“I think there is room for the establishment of some reasonable standards that would be administered by an agency - I’m old enough to remember...”
THAT NEVER HAPPENED. LOL. Just kidding. While I understand the anger at EPS, the people that think businesses would use scrubbers, cars would use catalytic converters, and water would be sanitized prior to discharge without laws in place are NUTS. The first company that takes catalytic converters off its cars gets a competitive advantage, and it’s game-over. In fact, if all of the pollution controls were removed from cars, their price would drop by thousands. Sounds good, until you’ve had the experience of driving through air so dirty (in an underground parking garage) that your engine couldn’t even keep running (much less you breathing normally).
Will states step up? Maybe. But same thing, if one state, like Texas says no regulations...then business goes there and other states are forced to cut way back on their regs - and we’re back to pre-EPA.
So, I like Newt’s approach. Rip out the old EPA and start over from scratch, with new people and a clear mission to HELP BUSINESS, while still having reasonable laws to keep the air, water, and ground clean.
Starting over from scratch with ALL agencies would probably be a good idea. They have become too ideological (suchas the EPA with its greenie global-warming carbon-overload lunacy) and too non-responsive and too far beyond either oversight or control.
It is very true that there are no market forces that would make a company stop dumping its chemical waste into the nearest river if it could get away with it. In fact, one of the reasons that China is so “competitive” is that it has absolutely no environmental standards and the rivers and land throughout most of China have become toxic dumps. So somebody somewhere has to make sure that there are some standards and some enforcement power...but as you say, the goal has got to be to permit business, permit production, but protect people from the harmful effects of unrestricted activities.
The problem now is that the EPA is not only anti-business, it’s anti-people, and is aiming for the ultimate greenie paradise of no human beings or forcing human beings back to the cave.
Agencies need public oversight, public policy setting, and should not become either enforcement arms of weirdness from the Executive Branch or independent operators taken over by ideologues.