"The Gipper" explains why William Ruckelshaus (just behind him) is his choice to run EPA.
These days, Ronald Reagan is something of a hero to conservatives in Congress who see him as the champion of a smaller government with less taxes and low deficits (as numerous media have reported–the praise he earns on taxes and deficits often ignores the historical facts of his policies. you can read more about that here.) Many of these modern-day Reagan-worshipers are the same folks who are behind the unprecedented assault on the Environmental Protection Agency, working to slash EPA’s budgets and deprive the agency of its authority to keep our air and water clean, and our nation’s people protected from the pollution hazards that threaten our health.
Since Ronald Reagan is resting in peace, we can’t ask him what he thinks about the present-day assault on the EPA. But we can pay heed to the views expressed by William Ruckelshaus, the man that President Reagan and President Nixon entrusted to run the EPA. Writing in today’s Washington Post along with Christine Todd Whitman, former Republican Governor of New Jersey and former EPA Administrator under George W. Bush, these former cabinet members injected some much-needed nonpartisan perspective on the importance of a strong, science-based EPA into the debate:
Today the agency President Richard Nixon created in response to the public outcry over visible air pollution and flammable rivers is under siege. The Senate is poised to vote on a bill that would, for the first time, “disapprove” of a scientifically based finding, in this case that greenhouse gases endanger public health and welfare. This finding was extensively reviewed by officials in the administrations of presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama. It was finalized by the Environmental Protection Agency in response to a 2007 Supreme Court decision that greenhouse gases fit within the Clean Air Act definition of air pollutants.
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It has taken four decades to put in place the infrastructure to ensure that pollution is controlled through limitations on corporate, municipal and individual conduct. Dismantle that infrastructure today, and a new one would have to be created tomorrow at great expense and at great sacrifice to America’s public health and environment. The American public will not long stand for an end to regulations that have protected their health and quality of life.
You can read the entire op-ed by clicking here.
It’s time to remind EPA’s conservative congressional opponents of the role that Republican predecessors and the professionals they appointed played in building an EPA that has made our environment cleaner and our economy stronger, while improving and protecting public health. CLF is making that easy for constituents of Republican Senators Snowe and Collins in Maine and Scott Brown in Massachusetts–click here to find out more–and spread the word to your friends in other parts of the country.
Frank Haggerty
The EPA needs to review the toxic abandoned Cannon Street Power Plant on Pine Street in New Bedford,Massachusetts . This abandoned power plant is the most toxic power plant in a marine environment in the United States .
We need the abandoned toxic Cannon Street Power Plant in New Bedford cleaned up before a renewable energy ocean port is built next door to the plant .
The House in 1996 passed a plan that contained $300,000 to study the possibility of converting the toxic abandoned New Bedford power plant. The Cannon Street clean up documents already exist and are said to weigh twenty pounds.
Most private or nonprofit groups are unable to build any project on the site of Commonwealth Electric’s closed Cannon Street power station which contains fuel oil, tar, coal tar, cyanide, lead paint, asbestos, guano, asbestos, mold and heavy metals. No one wants to have to pay for the clean up of the site.
The CLF should leverge stimulus funds to clean up this plant .How can 600 million in stimulus funds go to new renewable energy projects while leaving a toxic abandoned power plant in New Bedford . This power plant is a hugh carbon foot print in the New Bedford area and should be refered to as a carbon boot !
D. R. Tucker
As a Republican who’s embarrassed by his party’s cluelessness on this issue, I was thrilled to read the Ruckelshaus/Whitman piece. The GOP is now dominated by hyper-libertarians who believe that businesses have a right to pollute and that the federal government has no right to stop them. Whenever I hear Jim Inhofe or Fred Upton speak, I have a vision of Teddy Roosevelt spinning in his grave. I hope more sensible Republicans push back against the extreme libertarianism that fuels the hardcore right’s demonization of the EPA and the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.