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Mitt Romney Wants to Force EPA to Lie to Americans About Whether the Air is Safe to Breathe

Posted by: jwalke -

What is it with Mitt Romney and his penchant for lying to Americans about air pollution?

NRDC Action Fund director, Heather Taylor wrote about him lying to an Iowa audience this week with the falsehood that the Environmental Protection Agency wants to regulate farm dust. It’s a lie that he has repeated before in an effort to frighten farmers and deceive voters.

It turns out Romney has also vowed to change the Clean Air Act to require EPA to lie to Americans about whether the air is clean and healthy to breathe. Romney wants to eliminate the exclusive health basis that has been the foundation for our landmark clean air law for over 40 years. Romney’s approach would force EPA to depart from scientifically-grounded, health-protective standards and respond instead to cost complaints by industry lobbyists and political interference by White House economists.

In the process, he would overturn a unanimous Supreme Court decision authored by Justice Antonin Scalia that ruled clean air standards must be based on what is necessary to protect Americans’ health, based on medical science rather than industry cost complaints.

As I have noted previously:

For over 40 years the Clean Air Act has required the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to set honest air quality standards that are “requisite to protect the public health” with an “adequate margin of safety.”  Clean Air standards must be honestly based on the best health science and medical understanding concerning how much pollution is harmful to humans. Standards may not be weakened or distorted by political or other non-medical factors.

The New York Times recently reported however, that Romney supports eliminating the longstanding health foundation for clean air standards. Instead he wants compliance costs by polluting industries to factor into determining clean air standards. This would pervert the question of how much air pollution is unhealthy for humans to breathe as a matter of the best scientific and medical understanding, letting economic factors force EPA to depart from truly protective air quality standards.

Romney’s approach is the same dirty agenda pushed by Tea Party Republicans in the House of Representatives, which passed a bill this year to dramatically weaken clean air protections following this very playbook.

I have described what the House Republicans’ bill would mean if it became law:

The bill would force the head of EPA to adopt unhealthy clean air standards for smog pollution if someone decides it costs too much to set healthy standards. The legislation then would compel EPA to misrepresent those unhealthy air quality standards to Americans as sufficient to achieve “clean air.”

This is no different from Congress forcing doctors to lie to patients about their correct diagnoses if some government bureaucrat or economist or insurance company says it costs too much to treat the honestly diagnosed illness.

The American Lung Association has rightly dubbed this bill the “Gasp Act,” and ALA opposes it along with many other medical organizations. Fortunately the Senate and President Obama oppose the legislation too, so the Tea Party’s House bill has stalled. That could change if the GOP takes over the Senate and Romney becomes president.

It’s ironic that Romney condemns so-called “death panels” that do not exist under President Obama’s healthcare law, then turns around and pushes a process under the Clean Air Act in which bureaucrats and economists and politicians get to decide that some lives are not worth saving or protecting because it allegedly costs industry polluters too much.

Romney wants to replace a clean air process with dirty air panels that will deny health protections to Americans if the safeguards don’t pass a politicized cost-benefit calculation that the Clean Air Act has abhorred for over 40 years.

Lying during the campaign is a terrible thing. But it’s so much worse that Romney is running on actual policies to weaken clean air protections and require EPA to lie to all Americans about whether our air is safe to breathe.

 

 

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Mitt Romney Dusts Off a Proven Lie to Try to Deceive Voters

Posted by: Heather Taylor-Miesle -

Mitt Romney lied to an audience in Iowa on Tuesday by spouting one of his favorite falsehoods: the Environmental Protection Agency wants to regulate farm dust.

Romney has been repeating this particular lie since at least late 2011. He has been corrected again and again, only to reiterate the lie again and again, just as he did on Tuesday.

What does it say about the character of a presidential candidate that he would lie to Americans and try to frighten farmers with proven falsehoods? Even if one were to be more generous and lay the blame with the campaign, is it ineptitude or cynicism that allows that lie to be repeated so persistently? Or is this just evidence of the alternative reality for facts that have become a defining feature of Romney’s campaign?

The paranoid urban myth (perhaps rural myth is more accurate) about farm dust was hatched by industry lobbyists back in 2011, then began to circulate among conservative bloggers, then was repeated by Republicans in Congress.

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson immediately set the record straight by making clear the EPA was not going to regulate farm dust. She indicated the agency would not even propose taking the action that critics were claiming – falsely and mendaciously – would result in regulating farm dust. The head of EPA’s air program testified in Congress that it was a myth that the EPA was planning to regulate farm dust.

Senator Mike Johanns (R-Neb.), the sponsor of a Senate bill to exempt farm dust from regulation—non-existent regulation, mind you—announced himself satisfied that the EPA had no plan or intention to regulate farm dust: “EPA has finally provided what I’ve been asking for all along: unequivocal assurance that it won’t attempt to regulate farm dust.”

In June, true to Jackson’s word, the EPA proposed not to change the Clean Air Act’s “coarse particle” pollution standard at all, which should have put to rest once and for all any rumor that the EPA planned to regulate farm dust. The agency said that it would continue to maintain the standard set in 1987 by the Reagan administration, a standard that also does not regulate farm dust.

Now that Mr. Romney has been caught in this flagrant lie, it will be interesting to see how his campaign apparatus will respond. Maybe they will stir up fears about the EPA’s wicked heart: 

“How do you really know EPA does not want to regulate farm dust and destroy capitalism?”

Maybe they will pivot with evasions that build on the original lie as fact: “Oh, EPA wanted to regulate farm dust all right until Republicans stopped them, but they still want to and will jump at the chance unless I am in the oval office.”

The frustrating truth is the campaign will probably display a “What, me worry?” attitude about getting caught lying. Again. If he has done it before and he has gotten this far, then it must be working, right?

Knowing the futility of what I’m about to ask, I have to pose this simple question anyway: Mr. Romney, you say that the EPA “wants to regulate dust” from farms. Prove it, please. Where has EPA said that? Document and page number?

In the meantime, please stop lying to us. Please stop throwing dust in our eyes and pretending Americans deserve a president who evidently will say anything to get elected.

 

 

 

 

 

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GOP Candidates’ Energy Distortions Defy Basic Logic

Posted by: Heather Taylor-Miesle -

Mitt Romney has won the New Hampshire primary. That news doesn’t surprise many, since many pundits predicted it. What is more interesting is who landed in the second and third spots and the closeness???

Ron Paul came in second and beat out Santorum as the far-right candidate of choice. John Huntsman, meanwhile, had his long-awaited “surge” and came in third.  Now momentum shifts to South Carolina, with all candidates staying in the race until that primary is over.

No doubt we will be hearing more about the candidates’ positions on energy and the environment. While these issues haven’t dominated in the campaign, they’ve been a constant thread, featured in debates and talk shows. Sadly, few candidates have offered the energy solutions our country needs right now.

Over the weekend, my daughter and I were reading side-by-side. She looked over at my magazine article and saw a photo of a pelican drenched in oil, and said, “Mommy, you go and make that stop.” Even a four-year-old could see something was wrong with oil run amok.

The next day, I saw a photo from KCOY.com of the man whose job it is to measure California’s snowpack high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. He uses a giant ruler to assess how much water our thirsty state can look forward to in the spring. As of now, however, the guy has nothing to do. The picture showed him standing in a dry mountain meadow devoid of snow.

We are surrounded by shots like these — images that reveal something is profoundly wrong with our energy picture. In the face of intensifying climate change and rising gas prices, we leaders to offer smart policies based on the facts. Instead, GOP candidates are giving us more spin. All but John Huntsman continue to pretend climate change doesn’t exist — despite several of them acknowledging it in the past. Rhetoric trumps reality in their campaigns, and we can’t expect any climate solutions to come from their administrations.

But the distortion isn’t limited to climate. In the GOP debate on Sunday, Gingrich conjured a popular Tea Party boogey man: mythical dust regulations. To illustrate why he thought the Environmental Protection Agency was “incorrigible” he said, “In Iowa they had a dust regulation underway because they control particulate matter… They were worried that plowing on a corn field would leave dust to go to another farmer’s corn field. They were planning to issue a regulation.” That may whip up the anti-regulation crowd, but it is patently false.

As my colleague John Walke, the director of NRDC’s Clean Air Program, wrote on his blog: “Let’s be clear. There are no EPA farm dust regulations. There are no such proposed regulations. There are no EPA intentions for such regulations. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has specifically disavowed such intentions in Congressional testimony when quizzed by suspicious Congressmen.” That didn’t stop Gingrich from hawking bogus claims.

Gingrich’s environmental falsehoods didn’t stop there. He said, “The long term answer to $4 heating oil is to open up offshore development of oil and gas, open up federal lines to oil and gas, flood the market… Under Obama, 2011 was the highest price of gasoline in history. It is a direct result of his policies.”

It is true gas prices soared last year, but the spike was the result of growing demand from China and India, political instability in Libya, trouble with refineries in France, and a host of other global forces.

If Gingrich believes more drilling would have made a difference, then Obama proved that claim false as well. Under the Obama Administration, companies drilled almost 21,000 oil wells in the first eight months of 2011—the highest number in almost 30 years. That’s nearly double the amount drilling the same period last year, and nearly triple the number drilled in 2009. Yet none of this expanded drilling made a difference to the global price of oil.

Huntsman was the only candidate in Sunday’s debate to give a nuanced view of energy markets. He said America needs to diversify its energy resources if we want to attain energy independence. “One of the first things I would do as president is I would take a look at that one-product distribution bias that always favors one product.  And that’s oil… We have got to disrupt that one product monopoly that does not serve this country or its consumers.”

Now I may not agree with Huntsman on how to break up that monopoly or which energy resources we should expand, but at least he is looking at the problem head on. That is what America needs right now. You don’t have to have a PhD in economics and you don’t have to write a chapter on climate change for Gingrich’s book to recognize America’s energy future is not secure. My four-year-old can tell you that.

In the face of very real problems like global competition for oil and impacts of climate change, we need real solutions. Not leaders who peddle in false claims.

President Goes to EPA while Most of GOP Candidates’ Heads are in the Sand

Posted by: Heather Taylor-Miesle -

From Capitol Hill to the campaign trail, Republicans have spent the past year lambasting the Environmental Protection Agency and the work it does to safeguard our air, water, wildlife and lands.

Today, President Obama plans to present a clear contrast to the GOP’s misguided rhetoric.  He is scheduled to visit the EPA in a very visible sign of support for the staff and the standards that protect our air, water and environment.

The president’s much-needed trip to the EPA is a breath of fresh air amid the GOP smoke and mirrors surrounding the agency.

Mitt Romney calls the agency whose work annually saves hundreds of thousands of lives “out of control. Rick Santorum claims the EPA’s attempts to reduce mercury from coal-fired power plants is misguided, insinuating the science that proves mercury is dangerously toxic to small children and others is wrong or at least unimportant. Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul want to eliminate the agency. And for Rick Perry, the EPA is um, um, Public Enemy No. 1.

Over in Congress, Republicans have literally wasted more than a year wrongly blaming the sour economy on EPA, instead of addressing the real causes for our economic meltdown. The tally so far: 191 votes taken in the House to undermine environmental protections.

(Hint to House GOP: Keeping our air and water and lungs clean didn’t hurt our economy. Government standards didn’t either. The real cause of the worst recession since the Great Depression was an overheated real estate market, fueled by lax government oversight of lending and financial markets. That, in turn, prompted massive corporate layoffs and plummeting consumer confidence).

Politically, it would have been much easier for Obama to simply avoid the EPA amid all the Tea Party fueled rhetoric and flat-our lies we’ve been forced to hear about it in Congress and on the campaign trail.

But unlike the GOP candidates, the president is echoing not what short-sighted campaign pollsters and contributors want him to say, but what the majority of mainstream Americans say they want and need – clean water, clean air and protection from polluters.?While GOP candidates are busy trying to outdo one another doing the dirty work of Big Polluters, President Obama is showing he’s for defending public health and the agency charged with enforcing the bedrock environmental laws that helped make our country great.

His visit shows we don’t have to follow the GOP backward to a time when we didn’t have the agency and its protections; back to a time when our rivers were so polluted they caught on fire and our skies were so choked with smog we couldn’t breathe.

It shows the sort of leadership we need in this country.

Another Romney Flip Flop: More Pollution From Cars and Trucks

Posted by: Heather Taylor-Miesle -

Another day, another flip flop. At Sunday’s Mike Huckabee-hosted presidential forum, Republican candidate Mitt Romney offered up yet another flip flop, this time on reducing global warming pollution from cars and trucks. He said that he would “get the EPA out of its effort to manage carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles and trucks.”

Back in 2004, then Governor Romney signed Massachusetts up to copy California in implementing carbon emissions standards for light duty vehicles. The car companies pretty much hated that because it created a dreaded “patchwork,” in which the standard would apply in about half of the states but not in the rest.

Luckily, the Obama administration stepped in. The President brokered a deal to come up with a single national standard to reduce carbon pollution, which the car companies, the states, unions, EPA, and environmental groups like NRDC could all agree on. He made it happen primarily through a rule issued by EPA, which reduces pollution, saves consumers money, and reduces confusion for industry. That program was so successful that last month, EPA proposed to extend and strengthen the program through 2025.

Back to Romney. Of course, no one likes a flip-flopper. But the truth is, sometimes it makes sense to change your mind. You get new information, like former climate-skeptic Richard Muller who came to his senses and realized the globe really is warming up. That’s what makes Romney’s latest flip flop so infuriating. Almost every bit of new information we have shows that the need to reduce global warming pollution is greater than ever and the dangers are worse than we previously thought.

And the rules that Romney once supported, but now decries, provide tremendous benefits. The new set of rules would save over 4 billion barrels of oil. Owners of new efficient vehicles would save up to $4,400 over the life of the vehicle. Since he doesn’t seem to have any problem with changing his positions, can we humbly suggest that the Governor just go ahead and switch back to the position that is good for industry, good for consumers and good for the planet?

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