{"id":22148,"date":"2010-02-04T13:20:24","date_gmt":"2010-02-04T18:20:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/?p=22148"},"modified":"2011-09-24T16:12:08","modified_gmt":"2011-09-24T20:12:08","slug":"epa-renews-environmental-protections-2-4-10","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/by-judith-gayle-2\/epa-renews-environmental-protections-2-4-10\/","title":{"rendered":"Putting ‘Protection’ Back in EPA"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Judith Gayle<\/strong> | Political Waves (the Planet Waves politics blog)<\/p>\n

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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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0in 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.<\/p>\n

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Even now, the Republicans are arguing that the environment doesn’t NEED protections — this week, the EPA held a public hearing in regard to a proposed overhaul of Bush’s weak smog standards and Jackson was urged to drop the smog proposal “since the premise on which it was advanced is flawed.” Like global warming, I suppose, smog isn’t real? These guys obviously don’t live in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n

In 2007, the Supreme Court chided the EPA for failing to regulate greenhouse gases, given their latitude to pursue regulations and declare health hazards, as awarded\u00a0by the Clean\u00a0Air Act\u00a0— Jackson has taken advantage of that ruling to tighten control over pollutants and set new standards. Obama needs the EPA to nibble away at the problem from the bottom, while he attempts to address it from the top<\/p>\n

This is one of those agencies that the public ignores, confident that it works in their favor. It hasn’t for quite some time, but Lisa Jackson has turned that around. With public protection and environmental issues an uphill battle in the coming years, Obama has proposed an increase in the EPA budget, getting them ready for battle.\u00a0 From bio-fuels to emissions to clean air to water, we’ll be hearing more from the EPA in coming years — and this time, science and common sense will get a place at the table.<\/p>\n

Here’s a link to an article in Rolling Stone<\/em><\/a> that fleshes out Jackson’s accomplishments in turning back the Bush years.<\/p>\n

Jude<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"generate_page_header":""},"categories":[1744],"tags":[29,1644,1646,52,1647,1360],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22148"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22148"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22148\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22148"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22148"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetwaves.net\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22148"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}