The EPA has been claiming high ozone levels in Colorado are due to Utah coal plants (who don’t have scrubbers on them).
Utah’s legislature agreed something needed to be done and set aside $2 million — for legal fees to sue the EPA and avoid the extra cleanup.
https://coloradosun.com/2023/03/08/colorado-air-pollution-utah-ozone-epa/
As a Utahn, it pisses me off that we still have fucking coal plants here. We have 200-250 days of sun here. Shit, we’re at 4-5000 feet of elevation, so the solar flux is fucking intense. Why the fuck haven’t we built solar panels and shut these plants down? Why aren’t our reservoirs covered in at least some number of panels to cut the evaporation? Rather than fix that, let’s scum up the air for us and our neighbors with our shitty 1900s era coal plants and our fucking oil refineries that help contribute to some of the worst air quality in North America when an inversion hits Salt Lake City.
I have nothing but contempt for the basket of cunts our gerrymandered districts keep shitting out. It’s amazing how ugly the politics can be in such a beautiful place.
Utah has some of my favorite places earth. It’s almost painful how beautiful it can be. It really is a shame what the government there does.
gerrymandered districts
The entire state elects Republicans because they want to. There are no gerrymandered districts. You voted for Donald Trump by 20% in 2020. All your Senators and US Representatives are Republican.
Attacking someone personally over the dominant politics of the state the live plays perfectly into the hands of the conservative agenda. Keeps those leftys fighting each other while conservatives push their agenda on all of us with the coordination of unified force.
And by your own statement you are incorrect: if the state legislature and the federal representatives are overwhelmingly Republican, they already gerrymandered the whole state.
As others have said, Utah is, in fact, heavily gerrymandered. We even had a ballot initiative that passed in 2018 demanding that the legislature draw more fair maps. Rather than do that, the shitfucks at the capitol came up with maps that were somehow even worse. Like, we have some real idiots in this state who want to be abused by fascists for some reason. I’m also an idiot, but I am firmly progressive and do not want to suck on a fascist’s boot, and I’m not alone. Utah may be red, but Salt Lake City is very, very blue.
This article does a pretty good job of discussing how fucked the situation here is: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/11/us/redistricting-map-utah-salt-lake-city.html
Here’s an archive link if you hit a paywall: https://archive.ph/4scLB
I wonder how much of a gratuity the Republican justices are going to get for this ruling.
Be sure to tip your senator!
We should be
riotingprotesting for that. Tell me the days and I’ll be in DC. I can also help plan.Not sure anything like that is put together, but a good start is to call your rep and senators and ask them to close the various loopholes that the courts have put in US bribery law, both the after-the-fact-gratuity one and the explicit (instead of implicit) quid-pro-quo one.
In a matter of hours scotus has has legalized bribery, promoted pollution, and fucked everyone. All because of Republican appointed judges. Next time anyone tells you both sides are the same, do tell them to go fuck themselves.
Colorado needs to tax the shit out of everything coming from and going to Utah, everyone should. Fuck it, tax the Mormon churches to make up for their theologically driven state of pollution.
All churches should be taxed. There is no valid reason for an exception.
Coney Barrett has actually had a couple moments this years where she has popped out of the conservative dogma bubble. I wonder if the other women on the court can pull her out of the echo chamber.
Yes, Congress explicitly empowered you to do this, and yes you may be protecting citizens rights to not have corporations cover them with harmful, painful pollution… but it might eat into the profits of some of our bribery-patrons, so we’ve decided that we are going to supersede Congress’s authority on this. We’ll figure out our weasely reasoning later.
- SCOTUS, a Constitutionally illegitimate terrorist organization
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The rule is intended to restrict smokestack emissions from power plants and other industrial sources that burden downwind areas with smog-causing pollution.
The Supreme Court, with a 6-3 conservative majority, has increasingly reined in the powers of federal agencies, including the EPA, in recent years.
The court is currently weighing whether to overturn its 40-year-old Chevron decision, which has been the basis for upholding a wide range of regulations on public health, workplace safety and consumer protections.
Three energy-producing states — Ohio, Indiana and West Virginia — have challenged the air pollution rule, along with the steel industry and other groups, calling it costly and ineffective.
Those states are Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah and West Virginia.
Ground-level ozone, which forms when industrial pollutants chemically react in the presence of sunlight, can cause respiratory problems, including asthma and chronic bronchitis.
The original article contains 608 words, the summary contains 146 words. Saved 76%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
