After Taking Your Health Care, Bevin Arranges to Kill You By Radiation and Overweight Trucks

Seriously, repugs are just flat-out doing everything they can to kill everyone who is not rich.

From the press release:

FRANKFORT, Ky. (June 12, 2017) - Gov. Matt Bevin will join state and local officials in Paducah on Wednesday to ceremonially sign the recently enacted Senate Bill 11. The legislation, known as the “Leeper Act,” lifts Kentucky’s 33-year-old moratorium on nuclear power plant construction.

McCracken County is home to the Paducah Gaseous Diffusion Plant, which produced enriched uranium from 1954 until 2013 and employed more than 1,000 local residents at its peak.

And if you think that is no big deal, the Leeper Act nuclear moratorium saved Kentucky from  a dozen Three-Mile-Islands-in-waiting. Every new coal and gas plant built since 1986 would be a Chernobyl waiting to happen. And now we get to find out just how dangerous they are.

We already know how dangerous overweight trucks are; before the legislation repugs are killing, overweight trucks killed dozens of Kentuckians.  But hey, they were probably Democrats anyway so who cares.

From the press release:

FRANKFORT, Ky. (June 12, 2017) - Gov. Matt Bevin will join state and local officials in Henderson on Wednesday to ceremonially sign the recently enacted House Bill 184. This measure increases roadway weight limits for trucks, bringing them in line with competing states.

This legislation will positively impact a wide array of Kentucky businesses, including the aluminum industry—which directly employees 18,000 workers and supplies the Commonwealth’s auto manufacturers.

Oh, yeah lots of new jobs.  Repairing the highways turned to asphalt dust by overweight trucks. Scraping the bodies off the highways after overweight trucks pancaked their cars.

The deadline for filing to run for repugs seats in the General Assembly is January 30, 2018.  That's just seven and a half months away. Throwing their medieval asses out is the ONLY way to reverse Bevin's destruction.  Start raising money and knocking on doors NOW.

KY Fighting "Clean Power" Regs It Already Meets

How stupid is Kentucky about coal?  Not only hasn't Kentucky noticed that Big Coal died about 20 years ago and its rotting corpse has been stinking up the place ever since, but Kentucky is wasting time and tax dollars fighting EPA clean power regulations that the Commonwealth already meets because that's how dead coal is.

And this is the headline of the day:  "Kentucky May Accidentally Comply With EPA's Clean Power Plan"

From Inside Climate News:

Kentucky has consistently opposed federal efforts to impose environmental rules on the state's power plants.  First, lawmakers passed a bill to exempt the state from submitting a plan to meet the proposed air regulations that work against coal. Then it sued the Environmental Protection Agency over the rule.

Now, the state may go from defiance to compliance––without meaning to.

Cheap natural gas is flooding the market as environmental regulations take effect and because upgrading aging plants is cost-prohibitive, coal-fired power plants across Kentucky are shutting down, as they are across the country. In Kentucky alone, more than a quarter of the coal-fired plants have already shut down, or are expected to in the next two years.

Last year, the Obama administration released the draft version of the Clean Power Plan, which aims to cut carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and sets emission targets for each state. Kentucky is supposed to reduce emissions 15 percent by 2020––and a total of 18 percent by 2030––from 2012 levels. It's also required to submit a plan showing how it will reach those goals.

With the announced retirements alone, Kentucky will reach the EPA's goal, energy analysts and state officials believe.

"Kentucky could be well in compliance with the targets" provided the state replaced the coal power with clean energy sources, said Amlan Saha, a vice president at M.J. Bradley and Associates, an environmental consulting group. "That’s not the case with many other states."

Coal is a vital part of Kentucky's culture. Despite flagging production numbers and new lows in coal jobs, the attachment to coal runs deep, and the industry continues to maintain a hold over the state’s politics.

Much more at the link.

Natural gas, of course, is not only not remotely close to "clean," but considering the effect of leaked methane on exacerbating global warming, fracked natural gas may be even worse than coal.

Shame on EPA for counting natural gas as "clean" energy.  If EPA counted only genuinely renewable energy as clean, Kentucky would be further from meeting clean power standards than it ever has been.