Monday, December 2, 2013

It's A Plot! The Closure Of A Lead Smelter

It may well be as the EPA's objective seems to be to eliminate all the jobs it can before the angry mob shows up to burn down their building.

As regards the conspiracy to impose gun control by making lead unavailable for ammo, I suspect this is somewhat over stated. I did some digging and discovered that some 84% of the lead used in this country goes into lead-acid batteries. Only about 6% is used for ammo.

While the Doe Run smelter may be closed due to the EPA cutting the allowable emissions to 10% of what it used to be, the company recycling center continues to churn out lead for all purposes pretty much unabated.

Reducing emissions to 10% of previous levels sounds like something you'd do if there were stacks of dead bodies lying about somewhere. I don't remember reading about such a catastrophe. Maybe one of you did? This sort of trick goes back a bit. At the end of the Clinton administration the EPA cut the allowable level of Arsenic in drinking water that drastically, rendering large areas of the southwest without federally approved water. The old level was not dangerous, but Bush's action to put the levels back where they were produced headlines about "Bush Raises Arsenic in water 10-fold". Making sure Bush knew where he stood with the press I guess, it's the regulatory equivalent of short-sheeting the bed.

2 comments:

jed said...

More on the subject

Billll said...

The study I found ended in about 2002. I could see some shift in usage, but moving from 80% to 88% for batteries (a lot of new electric golf carts?) and from 6% to 3% (maybe the extra cart batteries and declining usage in other industries shifted the percentages?)for bullets seems like a lot.

Still, the bullet manufacturers all seem to see this as a non-issue.