Curb ideological emissions
Published 12:01 am Sunday, April 10, 2011
Sound environmental stewardship, once a deeply held principle among Republicans, apparently has fallen out of favor in today’s GOP — the congressional wing, at least.
Some Republicans who are fighting hard to weaken the federal Environmental Protection Agency — rejecting science in favor of
politics — seem not even to realize that the EPA was created under a GOP president, Richard Nixon, in 1970. Its first leader, life-long Republican William Ruckelshaus, is among an outnumbered chorus of moderate Republicans who take issue with the right’s current EPA bashing.
In a Washington Post op-ed last month, Ruckelshaus and another former Republican EPA administrator, Christine Todd Whitman, criticized “the virulent attacks on the EPA driven by concern about overregulation.” They recalled why the EPA was created — out of a recognition that pollution “needed to be controlled or America’s public health and environment would deteriorate” — a truth that still holds.
Other fed-up moderates have been less measured in their criticism. Responding to House Republicans’ recent efforts to undercut the EPA’s authority as part of the contentious budget negotiations, the group Republicans for Environmental Protection issued a statement that said failure to pass a budget “is being perpetuated by House Republican leaders who have allowed themselves to be held hostage by theatrical malcontents pushing a radical agenda that has nothing to do with cutting wasteful government spending.”
Indeed, House Republicans last week joined with a handful of Democrats — mostly from coal- and oil-rich states — to throw out EPA’s finding that greenhouse gases threaten the public health and welfare. That scientific finding, enabled by a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court decision directing the agency to rule on the matter, is considered a prelude to regulatory action curbing greenhouse-gas emissions.
Such action is clearly necessary, not only to begin chipping away at carbon dioxide’s effect on climate change, but to provide the economic predictability that can fuel the growth of clean energy industries. The latter, in particular, is a concept conservatives ought to embrace. Instead, congressional Republicans working to perpetuate the emission-rich status quo, giving other nations an edge in leading a new, clean energy economy.
Congressional Republicans should cool the rhetoric, take a breath, and listen to those in their own party who laid the policy foundations for the clean air and water we take for granted today.
Then, perhaps, this ideological aversion to regulation can dissipate a little, yielding to a calmer, rational debate over the proper roles of the EPA and Congress in protecting the environment that sustains us.
