EPA Enters Twilight Zone

The Environmental Protection Agency has been in the news lately. In the past that introduction would have been the prelude to a story about a major polluter being brought to trial or the discovery of toxic dumping into a stream. Nowadays it's just one more instance of the Agency itself being sued for preventing environmental protection.

Recent actions include a Supreme Court decision that the EPA cannot shirk its authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, another that it must actually enforce the Clean Air Act mandate that power plants must upgrade their pollution controls when they expand, and most recently a suit filed by the State of California spearheading an effort by seventeen states, demanding that they be granted waivers allowing them to require stricter controls on automobile greenhouse emissions than the EPA wants to enforce. In the last case, EPA Director Stephen Johnson denied a request of a type that has been routinely approved in the past, and despite the findings of his agency's own scientists that the states' proposals were justified.

In our Orwellian Bush World where nothing means what it says this has become commonplace. It's also an indication of how far things have lurched to the Right. The EPA was born on December 2, 1970 when President Richard Nixon, hardly an icon of the Left, signed it into existence. Bipartisan support lasted about ten years, until the Reagan Administration took office. The Agency has been under assault ever since by self-described advocates of freedom, as though the freedom to poison people's air and water was any more of a fundamental right than the freedom to drop arsenic into their coffee.

The Bush Administration realizes that most Americans appreciate their natural wonders and do not want to eat, drink or breathe poison, so their doublespeak machine has outdone itself in inventing names that obscure the real intent of their policies. An initiative to permit greater discharges of mercury into the atmosphere was labelled the Clear Skies Act. Another to accelerate the cutting of old growth trees was styled the Healthy Forests Act. Their park protection plan has cut park protection by 40%.

The President makes the case that the United States cannot afford to invest in supposedly prohibitively expensive environmental controls or it will be unable to compete with foreign countries, especially China. In a strange juxtaposition of word and fact, China now ranks second in the production of solar cells (behind Japan) while the United States has slipped to fourth. The U.S. government spends $1.5 billion a year on renewable energy research while the Chinese government has budgeted $200 billion over the next 15 years. It appears the U.S. may indeed find itself unable to compete, although not in the way in which it expects.

Meanwhile we have in the EPA a federal agency whose professional employees work at futile cross purposes with their politically appointed superiors, and an agency formed to clean up the environment that exerts its power to protect polluters and prevent the enactment of environmental protections. It's a shame Rod Serling is no longer with us. The irony of all this is worthy of a Twilight Zone episode.