One year ago today, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency that the Clean Air Act covers greenhouse gases that endanger public health. Thus, it would be the right — and presumably the obligation — of the EPA to monitor automobile emissions standards. Although the agency concluded these pollutants do endanger human health, EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson basically said last week that he would ignore the findings. Instead he called for more discussion before the Clean Air Act would be regulated.
Mr. Johnson, the head of the nation’s authority on environmental health research, is questioning the health impacts of pollution. Alas, it is no longer April Fools’ Day, and telling the country that we need another debate about global warming isn’t funny in the slightest.
Sadly, this is indicative of the growing irrelevance of the EPA. Highly politicized and underfunded, it has little power to enforce compliance. There is a disconnect between what the EPA is supposed to do and what it is actually doing, especially under President George Bush’s watch. The EPA shouldn’t be irrelevant in the fight for improved environmental health, but it will certainly continue to be so until it is dramatically reformed.
Take automotive emission standards, for example. The Bush administration directed the EPA last year to deny a waiver to California that would have forced it to conform to the national regulations. As reported in The New York Times, Mr. Johnson said at the time the federal government was “moving forward with a … national solution.” Except we were not moving forward. Rather, the EPA forced California to take a step back and prevented the state from demanding higher fuel efficiency standards than the national minimum. The EPA, through political maneuvering, effectively blocked meaningful environmental progress.
The EPA has become nothing more than a dummy group, with the president acting as ventriloquist. By not demanding progressive standards while stifling those who have, the organization is basically saying that protecting the environment and our health is antithetical to everything it stands for.
And, as any good puppet, the EPA has been whittled down to the point where it moves only when someone forcefully pulls its strings. For instance, it is the EPA’s duty to monitor compliance with the Clean Air Act. Yet, right here in Madison, the travesty of the Charter Street coal plant remained unchanged and unnoticed until the Sierra Club lawsuit woke up the EPA. Through the Clean Air Act of 1970, Congress provisioned that any citizen could sue to compel the EPA to fulfill the act’s mandates. But why should it wait until someone sues? What does that say about the integrity of this “watchdog” agency?
I’m sure the EPA actually does have good intentions and truly does want to protect our environmental health. However, it’s faced with a dire lack of funding and executive power. We can’t expect it to monitor the entire nation or enforce compliance with regulations when it is physically impossible to do so.
As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported March 29, one of the EPA’s oversight panels has not been funded since last August because it ran out of money. This chemical evaluation program was supposed to assess potentially harmful compounds in commercial products, especially for children. Now that this entity has no money, not only can it not do anything to protect health, but no other government agency has picked up the slack. That’s right: No one is on the lookout for these chemicals that could harm children.
But if it is any consolation, it’s not as if the EPA was doing a stellar job while the panel was being funded, either. What was supposed to happen was that if the agency saw a chemical as being potentially harmful, it asked the companies that manufactured it to do more testing. However, Ward Penberthy, associate director of the EPA’s Chemical Control Division admitted to the Journal Sentinel “We can’t make [the corporations] do anything.” Energy companies like BP Amoco and ExxonMobil, when asked to test how a chemical could adversely affect the developing brain basically said, no, we don’t feel like giving the EPA more information — so we won’t.
And the EPA can do nothing about it. It has no police power to enforce its regulations. The regulations have basically devolved into meaningless suggestions from the federal government. And monitoring them is both time-consuming and costly. If companies would voluntarily cooperate and improve themselves, it would be great. But they don’t. It’s not in the industry’s best interests to cooperate willingly, at least not as long as they know there won’t be repercussions if they don’t.
The EPA is an important entity, and it does many great things for our nation’s environmental health. However, it will continue to be ignored and subverted unless it has both respect and adequate resources. We can’t afford for it to be a dummy any longer. There is a reason the EPA exists, but political maneuvering, a lack of funding and a lack of police power has hindered its mission. Only with significant reform can it effectively do its job.
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Suchita Shah ([email protected]) is a senior studying neurobiology.
