Dear Friend and Reader:
I read somewhere on this site, “the future is a moving target.” Nothing could be more true than with current events in environmental policy in Washington, D.C.
Monday, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published its policy that greenhouse gases are a public health threat. This means the government, through the EPA, can begin to act to curb the effects of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act without long debate in Congress over whether or not climate change does exist or that greenhouse gases: methane, carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride — are dangerous to your health. Furthermore, yesterday Congress rejected calls to limit the EPA’s role in defining policy to curb greenhouse gas emissions. This is quite a turnaround from Congress six years ago, when the Bush Administration’s EPA promoted business interests over that of public health, and Congress gave it a rubber stamp approval.
While Monday’s EPA announcement is long overdue, we’ve had eight years of denial close to medieval thinking to get over. The same type of thinking led by a dangerous mix of science, Bible-based ideology and greed for profit denying the danger of greenhouse gases and their effect on the overall warming of the planet. In that denial, thinking and even knowledge was prohibited from expression.