The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has a job to do. It’s supposed to safeguard our air, water and land. Its regulatory responsibilities are to keep an eye on the impact of activities by private industry, government agencies and, yes, on us common citizens.
But comments Monday from new EPA chief Stephen Johnson made the agency sound like a lapdog, not a watchdog.
Speaking to the Western Governors’ Association’s conference in Breckenridge, Johnson said the EPA should encourage energy development and ease the environmental permit process. He said he wants the EPA to be a “catalyst for energy development.”
Huh? This fellow is confused. That’s not the EPA’s mission. The federal government already has an outfit (the Department of Energy) whose mission is to encourage development of energy resources. Yet another office (the Department of Interior) has become a cheerleader for oil and gas drilling.
Of course the nation should develop its energy resources, and some agencies of government have a legitimate guiding hand. But the EPA? It’s got a job to do, and energy development isn’t it.
The EPA’s mission – as proposed by President Nixon in 1970, defined and updated by Congress many times over 35 years, and sharpened by three decades of court cases – is to ensure that such public values as clean air and clean water are considered, and honored.
Johnson included some platitudes in his Monday speech about protecting the environment, but it clearly wasn’t much on his mind. Instead, he signaled a troubling change in attitude, at the very pinnacle of the agency, about the EPA’s role. His remarks were startling because he has been a career EPA scientist, and his appointment by President Bush seemed to bode well for enforcement of the nation’s environmental protection laws.
At its best, the EPA’s job is to ward off potential trouble. For example, about three years ago the U.S. Bureau of Land Management issued a deeply flawed environmental study about coal bed methane development in Montana. The plan would have allowed alarming levels of pollution. But the EPA’s regional office in Denver deservedly took the BLM to task for such sloppy work. Despite political pressure from high-ranking Interior officials, the EPA stuck to its guns and forced the BLM to devise a better plan.
Last year, in the face of industry protests, the EPA also required metro Denver’s oil refineries to begin producing the same clean fuels available in other regional markets.
Would the EPA have been able to defend the public’s interests in such controversies if Johnson’s vision of the agency as a “catalyst” for energy development had been in place? We wonder.
