Lisa Murkowski, R-Nutville, Alaska

The EPA is finally doing its job, after 8 years of not doing its job. The Bush EPA was a disaster and bad for human health.  The new EPA is a complete 180 from the old one.

That makes some people in Washington, D.C. quite unhappy.  Several Congressmen are trying to block the EPA from regulating greenhouse gases, which is the job of the EPA.

The Congressmen were used to the EPA being a do-nothing agency or worse, such as when they gave the “all clear” for air quality very shortly after 9/11.  We know now that the air was not safe to breath and many people who worked in NYC at “ground zero” are now dying of lung diseases and cancer.  The EPA’s job is to protect the public from dangerous and hazardous environmental issues that can be controlled; like pollution, like air quality, like water pollution, and like CO2.  If we put CO2 into the air, we can stop doing it or do much less of it.  But it’s Congressional Republicans, mainly, that don’t want the EPA to do their job. They are worried it will negatively impact their state’s workers (or big corporation donors like Massey Coal, Exxon, etc.).  Their obstructionism against EPA regulations is growing, and it is happening pre-emptively, because the EPA hasn’t even begun to regulate CO2 yet.

The other reason the EPA has an obligation to regulate CO2 and other greenhouse gases is that they made an endangerment finding on ruling of the Supreme Court of the U.S. back in 2007. The Bush EPA did nothing about that ruling but the Obama EPA acted as ordered to:  they published an endangerment finding that CO2 and other greenhouse gases threaten the health and welfare of Americans and it follows that they should be regulated. That’s a simplification of a complex legal case that was 66 pages long and passed by a 5-4 vote, but it did pass.  (Details on that below).

But now the Republicans in Congress are having a fit because they’re worried about re-election.  Such is politics in the U.S. — elections trump all common sense and everything else, including the future of the human race, or if we even have one.  We have to not let these Congressmen and women  stand in the way of the EPA’s potential and probably regulations of greenhouse gas.  The health and lives of everyone are at stake.  As noted recently:

A storm of Republican protest is erupting over the Environmental Protection Agency’s finding that greenhouse gases pose a public danger, with the latest wave coming from a state among those most at risk from the effects of climate change.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, one of the party’s rising stars, launched a letter-writing offensive from Baton Rouge this week to protest the possibility of EPA regulation that the finding now allows. His own letter focuses on the economic dislocation he says such regulation might bring; it doesn’t mention the economic threats climate change poses [...]