This week, Congress escalated its attacks on the U.S. EPA, now with both water and air quality controls being the target.
Representatives in the U.S. Congress moved to strip the EPA of its authority to regulate water quality in America this week by moving to transfer the responsibility of enforcing regulation from the federal government to individual states.
The original Clean Water Act of 1972 tried to balance the needs of States and the impacts of mining, energy, and industry development within their borders with the effects that those actions would have on residents and communities living downstream. The EPA was the glue that held individual States accountable to federal standards when impacts crossed State borders.
The new bill proposed in the U.S. Congress this week seeks to give control back to the States and eliminate the EPA's ability to review projects with a national perspective.
Clean Water Cooperative Federalism Act of 2011
The EPA may claim that it is following the law and only ‘assisting’ the States, but the reality is that the agency is strong-arming the States, just as it is muscling in on the jurisdiction of other Federal agencies,” said Rahall (the Bill's sponsor). “By creating wholly new criteria and new timelines for Clean Water Act permits and stubbornly insisting, from on high, that the State’s adhere to them, the EPA is imposing its own will and its own interpretations of water quality standards on the States. It has drawn a line in the sand is daring the States to cross over. [Source]EPA said the bill would significantly undermine the agency's role of overseeing states' establishment and enforcement of water pollution limits and permits. It said the measure would hinder EPA's ability to intervene on behalf of downstream states harmed by pollution coming from a state upstream. This would fundamentally disrupt the balance established by the original Clean Water Act in 1972, a law that carefully constructed complementary roles for EPA, the Corps, and states. [Source]
In a parallel chamber in Congress, representatives are also moving to strip the EPA of its authority to regulate air pollution.
In 2007, the Supreme Court ordered the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases. Since then, business interests have done everything in their power to secure delays in order to push back implementations of regulations that limit toxic emissions from industrial sources. The EPA Regulatory Relief Act of 2011 is simply another one of these delays.
EPA Regulatory Relief Act of 2001
The bill gives federal regulators additional time and guidelines to develop achievable rules governing emissions from industrial, commercial and institutional boilers and incinerators. Several affected industries and educational institutions have testified before the committee this year that the rules as currently proposed would negatively impact U.S. manufacturers, businesses, and universities, hampering job creation and global competitiveness. [Source]
They are proposing to scrap the rules that were finalized in February and give EPA another 15 months to come out with a replacement. Companies would have at least five years, rather than a maximum of three under current law, to comply. Boilers are the nation's second-largest industrial source of mercury after coal-fired power plants, which are also being subjected to new toxic emissions rules. They also release acid gases, lung-irritating soot and cancer-causing dioxins. [Source]
Then, in the middle of all of this, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that citizens do not have the right to sue utilities on the basis that emitted greenhouse gases are a public nuisance; the AEP v. Connecticut appeal came down unanimously in the Supreme Court. The gist of the most recent SCOTUS greenhouse gas ruling rested upon their 2007 decision that gave the EPA authority to regulate greenhouse gases.
AEP v. Connecticut
The Court rules that it is for the Environmental Protection Agency in the first instance, and not the courts, to deal with global warming that could be traced to the release of “greenhouse gases” into the atmosphere. Courts have only a secondary role, the decision stressed. [Source]In explaining why the suit must end, Ginsburg pointed out that the court in 2007 had ruled that the EPA had the authority to regulate greenhouses gases under the Clean Air Act. That decision undercut the need for a separate lawsuit dealing with the same problem, she said. "We have before us, to put it plainly, a 'who decides' question," she said. "The EPA is currently engaged in a rulemaking to decide whether the agency should set limits on emissions from domestic power plants. The Clean Air Act, in our judgment, leaves no room for a parallel track" that would call upon a judge to decide on the need for regulations, she said. [Source]
One has to wonder if the EPA is stripped of its authority to regulate air emissions and water contamination under the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act as is currently being proposed in the U.S. Congress, if citizens will then have the right to sue States, utilities, and industries.
It seems as though the Supreme Court ruling on AEP v. Connecticut pointed to the EPA as the regulator-in-chief. The courts can only act if the EPA does not or is not allowed to. Of course, the pollution and contamination can gets kicked a little further down the road, and once again corporate interests trump individuals' rights.
Of course business wants to be able to freely pollute the air and contaminate the water that the public relies on, but a democratic government is supposed to protect its people from corporate abuse. Who will protect those citizens living downstream if Pennsylvania goes ahead with fracking on the levels they wish? Who will protect those living downstream of uranium mining sites in the West? What happens when coal sludge ponds burst and cross State borders? What happens when the next offshore oil spill off the coast of one State washes onshore in another?
Such bills as are now being proposed in the U.S. Congress that weaken the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act paint a picture of America where States are more like individual entities rather than a part of the Union that creates the United States. Contamination and pollution beyond a State's border become another State's problem; it is a formula for division.
Once again, it is the corporations that win, and the people that lose.
