Posted on 01/27/2017 8:46:44 PM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
At the Republican National Convention last summer, the GOP approved a platform that stated: “We propose to shift responsibility for environmental regulation from the federal bureaucracy to the states and to transform the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] into an independent bipartisan commission, similar to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, with structural safeguards against politicized science.” It also says “We will likewise forbid the EPA to regulate carbon dioxide, something never envisioned when Congress passed the Clean Air Act.”
The GOP followed the lead of President Donald Trump, who in a March debate said he would abolish EPA, and in a May speech in North Dakota condemned “the Environmental Protection Agency’s use of totalitarian tactics” that has “denied millions of Americans access to the energy wealth sitting under our feet. This is your treasure, and you – the American People – are entitled to share in the riches.”
Trump and the GOP are saying, finally, what millions of people have been thinking for a long time: EPA has become the cause of, not the solution to, the nation’s major environmental problems. It’s time to end EPA.
A Promising Beginning
In the late 1960s, the United States faced real problems regarding the quality of its air and water, waste disposal, and contamination from mining and agriculture. Pollution crossed borders – the borders between private property as well as between cities, states, and nations – and traditional remedies based on private property rights didn’t seem to be working. The public was overly complacent about the possible threat to their safety.
Many scientists, myself included, lobbied the federal government to form a cabinet-level agency to address these problems. [1] In 1971, EPA was born. During the agency’s first 10 years, Congress passed seven legislative acts to protect the environment, including the Water Pollution Control Act (later renamed the Clean Water Act), Safe Drinking Water Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and the Clean Air Act.
At first, these laws worked well, protecting the environment and the health of our citizens. Problems were identified, measured, exposed, and major investments were made to reduce dangerous emissions and protect the public from exposure to them. EPA and other government agencies regularly report the subsequent dramatic reduction in all the pollutants we originally targeted. By the 1980s, nothing more needed to be done beyond monitoring our continuing success in cleaning up the environment. It was time to declare victory and go home.
EPA Is Now an Obstacle
Beginning around 1981, however, radical Leftists realized they could advance their political agenda by taking over the environmental movement and use it to advocate for ever-more draconian regulations on businesses. Environmentalists allowed this take-over to occur because it brought massive funding from liberal foundations, political power, and prestige. [2]
Politicians realized they could win votes by pandering to the environmental movement, repeating their pseudo-scientific claims, and posing as protectors of nature and the public health. The wind, solar, and ethanol industries saw they could use regulations to handicap competitors or help themselves to public subsidies.
Today, EPA is a captive of activist and special-interest groups. Its regulations have nothing to do with protecting the environment. Its rules account for nearly half of the $2 trillion annual cost of complying with all national regulations in the United States.
In 2008, The Heritage Foundation estimated the costs of EPA’s first proposal to regulate greenhouse gases in the name of fighting global warming were “close to $7 trillion and three million manufacturing jobs lost.” According to Heritage, “the sweep of regulations … could severely affect nearly every major energy-using product from cars to lawnmowers, and a million or more businesses and buildings of all types. And all of this sacrifice is in order to make, at best, a minuscule contribution to an overstated environmental threat.”
President Barack Obama has routinely used EPA to circumvent Congress to impose severe regulations on farmers, ranchers, other private landowners, fisheries, and the energy sector. Just last week, the agency rushed through approval of new fuel efficiency standards for automobiles more than a year ahead of schedule to thwart any attempts by the Trump administration to stop it. Courts and Congress have objected to and tried to limit EPA’s abuses, but without noticeable success. Once a genuine success story, EPA has become the biggest obstacle to further environmental progress.
Replacing EPA
The solution is to return this authority to the states, replacing EPA with a Committee of the Whole of the 50 state environmental protection agencies.
State EPAs already have primary responsibility for the implementation of the nation’s environmental laws and EPA regulations. With more than 30 years of experience, these state agencies are ready to take over management of the nation’s environment.
Accountable to 50 governors and state legislatures, state EPAs are more attuned to real-world needs and trade-offs. Located in 50 state capitols, they are less vulnerable to the Left’s massive beltway lobbying machine.
The Committee would be made up of representatives from each state. EPA could be phased out over five years, which could include a one-year preparation period followed by a four-year program in which 25 percent of the agency’s activities would be passed to the Committee each year.
Seventy-five percent of EPA’s budget could be eliminated and most of the remainder would pay for national research labs. A small administrative structure would allow the states to refine existing environmental laws in a manner more suitable to protecting our environment without thwarting the development of our natural resources and energy supplies.
Benefits of Replacing EPA
The federal budget for environmental protection could be reduced from $8.6 billion to $2 billion or less. Staffing could be reduced from more than 15,000 to 300. The real savings, of course, would be in reduction of the $1 trillion in annual regulatory costs EPA imposes each year.
This reform would produce a second huge benefit by ending the government’s war on affordable energy. EPA is the principal funder and advocate of global warming alarmism, the myth that man-made climate change is a crisis. That movement would end on the day EPA’s doors shut, allowing Congress to return to taxpayers and consumers a “peace dividend” amount to some of the $4 billion a day currently spent world-wide on climate change.
Dismantling EPA is one part of a comprehensive set of reforms, many of them discussed by Trump and referred to in the GOP platform, to lighten the massive weight of government regulations on the American people. The nation needs a pro-energy, pro-environment, and pro-jobs agenda that recognizes the tremendous value of the natural resources under our feet.
While the rest of the world stumbles blindly in the grip of an anti-energy and anti-freedom ideology, the U.S. can march ahead and regain its place as the world’s economic and technological leader.
The nation’s environment is in terrific shape, thanks to early efforts by EPA and more recent efforts by state governments and businesses. The nation’s economy and environment will be even better if the federal government gets out of the way.
The EPA has long outlived its usefulness. Let’s return its powers to the states, where they belong.
Jay H. Lehr, Ph.D., jlehr@heartland.org, is science director of The Heartland Institute and editor of The Alternative Energy and Shale Gas Encyclopedia. (Wiley, 2016).
[1] See, for example, references in various footnotes to my testimony in 1973 on behalf of the Clean Water Act before the Subcommittee on the Environment of the Senate Committee on Commerce, 93d Cong., 1st Sess., (1973), here: Thomas J. Douglas, Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 – History and Critique, 5 B.C. Envtl. Aff. L. Rev. 501 (1976),http://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/ealr/vol5/iss3/5 andhttp://lawdigitalcommons.bc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1892&context=ealr.
[2] This story is told in many books, including Green Rage: Radical Environmentalism and the Unmaking of Civilization by Christopher Manes (1990), Freezing in the Dark: Money, Power, Politics, and the Vast Left Wing Conspiracy by Ron Arnold, R. (2007), and In a Dark Wood: The Fight Over Forests and the Rising Tyranny of Ecology by Alston Chase (1995).
One gallon is not enough. It is silly having to stand in the bathroom waiting for the toilet to fill again so that I can finish with a second flush. You can bet that I curse the EPA and the bureaucrats every time.
Obamacare first. The move as many departments as possible out of D.C. Move them to a blue state like Illinois. Virginia then stays red.
And return this country to we the people!
I am still amazed at how quickly President Trump is moving on things. After the way the media kept saying he was never going to do anything, this has just been amazing.
Best part is they (Prez Trump people) are doing the 'distract the opponent with sound' thing. Throwing out crowd size and keeping the media and DC hacks obsessed with it.
Meanwhile, these executive orders are just spot on. They are doing SO much to bring this country back. Thank God.
Why would you want to do that with the advent of the LED? The CFL’s were not really worthy of consideration because of their ability to contaminate with mercury when broken. And now you can even get fluorescent tube replacements that are LED-based. LED’s now come in multiple color temperatures, are dimmable, and are even more energy efficient than CFLs. Now, a 75watt R-30 or R-40 LED bulb consumes about 11 watts and it lasts for 25,000 hours! The incandescent bulb now has a worthy replacement. We've re-lamped both our homes with LEDs and the reduction in energy use is noticeable.
“We should have a solution other than “move somewhere else”. I was here first, darn it !”
We are with you! We were also here first (we were born here, we didn’t sneak in) and now in our mid-70’s we are not going to move away. If the EPA is left to the states, we will be in for a rough ride here unless the Feds put some serious restrictions on the states. Personally, I’d like to see a very small, very restricted Federal EPA stick around to ride heard on states like CA.
Kill it. Drive a stake through its evil heart.
The EPA is an agency that is at war with the American people.
HUD is another
Makers of toilets have done really positive things with small-tank toilets. I went in to the store asking for a toilet that could flush a basketball shoe, and they sold me one that almost could. We don’t need the epa to reg this though.
You could send your extras to me POF. Wait.. i
might expire ahead of the bulb cache too. Lol
For those of you still looking for them, you can still buy incandescent bulbs at Walmart and have seen them at dollar stores too.
We had to buy a new one 2 years ago. Wish we could get the money back and purchase a toilet that actually has a decent enough flush to clean away what it’s supposed to!
“I worry that some state like CA are already more intrusive and restrictive than the EPA. Not only should we eliminate the EPA, but the Congress or SCOTUS needs to protect the citizens of states from their local government tyranny.”
You and your neighbors have to reign in CA. That is the whole point of limited federal .gov. You can’t say fed is too intrusive when you don’t like what they say and invite intrusion when you favor what they say.
The federal .gov has no business telling any state what to do or not to do that is not expressly delegated in the founding document.
Am fortunate enough to have seriously stocked up on incandescent bulbs 2-years before lights out...Have, at least, 10-years worth left without rationing..
We went full tilt LED, and our power bill is half what it was. No one forced me.
“We went full tilt LED, and our power bill is half what it was. No one forced me.”
The other thing we did was put in NEST “learning” thermostats, smoke/CO Detectors and a front door camera. They are all “internet connected,” so you can go to an app on your smart phone and see that your place isn’t on fire, what temperature the thermostat is set at, and a view of your front porch. And if anyone comes to your door, you get an alert on your phone with a video clip of who’s there. The thermostats “sense” that you aren’t home and lower temp (in winter, raise it in summer), and if you are on your way home, you can adjust the temp before you get there. With the smart thermostats we’ve been saving on our utilities. You can even keep your iPhone next to the bed and change the temp in the middle of the night without having to get up!
See my other comment. my husband has a medical condition where he gets migraines with LEDs or florescent (yes even the new ones). He is basically disabled with them. We CANNOT USE THEM AT ALL!!!
I’ve got a lot of 100W bulbs, but I find I don’t use them as much as the 45/60, and they are running perilously low. Shouldn’t matter. End the ban, bring them back, and I don’t have to hoard a damn legal product because of some nanny state puke with a hot niece.
Time to put EPA's ammo, if any, up for sale.
The same for the IRS and .......
Lol..same here. Very happy about it.
One of our nation’s crony capitalists’ finest moments.
This was driven by GE. Seems incandescent bulbs weren’t profitable enough for GE.
GE’s Immelt is a dyed in the wool fascist.
President Trump needs to tread lightly dealing with people of such low caliber as Immelt.
Fact!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.