Posted on 12/14/2004 8:01:44 PM PST by Torie
Greener Pastures by Gregg Easterbrook
Michael Leavitt announced yesterday that he will leave the Environmental Protection Agency after just 14 months at the EPA's helm and become George W. Bush's secretary of Health and Human Services. ... He is departing because he realized that environmental regulatory reform is currently impossible. Neither the left nor the right will allow it.
[snip]
But under current law, cost-effective environmental protection is often discouraged.
[snip]
On the right, the Republican nut-case faction in the House continues to claim that environmental protection is destroying the economy, though there is zero evidence of this: Pollution has declined as the economy has grown very nicely in the last 20 years. ...
Over on the chardonnay-circuit left, the cherished illusion among Democrats and editorial writers is that George W. Bush is trying to destroy environmental law and engaging in sinister rollbacks of existing legislation. Neither is true, but both claims have proved effective in Bush-bashing and MoveOn-style fundraising. Bush has not rolled back any major environmental law--he couldn't, since Congress has not enacted any major environmental legislation during his presidency!
[snip]
... Bush's Clear Skies legislation [would] make a roughly three-quarters future reduction in smog-forming pollutants from power plants and factories by creating a system of tradable permits. Tradable permits to reduce acid rain, an idea enacted by Congress in 1991, have been spectacularly successful, cutting the problem quickly and cheaply--this is the reason you never hear about acid rain anymore. Bush's idea was to take the concept that worked spectacularly well at cutting acid rain and extend it to all forms of air pollution, except greenhouse gases.
What happened? Democrats, enviros, and editorialists violently denounced Clear Skies; Jeffords basically said he would fight it to the last man; the legislation went nowhere. ... The existing, extremely prescriptive language of the Clean Air Act almost always leads to litigation. ... The Clear Skies trading program would have swept all that away, replacing it with a simple permit-trading system modeled on the acid-rain reduction program, which worked fast and cheaply because it was worded to avoid litigation.
...For reasons of political theater, Democrats and enviros were opposed to a bill to reduce pollution, while Tom DeLay and his nut-case faction continued to claim that environmentalism is ruining the country.
[snip]
And so the waste continues, and the EPA administrator has a miserable job, because he has no discretion to do anything remotely sensible, and is a pin ball of trial lawyer litigation and judicial writs order forcing him to do nonsensical things.
To the Democrat politicos, the juice is in the litigation. Enviromentalism is a gravy train for their trial lawyer constituency. To the enviro-wackos, enviromentalism is a weapon to attack corporations, kill jobs and profits, thereby destroying capitalism.
Thus, "enviromentalism" has nothing to do with the environment.
We are the most powerful guild in the land. We crush all who dare oppose us. We are the king of the hill, which is very well fortified to keep the peasants out.
Not to mention the cauldrons of boiling oil for the supporters of tort reform, I betcha.
If memory serves me correctly, the honorable Mr. Leavitt is
a big time globalist.
In CO in the mid 90s there was a big fight
over a call for a Constitutional Convention.
Mr. Leavitt was the instigator, I believe.
Oh the horror of it all. By the way, Leavitt was governor of Utah, not Colorado, the descendant of this guy that had about 8 wives, give or take, and sired about 40 issue, give or take.
I know he was Gov of Utah but he was the one
trying to get the states to call for a Constitutional
Convention.
CO liberty lovers exposed it and a big battle ensued.
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