Clean Air Action Center – Help Protect the Clean Air Act
Friday, February 18, 2011
Members of Congress are trying to prevent the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from doing its job and regulating greenhouse gases through the Clean Air Act. Weakening the Clean Air Act means undermining a program that has saved hundreds of thousands of lives and successfully protected the air we breathe for decades. Every dollar invested in Clean Air Act safeguards has returned at least $30 in economic benefit and savings. Please take action to help protect the Clean Air Act.
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Learn More:
Representatives’ Letter of Support to Speaker Boehner to Uphold the Clean Air Act (signed by 155 Congresspeople)
Senators introduce resolution to uphold the Clean Air Act
The Hill: EPA Report Says Clean Air Act will Save 230,000 Lives and Add $2 Trillion to Economy
EPA Admnistrator Lisa Jackson on the Clean Air Act’s Track Record
Reuters: Most Americans Oppose Restrictions on EPA, Poll Finds
USA Today: Polls Show Americans Back EPA and Clean Energy
New York Times: The Bush Administration EPA said it had no choice but to reguate greenhouse gases
Clean Air Act Benefits – Past, Present and Future
David Durenberger: Don’t undercut Clean Air Act
As a Republican U.S. senator from Minnesota, I worked to craft a bipartisan law to strengthen the Clean Air Act in 1990.
President George H.W. Bush led efforts to ensure a strong bill, and in the end 89 senators voted to pass it.
Now, more than 20 years later, Republicans and Democrats in Washington are working to roll back our progress.
The Clean Air Act is one of the great public-health achievements of American history — especially for kids.
The act has prevented more than 18 million child respiratory illnesses and 300,000 premature deaths, and has dramatically reduced the number of children with IQs below 70 by taking lead out of gasoline.
Cutting mercury, soot, smog, carbon dioxide and dioxins means fewer Americans suffer from asthma attacks and respiratory diseases. Further, it will prevent more than 250 million skin cancer cases by 2075 by phasing out ozone-depleting chemicals.
When we passed the sweeping Clean Air Act amendments in 1990, we sought to ensure that the Environmental Protection Agency had the tools to tackle new and emerging air pollution problems.
Today, the EPA is in the process of acting on recent scientific findings to update and modernize air pollution standards as we envisioned over two decades ago.
To this day, I remember the passage of the Clean Air Act as a model for the way national policy should be made where there are a variety of economic, regional and ideological forces at work to challenge its effectiveness as law.
The cooperation between President Bush and the Democratic leadership of the Senate enabled us to move toward practical, realistic and economically feasible health standards and implementation deadlines.
It enabled the Senate to withstand pressures from the House to increase the regulatory pressure. I can’t imagine today anyone wanting to undo an effort that was so fair and so effective.
My understanding of recent public opinion is that Americans — Democrats, independents and Republicans — all support a strong Clean Air Act. This Congress is out of step with both public opinion and history.
David Durenberger represented Minnesota in the U.S. Senate from 1978-1995 and was a member of the conference committee that crafted the Clean Air Act amendments in 1990.
Source: Twin City Star Tribune
Attacks on the Clean Air Act:
Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) introduced the “Defending America’s Affordable Energy and Jobs Act” (S. 228). The bill would prohibit federal agencies from promulgating or enforcing regulations to control greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, taking any action relating to the climate effects of GHG emissions, or taking into consideration the climate effects of GHG emissions in implementing any law. The bill would also nullify all rules and actions previously taken by federal agencies to regulate GHG emissions.
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) and Rep. Ed Whitfield (R-KY), Chairman of the Energy and Power Subcommittee, circulated a draft version of the “Energy Tax Prevention Act.” Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) is supporting a similar proposal in the Senate. The draft legislation would amend the Clean Air Act to eliminate EPA’s authority to regulate GHG emissions due to their climate change effects. The draft would also repeal EPA’s finding that GHG emissions endanger public health and welfare and other actions EPA has taken to facilitate the regulation of GHG emissions under the Clean Air Act. The draft bill is available at http://republicans.energycommerce.house.gov/Media/file/PDFs/GG_01_xml.pdf .
Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) reintroduced his “EPA Stationary Source Regulations Suspension Act” (S. 231), which would suspend EPA regulation of stationary sources of GHG emissions under the Clean Air Act for two years following enactment. Six Democrats co-sponsored the bill: Sens. Kent Conrad (ND), Tim Johnson (SD), Joe Manchin (WV), Claire McCaskill (MO), Ben Nelson (NE), and Jim Webb (VA).
(Source: VNF.com)
A siege against the EPA and environmental progress
By William D. Ruckelshaus and Christine Todd Whitman, Thursday, March 24, 7:52 PM
How soon we forget.
In 1970, speaking from badly polluted Los Angeles, Bob Hope cracked, “I don’t trust air I can’t see.” Most Americans could see too much of their air. So they demanded that Congress and the president do something about it.
Today the agency President Richard Nixon created in response to the public outcry over visible air pollution and flammable rivers is under siege. The Senate is poised to vote on a bill that would, for the first time, “disapprove” of a scientifically based finding, in this case that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. This finding was extensively reviewed by officials in the administrations of presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. It was finalized by the Environmental Protection Agency in response to a 2007 Supreme Court decision that greenhouse gases fit within the Clean Air Act definition of air pollutants.
As former administrators of the EPA, both under Republican presidents, we have observed firsthand rapid changes in scientific knowledge concerning the dangers posed by particular pollutants, including lead additives in gasoline, benzene and the impact of contaminants on our drinking-water supply. In each of these cases, the authority of our major environmental statutes was essential to protect public health and the most vulnerable members of our society, even in the face of remaining scientific debate.
Earlier this year, the House of Representatives approved a bill that would cut the EPA’s budget by nearly a third and in certain areas impede its ability to protect our air and water.
The EPA was created out of recognition that pollution — largely an unwanted side effect of an increasingly industrialized society — needed to be controlled or America’s public health and environment would deteriorate. The public called on our national government to step in and halt what the states could not or would not do.
As the EPA was being established, Congress passed the Clean Air Act in a burst of nonpartisan agreement: 73 to 0 in the Senate and 374 to 1 in the House.
During the 1970s, many other laws were passed to deal with air and water pollution, drinking-water contamination, radiation, solid waste, pesticides and toxic substances. Sixteen major pieces of legislation were enacted to address aspects of industrial, municipal or human activity that were threatening public health or the environment. Most were passed by a Democrat-controlled Congress and signed into law by a Republican president, and the votes were seldom close.
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.
It has taken four decades to put in place the infrastructure to ensure that pollution is controlled through limitations on corporate, municipal and individual conduct. Dismantle that infrastructure today, and a new one would have to be created tomorrow at great expense and at great sacrifice to America’s public health and environment. The American public will not long stand for an end to regulations that have protected their health and quality of life.
Our country needs today what it needed in 1970: a strong, self-confident, scientifically driven, transparent, fair and responsible EPA. Congress should help America achieve that. It should do so not with lowered sights but lowered voices that will result in an EPA fully capable of helping fashion a prosperous, healthy America whose environment continues to improve.
William D. Ruckelshaus was administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency from 1970 to 1973 and 1983 to 1985. Christine Todd Whitman, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, was EPA administrator from 2001 to 2003.
© 2011 The Washington Post Company
