Why Is the EPA Out Of Control? Because They Succeeded.

Ever since travel writer Anne Royall regaled early 19th century audiences with tales of environmental destruction in the Kanawha Valley salt works, there has been concern about pollution and destruction.  Ronald Lewis' Transforming the Appalachian Countryside chronicles the effect of the later 1800s timber industry on the landscape, eroded mountains, streams devoid of fish, and other disasters. In 1969 came the seminal environmental event, when pollution in Ohio's Cuyahoga River caught fire.

Modern conservatives blame Richard Nixon for the later sins of the Environmental Protection Agency that he created.  Nixon, however, knew that systematic abuse of the environment had become standard operating procedure in many industries.  This was the problem that the EPA was created to address. The Industrial Revolution brought prosperity, education, higher living standards, and longer lives.  It also set a river on fire.  Nixon created the EPA to reduce pollutants and enforce new environmental standards to encourage conservation and protect the environment. 

And what came of it?  The EPA succeeded.  According to their own statistics, carbon monoxide levels in the air dropped 83 percent from 1980 levels, from 178 million tons to 51 million. Much of the drop in carbon monoxide emissions came between 2001 and 2009, the years of the George W. Bush presidency.  Airborne lead dropped 91 percent. Aggregate emissions of six common pollutants dropped 67 percent.

Percentages and raw numbers dropped even though the US has more people, producing more goods and services, and driving more vehicles than ever. 

So the EPA actually succeeded in its most important primary task.  It brought reasonable standards into being and provided an enforcement mechanism to ensure that the air and water did not harm us.  In any group of people, accidents and even disasters will happen.  But they do not have a serious long term impact because industries generally abide by EPA standards.  

If the story ended here, we'd call it a government success story.  Most people understand, however, that it did not, that the EPA now uses flimsy evidence and bad science to justify destroying industries.  Worse, they work at the behest, as Heritage's Stephen Moore describes, of green energy moguls who have a vested interest in its work.  So-called green energy cannot replace coal, gas, or oil.  It also requires enormous amounts of resources to build and ship which limit their benefit to the environment. 

A lot of politics and money have energized the EPA to attack the cleanest coal mining and power production that has ever been seen anywhere in history.  But why do they also go after farms?  Why, for example, as Delegate Kelli Sobonya said last week, has the EPA gotten so obsessed with limiting "bovine emissions" (that's cow farts to the rest of us.)

Another aspect fuels EPA lunacy.  They succeeded and now the agency has little real justification for crusading.  Going after bogeymen, real or false, gives bureaucrats a sense of purpose.  Secular Saint Georges slaying the mean and nasty pollution dragon, saving the world from global warming, err climate change.  This all sounds like much more fun than a scaled down agency administering reasonable regulations that maintain a successful status quo.  

The EPA achieved its original goal beyond what was likely expected in 1972. It eventually hit a balance between the needs of a dynamic economy and the needs of a protected environment.  Now, to justify itself, it goes out looking for new empires to battle and conquer.

It's human nature to want to matter and have a strong sense of purpose.  But this agency level self-fulfillment should not come at the cost of real jobs, real standards of living, and real lives.

 

Calling Out the Mob

Last winter, as biting winds whipped snow around the federal capital, chilling news on energy was released.  The moratorium on coal fired power plants, combined with a number of forced closures, would force energy prices to rise 70 to 80 percent.  The Obama Administration last week tried to cushion the blow of higher prices with an apocalyptic prediction of climate destruction.

Ignoring Congress, the EPA manufactured a regulatory interpretation that allowed them to force plants to use sequestration technology to capture carbon.  This technology does not even exist.  Enforcing this rule will start shutting down plants whose output was necessary to maintaining power levels in the Northeast during the record cold winter.

This is, of course, done to prevent global warming.

The Heritage Foundation's Stephen Moore and Joel Griffith researched all of the climate claims used as "proof" of climate catastrophe.  Every single weather phenomenon was debunked by the article. Temperatures have neither increased, nor dropped on average in ten years.  Tornadoes do not happen with any increasing frequency.  Hurricanes have actually happened less often.

Moore and Griffith also examined Jimmy Carter's own apocalyptic climate report, predicting oil shortages and starvation in 2000.  None of the fearsome claims made by the scientists of the 1970s ever came to pass.

And they wonder why Americans view politicized science with more skepticism now.

Time For the RNC and Old Big Labor to Have a Sit Down

Big Labor for generations reflexively supported the Democratic Party with financial support and people power.  In the 20th Century, this symbiosis worked well.  It gave their party almost lockdown control of the House of Representatives and almost the same stranglehold on the Senate.

Democrats owned Congress for much of the time between the Great Depression and the 1990s because they supported labor.  They portrayed Big Business as opposing the interests of the working man.  Working men and their supporters lined up to vote for the commoner's party.  Republicans, they reasoned, didn't get the worker.

Workers did not leave the Democratic Party, but the Democrats at the national level left them.  Obama's allegiance to billionaire Big Green businessmen continues to stall a Keystone pipeline that will directly benefit the pipefitters' union among many others.  Before that came the war on coal.  Blue collar voters who once temporarily ditched the Democrats for Reagan, but did not change affiliation, now see the GOP as a permanent home.  Stephen Moore, economic analyst from Heritage Foundation notes that Republicans stand to gain in many currently blue or purple states just as they have in West Virginia.

Moore also says that only two groups oppose Keystone, Democrats who make over $100,000 per year and Democrats with postgraduate degrees.

Certain unions benefit from the new regime.  Service workers and auto workers have reaped huge state based rewards.  Mining and other manufacturing sectors have seen government policy try to drive them from the economic map.

It is high time that the GOP leadership and union bosses like Cecil Roberts have a quiet chat about mutual interests.  They don't have to like each other, but Obama and Green Democrats are the common foe.