By Judith Gayle | Political Waves (the Planet Waves politics blog)
While conservatives are doing just about everything they can think of to stop it, the Environmental Protection Agency is moving ahead aggressively to regulate greenhouse gases, protect the public from health hazards and reverse the sometimes illegal practices of the Bush years. After a slow start and some missteps, EPA administrator Lisa Jackson seems to have turned the agency around.
She got howls and rocks thrown from the left when she began her duties in 2009, continuing the policies of the Bush administration, particularly in regard to mountain-top removal. But now, she’s settled in, proved an aggressive champion of the environment and put science back on the table, something long ignored by the Bushies who considered any environmental protections an assault upon free enterprise.
Jackson admits that it took a while to evaluate the problems and restore the dedicated career employees who had been shunted to the side during Bush’s tenure. Bush was particularly aggressive early on in turning back these protections, proving his complicity with conservative ideology and offering a boon to corporate power grab. Early in the century, that was my first red flag that science was in for a bad ride under the Texas Terror, I just didn’t foresee it being discredited as a liberal ploy to increase government.