LA Weekly

The California Air Resources Board today approved a plan to reduce emissions at the ports. If it lives up to its designs, the Emissions Reduction Plan (ERP) will reduce premature deaths caused by port pollution from the current 2,400 per year to 800 per year by 2020. That's good, I suppose. But I was there at the Long Beach Convention Center when this happened, and I can attest that not everyone was happy about it. Even the people who were sort of okay about it weren't happy about it.

Andrea Hricko of USC's Southern California Environmental Health Sciences Center put it this way (and I paraphrase): If an avian flu epidemic were claiming 2,400 lives in the state each year, and some scientists proposed reducing that by 800 by 2020, would that be acceptable?

--------

Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)