| W's Tuesday: Break Laws, Poison Americans, Take Nap |
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| Written by Charlie Lawton | |
| Friday, 14 March 2008 | |
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Dear Mr. President: Last Tuesday -- one day before the release of new EPA ozone regulations setting a standard for ozone pollution -- you personally intervened in the agency's decision-making process and ordered that the standards be loosened in a key category. In so doing, you openly engaged in political interference in agency deliberations -- interference which directly contravenes the letter and spirit of the Clean Air Act. That interference, to our minds, constitutes an illegal and openly criminal act. "This is not a weakening of regs or standards, but it was an effort to make the standards consistent," bleated Tony Fratto, your White House Press Secretary. Stephen Johnson, your EPA Administrator, ever willing to fall on his sword for the good of his king, attempted to jump in front of the bullet by taking responsibility for the decision on Friday. He claimed that, "Invoking of the executive order (from the White House) did not deal with the stringency" of the public welfare standard, only the form. "I made the decision on the stringency," he said. How your heart must have swelled to see a formerly good man sacrificing the last shreds of his honor and credibility to protect the last shreds of yours. (If you don't remember what Johnson looks like, you're standing behind him in the above photo as he takes his oath of office.) Never mind that consistency was never quite the point of the public health and public welfare standards, and that no executive order can or should contradict the recommendations of EPA scientists and staff. The new ozone regulations, as you know, have two parts: the public health standard, which specifies a maximum year-round concentration for ozone, and the public welfare standard, which specifies tighter seasonal standards to protect agricultural land, wildlife, and parks. The welfare standard is tighter than the health standard and provides for more stringent protections in seasons where high ozone can damage crops and ecological systems. EPA scientists, health experts, and environmental groups were unanimous in their support for the tighter welfare standards. So we have to ask: why on God's formerly green Earth were you telling the EPA to make the regs consistent? They were never supposed to be in the first place. That's the reason there are two parts! Don't you get it? Of course, the new standards were already compromised to give a little hand up to electric utilities, cement manufacturers, and businesses lobbies representing industries that release pollutants. This also totally contradicts the letter and spirit of the Clean Air Act, which stipulates that the EPA may not take economic concerns into account during its deliberations. Your fingerprints aren't plastered directly on that, but we all know who called that shot, right? Your intervention on Tuesday, however, is of a totally different magnitude. It represents such a clear, brazen overstepping of boundaries that we're almost more insulted by the insult to our collective intelligence than we are by the weakening of standards that would better protect our health and ecosystems. Mr. President, we here at EnviroWonk are flatly disgusted by your total disregard for the recommendations of the EPA's scientists and staff, your contempt for the letter and spirit of a law that we depend on to maintain the quality of the air we breathe, and your openly preferential treatment of business interests at the expense of good sense and good science. For shame, sir. You are a president -- a head of state, a leader of a nation, and the chief executive of a government. Your duties are to all of us -- and to all the laws that we have put in place to govern our society. You are not a lobbyist for industrial interests, and nor are they your primary constituents. Pity it's too late for you to learn that. Sincerely, EnviroWonk Comments (58)
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Yeah, OK, we can be the change that we want to see in the world. But unless powerful people in powerful positions want to be that change as well, nothing's going to change.
So now, finally, there's a place where you can go for news and analysis of politics from an environmental perspective.
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OMB Watch also has a very informative posting on this controversy with additional disclosures at http://www.ombwatch.org/article/articleview/4195.
The President's argument that the two standards should be "consistent" was simply designed to reflect cartoonish consistency with prior decisions by EPA to keep the two standards the same, based upon scientific understanding at the time. Here, EPA's outside scientific experts, internal scientists and even Johnson himself had concluded there needed to be a distinct public welfare standard to guard against the cumulative, seasonal impacts of ozone on forests, national parks, crops etc.
The administration's claim that the President's decision was not based upon the "stringency" of the public welfare standard is equally wrong. Indeed, here's what the White House memo said that justified the President's March 11th decision: the public welfare standard ordered by the President "avoids setting a standard higher or lower than is necessary."
Hmmmm, sure sounds like that is talking about stringency to me. But I gues the sentence did not use the magic word "stringency," so that makes it OK, right?