Monthly Archives: March 2017

10 Things You Should Know About the Clean Power Plan

Just hours after President Trump signed an executive order to weaken a wide range of America’s important climate and heath protections, the Administration filed a motion to delay the D.C Circuit court’s review of the Clean Power Plan case.

That’s only the first of what we expect will be many attacks on the Clean Power Plan – our only nationwide limit on climate pollution from power plants. However, the Clean Power Plan is popular with Americans across the country, and an extraordinarily broad and diverse group of leaders and experts from across America have announced their support for the Clean Power Plan since the executive order.

You’ll likely be hearing a lot about this story in the near future. While you follow the news, here are 10 things you should know about the Clean Power Plan.

1. The Clean Power Plan is expected to save thousands of lives and protect the health of Americans across the country. According to EPA’s analysis, when fully implemented the Clean Power Plan will:

    • Prevent up to 3,600 premature deaths each year
    • Prevent up to 1,700 heart attacks each year
    • Prevent up to 90,000 asthma attacks each year
    • Prevent up to 300,000 missed work days and school days each year

2. The Clean Power Plan’s pollution reduction targets are eminently achievable.

Carbon pollution from the power sector has decreased by more than 20 percent since 2005, meaning that we’re already more than two-thirds of the way toward meeting the Clean Power Plan standards for 2030. In fact, most states that are litigating against the Clean Power Plan are on track to meet these pollution limits. The Clean Power Plan is essential to ensure that this momentum is sustained and that power sector investments in clean energy are deployed in a way that maximizes their pollution reduction benefits.

3. The Clean Power Plan can reduce electricity bills for families.

The Clean Power Plan gives states and power companies tremendous flexibility in deciding how to meet the pollution reduction targets – including through cost-effective energy efficiency measures that save families money. Independent analyses of the Clean Power Plan have found that average bills could decline by as much as 11 percent as a result of these measures. That’s why leading consumer and ratepayer advocates, including Consumers Union, support the Clean Power Plan.

4. Our vibrant clean energy sector employs millions of Americans and it is thriving.

According to a recent assessment by Advanced Energy Economy, the United States clean energy sector is now a rapidly-growing, $200 billion industry that employs 3.3 million Americans.

5. Clean energy is creating economic opportunities in communities across the nation.

The American Wind Energy Association estimates that 70 percent of wind farms are located in low-income counties, and that wind developers currently pay $222 million a year in lease payments to U.S. farmers, ranchers and other rural landowners. AWEA also estimates that wind energy has created more than 25,000 manufacturing jobs in 43 states.

6. The Administration’s promises that revoking climate and clean air protections will bring back coal jobs are false, as the coal industry itself recognizes.

Independent analyses have found that employment in the coal industry has been falling steadily since 1975, due largely to changing methods of coal production and – in more recent years – by competition from inexpensive natural gas. These trends cannot be reversed by revoking the Clean Power Plan or other protections for clean air and clean water. Even coal company executives have acknowledged that the executive order can’t bring mining jobs back.

7. An extraordinarily broad and diverse coalition is supporting the Clean Power Plan in court.

This coalition includes, among others: eighteen states and sixty municipalities; power companies that own and operate nearly ten percent of the nation’s generating capacity; leading businesses like Amazon, Apple, Google, Mars, and IKEA; former Republican heads of EPA; public health and environmental organizations; consumer and ratepayer advocates; faith organizations; and many others.

8. Large majorities of Americans in red and blue states alike support reducing climate pollution from existing power plants.

According to a recent national poll, 69 percent of Americans support placing limits on climate pollution from existing power plants – including a majority of Americans in every Congressional district in the country.

9. The nation’s leading businesses support policies to reduce climate pollution.

Just this month, over 1,000 companies and investors called on the Trump Administration to continue low-carbon policies, noting that “failure to build a low-carbon economy puts American prosperity at risk” and that “the right action now will create jobs and boost U.S. competitiveness.”

10. The Clean Power Plan rests on a rock-solid legal foundation.

The Supreme Court has held on three separate occasions that Congress has vested EPA with the responsibility – and the tools – to reduce carbon pollution under the Clean Air Act. Numerous legal experts –  including drafters of the Clean Air Act, former EPA Administrators who served under Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and Bush, and former state energy and environmental officials – have affirmed the strong legal basis for the Clean Power Plan 

Attacks on the Clean Power Plan and our other clean air protections present an unprecedented attack on our children’s health. It takes our nation backwards – to more pollution, more disease – even though Americans support forward progress towards clean air and clean energy.

Posted in Clean Power Plan, Economics, Policy, Setting the Facts Straight / Comments are closed

Six Ways President Trump’s Energy Plan Doesn’t Add Up

This blog was authored by Jeremy Proville and Jonathan Camuzeaux 

Just 60 days into Trump’s presidency, his administration has wasted no time in pursuing efforts to lift oil and gas development restrictions and dismantle a range of environmental protections to push through his “America First Energy Plan.” An agenda that he claims will allow the country to, “take advantage of the estimated $50 trillion in untapped shale, oil, and natural gas reserves, especially those on federal lands that the American people own.”

Putting aside the convenient roundness of this number, the sheer size of it makes this policy sound appealing, but buyer beware. Behind the smoke and mirrors of this $50 trillion is a report commissioned by the industry-backed Institute for Energy Research (IER) that lacks serious economic rigor. The positive projections from lifting oil and gas restrictions come straight from the IER’s advocacy arm, the American Energy Alliance. Several economists reviewed the assessment and agreed: “this is not academic research and would never see the light of day in an academic journal.”

Here is why Trump’s plan promises a future it can’t deliver:

1. No analytical back up for almost $20 trillion of the $50 trillion.

Off the bat, it’s clear that President Trump’s Plan relies on flawed math. What’s actually estimated in the report is $31.7 trillion, not $50 trillion, based on increased revenue from oil, gas and coal production over 37 years (this total includes estimated increases in GDP, wages, and tax revenue). The other roughly half of this “$50 trillion” number appears to be conjured out of thin air.

2. Inflated fuel prices

An average oil price of $100 per barrel and of $5.64 per thousand cubic feet of natural gas (Henry Hub spot price) was used to calculate overall benefits. Oil prices are volatile: in the last five years, they reached a high of $111 per barrel and a low of $29 per barrel. They were below $50 a barrel a few days ago. A $5.64 gas price is not outrageous, but gas prices have mostly been below $5 for several years. By using inflated oil and gas prices and multiplying the benefits out over 37 years, the author dismisses any volatility or price impacts from changes in supply. There’s no denying oil and gas prices could go up in the future, but they could also go down, and the modeling in the IER report is inadequate at best when it comes to tackling this issue.

3. Technically vs. economically recoverable resources

The IER report is overly optimistic when it comes to the amount of oil and gas that can be viably produced on today’s restricted federal lands. Indeed, the report assumes that recoverable reserves can be exploited to the last drop over the 37-year period based on estimates from a Congressional Budget Office report. A deeper look reveals that these estimates are actually for “technically recoverable resources,” or the amount of oil and gas that can be produced using current technology, industry practice, and geologic knowledge. While these resources are deemed accessible from a technical standpoint, they cannot always be produced profitably. This is an important distinction as it is the aspect that differentiates technically recoverable from economically recoverable resources. The latter is always a smaller subset of what is technically extractable, as illustrated by this diagram from the Energy Information Administration. The IER report ignores basic industry knowledge to present a rosier picture.

4. Lack of discounting causes overestimations

When economists evaluate the economic benefits of a policy that has impacts well into the future, it is common practice to apply a discount rate to get a sense of their value to society in today’s terms. Discounting is important to account for the simple fact that we generally value present benefits more than future benefits. The IER analysis does not include any discounting and therefore overestimates the true dollar-benefits of lifting oil and gas restrictions. For example, applying a standard 5% discount rate to the $31.7 trillion benefits would reduce the amount to $12.2 trillion.

5. Calculated benefits are not additional to the status quo

The IER report suggests that the $31.7 trillion would be completely new and additional to the current status quo. This is false. One must compare these projections against a future scenario in which the restrictions are not lifted. Currently, the plan doesn’t examine a future in which these oil and gas restrictions remain and still produce large economic benefits, while protecting the environment.

6. No consideration of environmental costs

Another significant failure of IER’s report: even if GDP growth was properly estimated, it would not account for the environmental costs associated with this uptick in oil and gas development and use. This is not something that can ignored, and any serious analysis would address it.

We know drilling activities can lead to disastrous outcomes that have real environmental and economic impacts. Oil spills like the Deepwater Horizon and Exxon Valdez have demonstrated that tragic events happen and come with a hefty social, environmental and hard dollar price tag. The same can be said for natural gas leaks, including a recent one in Aliso Canyon, California. And of course, there are significant, long-term environmental costs to increased emissions of greenhouse gases including more extreme weather, damages to human health and food scarcity to name a few.

The Bottom Line: The $50 Trillion is An Alternative Fact but the Safeguards America will Lose are Real

These factors fundamentally undercut President Trump’s promise that Americans will reap the benefits of a $50 trillion dollar future energy industry. Most importantly, the real issue is what is being sacrificed if we set down this path. That is, a clean energy future where our country can lead the way in innovation and green growth; creating new, long-term industries and high-paying jobs, without losing our bedrock environmental safeguards. If the administration plans to upend hard-fought restrictions that provide Americans with clean air and water, we expect them to provide a substantially more defensible analytical foundation.

Photos by lovnpeace and KarinKarin

This post originally appeared on EDF’s Market Forces blog.

Posted in Economics, Energy, Greenhouse Gas Emissions / Comments are closed

How Do We Know That Humans Are Causing Climate Change? These Nine Lines of Evidence

While most Americans acknowledge that climate change is happening, some are still unsure about the causes.

They are often labeled “climate skeptics,” but that label can cause confusion or even anger.

Isn’t the nature of science to be skeptical? Isn’t it good to question everything?

Yes, but —

Here’s what is getting lost in the conversation:

Scientists have been asking these questions for nearly 200 years. The scientific community has been studying these questions for so long that collectively they have amassed an overwhelming amount of evidence pointing to a clear conclusion.

A similar situation is smoking and cancer. Nowadays, no one questions the link between smoking and cancer, because the science was settled in the 1960s after more than 50 years of research. The questions have been asked and answered with indisputable evidence.

We can think of the state of human activities and climate change as no different than smoking and cancer. In fact, we are statistically more confident that humans cause climate change than that smoking causes cancer.

Our confidence comes from the culmination of over a century of research by tens of thousands of scientists at hundreds of institutions in more than a hundred nations.

So what is the evidence?

The research falls into nine independently-studied but physically-related lines of evidence, that build to the overall clear conclusion that humans are the main cause of climate change:

  1. Simple chemistry that when we burn carbon-based materials, carbon dioxide (CO2) is emitted (research beginning in 1900s)
  2. Basic accounting of what we burn, and therefore how much CO2 we emit (data collection beginning in 1970s)
  3. Measuring CO2 in the atmosphere and trapped in ice to find that it is indeed increasing and that the levels are higher than anything we’ve seen in hundreds of thousands of years  (measurements beginning in 1950s)
  4. Chemical analysis of the atmospheric CO2 that reveals the increase is coming from burning fossil fuels (research beginning in 1950s)
  5. Basic physics that shows us that CO2 absorbs heat (research beginning in 1820s)
  6. Monitoring climate conditions to find that recent warming of the Earth is correlated to and follows rising CO2 emissions (research beginning in 1930s)
  7. Ruling out natural factors that can influence climate like the Sun and ocean cycles (research beginning in 1830s)
  8. Employing computer models to run experiments of natural vs. human-influenced “simulated Earths” (research beginning in 1960s)
  9. Consensus among scientists that consider all previous lines of evidence and make their own conclusions (polling beginning in 1990s)

(You can also see these nine lines of evidence illustrated in the graphic below)

Skeptics sometimes point to the last two supporting lines of evidence as weaknesses. They’re not. But even if you choose to doubt them, it is really the first seven that, combined, point to human activities as the only explanation of rising global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution, and the subsequent climate changes (such as ice melt and sea level rise) that have occurred due to this global warming.

The science is settled, and the sooner we accept this, the sooner we can work together towards addressing the problems caused by climate change – and towards a better future for us all.

 

(Click here for a pdf version of the graphic)

 

Posted in Basic Science of Global Warming, Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Science, Setting the Facts Straight / Read 39 Responses

Trump Moves to Cook the Books, Undercutting Common Sense Climate Protections

This blog was co-authored with Martha Roberts

It’s reported that the Trump Administration is poised to continue its barrage of attacks on some of our most vital health and environmental protections, following last week’s assault on broadly supported fuel economy and greenhouse gas safeguards for cars and light trucks. Here’s one attack that they may try to sneak under the radar—a move that would undercut common sense climate protection all across the federal government: directing federal agencies to abandon the use of social cost of carbon estimates in their evaluation of new policy.

The social cost of carbon is a measure of the economic harm from the impacts of climate change. Specifically, it’s the dollar value of the total damages from emitting one ton of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Weakening or eliminating the use of the social cost of carbon would result in skewed and biased policy-making that ignores the benefits of crucial safeguards and stacks the deck against actions to protect communities from the mounting costs of climate change.

The devastating impacts of climate change on health and the environment – such as extreme weather events, the spread of disease, sea level rise, and increased food insecurity – can cost American businesses, families, governments and taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars through rising health care costs, destruction of property, increased food prices, and more. Many of these impacts are already being felt by communities across the country, as the government’s leading scientific agencies have found.

When the federal government develops policy affecting the carbon pollution causing climate change, it is both reasonable and essential that it takes these costs into account. The social cost of carbon is a tool that allows policy-makers to do just that.

Currently, the federal government uses a social cost of carbon estimate—roughly $40 per ton of carbon pollution—that was developed through a transparent and rigorous interagency process, relied on the latest peer-reviewed science and economics available, and allowed for repeated public comment as well as input from the National Academy of Sciences.

But that may not last much longer. As we’ve seen, the Trump Administration is waging war against an array of our most crucial health and environmental protections, ignoring the urgent threat of climate change while prioritizing fossil fuel interests. President Trump’s new Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Scott Pruitt, denies that carbon pollution is a primary contributor to climate change, and built his political career by suing EPA 14 times as Oklahoma Attorney General to block protections from mercury, arsenic and smog pollution, hand in hand with the worst elements of the fossil fuel industry. Meanwhile the Administration is proposing devastating cuts to the budgets for EPA and climate research, and is moving towards revoking the Clean Power Plan, America’s first-ever nationwide limits on carbon pollution from power plants.

All of this points to a clear disregard for basic science, economic principles, and our nation’s clean air laws. Eliminating or weakening the social cost of carbon is another pernicious tactic by the Administration to undermine the development of crucial climate safeguards – by erroneously making it appear as though reducing carbon pollution has little or no benefit to society and the economy. Even the current figure is very likely a conservative lower bound since it does not yet include all of the widely recognized and accepted impacts of climate change.

The details of the upcoming attack are still unclear. It’s possible that the Administration may end use of the uniform social cost of carbon estimate at the federal level—despite its rigorous basis and judicial precedent. Other indications suggest that the Administration may choose to artificially and arbitrarily discount the costs of climate change for the health and economic well-being of our kids, grandkids, and future generations—ignoring the growing consensus among economists that supports valuing these impacts more, as does a recent report from the Council of Economic Advisors. Or the Administration may decide to disregard the fact that our greenhouse gas pollution has harmful impacts outside U.S. borders that can have costly repercussions for Americans.

Throwing out the social cost of carbon may play well with President Trump’s supporters in the fossil fuel industry. But the importance and appropriateness of accounting for these costs is a matter of both economics and law. We also know that nearly two thirds of Americans are concerned about climate change. Undermining limits on pollution—protections that are rooted in rigorous scientific research, reflecting long-standing bipartisan economic principles—will ultimately harm the health and environmental safety of all Americans, including Trump’s supporters.

This post originally appeared on EDF’s Market Forces blog.

Posted in Economics, Greenhouse Gas Emissions / Comments are closed

Four Important EPA Programs Threatened by President Trump’s “Skinny Budget”

Wikimedia Commons

The Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) critical mission to protect health and the environment is strongly supported by the public, which is why it is incredibly alarming to see that President’s Trump’s new “skinny budget” would cut EPA’s funding by 31 percent.

Half of EPA’s budget goes to states, tribes, local agencies, and non-profits, which help carry out EPA’s lifesaving mission and provide significant benefits to communities in the process. EPA also provides essential technical guidance, assistance, scientific research, coordination, and more to help states and others protect health and the environment. Budget cuts to EPA would jeopardize Americans’ health and the safety of their communities.

In addition to the vital programs that protect our air and water, these are a few examples of programs that EPA oversees – and that are now at risk.

Cleaning Up Pollution from School Buses

School buses take 25 million American children to and from school every day. Many of these buses are old and their exhaust includes harmful pollutants like nitrogen oxides, particulate matter, and toxics.

Children are particularly vulnerable to pollution given their faster breathing rates and developing respiratory systems. Exposure to this pollution can aggravate asthma and cause other health problems.

Newer diesel engines are 90 percent cleaner than the old ones, however. So EPA administers a program for school districts to help them fix the problem. School districts can apply for rebates to replace or retrofit older buses under the Diesel Emissions Reduction Act (DERA) – a broadly bi-partisan program enacted by Congress. More than 500 school districts applied for this program in 2016 and 88 school bus fleets from 27 states were selected. More than 400 older diesel buses will be retrofitted or replaced thanks to DERA.

The 2016 grant recipients include:

  • Marana Unified School District #6 in Arizona, which received $465,000 to replace or retrofit 20 buses
  • Three school districts in Michigan (Haslett, Hudsonville, and Whittemore) that received $180,000 for nine buses
  • Three school districts in Pennsylvania (Carlisle, Glenmoore, and Philadelphia) that received $305,000 for 17 buses

The school bus program provides essential funding to school districts that need it. And we know that cleaning up buses is working – a recent study found that children in schools that had adopted cleaner fuels and technology were absent less and had improved lung function. Experts estimate that there are 250,000 older, dirtier school buses still in operation, indicating that we – and EPA – have much more work to do to protect children’s health.

(The school bus program is just one part of the DERA program to reduce diesel emissions. Find total DERA allocations to all states, from 2012-2016, here.)

Chesapeake Bay Program

The Chesapeake Bay ecosystem provides more than $100 billion in economic benefits each year to the region’s 18 million residents, yet has for years been threatened by air and water pollution.

The Chesapeake Bay Program, created in 1983, is a partnership of six states (Delaware, Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia), the District of Columbia, the federal government, and numerous local governments and NGOs dedicated to restoring this iconic feature of the Mid-Atlantic.

EPA plays a vital coordination and technical advisory role for the Chesapeake Bay Program, setting goals and assisting local jurisdictions’ efforts to meet them. About two-thirds of the $70 million or so EPA dedicates to the Chesapeake Bay Program flows to state and local governments as grants.

Successful — yet ongoing — cleanup efforts include:

  • Between 1985 and 2015, the Chesapeake Bay Program has reduced harmful nitrogen water pollution by 30 percent, phosphorus by 40 percent, and sediment by 25 percent.
  • The outlook for fish and blue crab habitats, as well as key wetlands and underwater grasses, is also improving.
  • A new agreement signed in 2014 launched a more robust, accelerated restoration pathway that is still being implemented and just starting to show signs of progress.

Budget cuts to the Chesapeake Bay Program would jeopardize these encouraging trends.

Cleaning up Brownfields and Toxic Sites

Brownfields – properties contaminated by a hazardous substance – present a significant challenge to communities.

There are almost half a million Brownfields sites across the country. EPA provides technical assistance and administers several grant programs for states, local governments, and tribes to clean these sites up, conduct assessments, do job training, develop plans for use of the properties, and more.

These projects not only protect a community’s health and citizens, they also provide valuable economic and societal benefits by bolstering redevelopment efforts in existing communities —turning abandoned properties and eyesores into engines for job creation and economic growth.

In fiscal year 2016, projects created $16.11 per EPA dollar expended. Brownfields projects have overall created more than 117,000 jobs nationwide and have been found to increase residential property values near a Brownfields site by as much as 15.2 percent when a cleanup is completed.

A few projects funded or completed include:

  • $600,000 awarded for cleanup of a former tannery in Berwick, Maine. The vacant property was used for 100 years for leather tanning, woolen milling, and shoe and carriage manufacturing. Contaminants include VOCs, PAHs, and metals in soil and groundwater.
  • In Shelby, Montana, a largely abandoned historic school building was assessed for environmental issues, and asbestos and lead were cleaned up as part of a $200,000 EPA grant. The school was turned into a community center and was estimated to create 15 permanent jobs.
  • With $250,000 in EPA grant funding, the town of Fletcher, North Carolina turned a former log home manufacturing facility into a town hall. The project included clean-up of dioxin (a chemical that can cause reproductive and developmental problems and cancer) and pentachlorophenol (a chemical associated with cancer and other harmful impacts to human health).

According to EPA and U.S. Census data, approximately 104 million people (one-third of the U.S. population) live within three miles of a Brownfields site that received EPA funding, including more than one-third of all children under the age of five.

Reducing Lead

Thanks to the EPA’s decades-long effort to address the threat of lead pollution, blood lead levels across the country have declined more than 90 percent since the mid-1970s (see this interactive EDF graphic to learn more about the policies that helped). These efforts have protected countless children from the lifelong burden of diminished IQ from early childhood lead exposure.

However, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at least four million households have children living in them who are still being exposed to high levels of lead —highlighting the need for continued EPA efforts and funding in this area.

Over the past five decades, EPA has worked to reduce or eliminate the use of lead in gasoline, paint, plumbing pipes, and soil. EPA provides lead reduction grants to states, territories, and tribes to help them implement programs to mitigate lead-based paint in homes. EPA also conducts extensive outreach to educate the public about the health risks of lead exposure, and manages a national certification program for contractors who work on homes containing lead. Last year, EPA took more than 100 enforcement actions to require property managers and contractors to protect vulnerable communities from the dangers of lead.

A few examples of funded EPA programs include:

  • $243,007 awarded to the Arkansas Department of Health to administer and enforce the state’s lead based paint program, which will support training for lead inspectors and lead enforcement activities, and will help protect children from lead poisoning.
  • One of EPA’s regional offices (representing Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, New Mexico and 66 tribes) provided $898,384 in grants for work on lead abatement programs,  which include providing training for lead inspectors, conducting outreach, conducting inspections of contractors engaged in lead-based paint abatement activities, and enforcement action.
  • The Ohio Department of Health was awarded more than $55,000 to develop and refine its state lead licensing program and almost $375,000 to administer its lead accreditation and certification program in FY 2016.

These programs are just a small snapshot of the lifesaving programs EPA implements to protect public health. Programs like these could be completely eliminated or severely cut if the “skinny budget” is adopted by Congress.

Posted in Health, News, Policy / Read 1 Response

America’s Leaders Weigh in on the Dangers of Proposed EPA Budget Cuts

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Details of President Trump’s budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) have started leaking out — and they are alarming, to say the least.

The reported budget cuts outline a disturbingly stark vision for the nation’s guardians of human health and the environment, cutting EPA staff by one-fifth and resources by 25 percent.

This budget would reportedly slash funding to restore the Great Lakes and the Chesapeake Bay, for state air quality grants, for environmental justice programs, for safe drinking water grants to states, and much more.

It would also reportedly gut EPA’s Office of Research and Development, the office responsible for guiding the agency’s approach to science. The Office of Research and Development includes vital work like the Safe and Sustainable Water Resources program.

This short-sighted budget proposal would mean dirtier air and water. It would mean more deaths among American citizens, and more asthma attacks among American children.

That’s why reports of a budget proposal this alarming has drawn criticism from all corners of America, from red and blue states alike.

As Jim Brainard, the Republican Mayor of Carmel, Indiana put it:

I haven’t met a Republican or Democrat yet that wants to drink dirty water or breathe dirty air.

Members of Congress from both parties, former EPA administrators serving under both Republican and Democratic Presidents, experts from state and local air agencies, environmental justice groups, and others all agree:

William Ruckelshaus, EPA Administrator for Presidents Nixon and Reagan:

A strong and credible regulatory regime is essential to the smooth functioning of our economy… Budget cuts that hurt programs that states now have in place to meet those duties run the risk of returning us to a time when some states offered industries a free lunch, creating havens for polluters. This could leave states with strong environmental programs supported by the public at a competitive disadvantage compared to states with weak programs. In other words, it could lead to a race to the bottom.

Christine Todd Whitman, EPA Administrator for President George W. Bush:

I haven’t ever really seen anything quite like this,” and on the enforcement of environmental rules, “a lot of that enforcement is protecting people.

Gina McCarthy, EPA Administrator for President Obama:

This budget is a fantasy if the administration believes it will preserve EPA’s mission to protect public health… It ignores the need to invest in science and to implement the law… It ignores the lessons of history that led to EPA’s creation 46 years ago. And it ignores the American people calling for its continued support … This is actually going to be devastating for the agency’s ability to protect public health.

WE ACT for Environmental Justice:

Trump’s proposed cuts to EPA’s programs are racist and an attack on EJ communities nationwide.

Dominique Browning, founder of Moms Clean Air Force:

No mom — whether Republican, Democrat, or Independent — voted for air pollution. No mom voted for anything that would endanger her children’s health. We’ve come a long way in cleaning up air pollution, and cutting back EPA’s efforts to enforce the rules that protect us — in favor of polluters’ profits — runs completely against what mothers and fathers across the country want: safe and clean air.

National Association of Clean Air Agencies director Bill Becker:

These cuts, if enacted by Congress, will rip the heart and soul out of the national air pollution control program and jeopardize the health and welfare of tens of millions of people around the country… I can guarantee with certainty that at least in the air pollution area, there will be many more people who will die prematurely and tens of thousands, perhaps millions more, who will get sick unnecessarily… [the cuts will have] a direct and serious adverse health impact on almost every major metropolitan area in the country.

Rep. Mike Simpson (R-Idaho):

There’s not that much in the EPA, for crying out loud. (Simpson also noted that Republicans had already reduced EPA’s budget significantly in recent years.

Rep. Tom Cole (R-Oklahoma):

EPA has been cut by over 20 percent in the last few years. The discretionary budget has been lowered pretty dramatically compared to how it was in 2009, and it’s under what [Speaker] Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) thought it would be in his budget.

Sen. Tom Carper (D-Delaware):

Reckless cuts to the EPA — the agency responsible for protecting public health and our environment — are not what Americans voted for in November.

Rep. Dave Joyce (R-Ohio):

[W]e’re not going to let that happen, we’re going to continue to oppose cuts to the [Great Lakes Restoration Initiative] and we’re going to mobilize our voting forces to let them know that this isn’t going to stand.

Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI):

[Proposed cuts to the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative are] outrageous … this initiative has been critical to cleaning up our Great Lakes and waterways, restoring fish and wildlife habitats, and fighting invasive species, like Asian carp… I call on President Trump to reverse course on these harmful decisions.

John Stine, Commissioner of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency:

It would cut across every area of our work… It would hurt the people who look to [our] programs for protecting the quality of their health and the quality of the places they live… We need people to understand that this work is not just … abstract, these are all people and places that are at some level of risk.

American Lung Association:

Slashing funding for programs that are proven to save lives is a disastrous strategy; cuts to key lung health programs at EPA and HHS make Americans less secure and less protected from known health threats such as the next influenza pandemic and air pollution. Our nation’s scientists and doctors will be less likely to find cures and better treatments for the millions of Americans with lung cancer, COPD and asthma.

Clean air, water, and other environmental safeguards are essential to Americans’ lives. The vast majority of Americans across the country support EPA’s mission – a mission the agency has been carrying out under both political parties for almost half a century, and one that that has led to incredible progress in cleaning and protecting our air and waters.

Posted in Clean Air Act, Health, News, Partners for Change, Policy, What Others are Saying / Comments are closed