's been so much about the hardships of its victims and there are so many victims and the struggle to find a way to help them and also the new kind of law that was invented to do that: I mean making the manufacturers liable-- all that came out of the asbestos fight-- and after watching the video of Alex Jones and seeing how a liar is impervious to facts along with his lawyers so long as he has a way of coating facts in another lie like Trump also does, I just feel so tired I wonder if there's any solution short of naming every new sewer treatment plant after Trump cabinet members to put me right again.
Uh huh, nye nye.