Created by a Republican 46+ years ago. More than a decade before the coke/yuppie/Izod generation. cf. Wall Street, Boiler Room.
Sorry, you don’t get to claim the Republican party isn’t all about ‘Greed is good’ anymore.
I share the opinion of those that think Nixon would be decried as a socialist/communist or something similar if he were to run today with his same policies. No party, Democrat, Republican, or otherwise, has had the same platform for its whole existence, so saying that a Republican president created the EPA decades ago doesn’t mean much for the Republican party today.
The EPA like everything else is subject to the law of diminishing returns. To illustrate think of taking down a Christmas Tree. Undecorating and disposing of a pine tree means huge numbers of needles falling onto the floor. In order to clean this up you take a broom and dustpan and in five minutes pick up 90% of the needles. Then you take a vacuum and in five minutes get 90% of the needles that are left. That still leaves 1% of the needles so you get down on your hands and knees and pick and in five minutes pick up the rest by hand. Picking up the last 1% took as much time and more effort than picking up the first 90%. If you decide to skip the hands and knees step it does not mean you are for having the floor covered with needles.
Since the EPA was first created the air is much cleaner, the water is much cleaner, and so is the environment generally. The EPA is responsible for some of that. Doing good work forty years ago does not mean they are exempt from criticism. No bureaucracy will go away even after it has accomplished its mission so the EPA is looking for new areas to regulate that do not pass a cost benefit analysis. For example they wanted to pass a mercury regulationthat is estimated would cost $9.6 billion a year and have $4 to 6 million in benefits. They triedto regulate emissions by amateur racers. As has been discussed up thread they used social media to advocate for positive feedback for a proposed rule.
They also tried to change the law to get Carbon Dioxide classified as a pollutant without congressional approval.
Uh… admittedly, I’m not going to watch the videos, but nothing in the Denver Post article contradicts my point: the disaster was preventable but not malicious.
That is a bit misleading because the regulation did not look just at mercury.
BTW AFAIK that bit about the EPA "tried to change the law to get Carbon Dioxide classified as a pollutant without congressional approval. " Is a bit silly, it ignores that the EPA had discretion in looking at what current science is reporting about pollutants. The current congress is full of Republicans who deny that very issue and the administration and the EPA were the ones making the best efforts to control the issue with that restriction.
Conservative states did try to defeat the regulations but even Scalia, while chastising the EPA for not getting more congressional input, (again, their input was to deny the whole thing) granted that the EPA had a point though.
In fact, in 2007, a divided Supreme Court (5-4) ruled that the EPA had the duty (not just the right) to regulate CO2. This is way beyond saying that they don’t have the authority to do it…It is saying they don’t have the authority NOT to do it.
More recently, with an Administration that wanted to regulate CO2, the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 to uphold the right of the EPA to regulate CO2, while slightly limiting that right (so that it covered 83% rather than 86% of all emissions). This ruling was even endorsed by conservatives Scalia (who wrote the decision), Roberts, and Kennedy. Only the ultra-right Alito and Thomas dissented from the notion that the EPA had this right.
That was a 5-4 decision, so in other words, there is lots of disagreement over whether what they did was legal or illegal. That is hardly an example of some sort of dramatic illegality when the Supremes are as closely divided as possible over whether such illegality occurred.
Where did you see that they won? What I saw as of the summer is that the rule has been temporarily blocked while litigation proceeds on it.
You’ve presented a very biased view where you have cherrypicked the cases where there have been rulings that the regulators broke the law by going too far (and with the issues I noted above with 2 of your examples), but have ignored the cases where Courts have ruled that the regulators have not gone far enough.
Could you provide us a link to the decision? Your link talks about Scott Priutt filing the lawsuit, not the outcome of that suit.
Court vacates lesser prairie chickens’ threatened status.
Regarding the lawsuits about the Clean Water Act power-grab, multiple lawsuits are in progress at various stages. It’s true that there has been no final ruling, but given that the CWA clearly defines that “navigable waters” are covered and that the EPA regulations clearly went beyond that, chances for the rule surviving as written would seem slim. In the current administration the issue may become moot, of course, as may other legal fights involving the EPA currently working their way through the courts.
And I never said I didn’t. The OP asked for help in understanding how the right views the EPA.
As there’s been a lot of talk lately about the possibility that some elite liberals are in a bubble, it may be worth noting that for a typical lawyer in DC or socialite in Manhattan, these sorts of EPA regulations have few direct effects. But for millions of people, mainly out in that big stretch of the country between the Appalachians and the Sierra Nevada, they do. For many ranchers, miners, oil rig workers, factory workers, truck drivers, and others, these issues directly impact their ability to earn a good living.
I don’t mind the idea of the EPA, in fact I think they’ve done a lot of good for our country.
But I sure curse their frigging name while I’m spilling a bunch of gasoline on my grass while trying to fill my lawnmower with one of those ventless gas cans that require three hands to operate. Seriously, how do the vented vapors cause more environmental harm, than spilling a pint of gas directly on the ground.
Can you unpack your “power-grab” statement? I’m not seeing the incentive for the EPA to grab more and more “power”. It’s my guess that some in the EPA may see it is their responsibility to ensure clean water, and may have evidence that chemicals dumped into a pond completely enclosed in one’s property will eventually seep into the ground water, affecting us all, so they see it as a duty to regulate/enforce this sort of thing. Labeling it as a power-grab places nefarious intentions on this, and if you don’t have any evidence of that, why do you insist on calling it that? Why would anyone at the EPA intentionally make up regulations to harm business? What motivation or incentive do they have for doing that? It doesn’t make any sense to me.
Could it be because the law doesn’t authorize them to regulate ponds completely enclosed in one’s property?
It’s projection. Those against the EPA have selfish motives for their opposition, so they assume that those in favor of the EPA must have selfish motives for their support. Its the same reason that climate deniers claim that the 90+% of climate scientists who promote global warming as a problem are faking their data to indicate a crisis so that they can get more funding to do more faulty research.
So, speaking as an professional environmental person (and generally a supporter of the Endangered Species Act), I’d say that the endangered species act is, in essence, “selfish”. It codifies that a large group of people have a “selfish” interest in a species not going extinct. There’s actually a great deal of research done to quantify this selfishness by placing non-market value on such things. E.g. quantifying “would you pay $10 apiece to ensure that the condor will survive? what about $20? $1000?”. (I understand that you are talking about assuming additional hidden motives such as a personal profit - but it’s important to recognize that the larger tradeoff is collective selfishness - and there’s nothing wrong with that).
Edited to distinguish “ESA” from “EPA”
But is that a power-grab? And what would be the motivation or incentive to work outside the law to regulate these ponds?
You started this thread asking about what beef conservatives have with the EPA. This is one of them. It’s certainly not uncommon for conservatives to view it as a power grab. It’s even in the GOP platform:
As to the motivation / incentive, here’s another aspect common to conservative’s worldviews: it’s not uncommon for bureaucracies to take on a life of their own, working to gain additional power and budget. You can read up on Parkinson’s Law sometime if you’re interested in it.
The reason is that GOP voters, GOP legislators, & GOP executives have listened for decades to “right-wing,” “libertarian,” & “pro-business” stories disseminated virally by media and propaganda outfits specifically funded by wealthy political activists. What do the “culturally conservative” Heritage Foundation, and the “libertarian” Cato Institute have in common, and in common with many other “respected think tanks” in the USA? They’re funded by the same billionaires. The Koch family are the big names in those cases. There are also the libertarian Mercers (who elevated “Leninist tea party guy” Steve Bannon), the Forbes family, and whatever Pete Peterson is. There are some other wealthy types who play this sort of donation game but avoid controversy, like the Mellons.
In a free market society, the richest of the rich tend to be more sociopathic, because at the top levels of wealth, those with less conscience give less to charity, and they cheat their way into more profit more. So over time, the less empathetic and less moral get richer and richer, and the influence of lobbying organizations & political parties is bent to those who can fund them. The Kochs (through various outlets pretending to be conservative, libertarian, traditional, rationalist, reformist, or skeptical, to gain as much audience as possible) have won over enough hearts and minds to direct the GOP base overall in a low-tax, low-service, anti-regulation direction. And any GOP legislator who goes wobbly can expect to be shot down by a direct mail campaign (usually through “Americans for Prosperity”) and replaced.
So conservatives have been taught to be not conservationist for thirty years. At this point, the old-fashioned sort of conservatives have no political representation, and may be dying off. I have heard that in Canada, former PM Steve Harper apparently went to a church that taught that petroleum was a precious gift from God, and that both restrictions on the industry & the environmental science that led to them were therefore bad, We may find that in another thirty years, complaining about the smog is considered treason and punishable as such.