Environmental protection in the US is under attack from extremist Tea Partiers backed by big business.
A backlash by wealthy business owners and conservative activists against President Obama’s green agenda has snowballed into the greatest assault on environmental protection that America has ever seen.
"This is almost unprecedented in environmental history, in that they are moving in so many directions and in so many ways to effect the same results that even if they are only partly successful, it will still have a serious outcome,"said Bill Becker, secretary of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies, which monitors air pollution.
The Guardian points out the green agenda is under assault on multiple fronts, from eliminating community funding for recycling in Wisconsin to loosening regulations governing coal mining in West Virginia.
By now you know Republicans have introduced bills in the House and Senate that would permanently strip the EPA of its power to act on climate change.
Although the bill wouldn’t touch the new vehicle mileage standards that increase their efficiency and reduce US demand for oil, it would prevent any further reductions after 2016, when the measure sunsets.
The Republican budget proposal, currently being debated, reserves the very biggest cut of any government agency for the EPA – $3 billion, or 30% of its budget.
Those cuts would be felt on the ground across the US. The EPA wouldn’t be able to protect salmon in San Francisco Bay, treat sewage entering Florida’s lakes, weaken rules for mercury pollution from cement kilns, and open the door to wolf hunts. $900 million from the sale of oil leases would be directed away from maintaining state parks.
Environmental groups say the cuts go far deeper than any enacted under George Bush, who was notorious for blocking action on global warming and for a more general opposition to government regulation of industry.
A number of Democratic senators are quietly complaining that – without a strong push back from Obama – the anti-environment campaign is in danger of doing lasting damage, says The Guardian.
Last week, New Hampshire voted to leave the regional greenhouse gas reduction initiative. "Neither man nor cow is responsible for global warming," said state Republican Shawn Jasper.
Tea Party governors in New Mexico and Maine have moved to reverse air and water pollution laws, and efforts to promote renewable energy. In Pennsylvania, authorities have removed restrictions on natural gas drilling in state parks.
Notorious Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker, is cutting off funds for local recycling programs. City councils say they’ll have to stop offering curbside recycling pick-up.
"People are using the budget debate and the financial situation as cover to attack core environmental protections," said Joe Mendelson, global warming policy director for the National Wildlife Federation. "They are using the budget process as a costume to hide what they are doing – which is a full-on assault against our fundamental environmental protections."
Much of the momentum for the anti-environment agenda was provided by the success of extremist Tea Party candidates in last November’s elections.
"Everything is about the next elections," said Doug Scott, director of the Illinois EPA. "You have people voting against things they supported for years because it is on the talking points now."
Then there was the large infusion of cash from the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. The Kochs bankrolled the Tea Party group, Americans for Prosperity, which has said it spent $40 million in the elections. Koch Industries and its employees donated $2.2 million to candidates in last year’s elections, more than corporations like Exxon Mobil, according to the Centre for Responsive Politics.
Their interest has not waned. Americans for Prosperity sees cutting environmental regulation – especially that related to climate change, which would cost the oil industry – as a key area.
"Energy policy is one of our top three priorities," said Phil Kerpen, policy director of Americans for Prosperity. "For me personally it’s a top concern and major focus."
He added: "It is not that we are totally against environmental protection but in the hierarchy of values, it has taken a back seat."
© 2011 The Guardian
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Money for the top .01 % is far more important than social values in the world today, as the “justice” system has been replaced by the word manipulating “legal system”. The future will become more violent and the “average” people will be the one’s to suffer most, unless there is rapid change in society’s values. The longer it takes the more violent it will be.
It is no coincidence that the least polluted nations on earth are the richest nations. It is the creation of wealth that has allowed these nations the luxury of spending billions of tax dollars each year to clean-up and regulate their environments. Conversely, it is the poorest nations on earth that are the most polluted as they lack the resources to spend significant sums on anything but feeding and housing their citizens.
The effort to reign in the leftists that now control so much of our government, including the EPA, is maybe the best thing we can do to insure the quality of our environment in the future. The war on so-called “fossil fuel” and “greenhouse gases”, fueled by the Anthropogenic Global Warming fraud, is slowly destroying our standard of living by making America less competitive and burdening our citizens with artificially high energy costs eroding their purchasing power and their employment base. By attacking the mechanisms of wealth creation with junk and psuedo-science, the global leftists are creating a world where no nation will have the financial health required to make protecting the environment anything but an afterthought.
By the way, did you know that the amount of co2 that human activity adds to the atmosphere is less than .00019 (nineteen-one-thousanths of one percent) of the total of all atmospheric gases.
The idea that man’s carbon output is causing, or even contributing to planetary warming is laughable. Please go do some research for yourselves, the truth is sobering.
ACtually its the most socialist that are the worst polluters.. not the poorest…
the top 10 most polluted environements are all in china and russia, the place the left is copying!!!
go ahead. look it up… areas larger than states that were dumping grounds for tailings and all kinds of stuff…
check out their nickel manufacturing…
people have no rights there, and so there is no reason to protect or make any well being for them. though there is plenty of reason to creat such an image of such, so people here can pretend to be smart by instituting state slavery as an answer.
my family is ex soviet (latvia).
so go ahead… tell me it isnt state slavery
slaves have no right to anything, let alone clean things…
When the watermelons squeal, we know we are winning.
Obama didn’t even mention the climate change crisis in his State of the Union Address and IPCC funding has been pulled by the Republican voted majority. Carbon markets have collapsed and world governments have walked away from the scientific warnings of unstoppable warming.
So why are these scientists not marching in the streets about this crisis and why are they not at least acting like this is as planetary emergency? Shouldn’t they be on CNN and Oprha? Why is the world not treating this CO2 climate crisis like the emergency the UN says it is?
I’ve never felt comfortable telling our children that CO2 is going to cause out of control warming for them or their children so should we reconsider this whole issue of CO2 causing pollution still?
What now? Is the climate change movement sustainable for another 25 years?