Collide-a-scape

Two former EPA administrators (under Republican Administrations) take a trip down memory lane:

The air across our country is appreciably cleaner and healthier as a result of EPA regulation of trucks, buses, automobiles and large industrial sources of air pollution. There are three times the number of cars on the roads today as in 1970, yet they put out a small fraction of the pollution.

Likewise, American waterways have shown marked improvement. Lakes and rivers across the nation have shifted from being public health threats to being sources of drinking water as well as places for fishing and other forms of recreation. Lake Erie was declared dead in 1970 but today supports a multimillion-dollar fishery.

Amid the virulent attacks on the EPA driven by concern about overregulation, it is easy to forget how far we have come in the past 40 years. We should take heart from all this progress and not, as some in Congress have suggested, seek to tear down the agency that the president and Congress created to protect America’s health and environment.

I wonder if Tea Party Republicans would be more receptive if this plea was penned instead by James Watt and Gale Norton.

And you thought the the whole cap-and-trade debate surrounding the U.S. climate bill was already hopelessly politicized. What’s that, you’ve become a bit numbed to it all? How about we throw in a juicy free speech angle to spice things up a bit.

Remember those two EPA lawyers that wrote a critical op-ed of cap-and-trade last weekend in the Washington Post?  They also made the same case in a video posted on YouTube (entitled, “The Huge Mistake”), which EPA is now demanding be removed, according David Roberts at Grist. Wrong move, Roberts points out, for one obvious reason:

When Bush administration NASA officials attempted to monitor and control what scientist James Hansen said to the press, they were rightly criticized. By the same token, even though I think many of Williams & Zabel’s policy arguments are deeply flawed, I can’t see any justification for refusing them the right to communicate honestly about their backgrounds to the public. EPA should back off.

The irony of the EPA’s attempted muzzling doesn’t stop there. In May of 2008, the same two lawyers wrote a similarly critical missive against cap-and-trade in an open letter to Congress.  Guess what, the Bush Administration had no problems with this demonstration of free speech. As Keith Johnson at the WSJ’s Environment Capitol noted at the time, if the muzzle was strapped on for the likes of Hansen,

it apparently can also be removed–like when a chance arises to criticize the climate-change bills in Congress that the administration dislikes.

Never mind the charges of hypocrisy that are sure to be leveled at the Obama Administration if its EPA insists on that video being pulled down. As one commenter at Grist observes

No, the real stupidity by the EPA is that by reacting so, they propel this into greater controversy and publicity.

Too late for that, unless Morano sleeps in on Sundays.

Lost in all this is a larger, perhaps even uglier debate that might soon rear its head, if anyone picks up on the argument Michael Tobis is making, in light of recent events:

Now that Copenhagen is not a big deal anymore, there’s no real rush to produce a bill in the US. Let’s drop Waxman-Markey and its variants, and take our time to try to come up with something that works.

Michael, what are you, a “delayer”?

You have to read this final report just issued by the Interior Department to appreciate the blatant disregard for the West’s air quality demonstrated by the Bush Administration in its final weeks.

First, some background. Late last year, I wrote a piece for High Country News that revealed the blistering critiques EPA’s Rocky Mountain office had sent to Utah BLM for its shoddy (and in many cases, non-existent) air quality analysis of gas drilling projects on federal lands. In essence, the BLM’s standard practice during the Bush Administration was to approve individual gas projects that numbered hundreds or thousands of wells without looking at the cumulative impact to air quality.

What made this especially egregious was the slate of huge drilling projects approved in the waning months of the Administration, which I wrote about here for Mother Jones magazine.

To many, the BLM’s controversial lease auction in Utah around Christmas time (later voided by Interior Secretary Salazar) served as a cruel coda to eight years of untrammeled energy development of western lands. As I also reported for Mother Jones, one distressed BLM manager in Utah unloaded all his pent-up frustration:

What can I say that has not already been said? Just more of the same from a Department of the Interior that has no sense of ethics and no moral compass. It is like we are playing in some reality game show where deceit is just part of the game.

And that’s exactly how it was played right up to Bush’s final days in office. The Interior report released yesterday is largely a rebuke to Utah BLM for the way it circumvented the concerns and advisory role of other federal agencies, such as the National Park Service and EPA, during the pre-auction review phase of those final leases.

Specifically, the Interior report also documents how the Bush Administration tried to ensure that those mounting concerns about air quality could not be acted on even after Bush’s term ended:

On January 15, 2009, a few days before leaving office, Bush Administration appointees representing BLM and the United States Forest Service executed a Memorandum of Understanding which asserted that quantitative air quality analysis would not be “appropriate” when making oil and gas planning decisions, or when undertaking “low-level energy development activity.”

How convenenient. And sleazy.

The riddle of EPA’s reluctance to consider soot a contributor to global warming has befuddled me since I read this story, which I thought made a solid case:

While carbon dioxide may be the No. 1 contributor to rising global temperatures, scientists say, black carbon has emerged as an important No. 2, with recent studies estimating that it is responsible for 18 percent of the planet’s warming, compared with 40 percent for carbon dioxide.

Then my confusion deepened when this odd pairing of politicians called attention to black carbon’s linkage to climate change.

As Roger Pielke Jr., wonders:

So if the science is robust and the political will is there, why would EPA steer away from black carbon as an “easy win” on climate change?

Pielke guesses that EPA has “painted itself into a corner” with its recent global warming endangerment finding:

If black carbon is a pollutant due to its role in global and regional climate change, then as a precedent it opens up the door to a lot of uncomfortable questions and potential actions. For instance, if black carbon is an important forcing that affects the climate system with negative impacts, then why not water vapor emissions from land use, which also has been shown to influence local and regional climates? What about other land use change that alters surface energy budgets, such as albedo changes, irrigation, urbanization, and land clearing? And so on. Black carbon is an inconvenient forcing, and thus for EPA, rather than open up a can of worms, they have decided to follow the tried and true approach of hiding behind uncertainty.

Okay, can Roger Pielke Jr., or someone else then explain why James Inhofe has signed on to the congressional black carbon fact-finding mission? Following Pielke’s logic, is he looking to call EPA’s bluff, or is Inhofe motivated by true concern for the environment in this instance?

Now that this day is here, I can imagine the current EPA Administrator gleefully thinking, in the deepest recesses of her subconscious, “You wanna piece of this…”

Somewhere, Christie Todd Whitman is having a bad flashback.