Half of US rivers are so polluted "they are unable to sustain life".

Nonsense, there are loads of problems but there is one side who is always on the side of making it worse. That's just reality and no false equivalency can erase it.

I like people CS. I think humans are an asset to the world (and universe as well). In that regard, while pristine areas are nice when it comes down to a choice I will always come down in favor of what serves the interests of human needs.

and along with lead paint chips, a steady part of your diet?

Posts like this remind me to be grateful for not having to filter reality through partisan lenses.

Notice I'm not even asking for you to back up your claim.

Does the water on your planet run red and blue?

Does it turn to spaghetti when it's in your shoe?

If you had a reality based filter then you'd know who is constantly trying to make standards weaker and who is at least not doing that and occasionally actually trying to improve the situation.

Look, I know all the cool kids want to pretend that political ideology doesn't matter and that everyone is exactly the same but the real world doesn't work that way. Not by a long shot.

No kidding. It would probably be a great shock to his system to find out that it was a republican president who created the EPA (Nixon) as well as the Antiquities act(T.R) and the endangered species act(Nixon). Then again we are talking about an uneducated idiot for a poster.

Is it ashamed of who it was born like Mikey the who?

By "make standards weaker" do you mean "rein in an EPA that's out of control and drunk with power"? You, young man, are a monkey-humper. An ape-rapist. A pimp of chimps. You do bad things, and you smell bad, and you should feel bad. No one likes you, not even your anus. I'd insult you further, but even as an object of my derision your worth is severely limited.

In my view a polluter being forced to pay to clean up his own mess serves human needs.

I have no problem with that.

To a degree anyway.

Yeah. It's not like the Democrats haven't run the country sometime in the last hundred years either. Both parties are guilty.

The Environmental Policy Act was written and championed by Senator Henry 'Scoop' Jackson of Washington State, modeled after his home state's Department of Ecology (the first of its kind in the nation). While Nixon did sign it, he expressed reservations, and had no real choice as it was passed with veto proof majorities in both houses.

Could you, would you drink it on a train?

As usual, it's because of half-assing by Washington. Atlanta dumps raw sewage into my drinking water because the fines the EPA level on the city are less than the cost of building and running a water treatment plant.

Start hauling the Mayor and City Council away in handcuffs and things will change. Until then, it's partisan "gotcha" politics.

Jailing people for pollution? What are you some sort of communist?

I have to agree with CS in that it's stupid not to vote for things that makes sense just cuz the other guy's for it. Polluted water is not good for anyone.

Far too many in office just think about the short term, ie their re-election instead of actually improving anything.

This part is true.

Bullshit. The EPA was proposed by President Richard Nixon and began operation on December 2, 1970, after Nixon signed an executive order. There was no trepidation on his part.

Eh, I'd be fine with skipping the whole jail thing if the fines were more substantial. Say, one quadrillion dollars per ton of untreated sewage dumped into the river. But, divorced from the larger matter, my judgement may be clouded by a deep-seated hatred for the entire State of Georgia.

To be fair, waste water treatment facilities aren't cheap. Just ask Jefferson County.

Congress passed the law, Nixon reorganized agencies to enforce it. If it makes you feel better thinking Nixon thus created it, have at it.

By that rational we shouldn't credit any President for anything because all laws are started in congress. The point is Nixon very much wanted the EPA . No one was pointing a gun to his head and saying "Sign it."

Well, Florida residents who follow things like water rights aren't big on Georgia, either. They want to irrigate the urban sprawl of Atlanta by sucking the Apalachicola River dry, thus turning one of the few relatively unspoiled parts of Florida (and it's oyster industry) into a dead zone.

Environmental policy was one of the few areas in which Nixon was actually a pretty good president.

But, really, is anyone going to deny that for the last 20 or 30 years, Democrats have been generally in favor of environmental protection laws and Republicans have been generally against them? There are obviously exceptions, but that's the general tendency, and self-righteous finger-waggling and "tut-tut, don't be partisan, donkey elephant blah blah blah" isn't likely to make anyone forget it.

The point is missed though. The EPA is strictly anti business instead of working with business. If you want to pollute less, find a way to increase efficiency. Just as a car that gets 40mpg pollutes less than one that gets 20mpg. There is a right way to solve this thing and blind standards that cripple industry is not it. I will never understand the mindset of democrats who think that if you don't agree with their way of solving a problem, then you don't agree that there is a problem at all.

And how do we get those 40 MPG cars, EP? Have you heard of CAFE standards?

I reject the claim that the EPA is anti-business. They're simply an enforcement agency which enforces the (extremely low) standards which Congress has set.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=birth-control-in-water-supply

The next big thing is birth control hormones in water along with endocrine disruptors

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocrine_disruptor

That's what is causing the massive increase in hermaphroditic fish & amphibians along with all sorts of strange cancers. If it is happening to the fish it is likely happening to people who also drink the water but at slower rates (as we don't live in the water like fish or frogs).

I recommend burning Atlanta and it's sprawl that is called Georgia to the ground.