New York Times "Room For Debate" Blog -- August 25, 2011 What if Republicans Closed the E.P.A.? Many of the G.O.P. presidential candidates want to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency. What's the alternative to it? %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Chip Jacobs -- No E.P.A.? Welcome Back Smog Updated August 25, 2011, 03:30 PM Chip Jacobs is a freelance writer and co-author of "Smogtown: the Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles." In national politics, California may be seen as Exhibit A for over-regulating the environment. But anyone making that argument must ignore what the state was like before the Environmental Protection Agency. Its rules and enforcement have made California a livable, thriving state. Now, if you’re a Republican presidential candidate irate about America’s wheezy economy, it’s easy to go Red Queen and call for guillotining the E.P.A. Scapegoating regulators as job-killing obstructionists can pump up the faithful, but it doesn’t reflect well on America’s environmental maturity. None of the White House hopefuls mention the expected $2 trillion in health and environmental benefits from the Clean Air Act by 2020. Few of the greenhouse skeptics, in fact, even broach fresh air at all, perhaps because they hail from states where it was never toxic. It’s actually the E.P.A.’s cautiousness, and not over-zealotry, where it has taken its lumps here in California. So the next time Michele Bachmann promises to dissolve the Nixon-created E.P.A., perhaps she should do it in Burbank, northwest of downtown Los Angeles. The teeming suburb once was home to the defense contractor Lockheed and other industrial behemoths. When they packed up, however, they left dangerous contaminants behind. Thankfully, the E.P.A. declared it a Superfund site and ordered filtration systems built. Because Burbank and adjoining Los Angeles and Glendale partly depend on local aquifers, hundreds of thousands of people were protected from carcinogenic water that might’ve wrecked their lives. Heavy industry once polluted willy-nilly in California, until it was chastened by the big gun known as the E.P.A. Since the 1980s, the agency has hastened dozens of other cleanups in California, from leaching chemicals at Bay Area military sites to polluted groundwater in the San Gabriel Valley. While anti-regulatory politicians like to mock California for its environmental zeal, it still boasts the world’s eighth-largest economy. It’s actually the E.P.A.’s cautiousness, and not over-zealotry, where it has taken its lumps here in California. There’s still, for instance, no national health standard for chromium-six, the solvent that Erin Brockovich crusaded against in remote Hinkley, Calif. The upshot? Susceptible people lack a guardian with regulatory brawn, and state officials are no match for corporate lobbyists. Imagining a California without an E.P.A. is visualizing a landscape where acrid smog returns, compromised aquifers are unusable and only the suicidal would live near a factory. Better to have an inconsistent guardian than none at all, no matter the campaign bravado. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Jonathan Adler -- Fixing, Not Ending, Regulation Updated August 25, 2011, 03:30 PM Jonathan H. Adler is a professor of law and the director of the Center for Business Law and Regulation at the Case Western Reserve University School of Law, where he teaches several environmental and regulatory courses. There’s plenty not to like about contemporary environmental regulation. Most of today’s regulatory infrastructure was erected decades ago, and it has not aged well. Federal laws designed to control the nation’s heaviest polluters and maintain regional air quality are a poor fit for the broader environmental problems of today. Yet opposing the Environmental Protection Agency, by itself, is not a serious environmental policy. If Republican candidates are serious about reducing regulatory burdens while maintaining the nation’s historic commitment to environmental conservation, they need to articulate an alternative environmental vision more consonant with conservative values. What would an alternative environmental vision look like? It would have to marry traditional conservative commitments to property rights and limited government with a genuine concern for environmental conservation. It would embrace technological innovation and ecological entrepreneurship and comprehend that one-size-fits-all approaches rarely fit much of the country very well. It would recognize that the same federal government that enforces environmental protections often subsidizes and encourages the very environmental degradation that regulatory programs are designed to prevent. It would also understand that well-intentioned environmental regulations are often themselves an obstacle to environmental progress. Republican candidates need to articulate an alternative environmental vision more consonant with conservative values. A good place to start would be targeting environmentally harmful subsidies, such as those for ethanol and polluting industries, and identifying regulatory requirements that penalize conservation and frustrate the development and deployment of cleaner technologies. Another useful step would be to create an ecological waiver process, through which states and localities could seek relief from prescriptive requirements. Such a process was essential to welfare reform and could facilitate meaningful environmental reforms as well. Improving environmental quality does not require the maintenance of a massive centralized, regulatory bureaucracy in Washington, but restoring rationality to environmental policy is not as simple as shuttering the E.P.A. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Rick Shenkman -- Dismantling an Agency Isn't Easy Updated August 25, 2011, 04:14 PM Rick Shenkman is the publisher of the History News Network and author of "Just How Stupid Are We?: Facing the Truth About the American Voter." Not even Ronald Reagan, patron saint of the conservative movement, attempted to abolish the E.P.A. — and with good reason. There was an easier way to sabotage environmental regulations, which was after all the goal. It was to put deregulators in charge of the agency and then cut its budget. The first year of his administration, E.P.A. enforcement actions referred to the Justice Department fell by 69 percent. Only a scandal involving one Anne Gorsuch Burford, the now forgotten administrator of the agency, prevented its wholesale dismantling just a decade after it was established by (surprise!) Richard Nixon. Republicans created the E.P.A. to increase efficiency. Now they want to abolish it for the same reason. Nixon had roared into Washington to cleanse the Augean stables to the cheers of conservatives hostile to big government. Alas, for their sake, he turned out to be a stealth happy regulator, helping establish, in addition to the E.P.A., the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Office of Consumer Affairs, among other initiatives. Why was Nixon persuaded to establish the E.P.A.? Like the leading lights of the progressive movement, he was appalled by government inefficiency. The E.P.A. nicely consolidated functions that previously had been the responsibility of 44 agencies and 9 departments. (In the topsy-turvy world of G.O.P. politics, it is now claimed that abolishing the E.P.A. will enhance government efficiency. The claim on behalf of one bill introduced this spring is that consolidating the departments of energy and the E.P.A. will save a “staggering” $3 billion the first year alone.) Ten years after its founding, the E.P.A. had become so much a fixture in Washington that Reagan never considered abolishing it outright. Only the Energy Department, established just a few years earlier by Jimmy Carter, was slated for abolition, and it survived. In Reagan’s diary is a curious passage in which he brags that “I promised to do away with the Energy Dept. Jim Edwards (Sec.) has carried this out.” This entry is recorded on Page 56. Some 617 pages and seven years later, the Energy Department is apparently still in existence as Reagan bemoans the request of bureaucrats for a $21 million increase in its budget. Moral of this story: Getting rid of departments ain’t easy. There is another entry in Reagan’s diary that caught my eye as I was researching his record. It is the entry from Wednesday, March 16, 1983. Reagan notes in passing that he “dropped in on a meeting with several dept. heads from the E.P.A.” following the resignation of Anne Gorsuch Burford, who had been cited for contempt of Congress and would soon be indicted. Reagan continued: “We’re trying to boost their morale.” The statement fascinates. Was the intention to buck them up so that they could continue writing new regulations? Or was it to bolster their spirits as they unwrote regulations? The latter is more likely. When people hostile to government are put in charge, it’s seldom to make government more efficient, no matter what they say. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Marlo Lewis Jr. -- Bureaucrats Have Gone Rogue Updated August 25, 2011, 03:31 PM Marlo Lewis Jr. is a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. G.O.P. presidential candidates should emphasize that reining in the E.P.A. is a constitutional imperative. Yes, Americans are worried about jobs and the economy, but arguing from constitutional principle immediately puts you on the moral high ground. Which constitutional precepts are relevant here? Only the people’s representatives, not non-elected bureaucrats, should have the power to decide national policy. Legislative intent, not semantic cleverness, should determine the extent of an agency’s power. No one should be judge of his own cause. Republican candidates should work to rein in the E.P.A., making sure it follows Congress's intent. The E.P.A. today is legislating climate policy under the guise of implementing a statute, the Clean Air Act, enacted in 1970, years before global warming was even a gleam in Al Gore’s eye. This is an egregious breach of the separation of powers. The claim that Congress gave E.P.A. such expansive powers in 1970 but just forgot to tell anybody is absurd. G.O.P. presidential hopefuls should support the Energy Tax Prevention Act, which would overturn most of the E.P.A.’s greenhouse gas regulations. How unreasonable, though, that Congress must pass a law to stop the E.P.A. from implementing policies Congress never voted on or approved. If a rule would have a major impact on society, or would make a major change in public policy, the rule should not take effect until proponents first persuade Congress to approve it. The E.P.A.’s power grab is only the most extreme example of a larger malady: regulation without representation. Today, agencies not only develop regulatory proposals, but also enact the rules, based on analyses they themselves conduct. This is too much power to vest in officials not accountable to the public at the ballot box. G.O.P. presidential contenders should thus also support the Reins Act, which would restore the separation of powers by explicitly making Congress responsible for regulatory decisions. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Peter Lehner -- A Cop on the Beat Updated August 25, 2011, 03:31 PM Peter Lehner is the executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council and author of "In Deep Water: The Anatomy of a Disaster, the Fate of the Gulf, and How to End Our Oil Addiction." Imagine a country where air was so polluted it destroyed forests, made children sick and caused nearly 200,000 premature deaths a year, a place where industrial waste poisoned vast reaches of land and rivers were so contaminated they literally caught fire. The E.P.A. has transformed our nation, strengthened our economy and improved our lives beyond measure. That was the United States four decades ago, when President Richard Nixon laid out the case for creating the Environmental Protection Agency. "We can choose to debase the physical environment in which we live, and with it the human society that depends on that environment," said Nixon, "or we can choose to come to terms with nature, to make amends for the past, and build the basis for a balanced and responsible future." We made our choice, to create a single agency to safeguard public health, protect our land, water and air, and hold polluters to account. The results have transformed our nation, strengthened our economy and improved our lives beyond measure. And the cost? The E.P.A. will spend about $10 billion this year, less than 0.3 percent of federal spending. Because of the E.P.A.'s vital work, we no longer dump raw sewage. We've cleaned up municipal waste. We've restored thousands of acres of ruined brownfields, stopped our cars from belching 200,000 tons a year of lead into the air, made acid rain a thing of the past, dramatically reduced toxic chemical use and collected billions of dollars in reparations from corporate polluters. And our economy is stronger for it. Improvements in air quality alone saved the country $1.3 trillion last year in public health costs and worker productivity. Safeguarding our environment employs nearly 1.7 million Americans. And we're leaders in the global market – worth $800 billion a year - for equipment that helps to clean and monitor air, water and lands. Forty years after its creation, the E.P.A. still leads the way toward a balanced and responsible future, safeguarding our health, protecting our environment and supporting American jobs.