Guest blogged by Ernest A. Canning
Contrary to the Republican Party’s recently launched, all-out War on the EPA, the 40-year old Environmental Protection Agency, founded during the Richard Nixon Administration with strong bi-partisan support, is a job creator, according to a newly released report by the Majority Staff of the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
Chaired by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D), the committee’s 29-page report [PDF] touts “essential contributions that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and landmark environmental laws” contribute towards “protecting public health and promoting economic growth.”
It also highlights quotes from radical leftists like George W. Bush’s Republican EPA Director, Christie Todd Whitman (“[I]t is easy to forget how far we have come in the past 40 years. We should take heart from all this progress and not, as some in Congress have suggested, seek to tear down the agency that the president and Congress created to protect America’s health and environment.”) and President Gerald Ford (“Nothing is more essential to the life of every single American than clean air, pure food, and safe drinking water”).
The Democrats’ report excoriates the deceptive partisan attacks embodied in recently introduced GOP House legislation meant “to weaken EPA’s authority to regulate toxic emissions,” and concludes by underscoring the EPA’s role in promoting both environmental and economic health in the nation…
These safeguards reduce premature deaths and illnesses, promoting a healthier, more productive work force.
Attacks on the nation’s successful public health protections are not supported by the facts. Repeated studies have shown that polluting industry claims of costs and job losses are often inaccurate.
In introducing the report (see video below), Sen. Boxer quoted statements made by Republican Presidents Nixon and Ford in signing pertinent environmental legislation involving regulation by the EPA. She described the GOP attacks on the popular federal agency — an assault funded by dirty fossil fuel corporations like Koch Industries — as “unprecedented” and “outrageous;” adding, “If you can’t breath, you can’t work”…
Video of Boxer’s introduction of the Senate EPW Staff Report follows…
Maybe they will just do as Texans do if EPA is not murdered, which is edit out climate change in official documents.