It’s bad enough that the Bush administration has been caught literally taking coal industry language — word for word — and using it for new EPA regulations on mercury emissions. But it’s so much worse that it’s happened three times.
For the third time, environmental advocates have discovered passages in the Bush administration’s proposal for regulating mercury pollution from power plants that mirror almost word for word portions of memos written by a law firm representing coal-fired power plants.
The passages state that the Environmental Protection Agency is not required to regulate other hazardous toxins emitted by power plants, such as lead and arsenic. Several attorneys general, as well as some environmental groups, have argued that the Clean Air Act compels the EPA to regulate these emissions as well as mercury.
The revelations concerning language written by Latham & Watkins could broaden an ongoing probe by the EPA’s inspector general into whether the industry had an undue influence on the agency’s proposed mercury rule, legislative critics of the proposed rule said.
You get caught, you’re embarrassed, and you take steps to prevent it in the future. Except you don’t, and you get caught again. There’s some public outrage, you pretend it’s no big deal, and you move on. Only to get caught again.
It’s as if the Bush administration has…no…shame. Getting busted allowing the coal industry to write pollution regulations is now, with Bush, the norm. The administration is not embarrassed, as it should be, because this is just the way Bush does business.
It also leads me to wonder if Bush administration officials are even needed anymore. Corporate lobbyists are writing the rules and regulations anyway, so why are we paying for a growing federal workforce? It’s not for writing regulations — that’s for industry shills to do — and it’s certainly not for enforcing regulations, because Bush is against that, too.
Some might argue it’s better to have federal employees so there’s some level of accountability, but the White House won’t allow for any accountability anyway, so what’s the point? We could just scrap the EPA now and save some money.
Sarcasm aside, this is not just an abuse of the public trust; it’s a health hazard that the administration is inviting by making it easier for industries to pollute.
“The big story here is the public health story; things like arsenic, lead and chromium are being released in very large quantities and pose a very serious health threat,” said John Stanton, a senior lawyer for Clear the Air, an environmental coalition that spotted the similarities between the regulation’s language and the industry memo.
I guess this is what Bush meant when he promised to be a “compassionate” conservative. If he’d only been more specific…
And, since the problem is the same as it was in April, I thought I’d bring back a Paul Krugman explanation of this mess than helps put the whole thing in context.
The answer is that the foxes have been put in charge of the henhouse. The head of the E.P.A.’s Office of Air and Radiation, like most key environmental appointees in the Bush administration, previously made his living representing polluting industries (which, in case you haven’t guessed, are huge Republican donors). On mercury, the administration didn’t just take industry views into account, it literally let the polluters write the regulations: much of the language of the administration’s proposal came directly from lobbyists’ memos.
E.P.A. experts normally study regulations before they are issued, but they were bypassed. According to The Los Angeles Times: “E.P.A. staffers say they were told not to undertake the normal scientific and economic studies called for under a standing executive order. . . . E.P.A. veterans say they cannot recall another instance where the agency’s technical experts were cut out of developing a major regulatory proposal.”
If there’s a good spin available for the White House to justify this, I can’t think of it.