Posted on 12/03/2016 10:14:14 AM PST by rktman
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began operating 46 years ago after former President Richard Nixon proposed it as a way to address mounting pollution concerns across the country.
EPA celebrated its 46th anniversary Friday, just weeks before President-elect Donald Trump likely takes the agency in a totally different direction compared to the last eight years under President Barack Obama, focusing on clean air and quality instead of global warming.
Not only is Trump looking to roll back Obama-era regulations, the incoming administration reportedly has plans to fundamentally reform major decades-old environmental laws: The Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.
No doubt, Trump will work to repeal the “waters of the United States” rule and the Clean Power Plan rule for power plants. But his handlers suggested the new administration would work with Congress to pursue major legislative changes to stop regulatory overreach.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailycaller.com ...
Very astute observations HiTech. Corn has many uses and by-products- DDG, oil, plastics, CO2 generation, etc. as well as ethanol. This battle with oil will be totally unnecessary if Trump opens up more exploration and we tell the Saudis to cram it. The U.S. can produce it’s own energy now.
Iron law of administrative agencies: they tend to grow by accretion, not just in assets and power but in arrogance.
One day they’re doing Woodsy the Owl commercials, four decades later they are (in my own experience) bullying an elderly widow to have several yards of crawl space soil removed by `specialists’ in HazMat suits, then replaced by `clean soil’ at an expense to her of several thousand dollars because her fuel oil tank spilled a few drops. I fought this for over a year until they went away.
Time to wipe the slate clean. The EPA would be a good start, and template, for addressing other feather-bedding, paper-pushing products of an overweening statist federal government and its state and local counterparts.
Still nuthin’ on .22’s though. LOL! I still got a bunch.
That's wrong. Totally wrong.
Between 1948 and 1970 Congress passed, and Presidents signed, the following laws:
Air
1955: Air Pollution Control Act PL 84-159
1963: Clean Air Act PL 88-206
1965: Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act PL 89-272
1966: Clean Air Act Amendments PL 89-675
1967: Air Quality Act PL 90-148
Water
1948: Water Pollution Control Act PL 80-845
1965: Water Quality Act PL 89-234
1966: Clean Waters Restoration Act PL 89-753
Land
1964: Wilderness Act PL 88-577
1968: Wild and Scenic Rivers Act PL 90-542
1970: Wilderness Act PL 91-504
Endangered species
1946: Fish and Wildlife Coordination Act PL 79-732
1966: Endangered Species Preservation Act PL 89-669
1969: Endangered Species Conservation Act PL 91-135
Hazardous waste
1965: Solid Waste Disposal Act PL 89-272
1970: Resource Recovery Act PL 91-512
All of these laws delegated Congress's lawmaking powers to the President and to the Executive Departments. Bu the time Nixon created the EPA by executive order, attempts to enforce these many laws were occurring in multiple departments, e.g., Justice, Commerce, Agriculture, Interior, Labor, Health Education and Welfare, and bureaucracy was growing iike mad.
Nixon's rationale for an EPA was to consolidate and coordinate all these enforcement activities into a single place, to eliminate waste, duplication of effort, and conflict over the meaning of the laws.
Now, of course, EPA turned into a monster. But the fault (as usual) lies with Congress for passing vague laws and then conferring its SOLE legislative power to unelected officials, thereby getting the best of both worlds: Attack "bureaucrats" at election time, tell aggrieved constituents "there's nothing I can do about it" most of the time.
I was once very interested in abolishing the EPA. But the problem is that, once the EPA is abolished, all the laws it is charged with enforcing will still exist.
Unless the Clean Air Act, the Water Quality Act, and the two Endangered Species Acts are repealed, the problem of the EPA is going to continue to exist in one form or another.
I think it would be an awesome move if Mr. Trump sentenced one of these departments or agencies to death; say Energy, Interior, or Education; as an example for the others.
Thanks for the excellent summary.
As I see it, a big (Yuge!) part of the problem with the EPA as we know it today is pretty much the same problem we have with most of the federal government:
MISSION CREEP.
If it started with the government ernestly trying to protect drinking water and ending acid rain, it ended with the EPA dictating the design of the toilets, faucets and heating stoves we can purchase, and destroying small landowners for diverting rainwater on their own property.
As with almost everything else the federal government does, a prudent amount of oversight and governance is never enough - they always push to build a bigger empire and gain more and more authority and power.
The guiding principle seems to be “If a little bit is just right, too much is even better.”
Congress has the oversight power to reign in power hungry bureaucracies but has been as guilty as the executive in allowing (even aiding) expansion and intrusion into the most minute corners of our daily lives.
Like...they don’t have to come into work any longer
CUZ THERE’S NO BUILDING THERE, ANYMORE...?
“Make it go back to what it was before it was created.”
I have to disagree with you there. The EPA helped clean up a lot of serious environmental messes and did good work with air quality before it became totally politicized by the far-left for their global warming scams as well as becoming an active participant in a lawyer-led shakedown industry.
I remeber as a child in 1969 in Cleveland, Ohio when an oil slick and trash on the Cuyahoga River - polluted from decades of industrial waste - caught fire on a Sunday morning in June near the Republic Steel mill. The fire causing about $100,000 ($700 K today) worth of damage to two railroad bridges. The ‘69 fire was not even the first time that the river burned. Dating back to the beginning of the twentieth century, the river had caught fire on several other occasions.
I grew up in Montana so I never experienced serious air pollution but I remeber watching the news seeing the brown clouds over L.A., New York, Chicago, etc.
Trust me, we don’t want mercury, lead, arsenic, and solid waste in our water or sulfur-dioxide, lead, and tones of soot particulates in our air.
Trump is exactly where I am at wrt EPA. Focus on clean and healthy air and water and to heck with the rest of the nonsense.
“Is it burning as much foreign oil as it saves?”
I see your point. I bought a Ford F150 ecoboost which is a flex fuel engine made to run on 85% ethanol.
We live in a winter climate 6 mo out of the year. The guy I bought it from said never run 85% ethanol. He says it may not start in the winter, starts in general may be poor, and it will give surprisingly low fuel economy. The owners manual says essentially the same thing.
Don’t get me going on small engines.
Ethanol is a joke. It’s a shame we all must suffer so some Iowa farmers can get rich.
“Including its demise. “
There are epa state offices too. I ran a small water company for 30, and had to deal with the Ohio epa. Pricks! All of them!
The EPA need some serious your form and one critical aspect. The EPA should no longer be able to us its own lawyers to defend against lawsuits from environmental organizations because they have been losing them on purpose in order to get more regulatory power. The EPA even funds the very environmental groups that sue them through grants. The layers defending the EPA need to be a contracted group of independant lawyers that are incentivized to win. If they win they get paid well in bonuses and when they lose they can get by on their salaries.
The Epa and Obama have been engaging in is what is called “lawfare,” a portmanteau of “lawsuit” and “warfare,” a process in which administration allies sue the government in order to achieve a policy objective. In this case the legal proceedings were not unwelcome. Lawfare typically involves what amounts to “hard sell” or high pressure sales tactics. On a contrived, expedited timeline based on a false claim that action is urgently needed, the administration connived with green groups in a “sue-and-settle” arrangement that advanced the groups’ objectives. In the process, the EPA excluded “other interested parties and the public and short-circuits a more deliberate rulemaking process.
See: http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/259684/crushing-poor-middle-class-epa-matthew-vadum
Sohio’s giant refinery was in The Flats.
Very good point.
Why the hell does EPA need armed units?
Scuse me. Heavily armed units?
EPA are simple gangsters.
Can you rollback the water heater law. Asanine law that effects small spaces.
My first change would be that all scientific studies paid for with public money must include the data sets that are used in the study, and any formulas and programming code used to manipulate the data. This alone would wipe out most junk science.
No, but we can start with managing navigable mud puddles measuring 2 feet across and about 3 inches deep. Would that help? LOL!
“Abolish the EPA now!!!”
I’m NOT in favor of this. The EPA was born in the era where a river caught on fire and lakes and rivers were dying or dead. No one ever thought Lake Erie would EVER come back. If there was no EPA the US would look like the former USSR now, with large toxic wastelands and a life expectancy at least 15 years less than ours. No one wants that.
But the EPA needs to be cleaned out of nuts and scaled back to its original mission and budget, maybe at late 1970’s levels.
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